It is tempting to dismiss the situation as owing to human nature. After all, authors are fallible. Authors, their editors and publishers should be working harder than most of them do to achieve accuracy. I say that as an author of nonfiction books for six publishers. Authors frequently stonewall their critics.
Publishers frequently do nothing to make corrections.
Let's ignore that Hatfield forgot to tell his readers about his criminal past. Let's focus instead on the text, in which Hatfield overreaches his evidence again and again. Hatfield never says who King is, how she knows anything about Bush, or precisely what she divulged. Well, it turns out King is the newsroom librarian for the daily paper in Midland, Texas. She never granted an interview, and had no detailed knowledge about Bush beyond what had appeared in the newspaper.