 Morris's original intention was to direct a film based on the MacDonald case that would challenge the story presented by government prosecutors at the 1979 trial, and by Joe McGinniss in his 1983 book on the case, "Fatal Vision", which proposed that MacDonald was a psychopath who had overdosed on the diet pill Eskatrol and tried to cover up the crime.However, no studios were willing to finance the film, and Morris wrote a book instead.The book's title comes from the beginning of "William Wilson", the 1839 short story by Edgar Allan Poe.