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The young Finney County attorney who served as chief prosecutor for the case, Duane West, was as central to the investigation as anyone at the time. Capote didn’t much care for Mr. West, and the feeling was mutual.
That resentment carried over into In Cold Blood, where Truman gave far more credit to Logan Green, an assistant West brought in to consult on the trial, than to the chief prosecutor himself—even attributing West’s own closing argument in the trial to Green.
As recently as November 2017, in an interview with the Wichita Eagle, West maintained that “Dewey didn't believe that story [of a robbery], and he pooh-poohed the whole thing, and so that's why he wasn’t sent up there [the prison] to visit with Wells. And then even after that, they still didn't think that was the thing; he still thought it was a grudge thing.”[179]
