Stuart Warner, an editor and writing coach at The Plain Dealer, wrote to us: "’Cold Blooded Liar’ is not a pure narrative. It was written by our investigative reporter and I edited it. We compromised, using some traditional investigative writing techniques with a lot of narrative thrown in. It uses as its model the movie ‘Thin Blue Line.’ Each day we took a look at the case from a different point of view, so what we have really is three separate narratives."

The story won first place in the American Society of Newspaper Editors writing competition for local watchdog reporting. It’s also in Poynter’s "Best Newspaper Writing of 2006."

Read “A Cold-Blooded Liar,” by Bob Paynter

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