Watch till the end for the cross-dressing payoff, as well as a nice plug for Blackberry.

And, of course, if you like the segment, you'll love the commemorative T-shirt.

She paid $925,000, public deeds show. The deal closed in late May, but didn’t show up in city records until last week.

Ms. Grace orates with a whopping, goading TV twang (“Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, it’s all about me,” is how she mocked a defendant last month). So of course she’d have a puffed-up Manhattan spread: This 842-square-foot apartment complements the 622-square-foot condo she bought three years earlier, which complemented a 1,230-square-foot place she bought in 2002.

According to city deeds, her lawyer for this deal was Jason Oshins, a recurring guest on Ms. Grace’s eponymous CNN Headline News program, where he’s billed as a defense attorney. “When I get charged with two cocaine possessions, I’m going to hire you,” she told him last month on the air. “Don’t lie to me, Jason Oshins!” she said earlier.

He wouldn’t comment on this deal: “You know any attorney, for fear of losing one’s license, can’t confirm anything.” But law practice aside, he has a budding career as a TV expert. “Being good-looking and intelligent, I figured I’d be a perfect talking head,” he explained to The Observer. “So that’s how I’ve gotten to know people I know from Court TV and CNN Headline News.”

But is he a defense attorney or a real estate lawyer? He said general practitioners can pick and choose what they do, and lately he’s been picking real estate.

As for Ms. Grace, here’s another reason she might have wanted to increase her East Side spread’s size to 2,694 square feet: She semi-secretly got married to a robustly sized Southerner earlier this year. The couple is expecting twins.

That was fewer than 24 hours after she had taped an interview for Nancy Grace’s prime-time Headline News show to talk about the Aug. 27 disappearance of her 2-year-old son, Trenton.

In the days after Melinda Duckett’s suicide, Ms. Grace utilized the services of Anna Cordasco, who is the managing director of the New York firm Citigate Sard Verbinnen, which specializes in below-the-radar corporate-image resuscitation.

Ms. Cordasco, who has Martha Stewart as another high-profile TV client, is old friends with Ms. Grace’s executive producer at Headline News, Dean Sicoli. Ms. Cordasco and her colleagues immediately set to work restoring the fire-breathing former prosecutor to her pre-Duckett level of dignity and national esteem.

Except, according to three sources close to Ms. Grace, once the crisis manager stepped in, the crisis just got worse.

In mid-October, six weeks after Duckett’s suicide, Ms. Cordasco e-mailed out a letter to producers of TV entertainment and news shows, pitching them on an upbeat story about Ms. Grace’s dogged pursuit of little Trenton and, if applicable, his killer.

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Observer, proposed a story on Ms. Grace’s upcoming trip to Florida, where she would join the boy’s father, Joshua Duckett, at an outpost called Team Trenton Headquarters. From there, Ms. Grace would broadcast her show each night, confer intimately with the police and continue to shine her national klieg light on the case of the missing 2-year-old—undaunted by the tragic fate of his mother, who, the letter noted, “committed suicide after appearing on her show.”

Ms. Cordasco mentioned parenthetically that Ms. Grace might even “go diving” in search of Trenton. CNN could provide footage, or Ms. Grace would happily do a “video diary.”

As near as can be ascertained, no one bit.

Meanwhile, privately, to reporters, Ms. Cordasco was touting the close relationship between Ms. Grace and the local police.

Ms. Cordasco sent an e-mail to print reporters in the Florida region, a copy of which was read to The Observer over the phone. In it, she wrote that Ms. Grace “will be going to Leesburg to search for Trenton Duckett with his father Josh …. Josh and the local police have asked Nancy to come down in order to bring the national spotlight back on the case. In addition, the police want to give Nancy special access to their helicopters, etc. Nancy has already made two trips to Florida to investigate the missing-child case and assist in the search efforts on her own.”

“A lot of the media feels like we coordinated our efforts around Nancy Grace and her show coming to Florida,” said Capt. James Pogue of the Marion County Sheriff’s Department. “And honestly, that is not the truth. What happened, it had nothing to do with Nancy Grace coming to town and doing all that. Our objective was to get Trenton Duckett’s face back on national TV so that the world would know who Trenton Duckett was, what he looked like, so they would start looking for him again.”

On Nov. 22, Lauren Ritchie, a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel, pounced on Ms. Cordasco’s talking point. “Just so the truth is known, Leesburg police did not invite Grace to come here, and when questioned about it, the public-relations firm backed away from that claim,” she wrote.

Ms. Ritchie also noted that there were no police helicopters to borrow anyway.

The piece caused an uproar at CNN and Headline News. “There were certainly some people pretty upset over here,” said one high-level network source.

Two days before Ms. Grace arrived, the local police made a big announcement: After two months of operating under the premise that the boy was likely dead, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office announced that it now believed, on the basis of no particularly new information, that he might be alive. Ms. Grace arrived in a flurry of fanfare and on Nov. 16 conducted the first of two live broadcasts from Leesburg, where Trenton was last seen with his mother, at a neighborhood Wendy’s.

On Nov. 17, authorities received nearly 100 tips because of Ms. Grace’s show. None, alas, has yielded any useful information as yet.

“We were brought on to work with her specifically on the Trenton Duckett issue,” Ms. Cordasco said on Nov. 27, in a short interview with The Observer. She hung up quickly, promising to call back. The following day, she called from her cell phone. “We are on retainer; we very much work for Nancy,” Ms. Cordasco said, and then hung up. She did not respond to other questions left in messages.

One source close to Ms. Grace said the anchor had fired the crisis manager.

“Citigate has not been let go. They are continuing to work on retainer, on an as-needed basis,” said Ms. Grace through a spokesperson on Nov. 28.

In Ms. Cordasco’s pitch e-mails, she also noted that Ms. Grace was headed to Biloxi on Oct. 28 to “help actually build homes lost in Katrina … to sheet rock, paint, etc.” Ms. Grace, she noted, was “really an amazing woman.”

On Nov. 21, lawyers representing Duckett’s estate filed suit against Ms. Grace and CNN, charging intentional misrepresentation of the interview, infliction of distress, and that Ms. Grace and CNN made Ms. Duckett into a public figure and then exploited her likeness for ratings. The complaint was published by the Smoking Gun that same day.

And on Nov. 23, The Biloxi Sun Herald reported on Ms. Grace’s visit. She traveled with a group from Christ United Methodist, her church in New York, and spent a few days helping to rebuild homes on Fayard Street.

Ms. Grace went “incognito” to the job site, eschewing her usual tastefully bright power suits for a baseball cap, construction-wear and a pair of work boots, the reporter noted. “Grace did not seek out publicity on her trip.”

What Becomes a Civil War Most?

What do you call a problem like escalating sectarian violence in Iraq?

“A civil war,” said Matt Lauer on the Today show on Nov. 27. NBC brass had discussed it, he told viewers, and had come to the bold and publicity-generating—if not exactly jaw-dropping—conclusion that democracy is maybe not flourishing quite the way we planned.

The other two broadcast networks, equally boldly, have not followed suit.

“It was their decision to make and their process,” said Jon Banner, the executive producer of ABC’s World News. “We constantly discuss editorial matters here—all the time, every day. How that decis ion got made there I have no idea, nor do I want to guess.”

“To be honest with you, I think it’s a political statement, not a news judgment,” said Rome Hartman, the executive producer of the CBS Evening News. “We deal with the events of the day, and we decide the best way to describe those events based on the news of the day, not by—never mind, I’m not gonna go there.”

Then he did.

“It should be noted that the day that this pronouncement—and who makes pronouncements anyway? But that’s what it sounded like—was a quiet day, relatively speaking, in Iraq,” he said.

CNN’s official statement on the matter is: “CNN will continue to report on what is happening in Iraq on a day-to-day basis. And we will also report on the ongoing debate in academic and political circles about what constitutes a civil war.”

It perhaps goes without saying that the Fox News Channel has not leaped onto the civil-war bandwagon. Fox anchors will join most of their colleagues in television news in anticipating their own Cronkite Moments.

“Every news organization is entitled to make editorial calls how they see fit. This was not a decision we came to lightly, without a great deal of discussion. We reached out to experts, military analysts, historians, people on the ground in Iraq, and they all unanimously agreed this was the appropriate label for the conflict,” said Allison Gollust, a spokeswoman for NBC News.

Meanwhile, all three broadcast network anchors, plus Anderson Cooper of CNN and Shep Smith of Fox, are scuttling off to Amman, Jordan, on Nov. 29—producers, security details and White House correspondents in tow. There they will cover President Bush’s summit with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki regarding whatever it is that’s happening in Iraq. The Big Three, according to their executive producers, will stay for a day or two—maybe longer if necessary.

“This is a critical time in the war in Iraq,” said Nightly News executive producer John Reiss. “It just made sense to send Brian [Williams] there.”

“It seems we’re on the cusp of something big with regard to the way we’re going in Iraq,” Mr. Banner said. “Everyone seems to be making a final push before there is some decision about what to do next. It’s important for us to get there.”

That was fewer than 24 hours after she had taped an interview for Nancy Grace’s prime-time Headline News show to talk about the Aug. 27 disappearance of her 2-year-old son, Trenton.

In the days after Melinda Duckett’s suicide, Ms. Grace utilized the services of Anna Cordasco, who is the managing director of the New York firm Citigate Sard Verbinnen, which specializes in below-the-radar corporate-image resuscitation.

Ms. Cordasco, who has Martha Stewart as another high-profile TV client, is old friends with Ms. Grace’s executive producer at Headline News, Dean Sicoli. Ms. Cordasco and her colleagues immediately set to work restoring the fire-breathing former prosecutor to her pre-Duckett level of dignity and national esteem.

Except, according to three sources close to Ms. Grace, once the crisis manager stepped in, the crisis just got worse.

In mid-October, six weeks after Duckett’s suicide, Ms. Cordasco e-mailed out a letter to producers of TV entertainment and news shows, pitching them on an upbeat story about Ms. Grace’s dogged pursuit of little Trenton and, if applicable, his killer.

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Observer, proposed a story on Ms. Grace’s upcoming trip to Florida, where she would join the boy’s father, Joshua Duckett, at an outpost called Team Trenton Headquarters. From there, Ms. Grace would broadcast her show each night, confer intimately with the police and continue to shine her national klieg light on the case of the missing 2-year-old—undaunted by the tragic fate of his mother, who, the letter noted, “committed suicide after appearing on her show.”

Ms. Cordasco mentioned parenthetically that Ms. Grace might even “go diving” in search of Trenton. CNN could provide footage, or Ms. Grace would happily do a “video diary.”

As near as can be ascertained, no one bit.

Meanwhile, privately, to reporters, Ms. Cordasco was touting the close relationship between Ms. Grace and the local police.

Ms. Cordasco sent an e-mail to print reporters in the Florida region, a copy of which was read to The Observer over the phone. In it, she wrote that Ms. Grace “will be going to Leesburg to search for Trenton Duckett with his father Josh …. Josh and the local police have asked Nancy to come down in order to bring the national spotlight back on the case. In addition, the police want to give Nancy special access to their helicopters, etc. Nancy has already made two trips to Florida to investigate the missing-child case and assist in the search efforts on her own.”

“A lot of the media feels like we coordinated our efforts around Nancy Grace and her show coming to Florida,” said Capt. James Pogue of the Marion County Sheriff’s Department. “And honestly, that is not the truth. What happened, it had nothing to do with Nancy Grace coming to town and doing all that. Our objective was to get Trenton Duckett’s face back on national TV so that the world would know who Trenton Duckett was, what he looked like, so they would start looking for him again.”

On Nov. 22, Lauren Ritchie, a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel, pounced on Ms. Cordasco’s talking point. “Just so the truth is known, Leesburg police did not invite Grace to come here, and when questioned about it, the public-relations firm backed away from that claim,” she wrote.

Ms. Ritchie also noted that there were no police helicopters to borrow anyway.

The piece caused an uproar at CNN and Headline News. “There were certainly some people pretty upset over here,” said one high-level network source.

Two days before Ms. Grace arrived, the local police made a big announcement: After two months of operating under the premise that the boy was likely dead, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office announced that it now believed, on the basis of no particularly new information, that he might be alive. Ms. Grace arrived in a flurry of fanfare and on Nov. 16 conducted the first of two live broadcasts from Leesburg, where Trenton was last seen with his mother, at a neighborhood Wendy’s.

On Nov. 17, authorities received nearly 100 tips because of Ms. Grace’s show. None, alas, has yielded any useful information as yet.

“We were brought on to work with her specifically on the Trenton Duckett issue,” Ms. Cordasco said on Nov. 27, in a short interview with The Observer. She hung up quickly, promising to call back. The following day, she called from her cell phone. “We are on retainer; we very much work for Nancy,” Ms. Cordasco said, and then hung up. She did not respond to other questions left in messages.

One source close to Ms. Grace said the anchor had fired the crisis manager.

“Citigate has not been let go. They are continuing to work on retainer, on an as-needed basis,” said Ms. Grace through a spokesperson on Nov. 28.

In Ms. Cordasco’s pitch e-mails, she also noted that Ms. Grace was headed to Biloxi on Oct. 28 to “help actually build homes lost in Katrina … to sheet rock, paint, etc.” Ms. Grace, she noted, was “really an amazing woman.”

On Nov. 21, lawyers representing Duckett’s estate filed suit against Ms. Grace and CNN, charging intentional misrepresentation of the interview, infliction of distress, and that Ms. Grace and CNN made Ms. Duckett into a public figure and then exploited her likeness for ratings. The complaint was published by the Smoking Gun that same day.

And on Nov. 23, The Biloxi Sun Herald reported on Ms. Grace’s visit. She traveled with a group from Christ United Methodist, her church in New York, and spent a few days helping to rebuild homes on Fayard Street.

Ms. Grace went “incognito” to the job site, eschewing her usual tastefully bright power suits for a baseball cap, construction-wear and a pair of work boots, the reporter noted. “Grace did not seek out publicity on her trip.”

What Becomes a Civil War Most?

What do you call a problem like escalating sectarian violence in Iraq?

“A civil war,” said Matt Lauer on the Today show on Nov. 27. NBC brass had discussed it, he told viewers, and had come to the bold and publicity-generating—if not exactly jaw-dropping—conclusion that democracy is maybe not flourishing quite the way we planned.

The other two broadcast networks, equally boldly, have not followed suit.

“It was their decision to make and their process,” said Jon Banner, the executive producer of ABC’s World News. “We constantly discuss editorial matters here—all the time, every day. How that decis ion got made there I have no idea, nor do I want to guess.”

“To be honest with you, I think it’s a political statement, not a news judgment,” said Rome Hartman, the executive producer of the CBS Evening News. “We deal with the events of the day, and we decide the best way to describe those events based on the news of the day, not by—never mind, I’m not gonna go there.”

Then he did.

“It should be noted that the day that this pronouncement—and who makes pronouncements anyway? But that’s what it sounded like—was a quiet day, relatively speaking, in Iraq,” he said.

CNN’s official statement on the matter is: “CNN will continue to report on what is happening in Iraq on a day-to-day basis. And we will also report on the ongoing debate in academic and political circles about what constitutes a civil war.”

It perhaps goes without saying that the Fox News Channel has not leaped onto the civil-war bandwagon. Fox anchors will join most of their colleagues in television news in anticipating their own Cronkite Moments.

“Every news organization is entitled to make editorial calls how they see fit. This was not a decision we came to lightly, without a great deal of discussion. We reached out to experts, military analysts, historians, people on the ground in Iraq, and they all unanimously agreed this was the appropriate label for the conflict,” said Allison Gollust, a spokeswoman for NBC News.

Meanwhile, all three broadcast network anchors, plus Anderson Cooper of CNN and Shep Smith of Fox, are scuttling off to Amman, Jordan, on Nov. 29—producers, security details and White House correspondents in tow. There they will cover President Bush’s summit with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki regarding whatever it is that’s happening in Iraq. The Big Three, according to their executive producers, will stay for a day or two—maybe longer if necessary.

“This is a critical time in the war in Iraq,” said Nightly News executive producer John Reiss. “It just made sense to send Brian [Williams] there.”

“It seems we’re on the cusp of something big with regard to the way we’re going in Iraq,” Mr. Banner said. “Everyone seems to be making a final push before there is some decision about what to do next. It’s important for us to get there.”

Over on Fox News, personalities were lining up to praise Mr. King. Greta Van Susteren was applauding him on the air and on her blog, adding that Fox News Channel chairman Roger Ailes was also a fan. Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes broke off bickering to pay homage, while the chyron beneath them read “We Respect Larry.”

In other media, the take on Mr. King had been less charitable. L.A. Weekly’s Nikki Finke kicked things off March 10 by writing on her blog that Mr. King was said to be “increasingly frail physically.” The Wall Street Journal followed with a column accusing the CNN host of being doddering and soft—and saying that the distinctly un-soft Nancy Grace, of CNN Headline News, was viewed as his possible successor.

“We really need to get our arms around this and try to get out an accurate description of what’s going on down here,” CNN News Group president Jim Walton told NYTV on March 21. “In the United States, there seems to be some sport about Larry and Nancy that is unfounded.”

But earlier, CNN had shown no hurry to call time out. While Mr. King went about his business—Monday: the Imette St. Guillen case! Wednesday: Liza Minnelli! Thursday: Macaulay Culkin!—the network allowed seven days to elapse between the initial criticisms of Mr. King and CNN president Jon Klein’s first published defense of his prime-time star.

That left the job of coming to praise Mr. King to that other cable news channel. “We do admire Larry,” Ms. Van Susteren—the Fox News anchor and former Larry King Live guest host—told NYTV by phone March 20. “Fox isn’t afraid to admit it. Fox has never been afraid. Fox doesn’t back off from the truth. We’re not a bunch of cowards here.”

If you’re counting, that’s three “Fox”-es to one “Larry.”

Mr. King still gets the highest ratings on CNN—to the tune of more than one million nightly viewers, which is less than half of Bill O’Reilly’s audience, a fact the Fox team wasn’t too proud to acknowledge.

“Larry deserves this,” Ms. Van Susteren said of her tribute to Mr. King. “Larry is what holds that place up.” (“Larry” 3, “Fox” 3!)

And if people think that the man holding CNN up is frail and faltering ….

As days passed with no defense from Mr. Klein, Mr. King’s staff began to grow anxious. The show’s executive producer, Wendy Whitworth, held a conference call to reassure the staff that everything would be fine, according to two network sources.

The silence from the executive suite brought back some of the feeling of last fall’s ouster of NewsNight anchor Aaron Brown, whom Mr. Klein publicly referred to as the “ice” to Anderson Cooper’s “fire” a few weeks before bumping him from his anchor chair.

Mr. Klein finally came forward, in the March 17 New York Post, about whether he was thinking of giving Mr. King the old Brown heave-ho: “We’d have to be even crazier than people think TV executives are to even think about moving a legend like Larry out of his time slot—especially when he reliably attracts a very nice audience each night. There’s absolutely no truth to this idle speculation.”

Declining a request for an interview with Mr. Klein, a CNN spokesperson said those comments stand as his statement.

Mr. Walton seconded that message. “Larry’s not going anywhere,” he said. “He’s fantastic at what he does. Much like what Johnny Carson did for late-night television, Larry King has done for the interview genre.”

Yet even Carson retired eventually. And CNN has no ready answer about what would come after Mr. King does leave. Larry King Live vastly outperforms anything else in the CNN lineup, regularly doubling its lead-in from Paula Zahn and nearly doubling its follower, Anderson Cooper.

Last summer, CNN appeared to take a shot at finding a possible heir, having Bob Costas guest-host a spate of shows while Mr. King was away. But while Mr. King has relied increasingly on sensational crime stories to boost ratings, Mr. Costas refused to host an hour in August dedicated to missing teen Natalee Holloway. That incident leaked to the press. Mr. Costas denied being the source of the leak, but told The New York Times, ‘‘I don’t believe there was a single American who was sitting around saying, ‘I’d really like to see Bob Costas’s take on this.’”

Mr. Costas was lauded by newspaper editorial boards far and wide as the one reasonable person in the tabloid-obsessed television news world. So ended that experiment in grooming a successor.

Nancy Grace, meanwhile, has never had a problem saying yes to Natalee Holloway. When Larry King Live discovered a few years ago that high-profile trials led to big ratings, Ms. Grace became a frequent guest host; Mr. King’s executive producer, Ms. Whitworth, developed the current Nancy Grace program for Headline News.

In December 2003, The Observer reported on the growing perception that the frequent guest host was being groomed as Mr. King’s successor. Asked then if Ms. Grace was his own first choice as a replacement, Mr. King replied, “No. I would have a more professional host.”

On March 21, Mr. Walton said the network does not now and never has had plans to drop Ms. Grace into Mr. King’s time slot—or any other time slot at CNN. Describing Ms. Grace as “lightning in a bottle,” he said it was in the company’s strategic best interest for her to keep drawing viewers to the Headline News channel.

“It is more advantageous to the shareholders for us to continue to build that asset,” he said. “As a proud father with all our networks here, I really don’t care which one gets the highest ratings, as long as it’s a CNN-branded network.”

“Headline News is a wonderful home for me—a perfect fit,” Ms. Grace wrote in a statement issued through a publicist. “I have no plans whatsoever to leave. I am lucky to be able to do the work that I do every day for crime victims everywhere. HLN has given me that platform. On a personal note, I would not even have my show at HLN today if Larry King, Wendy (his E.P.) and his staff had not invited me to be a regular guest, and a guest host, for years. I respect and admire Larry King both as a friend and a colleague. Larry needs no replacement … in fact, there IS no replacement for Larry, simply because there is no one like him.”

But at least at one time, if not still, Ms. Grace had her eyes on CNN, according to multiple sources close to the anchor.

“I know she was initially comparing her numbers to Larry’s ratings,” said one CNN producer. “She’s clearly a very ambitious person who didn’t get to where she was by sitting by idly.”

Another source said that when her show first launched, Ms. Grace closely compared her overnight ratings to those of the CNN prime-time anchors—and most closely to one in particular.

“Screw Greta. Screw Anderson. Screw any of the other competition on the other networks,” the source said. “When we looked at the ratings, it was all about Paula.”

As an anchor, Ms. Grace is a firebrand, less concerned with legal nuance than with her own feelings about a case. As a boss, according to sources inside and outside her show, she presides over a sometimes-difficult workplace. The program is on its third director in a year, which sources described as a high rate of turnover at any television news program. At least four members of her staff have met with the network’s human-resources department to discuss problems with the management of the program, according to three sources.

As a journalist, Ms. Grace has a reputation for being impulsive. In interviews with The Observer, sources recounted frantic phone calls from the show’s lawyers minutes before Ms. Grace went on the air. In one example, one staffer said, Ms. Grace heard in the makeup room that one of her favorite villains, Neil Entwistle, a man suspected of murdering his wife and daughter, had agreed to return to the United States to stand trial. Ms. Grace was narrowly talked out of reporting the tidbit, and Mr. Entwistle remained abroad another week before being extradited.

“It amazes me we get away with some of the stuff we get away with,” said one of Ms. Grace’s producers. “There are plenty of times where we have had to fix onscreen graphics because, when someone else saw the show, they pointed out, ‘Well, the guy really isn’t guilty; he hasn’t been charged yet.’ Or, ‘You can’t call him a “suspect”—he’s a “person of interest.”’”

Still, her numbers are astronomical. Ms. Grace’s audience has nearly tripled in the year she’s been on Headline News (she also hosts two hours of live television every day on Court TV). It now tops 600,000 each night, and appears to still be growing.

“I would be surprised if she went over to the network,” said Ms. Van Susteren, who was once considered a successor to Mr. King. “It’s so off the mission of Ted Turner. Ted Turner wanted news. He didn’t want theatrics.”

“I don’t know if Jon Klein is ready for a show like that in his prime-time line-up,” said one high-ranking CNN source. “Getting rid of Aaron Brown is one thing. Putting in the antithesis of Aaron Brown may be another.”

Over on Fox News, personalities were lining up to praise Mr. King. Greta Van Susteren was applauding him on the air and on her blog, adding that Fox News Channel chairman Roger Ailes was also a fan. Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes broke off bickering to pay homage, while the chyron beneath them read “We Respect Larry.”

In other media, the take on Mr. King had been less charitable. L.A. Weekly’s Nikki Finke kicked things off March 10 by writing on her blog that Mr. King was said to be “increasingly frail physically.” The Wall Street Journal followed with a column accusing the CNN host of being doddering and soft—and saying that the distinctly un-soft Nancy Grace, of CNN Headline News, was viewed as his possible successor.

“We really need to get our arms around this and try to get out an accurate description of what’s going on down here,” CNN News Group president Jim Walton told NYTV on March 21. “In the United States, there seems to be some sport about Larry and Nancy that is unfounded.”

But earlier, CNN had shown no hurry to call time out. While Mr. King went about his business—Monday: the Imette St. Guillen case! Wednesday: Liza Minnelli! Thursday: Macaulay Culkin!—the network allowed seven days to elapse between the initial criticisms of Mr. King and CNN president Jon Klein’s first published defense of his prime-time star.

That left the job of coming to praise Mr. King to that other cable news channel. “We do admire Larry,” Ms. Van Susteren—the Fox News anchor and former Larry King Live guest host—told NYTV by phone March 20. “Fox isn’t afraid to admit it. Fox has never been afraid. Fox doesn’t back off from the truth. We’re not a bunch of cowards here.”

If you’re counting, that’s three “Fox”-es to one “Larry.”

Mr. King still gets the highest ratings on CNN—to the tune of more than one million nightly viewers, which is less than half of Bill O’Reilly’s audience, a fact the Fox team wasn’t too proud to acknowledge.

“Larry deserves this,” Ms. Van Susteren said of her tribute to Mr. King. “Larry is what holds that place up.” (“Larry” 3, “Fox” 3!)

And if people think that the man holding CNN up is frail and faltering ….

As days passed with no defense from Mr. Klein, Mr. King’s staff began to grow anxious. The show’s executive producer, Wendy Whitworth, held a conference call to reassure the staff that everything would be fine, according to two network sources.

The silence from the executive suite brought back some of the feeling of last fall’s ouster of NewsNight anchor Aaron Brown, whom Mr. Klein publicly referred to as the “ice” to Anderson Cooper’s “fire” a few weeks before bumping him from his anchor chair.

Mr. Klein finally came forward, in the March 17 New York Post, about whether he was thinking of giving Mr. King the old Brown heave-ho: “We’d have to be even crazier than people think TV executives are to even think about moving a legend like Larry out of his time slot—especially when he reliably attracts a very nice audience each night. There’s absolutely no truth to this idle speculation.”

Declining a request for an interview with Mr. Klein, a CNN spokesperson said those comments stand as his statement.

Mr. Walton seconded that message. “Larry’s not going anywhere,” he said. “He’s fantastic at what he does. Much like what Johnny Carson did for late-night television, Larry King has done for the interview genre.”

Yet even Carson retired eventually. And CNN has no ready answer about what would come after Mr. King does leave. Larry King Live vastly outperforms anything else in the CNN lineup, regularly doubling its lead-in from Paula Zahn and nearly doubling its follower, Anderson Cooper.

Last summer, CNN appeared to take a shot at finding a possible heir, having Bob Costas guest-host a spate of shows while Mr. King was away. But while Mr. King has relied increasingly on sensational crime stories to boost ratings, Mr. Costas refused to host an hour in August dedicated to missing teen Natalee Holloway. That incident leaked to the press. Mr. Costas denied being the source of the leak, but told The New York Times, ‘‘I don’t believe there was a single American who was sitting around saying, ‘I’d really like to see Bob Costas’s take on this.’”

Mr. Costas was lauded by newspaper editorial boards far and wide as the one reasonable person in the tabloid-obsessed television news world. So ended that experiment in grooming a successor.

Nancy Grace, meanwhile, has never had a problem saying yes to Natalee Holloway. When Larry King Live discovered a few years ago that high-profile trials led to big ratings, Ms. Grace became a frequent guest host; Mr. King’s executive producer, Ms. Whitworth, developed the current Nancy Grace program for Headline News.

In December 2003, The Observer reported on the growing perception that the frequent guest host was being groomed as Mr. King’s successor. Asked then if Ms. Grace was his own first choice as a replacement, Mr. King replied, “No. I would have a more professional host.”

On March 21, Mr. Walton said the network does not now and never has had plans to drop Ms. Grace into Mr. King’s time slot—or any other time slot at CNN. Describing Ms. Grace as “lightning in a bottle,” he said it was in the company’s strategic best interest for her to keep drawing viewers to the Headline News channel.

“It is more advantageous to the shareholders for us to continue to build that asset,” he said. “As a proud father with all our networks here, I really don’t care which one gets the highest ratings, as long as it’s a CNN-branded network.”

“Headline News is a wonderful home for me—a perfect fit,” Ms. Grace wrote in a statement issued through a publicist. “I have no plans whatsoever to leave. I am lucky to be able to do the work that I do every day for crime victims everywhere. HLN has given me that platform. On a personal note, I would not even have my show at HLN today if Larry King, Wendy (his E.P.) and his staff had not invited me to be a regular guest, and a guest host, for years. I respect and admire Larry King both as a friend and a colleague. Larry needs no replacement … in fact, there IS no replacement for Larry, simply because there is no one like him.”

But at least at one time, if not still, Ms. Grace had her eyes on CNN, according to multiple sources close to the anchor.

“I know she was initially comparing her numbers to Larry’s ratings,” said one CNN producer. “She’s clearly a very ambitious person who didn’t get to where she was by sitting by idly.”

Another source said that when her show first launched, Ms. Grace closely compared her overnight ratings to those of the CNN prime-time anchors—and most closely to one in particular.

“Screw Greta. Screw Anderson. Screw any of the other competition on the other networks,” the source said. “When we looked at the ratings, it was all about Paula.”

As an anchor, Ms. Grace is a firebrand, less concerned with legal nuance than with her own feelings about a case. As a boss, according to sources inside and outside her show, she presides over a sometimes-difficult workplace. The program is on its third director in a year, which sources described as a high rate of turnover at any television news program. At least four members of her staff have met with the network’s human-resources department to discuss problems with the management of the program, according to three sources.

As a journalist, Ms. Grace has a reputation for being impulsive. In interviews with The Observer, sources recounted frantic phone calls from the show’s lawyers minutes before Ms. Grace went on the air. In one example, one staffer said, Ms. Grace heard in the makeup room that one of her favorite villains, Neil Entwistle, a man suspected of murdering his wife and daughter, had agreed to return to the United States to stand trial. Ms. Grace was narrowly talked out of reporting the tidbit, and Mr. Entwistle remained abroad another week before being extradited.

“It amazes me we get away with some of the stuff we get away with,” said one of Ms. Grace’s producers. “There are plenty of times where we have had to fix onscreen graphics because, when someone else saw the show, they pointed out, ‘Well, the guy really isn’t guilty; he hasn’t been charged yet.’ Or, ‘You can’t call him a “suspect”—he’s a “person of interest.”’”

Still, her numbers are astronomical. Ms. Grace’s audience has nearly tripled in the year she’s been on Headline News (she also hosts two hours of live television every day on Court TV). It now tops 600,000 each night, and appears to still be growing.

“I would be surprised if she went over to the network,” said Ms. Van Susteren, who was once considered a successor to Mr. King. “It’s so off the mission of Ted Turner. Ted Turner wanted news. He didn’t want theatrics.”

“I don’t know if Jon Klein is ready for a show like that in his prime-time line-up,” said one high-ranking CNN source. “Getting rid of Aaron Brown is one thing. Putting in the antithesis of Aaron Brown may be another.”

To the Editor:

John Heilpern’s excellent column correctly reports and analyzes the mishandling of My Name Is Rachel Corrie by New York Theater Workshop, which has resulted in the cancellation of its N.Y. premiere, apparently out of fear of political objections to its content [“A Scandal for Our Time: Rachel Corrie Ignites Uproar,” At the Theater, March 13]. I have a long history with the Workshop and great admiration for its artistic director, Jim Nicola, but I am disappointed and disheartened by this decision and have been baffled by the subsequent attempts to justify it.

I am writing to correct an impression conveyed in Mr. Heilpern’s column that my play about Afghanistan, Homebody/Kabul, was twice postponed after Sept. 11, 2001, because of the sensitive nature of the play’s subject. This was absolutely not the case. Homebody/Kabul had been fully cast and was in pre-production before the 9/11 attacks. The play went into rehearsal exactly as planned in early October, opening in early December 2001.

Because I think theater can usefully address itself to politically sensitive subjects, even if I’d been asked, I would not have agreed to a postponement. To his credit, Jim Nicola never asked.

Tony Kushner

Manhattan

Between the Tower And a Hard Place

To the Editor:

Ron Rosenbaum’s opinion to scrap the Freedom Tower is a terrible idea [“Eleventh-Hour Plea: Scrub Freedom Tower, a 1,776-Foot Blight,” Edgy Enthusiast, March 13]. After the unending process of getting something to replace the Twin Towers, Mr. Rosenbaum’s idea is to not rebuild. Shame on him. Thankfully, New York has more inspired and ambitious people than Mr. Rosenbaum.

Al DeChristifaro

Manhattan

To the Editor:

The idea of building anything on the W.T.C. site is abhorrent. I do agree with Mr. Rosenbaum that the site should be left open.

Maybe the U.S.S. Arizona should be raised and turned into a theme park. Souvenirs for all.

I’ve said it before: Turn all of the 16 acres into a national memorial.

Steven Rotter

Brooklyn

To the Editor:

Thanks to Mr. Rosenbaum for being the voice of sanity regarding the so-called Freedom Tower. Reasonable arguments don’t seem to be very popular these days, but I can only hope his will be heard.

John DeAngelis

Manhattan

Why They Built The Clinton Library

To the Editor:

It is not surprising that there are so many books being written about Hillary [“Da Hillary Code,” Ben Smith, March 13]. After all, she is the first First Lady to seek public office. She is the first woman whose candidacy is seriously being considered for President. She is an historical figure. Ever since Bill Clinton ran for President with the slogan “two for the price of one,” Hillary has been a force to be reckoned with. Current books being written about her will be used as fodder for future generations of historians.

Reba Shimansky

Manhattan

Whose Justice?

To the Editor:

In her article on Nancy Grace [“Did Nancy Grace, TV Crimebuster, Muddy Her Myth?”, NYTV, March 6], Rebecca Dana sums up the conviction of Keith Griffin’s killer in this way: “The justice system, in other words, apparently worked the way it was supposed to.”

Here, Ms. Dana embraces Ms. Grace’s hatred for the Bill of Rights and complete lack of compassion and empathy. Disgustingly, the prosecution in this case sought the death penalty for a retarded boy with no prior convictions. Shockingly, a jury took mere hours to sentence that boy to life in prison. As is all too common in a society that denies the accused even a facsimile of competent counsel either at trial or on appeal, Tommy McCoy “never had an appeal.”

That is not the way a moral justice system, under a healthy Constitution, is supposed to work.

Josh Perry

Brooklyn

How to Stay Moist

To the Editor:

Re Simon Doonan’s “How Dry I Am! Winter Means Lube, Tube” [Simon Says, March 6]: I’m writing from Chicago, where—despite being smack up against Lake Michigan—it is significantly drier in the winter than N.Y.C. Here are some things that have helped me:

1. Do not scratch! It just makes it worse.

2. Get a humidifier for your bedroom.

3. Get a humidifier for any other room you spend significant time in (your office, etc.).

4. Moisturizing oil. You put it on in the shower while you are still wet.

5. Do not take steaming hot showers—and PAT dry, do not rub.

Hope this helps. I love Mr. Doonan’s column.

Eileen Katman

Chicago

Christmas in March

To the Editor:

I’ve read Rex Reed for years and have been alternately amused and annoyed, but my hat’s off to his review of Joyeux Noël (Merry Christmas) [“Hold Your Fire,” On the Town, March 6]. It was a very touching description of a movie about a truly extraordinary event, one that’s particularly poignant now.

Mr. Reed can still bring it.

Bob Meinsma

San Francisco

That captures the tone of Big Love—disturbing, but not quite disturbing in the signature HBO way. No one ever swears in the hour-long scripted show. No one is brutally murdered. No one has a howling orgasm at 9 a.m. that wakes all the neighbors.

Instead, Bill Henrickson and his three wives live out the daily joys and frustrations of exurban domestic life, in three separate houses. The characters bicker, with equal gravity, about who will take the kids to school, who will pick up groceries, and who will sleep with Bill that night.

The result is that, when it premieres on March 12—in the showcase slot after The Sopranos—Big Love will become the creepiest show on television: more discomfiting than anything HBO has offered up before, more stomach-churning in its way than Fear Factor.

“In its own strange way, it’s a celebration of family,” said co-creator Mark Olsen, on the phone from the show’s Los Angeles studios.

Bill’s three wives are familiar female archetypes: There is Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), the first wife, the responsible and controlling one; Nicki (Chloë Sevigny), the second, a compulsive shopper whom Bill married after Barb got cancer and became infertile; and Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), the third, who started off as the baby-sitter and now has two tots of her own.

Unlike typical HBO fare, Big Love is profanity-free—a suggestion made by co–executive producer Tom Hanks. Instead, the characters say “fudge” and “H,” which would make Big Love suitable for network television. But there are just enough errant cheeks and nipples—known as “HBO-checks” in the NYTV household—scattered throughout each hour to remind viewers that they’re watching premium cable.

For a viewership inured to most forms of televised sex, violence and profanity, the network has found a new and unexpected way of making its audience squirm: happy misogyny. “The greatest freedom we have is obedience,” says Bill in one later episode, to nods all around.

Mr. Olsen and Will Scheffer, a gay couple who live in Pasadena, came up with the idea for Big Love while driving back to Manhattan from a visit with Mr. Olsen’s family in Nebraska. It was 2000, and they were kicking around ideas to pitch to HBO during the long car trip.

Somewhere around West Virginia, Mr. Olsen hit on polygamy. Mr. Scheffer found the whole idea “yucky,” he recounted, and—horrified by the prospect of a show about abusive family relations—didn’t speak to Mr. Olsen for the rest of the drive.

But Mr. Olsen set out to research the topic anyway. Eventually, as he kept telling Mr. Scheffer about it, he got his partner to go along. Two years later, after months spent digging through the archives of The Salt Lake Tribune and many furtive trips through polygamist enclaves, Messrs. Olsen and Scheffer sold their idea to HBO executives.

“It was almost a polemical pitch,” Mr. Olsen recalled. “We gave them a laundry list of points about what this show wasn’t about. We wanted to indicate we’re not interested in doing a hit job on the Mormon Church.”

That’s all well and good—unless you’re the Mormon Church, officials of which have denounced the show sight unseen. “We’re not going to like this program…” a spokesman for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints told the Denver Post. “We teach our members to have higher moral standards, and this is a program about sex.”

The church officially banned polygamy in 1890, although between 20,000 and 40,000 people still practice it. As polygamous hotspots have grown in the last two decades—most notably the Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints in Colorado City, Ariz., led by the outlaw “prophet” Warren Steed Jeffs—Mormon leaders have struggled to distance the church from the most radical offshoots.

HBO began meeting with the church months ago in hopes of preventing a full-scale boycott, despite all the historical evidence suggesting that few things boost ratings quite like the wrath of Christians. (Not even the wrath of Martha Stewart compares.) The network eventually agreed to air a disclaimer at the end of the pilot episode, differentiating everyday monogamous Mormons from their child-abusing, incest-condoning cousins. The disclaimer is also splashed in italics at the top of all the press materials, lest a reporter forget there is controversy here.

The writers—Mr. Scheffer, Mr. Olsen and a staff of seven—have struggled to make the show as nonjudgmental as possible, Mr. Olsen said. The writers have a good time with plurals, with Bill constantly fretting about his “homes,” but Mr. Olsen said they remind themselves that “these people care for each other. It’s not like everything has to have a happy ending, but it has to be put through the lens of ‘These people don’t hate each other. They are trying to be a family.’”

“That creates the need to write in a tone that isn’t sentimental, but isn’t dysfunctional either,” Mr. Scheffer added.

In focus groups, the show tested best among African-Americans—Mr. Scheffer guessed that was because Big Love is a show about people living on the margins of white-bread society. College students also have expressed particular interest, leading to an outpouring of student-paper editorials staunchly opposing polygamy.

The conservative blogosphere, meanwhile, has already sniffed out a plot to promote the homosexual agenda—for which, they suggest, fundamentalist Mormonism is a natural dramatic vehicle. In one scene, Nicki’s father (Harry Dean Stanton), a Jeffs-like leader of a polygamous compound called Juniper Creek, explains to a reporter that the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing bans on sodomy should carry over to polygamists as well. The next day’s headline: “We’re just like homosexuals.”

Creepy as the show is, it’s possible to imagine Big Love becoming a pop-culture phenomenon in much the same way as other shows with multiple female leads. Maybe the same women who identify with Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City or Gabrielle Solis on Desperate Housewives will find a sister in Nicki Henrickson, the incurable shopaholic and man-eater, who is $60,000 in debt and rarely without a Coach bag on her arm. Maybe polygyny is the new 40.

And maybe not. But every time the show seems to veer off into the unimaginable, the writers provide a little reminder that people like this do exist. They live in the same country. They even watch the same television.

Bill’s mother, a craggy, unlikable woman played by Grace Zabriskie, arrives in one episode for the birthday party of her grandson. Hostile to everyone and everything in the Henricksons’ picture-perfect house, she marches through the door, snarls at all the modern Mormon fundamentalists and says:

“Say, do you get Larry King? Nancy Grace is on tonight.”

Then, one August morning, a stranger—a 24-year-old thug with a history of being on the wrong side of the law—accosted Griffin outside a convenience store. He shot him five times in the head and back, stole $35 from his wallet, and left him dead.

Police soon tracked down the killer, and a new phase of suffering began for Ms. Grace. The suspect brazenly denied any involvement. At trial, Ms. Grace testified, then waited as jury deliberations dragged on for three days. The district attorney asked her if she wanted the death penalty, and in a moment of youthful weakness, she said no. The verdict came back guilty—life in prison—and a string of appeals ensued.

For Nancy Grace, the ordeal she describes felt nothing like justice. And so the Shakespeare-loving teen set out to change the justice system: first as a bulldog prosecutor, then as a Court TV and CNN anchor, crusader for victims’ rights and professional vilifier of the criminal-defense industry.

Her message, delivered with a crackling blend of folksiness and wrath, has made her a hit on two cable networks. Defense attorneys are pigs—morally comparable, she said in a Feb. 20 interview with USA Today, to “guards at Auschwitz.” Her latest show, Nancy Grace, celebrated its first anniversary on CNN’s Headline News Network that week; in one year, its viewership has tripled, to 606,000 a night.

Because of what happened in Georgia, Ms. Grace has said over and over, she knows firsthand how the system favors hardened criminals over victims. It is the foundation of her judicial philosophy, her motivation in life, her casus belli.

And much of it isn’t true.

Nancy Grace was engaged to a man named Keith Griffin. He was murdered in Georgia. And the man who killed him is serving a life sentence. In that, Ms. Grace’s version lines up with the official records from the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, newspaper articles from the time of the murder, and interviews with many of those involved in the case.

But those same sources contradict Ms. Grace when it comes to other salient facts of the crime and the trial—the facts that form the basis of Ms. Grace’s crusade against an impotent, criminal-coddling legal system.

• Griffin was shot not by a random robber, but by a former co-worker.

• The killer, Tommy McCoy, was 19, not 24, and had no prior convictions.

• Mr. McCoy confessed to the crime the evening he was arrested.

• The jury convicted in a matter of hours, not days.

• Prosecutors asked for the death penalty, but didn’t get it, because Mr. McCoy was mildly retarded.

• Mr. McCoy never had an appeal; he filed a habeas application five years ago, and after a hearing it was rejected.

Ms. Grace has also misreported the date of the incident—it was in 1979, not 1980—and has given Griffin’s age as 25 when it was 23.

The justice system, in other words, apparently worked the way it was supposed to.

In an emotional phone interview ranging over the inconsistencies in her account, Ms. Grace said, “I have not researched the defendant. I have tried not to think about it.”

“She has bent some stuff,” said Steve Griffin, Keith Griffin’s brother, in an interview with The Observer. “The reality of it is, the guy killed him. I know that. Our family knows that. There’s nothing we can do to bring him back. What she’s gonna say, she’s gonna say. I’m not gonna stop it.

“But if she doesn’t tell the truth, it’s gonna come out sooner or later.”

Nancy Grace anchors three hours of live television a day: two during the afternoon on Court TV’s Closing Arguments, then an hour of Nancy Grace on Headline News in the evening.

Before Nancy Grace, Headline News was exactly as it sounded—a virtually uninterrupted news-reading circuit of the day’s top stories. Then Ms. Grace joined the primetime lineup, fresh off an intense run of commentator and guest-host spots on Larry King Live.

Ms. Grace, who will not discuss her age, but according to official records is 46, comes across as the Bill O’Reilly of legal analysis, shutting down dissidents and cozying up to the likeminded, whom she addresses collectively as “friend.” She is a self-identified advocate for victims’ rights, with a taste for cases of the missing-white-woman variety.

And she rarely lets a week pass without reminding viewers of her own history. During her Feb. 24 show, she brought it to bear on the spokesperson for Jennifer Hagel-Smith, a bride whose husband disappeared during their honeymoon cruise.

“Why does Jennifer Hagel-Smith need a P.R. person?” she asked. “I’m a crime victim. I didn’t need a P.R. person. Why does she need a P.R. person?”

Ms. Grace’s accusatory style makes for gripping, if not always judicious, television. (Regarding the Auschwitz quote, Ms. Grace offered an explanation on the phone: “Under no condition is a defense attorney equal to a Nazi guard. That’s just an extreme example of someone refusing to take responsibility.”) In February, Ms. Grace’s staff was ordered to attend a three-hour workshop on reporting basics to help remedy “lax journalistic standards,” according to a CNN source. The session covered issues such as the meaning of “off the record” and the number of sources it takes to confirm a piece of information.

“[E]very editorial employee is expected to attend these seminars, as part of CNN’s standard training,” CNN publicist Janine Iamunno wrote in an e-mail. Ms. Grace did not attend—because, Ms. Iamunno explained, “she had attended a previous seminar.”

In her previous career, as an assistant district attorney in Atlanta from 1987 to 1996, Ms. Grace was cited three times for sloppy trial practices. She argued hundreds of jury trials and never lost one—another chapter in her mythic back-story.

But in 2005, the 11th Circuit Court in Georgia declared that Ms. Grace had “played fast and loose” with facts in her 1990 triple-murder prosecution of Herbert Connell Stephens. In 1997, the Georgia Supreme Court overturned an arson-murder verdict, finding Ms. Grace had withheld evidence from the defense; in 1994, the same court had overturned her conviction of a heroin trafficker, finding problems with her closing argument.

Her courtroom style made a more positive impression, however, on Court TV founder Steven Brill. Mr. Brill plucked her out of an Atlanta courtroom in 1996. At his behest, as the story goes, she moved to New York with two suitcases, $200 and a curling iron, to co-host a show with Johnnie Cochran.

All along the road to fame, Ms. Grace has kept the focus on her original motivation.

“With every case that I prosecuted,” she told Tim Russert in June 2005, “every bad person I put away, it healed me. And looking back on it, I thought I was trying to help them, but I was really helping me.”

Through a spokesperson, CNN NewsGroup vice president Ken Jautz offered a written endorsement of Ms. Grace’s performance: “Nothing changes the fact that Nancy suffered a tremendous personal tragedy when she was 19 years old, with the murder of her fiancé—a trauma that shaped who she is today. While some details may be able to be clarified in the over 25 years since the case, they do not [bear] any significance on Nancy’s career as a prosecutor, victims’ advocate or television host. We have great respect for Nancy and her willingness to draw upon this personal experience as she advocates for victims and enlightens all of us on her show every night.”

"NANCY'S ALWAYS BEEN TENDERHEARTED," said her mother, Elizabeth Grace. “She comes across as being so strong, but deep down, she has a lot of soft spots.”

By any standard, the murder of Keith Griffin shook Ms. Grace badly. She dropped out of college for a while, stopped eating and lost 30 pounds. She abandoned her plans to become an English professor and enrolled in Mercer University Law School, on her way to becoming a prosecutor.

Growing up, Elizabeth Grace said, her daughter had applied her tenacity to interior-design projects for her local 4-H club. She made little rooms out of particleboard and glued squares of carpet to the bottom. “She was always very competitive,” the elder Ms. Grace said.

Keith Griffin and Ms. Grace had been college sweethearts for more than two years when he proposed in the summer of 1979. Griffin planned to be a geologist, and was earning extra college money working for the Ingram Construction Co. on the Georgia Kraft Plywood Co. site near Madison, Ga. The engagement was a secret—only Griffin’s sister, Judy, knew about it—but the families approved of their relationship. Ms. Grace’s family thought Griffin was polite and charming; Griffin’s parents adored Ms. Grace. Griffin’s brother Steve, 13 months his junior, was the unimpressed one. “I thought she was a dingbat,” he said.

Then came Aug. 6. Griffin woke at 5 a.m. in the Grace home, where he’d spent the night in an extra room, and left for work. Ms. Grace’s mother said her daughter tucked some money in his hand before he left.

“I waved until he was nearly out of sight, because I’ve always heard that watching until someone is out of sight is bad luck,” Ms. Grace wrote in her autobiography, Objection!

At 8:30 that morning, Tommy McCoy, recently fired from his job at Ingram, went to his father’s house and took a pistol from the bedroom closet, according to the transcript of his confession given to two agents at the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department that evening. He wrapped the gun in a paper bag and hitched a ride with the family’s insurance man to his grandmother’s house, where he stayed until 11:15 a.m. Then he started walking toward Georgia Kraft.

WHAT HAPPENED TO KEITH GRIFFIN THAT DAY, Ms. Grace told Tim Russert in 2005, was this: “[H]e was, I guess you would say, mugged by someone—he didn’t even know him—and shot five times.”

“All this for $35?” Mr. Russert asked later in the interview.

“Thirty-five dollars,” Ms. Grace replied. “Thirty-five dollars.”

Ms. Grace also told Mr. Russert, “The man that murdered Keith was a repeat offender, and I thought the system had failed Keith.”

She had given the same message to a New York Times reporter in 2004: “The person that murdered Keith had several incidents with the law, and somebody let him slip through their fingers.”

And she told it to Larry King in 2003: “This perpetrator had been in and out of trouble. And I always wonder, if someone had cared about the case—not necessarily throw them behind bars and toss the key, but to rehab the person, or to throw them behind bars, to get him off the street.”

Nancy Grace’s stated mission has been to prevent that sort of mistake from being made again. “I am the system,” she declared to CNN’s Art Harris in a 1995 interview, when she was still a prosecutor. “I am part of the system, and it failed that time, and I hate to see it ever fail again.”

Yet it’s unclear when the system could have ever had a chance to lock up Mr. McCoy before the murder. According to his personal-history sheet, he had never been convicted of a crime. Ms. Grace noted in a written follow-up that Mr. McCoy could have had a sealed juvenile record.

On the phone, Ms. Grace said she recalled having been told “by an official” that “this young man had been in and out of trouble and that his own family had been afraid of him.” But she could not recall which official might have said that.

“I have not researched his background, no,” Ms. Grace said.

ACCORDING TO THE ATTORNEYS WHO TRIED THE CASE, as well as Mr. McCoy’s confession, the two men were not strangers, and nobody disputed who did the killing.

“He knew him, of course,” said Billy Prior, Mr. McCoy’s defense attorney. Griffin had seen Mr. McCoy walking and offered him a ride.

“[T]hat dude came up in a truck,” Mr. McCoy told police, according to the notes on his confession. “It was a blue truck, and it belongs to the man I used to work for. The boss wasn’t in it, and the guy that was in it was a white dude from Athens who worked with me for a while. He drove up next to where I was standing, and stopped the truck. He said, ‘Hello, Tommy, how are you?’”

Mr. McCoy then unloaded six rounds from his .38-caliber pistol. He took $10 from Griffin’s wallet and threw the wallet in the truck. The truck rolled into a ditch on the side of the road. Just then, Joe Brown, another employee of Ingram Construction, pulled up to see if Mr. McCoy needed help. Mr. McCoy trained the empty pistol on him, forced him out of his car, jumped in and drove off. “I shot that dude because he was one of the ones that got me fired from my job,” he said in his confession. “I went out there to get revenge because I had been fired.”

In her biography, Ms. Grace writes, “My deep-seated ethical problem with defense attorneys likely traces back to my being a witness in Keith’s murder trial …. The truth really doesn’t matter to the defense.”

In 2003, Ms. Grace told Larry King that the killer’s defense had been “Didn’t do it, wrong guy. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“No,” said Mr. Prior when asked about that account. “That was certainly not it.”

Mr. Prior laughed on hearing Ms. Grace’s quote comparing defense attorneys to Nazis. “I guess I’m where she got her idea,” he said. Mr. Prior is now a Superior Court judge in Morgan County and a fan of the Nancy Grace show.

“She’s not a reticent-type person,” he said. “I like that.”

But back in 1979, a mistaken-identity defense for Mr. McCoy would have had to overcome not only the confession but the testimony of Joe Brown, who had happened across the scene.

The most the defense could muster, Mr. Prior said, was a psychiatric evaluation, in which a doctor from the Georgia Central State Hospital declared Mr. McCoy “mildly retarded,” according to court documents.

“I don’t think I ever made a formal plea of insanity, because I couldn’t get a psychiatrist to say he was insane,” Mr. Prior said. “I did play on the mental-retardation thing. That was my only card.”

The district attorney who prosecuted the case, Joe Briley, is a longtime friend of Mr. Prior’s. Mr. Briley said he doesn’t care for Ms. Grace’s show. “I started to watch it one night,” he said, “but I don’t like the format. I knew right off that I didn’t like the format. I said, ‘I believe I’ll go watch a John Wayne movie or something.’”

Neither man recalled Nancy Grace as a pivotal figure at the trial. Mr. Briley faintly remembered asking her to identify Griffin’s wallet. “I don’t think she did anything to demark herself on the witness stand,” Mr. Briley said, “or I would have remembered.”

Ms. Grace offers vivid memories of the trial in her book. “The cavernous courtroom reminded me of the one in To Kill a Mockingbird,” she writes. She describes looking down at Tommy McCoy from the witness chair, some six feet off the ground.

And Ms. Grace’s mother recalls her coming home and recounting the trial point by point each night.

But Ms. Grace said that she has no recollection of Mr. McCoy’s confession or his defense strategy.

“I did not hear his defense,” she said. “I only recall my testimony.”

Where did she get the claim that Mr. McCoy had denied the killing? “Upon his arrest, I was told he said he didn’t do it,” Ms. Grace said. “He may have confessed at some juncture, but I was told that he initially said he didn’t do it.”

Columbus Johnson, the deputy sheriff who arrested Mr. McCoy and took him to jail in 1979, is now a captain in his 34th year with the department. “He didn’t open his mouth the whole way,” Mr. Johnson said. “He never said anything to me or the other officers that transported him.”

Asked if she had checked her memory against the official documents before writing the book and giving the interviews, Ms. Grace said, “I wrote about everything with the knowledge I had.”

The trial wrapped up quickly—not with three days of deliberations, as Ms. Grace described, but with one. Mr. McCoy was convicted of aggravated assault and murder, and acquitted of robbery.

Mr. Briley said he had no recollection of Ms. Grace’s dramatic, now-regretted decision not to ask for the death penalty in the sentencing phase. Rather than asking the family if they wanted to pursue death, he said, his practice was to tell them his plan and see if they supported it. “If she had been introduced by the family, and this may have been what happened, as his fiancée, then I would have included her in the conversation,” he said.

In any event, Mr. Briley did put in for the death penalty, in a letter on Oct. 3, 1979—saying the murder “was outrageously wanton or vile, horrible or inhuman in that it involved torture, depravity of mind, or an aggravated battery to the victim.”

The jury recommended life in prison. Both attorneys said they believe this to have been because Mr. McCoy was demonstrably slow-witted. “He was not very bright,” Mr. Briley said.

When the verdict was read, Mr. McCoy turned to Mr. Prior. “He asked me, ‘What does it mean?’” Mr. Prior said. “I told him it meant he was not going to the electric chair.”

Mr. McCoy has been in prison for 27 years now. “He did not appeal his case,” Mr. Prior said. “His family did not want to appeal.”

Five years ago, Mr. McCoy filed a habeas application with the state. “It’s not an appeal,” Mr. Prior said. “It’s a writ claiming he’s being illegally held.” Mr. Prior testified at a hearing, and the application was denied. He appears likely to remain behind bars for the rest of his life.

Ms. Grace, meanwhile, plans to continue her crusade. Even if the facts don’t exactly line up. Even if it’s starting to worry her mother.

“Like I told her so many times,” the elder Ms. Grace said: “‘Nancy, let it go.’”

Great news: Bitches are back!

Being noble and self-denying and altruistic is totally over. Self-involved disco slags with flippy bangs are suddenly all the rage! The caring celeb—that gal who cannot accept an award without professing how “humbled” she is by it—is suddenly déjà vu. The era when even Ginger Spice became a U.N. Goodwill Ambassador appears to have finally come to an end.

Personally, I am delighted to see the return of the overachieving, stop-at-nothing, nakedly ambitious media whore. The holier-than-thou movement was starting to rot the elastic on my sequined headband.

Re sequins, let’s talk about the reigning queen of the new bitch trend: Madonna.

“New York is not for little pussies who scream,” singeth Madge on her new, utterly great Confessions on a Dance Floor CD, adding, “If you don’t like my attitude then you can F off.” This new and delicious Madge incarnation—trashy 70’s hairdo, fishnets, hooker blousons, spangled shoes—feels a lot more authentic than the English lady of the manor, the Kabbalist or—most preposterous of all—the demure children’s author in the print shift dress and pastel cardigan.

Madge, you have finally figured it out: We love you because you have clawed your way to the top. You are a driven, talented bitch. You wanted fame, glamour, adulation and wealth, and you wanted it for one reason only: It was your reward for being more fabulous than the rest of us. Voilà!

Madonna is not the only bitch in town at the moment.

One of the c**tiest characters ever to strut the boards has finally arrived in the U.S. I’m talking about the wondrous, gin-swilling Beverly—as interpreted by Jennifer Jason Leigh in the revival of the 70’s Mike Leigh cult classic Abigail’s Party (the Acorn Theater, 410 West 42nd Street between Ninth and 10th avenues, 212-279-4200).

I would strongly advise you not to miss this demented production. Ms. Jason Leigh’s imperfect accent and her whiny voice, though jarring at first, ultimately work in her favor to create an even more bitchy Beverly than the Alison Steadman original. Watching Ms. Jason Leigh, whose hairdo is tellingly and startlingly identical to Madge’s new ’do, I was transported back to an era when media folk were mercifully apolitical and nobody expected them to play a role in solving the world’s problems.

For those of you who are too fabulous to go to the theater and experience this brilliant play, there is no shortage of nouveau bitchery on television: Court TV crime-buster Nancy Grace, Julie Cooper-Nichol of The O.C. and Tanya Turner on Footballers’ Wives, to name but three.

Now back to Madge: Not everyone loves the new back-on-top, hard-as-nails Mrs. Ritchie. Writing on Salon last week, that clever bitch Camille Paglia expressed her concern that Madonna “is starting to morph into the mature Joan Crawford of Torch Song, still ferociously dancing but with her fascist willpower signaled by brute, staring eyes and fixed jawline.” In a kind and caring way, Ms. Paglia goes on to posit the notion that Madonna runs the risk of “turning into a pasty powdered crumpet like the aging Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (What gives? I thought you Italian bitches always stuck together?)

Madge, don’t listen to her. She crazy. We love your new CD and we adore the insanely careerist you. A Garboesque retreat from the public gaze would deprive us all of so much in the coming years. Powdery crumpet, anyone?

So now let’s talk about that über-bitch hairdo. I, for one, am giving it a major thumbs-up. Y’all have been sporting that Kate Moss seaweedy look for far too long. It’s time to bitch it up.

I consulted top celebrity hairdresser Jimmy Paul—Madge’s scalp is one of the few he has not touched—for tips on how to replicate the Madge/ Abigail’s Party look.

“I call it a Farrah-slash-Gilda, as in the Rita Hayworth movie. It’s all about a deep side part and loads of Bumble and Bumble Thickening Spray,” said Mr. Paul when I grilled him during a Barneys ad shoot last week. He continued, “It’s not as hard as it looks. Put electric rollers in at a 45-degree angle. While they cook—and I do mean cook!—you will have plenty of time to paint your face.”

Burn, baby, burn!