How did Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs turn the Lucien Carr case into a novel?

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Portrait of Jack Kerouac, American novelist and poet, looking over his shoulder in a collared shirt, circa 1965. — Jack Kerouac American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac, c. 1965.

In 1944, Lucien Carr—a member of the social circle that included Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs—killed a man who he claimed had made unwanted sexual advances toward him. Following the incident, Carr confessed to both Kerouac and Burroughs before turning himself in to the police. Both writers were subsequently arrested as material witnesses, though they were eventually released without being charged with a crime.1

In 1945, Kerouac and Burroughs collaborated on a fictionalized account of these events titled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Although the manuscript was rejected by publishers at the time, it was eventually published in 2008.1