Lillie Mae wasn’t the only one in the family who suffered unrequited love. So did Truman.

But the object of Capote’s ardor was a murderer: Perry Smith, one of two men convicted of killing a Kansas farmer, his wife and two children in 1959. The story of Smith and his accomplice, Richard “Dick” Hickock, was the focus of “In Cold Blood.”

“All the time those boys were in Kansas, (Truman) made my life one hell on earth,” Rudisill said. “Because they were making his life hell on earth.”

Capote needed the men to be executed so he could finish his book. At the same time, he had become infatuated with Smith.

I ask Rudisill if the attraction was mutual.

“Absolutely, absolutely. I’ll stake my life on it. That’s all that Truman called about was Perry when he called me on the phone. …

“But he also told me this: He said, ‘Perry’s got to die, because if he doesn’t and they let him out, he will do the same thing again.’”

Smith and Hickock were executed by hanging on April 14, 1965. Moments later, Rudisill’s phone rang.

“He called me on the phone immediately, and he was just absolutely hysterical, strung out.”

In 1966, Capote celebrated the release of “In Cold Blood” with the legendary Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York, with Washington Post Publisher Katharine Graham as his guest of honor. Capote, according to biographer Gerald Clarke, did not invite Rudisill, “who, as a result, nurtured a grudge that was never to die.”

In 1975, Esquire published an excerpt of “Answered Prayers,” the unfinished novel Capote had worked on for years. Appalled by his revelations of intimate, confidential material, his coterie of rich and famous friends, his society swans, abandoned him.

And in time, he even grew to detest Harper Lee. “Mockingbird” won a Pulitzer Prize; “In Cold Blood” did not. Capote himself may have fed the persistent rumors that he was the actual author of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“‘I wrote the goddamned thing.’ That was his words,” Rudisill told me. “He said he was so bitter about it because she didn’t give him any credit for anything and when he took her to Kansas [to research “In Cold Blood”], he gave her all kind of credit.”

One night in a drunken rage, Capote called Rudisill threatening to go to the press with his story. She talked him out of it.

“I said: ‘Truman, please don’t do that.’ Because I said: ‘I know you wrote it.’ I mean, I know Truman wrote it. My god!”

In 2006, Dr. Wayne Flynt, a retired Auburn University professor, reported the discovery of a letter by Capote in which he said he had read “Mockingbird” and liked it. The letter was penned in 1959, a year before “Mockingbird” was published.

Flynt told NPR’s Melissa Block: “Nowhere in the letter does he claim any involvement whatsoever in the book.”