Until recently, the world seemed to have overlooked two articles that Harper Lee wrote about the 1959 case that took her to Kansas with Truman Capote. Photograph by Donald Uhrbrock / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty

Four days before Christmas in 1959, an employee in the records section of the Federal Bureau of Investigation wrote to one of J. Edgar Hoover’s top lieutenants to inform him of a “Call From [Redacted] of Random House.” The caller—almost certainly Bennett Cerf, the head of the publishing house—wanted to know if the Bureau could help one of his clients by sending a wire “identifying Truman Capote as a legitimate writer assigned to do a story.” The memo about that call has more blacked-out boxes than a crossword puzzle, but it conveys the lengths to which Random House went to assist Capote, who had left for Kansas without any press credentials after reading a sliver of an article in the New York Times about the Clutters, a family of four who had been murdered in their home.

Unfortunately for Capote, the F.B.I. checked its own files, consulted “Who’s Who in America,” and recommended against interceding on the author’s behalf. Fortunately for him, he’d already brought along a different kind of access, in the form of Harper Lee, his friend since childhood, when he’d summered next door to her while staying with family in Monroeville, Alabama. “She was extremely helpful in the beginning,” Capote later told George Plimpton, “when we weren’t making much headway with the townspeople, by making friends with the wives of the people I wanted to meet.”

But Capote was paying his compliments on the cheap. It wasn’t just the wives Lee wooed (and one wonders why Capote regarded only their husbands as worthwhile sources), and it wasn’t just in the beginning. Lee and Capote arrived together in December of 1959, only a few weeks after the murders, when the residents of Holcomb and Garden City were still so afraid that they left their lights on all night, and the investigators on the case weren’t sharing many details, because the murderers were still on the loose. What we know now is that many of those “townspeople” talked to Capote only because of Lee; she convinced most of Kansas to coöperate with the orchid who’d invaded their wheat fields.

Nancy Clutter’s boyfriend, Bobby Rupp, the last to see the family before the murders, has said that it was Lee who asked him most of the questions. Rupp told Ralph Voss, author of “Truman Capote and the Legacy of ‘In Cold Blood,’ ” that if it had been only Capote conducting the interviews, he “would probably have walked out of the room.” “If Capote came on as something of a shocker,” Agent Alvin Dewey, the lead investigator in the Clutter murders, told the Garden City Telegram, “she was there to absorb the shock. She had a down-home style, a friendly smile, and a knack for saying the right things.”

Ever since “In Cold Blood” appeared, in 1965, with a co-dedication to Lee, readers have known that she helped Capote with his research and reporting, but until recently the whole world seemed to have overlooked two pieces she herself had written about the case that took them to Kansas. Both pieces had been hidden in plain sight, announced, at the time they appeared, in a column in the Telegram by the local writer Dolores Hope. But the pieces went unnoticed until the newspaper was digitized, earlier this year—which rendered its archives readily searchable, including for the names of famous novelists. Last week, one of those pieces was reprinted by Smithsonian magazine. First published in March of 1960, it is an unsigned, twelve-hundred-word profile of Agent Dewey, which appeared in an unlikely place: The Grapevine, the newsletter of retired F.B.I. agents.

Even G-men like to keep in touch, and since 1938 they’ve published their own newsletter. A gossip sheet for an organization not inclined to gossip, it goes out every month, with profiles, conference announcements, and articles on contemporary concerns and historical cases. Humbert Humbert might have been wrong about a murderer’s fancy style, but you can, it seems, count on a lawman for plain prose: the pages of The Grapevine read like something between alumni notes and an autopsy.

Lee’s article is no exception. Either by design or by brute-force editing, she fully conformed to the newsletter’s anodyne house style. As in her fiction, Lee structured the story around families—here the Clutters and the Deweys, there the Ewells and the Finches—but, other than that, she showed little of her particular talents in the profile, which reads like the liner notes to the album Capote eventually produced. The piece begins with Dewey’s solving “the most extraordinary murder case in the history of the state” and ends with his return to the “routine larceny and burglary” that Kansas usually had to offer.

The killers, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, are named, and their criminal records and confessions are described, but there’s nothing of their interior lives, which Capote himself would conjure so fully in his book, nor is there any account of the long itinerary they followed out of Kansas as they evaded authorities. The descriptions are blanched (Herb Clutter was a “prominent” farmer; his family was “prominent” in the Methodist Church; the slayings were “senseless”; the investigation “intensive”), and by the time Dewey “feels an abiding sense of personal satisfaction in having brought to justice the killers of his friends,” the case has been drained of its terror and tragedy.

A single sentence offers a glimpse of Lee’s unmistakable style: “Pete, age 4, weighs 13 pounds,” she writes, “is tiger-striped and eats Cheerios for breakfast.” Courthouse Pete was the Dewey family’s housecat, and he gets an even fuller profile in Lee’s reporting notes. Now housed at the New York Public Library, those run to more than a hundred typed pages, which Lee prepared and revised for her friend nightly during their time in Kansas, creating a careful record of all their interviews and her impressions.

Of Lee’s forays into journalism—a few thousand words in Vogue and McCall’s in the sixties, a few hundred in O, The Oprah Magazine decades later—the Grapevine piece is remarkable only for where it was published. But, six years later, Lee wrote another article about Kansas, this one a profile of Capote himself. It was published in an equally unlikely venue: the newsletter of the Book of the Month Club, which chose “In Cold Blood” for its January, 1966, selection. Capote himself asked his friend to write the short biography the Club wanted to go along with the book, and the piece appeared under her byline, but somehow got lost in what she’d later call “the Capote industry.”

Unlike the earlier profile of Agent Dewey, the Capote profile is a fine and full demonstration of Lee’s talents, one that reveals far more about their friendship and about the kind of nonfiction writer she might’ve been. (About the only thing that links the two pieces, other than the state of Kansas, is another cat: the Capote household, Lee writes, “includes a fat bulldog and a thin cat, both travelers, both spoiled.” The cat was Diotima; the dog was Charlie T. Fatburger.) In just three short paragraphs, she follows her friend from “an unhappy, nomadic childhood” to “master of any literary form he chose to employ.” Capote’s stare, she claims, conveys his “total commitment and single-minded sense of purpose”—a quality that is shared, she observes ominously, “by criminals and geniuses.” She describes her friend as a superhero who likes to “split the landscape in fast sports cars” and “swim a mile out into the ocean.” (Those descriptions would read like exaggerations if other observers hadn’t also testified to Capote’s surprising stoutness. The editor Leo Lerman, who once saw Capote naked in a bathroom at Yaddo, said, “I was astonished because from the hips down he seemed to be a truck driver.”)