Final Vision
The Last Word on Jeffrey MacDonald
By Joe McGinniss
Byliner Originals
Colette MacDonald with daughters Kristen (left) and Kimberly.
Courtesy of www.thejeffreymacdonaldcase.com
Please be sure to visit Byliner.com for the latest updates to this story.
Copyright © 2012 by Joe McGinniss
All rights reserved
Cover image courtesy of www.thejeffreymacdonaldcase.com
ISBN: 978-1-61452-055-9
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Table of Contents
1. The Murders
2. The Never-Ending Story
3. The Girl in the Floppy Hat
4. The Speedy Trial Seesaw
5. Case Closed?
6. “The Evidence as a Whole”
7. “Things Do Not Lie”
8. Legal Burlesque
9. The Author Takes the Stand
About the Author
About Byliner
Byliner Originals & Byliner Fiction
1. The Murders
We were young at the start.
MacDonald, the murderer; Murtagh, his nemesis; and me.
Now we are old. And still the case won’t die.
It is the longest-running criminal case in U.S. history, United States of America v. Jeffrey R. MacDonald. It has lasted forty-two years and remains at least three or four years from closure.
If you know about the case, at least some of what you know is probably wrong. If you don’t know about it, you should, because it’s a story that reveals as much about America—the best and the worst of it—as any other you’ll hear.
At 3:42 a.m. on February 17, 1970, military police at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, near Fayetteville, responded to an emergency call placed by a man requesting assistance at 544 Castle Drive, in a section of the base that housed married officers.
Arriving at the address within ten minutes, military policemen found three bodies awash in a sea of blood. Twenty-five-year-old Colette MacDonald had had her skull fractured by a club. She’d been stabbed nine times in the neck and seven times in the chest with a knife, and twenty-one times in the chest with an ice pick. Both of her arms were broken.
Her five-year-old daughter, Kimberly, had had her skull, cheekbone, and nose fractured by a club. She’d been stabbed eight to ten times in the neck with a knife. Her two-year-old daughter, Kristen, had been stabbed twelve times in the back, four times in the chest, and once in the neck with a knife, and approximately fifteen times in the chest with an ice pick.
The autopsy showed that Colette had been five months pregnant with a baby boy.
The MPs also found twenty-six-year-old Green Beret captain Jeffrey MacDonald lying motionless next to his wife on the floor of the master bedroom, wearing only a pair of pajama bottoms. On the headboard of the bed, the word PIG had been written in blood.
Jeffrey MacDonald was alive. He moaned and then cried out, “Check my kids.”
He said he’d been sleeping on the living room couch when two white men and one black man attacked him. With them was a white woman who had long blond hair and was wearing high boots and a floppy hat. She was holding a lit candle and chanting, “Acid is groovy … Kill the pigs.” He’d tried to fight off the three men, but they’d knocked him unconscious. He said he was a doctor and that he thought he was going into shock. If that happened, he said, the MPs should elevate his legs, keep him warm, and make sure he didn’t swallow his tongue.
And so it began: the saga of the Princeton-educated Green Beret doctor who never served in Vietnam, never saw combat, and killed no one other than his own wife and children.
Brian Murtagh first got involved in 1971, as a twenty-five-year-old military attorney. He stayed involved throughout a forty-year career as a Justice Department prosecutor. It was by no means his only assignment: he was also lead U.S. prosecutor in the case that arose from the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. But for more than thirty years, every time MacDonald tried to argue his way out of prison, he found Murtagh there, barring the door with impeccably prepared legal briefs.
As for me, I got involved in 1979. I had planned to write only a newspaper column about MacDonald. I wound up writing a book about the case, Fatal Vision, first published in 1983. All these years later, the story has yet to let me go.
* * *
MacDonald told investigators he’d been knocked unconscious in a struggle against four murderous intruders who burst into his home and attacked him as he slept on his living room couch.
But despite the massacre of his wife and children, MacDonald was almost unharmed. Other than a small, neat chest incision that caused the partial collapse of one lung, he had two superficial stab wounds, neither of which required stitches, and a bruise on his forehead that hadn’t even broken the skin.
From the start, investigators found this discrepancy suspicious. They were also troubled by the relatively undisturbed condition of the living room where MacDonald said he’d fought his life-and-death battle. A coffee table lay on its side, atop magazines scattered on the floor. A plant had spilled from its pot. That was it. There were no other signs of a struggle. Nothing was stolen. The large stash of drugs MacDonald kept in a hall closet—including syringes, scalpel blades, and eighteen fifty-milligram vials of liquid Thorazine—was untouched.
Nonetheless, the FBI and the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) spent weeks pursuing leads involving Fayetteville-area drug dealers, anti-war hippies, and any other groups that might have wanted to copy the murder of actress Sharon Tate and four others, six months earlier, in her Los Angeles home by followers of Charles Manson. They got nowhere.
The CID formally questioned MacDonald for the first time on April 6, 1970. The investigation had been hampered by a number of amateurish mistakes: a hospital orderly had discarded MacDonald’s pajama bottoms, military police had allowed garbage men to collect the household trash, lab technicians had used the toilets inside the apartment, an ambulance driver had stolen MacDonald’s wallet, and a piece of skin found under Colette’s fingernail had been lost at the laboratory.
Despite these blunders, the CID had gathered and analyzed evidence that was inconsistent with MacDonald’s early and sketchy accounts. On April 6, as detectives questioned him in detail for the first time, they quickly realized he wasn’t telling them the truth. Unbeknownst to MacDonald, the physical evidence from the crime scene contradicted his story again and again.
MacDonald would give many later accounts: at the military hearing that summer, to other CID investigators in the early 1970s, to a grand jury in 1974 and 1975, and at trial in 1979. In each instance, he changed his story slightly as he attempted to match it to his understanding of the physical evidence that existed at the time. But he never caught up. In many ways, his ultimate fate was sealed on the morning and afternoon of April 6, 1970. As Brian Murtagh said years later, “The physical evidence only comes into focus when it is viewed through the prism of MacDonald’s false accounts.”
(Fatal Vision contains a comprehensive description of the physical evidence and a detailed explanation of how, as it developed over time through more sophisticated laboratory analysis, it proved the guilt of Jeffrey MacDonald.)
The Army charged MacDonald with three counts of murder on May 1, 1970. After a preliminary hearing that summer, the Army abruptly dropped the
charges and gave him an honorable discharge. He moved to Southern California and began work as an emergency room physician. The Army continued to investigate, pursuing leads that pointed to other possible suspects. The more evidence they gathered, however, the more convinced investigators became that MacDonald was, indeed, guilty.
In 1974, a grand jury was convened. They indicted MacDonald on three counts of murder in January 1975. Legal maneuvering ensued as MacDonald sought to avoid standing trial. That went on for four more years.
I met him in June 1979. By then he knew he would be returning to North Carolina in July to be tried for the murders committed nine years before. He told me how much he admired my work. He suggested that I write a book about his case. He said that during the trial I could live in Raleigh with him, his legal team, and his mother and friends in a fraternity house they were renting on the campus of North Carolina State University.
I told MacDonald that his proposal sounded interesting but that I’d have to have total editorial control. He said that was fine; he knew that a responsible writer would insist on nothing less. Then he told me I was the one and only writer he wanted to work with, the one and only writer who he knew would get the story right.
But there was a catch. He needed money. In return for exclusive access to him during and after the trial and for total access to the case files and his personal memoranda, he wanted a minor share of the proceeds from the book.
Only years later did I learn that, after brunch with me, MacDonald went to lunch with the popular crime writer Joseph Wambaugh. He told Wambaugh that he was the one and only writer he wanted to work with, the one and only writer who he knew would get the story right. Savvier than I was, Wambaugh said no. He’d been a Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective before becoming an author, and he spotted MacDonald as a fraud immediately.
In my naïveté, I did not. I thought he seemed a likable guy. His lawyer, Bernie Segal, and my agent made a deal. At the start, knowing none of the facts of the case, I had no clue as to whether or not MacDonald was guilty. As jurors were instructed to do, I granted him the presumption of innocence, but that is not the same as belief. Contrary to countless media stories that have appeared in the years since, I did not start off believing that MacDonald was innocent. There was no way I could form an opinion about his guilt or innocence until I saw and heard the evidence presented in court.
We got along well. We were about the same age (mid-thirties at the time) and shared common interests in books, music, and sports. After full days in court and on weekends, I’d jog with him around the NC State track, eat dinner with him, have a beer, shoot a game of pool.
Along the way—although I never told him so—he convinced himself that my book would portray him as an innocent victim of a justice system run amok. Because I wanted to stay as close to him as I could for as long as I could, in order to learn as much about him as possible, I did not disabuse him of that notion.
As the trial progressed, however, I began to grow uncomfortable. MacDonald and his lawyers expressed only contempt for the prosecution’s case, but privately I was finding it extremely persuasive. By the time the jury began its deliberations, I was convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that this bright and charming man with whom I’d just spent the summer had murdered his wife and children. Despite missteps the Army had made in its initial investigation, the evidence was undeniable. MacDonald was found guilty on three counts of murder and sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment, to be served consecutively.
But once I got home and began to receive anguished, imploring letters from MacDonald from prison, my doubts revived. He was such a good guy, how could he have done such a terrible thing? I must have missed something. The prosecution must have fooled me, and the jury, with sleight of hand.
For more than a year, I expressed sympathy to MacDonald. Finally, I came to believe he was a psychopath who’d been consciously seducing me in the hope I’d write a book that proclaimed him innocent. At that point, I stopped expressing sympathy. This made him uneasy. Psychopaths have supreme confidence in their seductive abilities. MacDonald did not want to believe he had failed. Fatal Vision, published four years after the trial, showed him that he had.
Despite the releases he’d signed at the start of the book project, MacDonald sued me in 1984 for fraud, breach of contract, breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The seven-week trial of that suit—it lasted longer than MacDonald’s murder trial—ended in a mistrial in 1987. My publisher’s insurance company then settled, paying MacDonald $325,000 to avoid the cost of a new trial. (The first trial had cost them far more than that.) Soon afterwards, MacDonald’s father-in-law, Freddy Kassab, sued him under California’s “Son of Sam” law (enacted to keep criminals from profiting from events related to their crimes) and won almost all of the proceeds.
Over the years, MacDonald filed many appeals of the guilty verdicts and motions for a new trial based on “newly-discovered evidence.” All were denied until 2011, when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decreed that MacDonald’s new claims should be considered in light of “the evidence as a whole.”
The district judge convened an evidentiary hearing in Wilmington, North Carolina, in September 2012. Because of certain things I’d written in Fatal Vision, the Justice Department subpoenaed me to testify. I would be the prosecution’s final witness, probably the last person who would ever testify against Jeffrey MacDonald in a court of law.
2. The Never-Ending Story
How did it come to pass that a domestic homicide in which the jury had deliberated for only six hours before returning three guilty verdicts became such an unwieldy, generation-spanning Dickensian spectacle, the never-ending story of the United States criminal justice system?
There is no short, simple answer. And the long one must take into account the differences between the military and civilian justice systems, the cumbersome bureaucracy of the Justice Department, the craving for publicity that motivates certain members of the criminal bar, the American predilection for conspiracy theories, and the personality of Jeffrey MacDonald himself.
In 1985, Franklin T. Dupree Jr., the federal judge who’d presided over MacDonald’s 1979 trial, summarized MacDonald’s story of the attacks and some of the reasons why investigators were skeptical of it:
MacDonald told investigators that … the three attackers continued to club and stab him until he lost consciousness. When he awoke on the hall steps to the living room, MacDonald stated that he got up and went to the master bedroom where he found his wife dead. He said that he pulled a Geneva Forge knife out of her body and covered her with his pajama top and a bathmat. He then went to his children’s rooms and unsuccessfully tried to revive them. After going to the bathroom to wash himself and calling the military police, he again lost consciousness. …
Although MacDonald had said that his pajama top was torn during his struggle with the three assailants in the living room, no fibers from the pajama top were found in that room. Fibers were found, however, inside and outside the body outline of Colette MacDonald in the master bedroom and in the rooms of Kristen and Kimberly MacDonald. A piece of a plastic surgeon’s glove, stained with Colette MacDonald’s blood, was found inside a sheet in a pile of bedding at the foot of the master bed. Moreover, although there were numerous unidentified fingerprints in the apartment, no direct evidence of the alleged intruders was found to support MacDonald’s version as to what happened on the night of the murders. From this and similar evidence, investigators became convinced that MacDonald had killed his family and staged the crime scene to cover up the murders.
The Army eventually charged MacDonald with the murders and a formal pre-court martial investigation was conducted and hearings held pursuant to Article 32 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The purpose of an Article 32 hearing is to determine whether criminal charges against an individual should proceed to court-martial—the military equ
ivalent of a jury trial. By July 1970, when MacDonald’s hearing began, the U.S. Army was in disarray, its public image at an all-time low. The 1968 Tet Offensive had made it clear that the U.S. was not winning the Vietnam War. In November 1969, journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story of the My Lai Massacre, describing how American soldiers had wantonly slaughtered hundreds of defenseless Vietnamese civilians, many of them women and children. In May 1970, National Guard troops fired on students at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine.
The last thing the Army wanted only months after My Lai and Kent State was a public spectacle surrounding a hearing to determine whether there was probable cause to prosecute a Green Beret officer for murdering his wife and children.
In retrospect, the outcome seems obvious. The hearing was so rushed that it began while the CID was still investigating and before laboratory testing of physical evidence from the crime scene was complete.
In October, the Army announced that charges against MacDonald had been dismissed due to “insufficient evidence.” MacDonald was quickly granted an honorable discharge. The Army washed its hands of him. He was somebody else’s problem now.
* * *
Despite the fact that the Article 32 hearing was closed to press and public, there had been print and broadcast coverage, and MacDonald was obsessed with it. His public image seemed to be his primary concern. On June 16, 1970, he wrote in his diary: “The publicity … was very good. Page one in the Sunday Raleigh News and Observer and was a good human interest story except we are sorry they used a picture of me in my convertible …”
On July 7: “Yesterday’s press fairly good to me … Evening TV coverage excellent.”
Two days later: “It is apparent that the press is strongly behind me.”
Later in July, CID agents forcibly removed MacDonald from his car in order to take a hair sample he would not provide voluntarily, despite being ordered to do so. His civilian lawyer, Bernie Segal, called a press conference to protest. “The news was out immediately,” MacDonald noted. “It appears to be the biggest story in weeks. Headlines all over, TV, radio … Jack Anderson’s column in Washington—everyone is interested. The AP and UPI told Freddy [Kassab, his father-in-law] in Long Island that it is world wide, not just national.”
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