Despite her reservations about Snider's guilt, by the end of the article Carpenter does allow that he was the one who killed his wife, finally acknowledging "And yet Snider appears to have been following a script of his own choosing." The hypocrisy of this concession, however, is that it is not born out of any careful examination of the facts and evidence, but rather made because it conveniently serves the core idea of Carpenter's story and the reason why she chose to undercut Stratten and bend the reader's empathy towards her murderer: to claim that Hefner and his magazine bear as much responsibility for the death of Dorothy Stratten as the man who killed her.