Final Vision: The Last Word on Jeffrey MacDonald (Kindle Single)

by Joe McGinniss

  Beasley told investigators that he then took the whole group into custody. He said he called the CID at Fort Bragg to say he had people he thought they should talk to, but when nobody showed up after an hour and a half, he let them go.

  Stoeckley, like hundreds of other Fayetteville-area hippies, was questioned repeatedly in the days that followed the murders. She was even quoted by name in a newspaper story, complaining, “Every time I go out, they pull me in.” She told a reporter that her problem was “I don’t have an alibi. The night it happened, nobody saw me.”

  Stoeckley resurfaced in connection with the case in August 1970, when a linen-service deliveryman named William Posey bumped into Bernie Segal outside the lawyer’s Fayetteville motel room.

  Eager to claim the $5,000 reward that Freddy and Mildred Kassab had offered for information leading to the arrest of the killers, Posey told Segal that he should look into a girl named Helena, who was a drug addict, a drug dealer, and a member of a witchcraft cult. He said she was about seventeen years old and frequently wore a blond wig, high boots, and floppy hat. At the time of the murders, he’d been living next door to her in the Haymount neighborhood.

  Posey said that on February 17, he’d gotten up to go to the bathroom at about 4:00 a.m. Looking out the window, he’d seen a car pull into the driveway shared by residents of his house and the house next door. He’d seen two or three men in the car and heard them laughing. Then he’d seen the girl named Helena get out of the car and go inside.

  On the day of the MacDonald family funerals, Posey told Segal, Helena had dressed in black and had hung funeral wreaths from the porch of her apartment. After that, she no longer wore her wig, boots, or floppy hat.

  Posey said he’d seen her again recently. For the first time, he asked if she’d been involved in the murders. She replied, “I don’t remember what I did that night.”

  Segal wasted no time putting Posey on the witness stand at the Article 32 hearing, where he repeated his story.

  The CID promptly sent agent William Ivory, who’d been the first CID investigator to the crime scene and who had questioned Stoeckley early in the investigation, to interview her again.

  Ivory said that Stoeckley told him she remembered going out alone that night, taking a friend’s car for a drive, but did not recall where she’d gone or what she’d done, because she’d been smoking marijuana. She said that if she had been involved in the murder, she was sure she would remember it.

  By the time he interviewed Stoeckley, Ivory was so certain MacDonald had murdered his family that he didn’t even bother to take notes. Under Segal’s withering cross-examination, the CID detective came across as a dull-witted bungler whose tunnel vision had prevented him from pursuing a viable lead.

  In his recommendation that charges against MacDonald be dismissed, the Article 32 investigating officer recommended that Stoeckley be further scrutinized. The job fell to the CID’s director of internal affairs, Colonel Jack Pruett, and Chief Warrant Officer Peter Kearns. Until Pruett and Kearns came along, no one connected to the case except Bernie Segal had taken Stoeckley seriously. The two new investigators took her very seriously indeed.

  They assigned agent Richard J. Mahon to learn all he could about Stoeckley. She had moved from Fayetteville to Nashville, but Mahon interviewed her during one of her visits home, in December 1970. She refused to take a polygraph or be fingerprinted, but she told Mahon she couldn’t recall what had happened on February 17 because she had taken so many drugs.

  Mahon spoke with Stoeckley’s parents concerning their daughter’s behavior after the crimes. They said she had joked about a newspaper article that suggested she might have been involved but that as time passed, and as she’d taken more drugs, she began to say she wondered whether it might not be true.

  Mahon learned that in April 1970 Stoeckley had been admitted to Womack Army Medical Center, at Fort Bragg, suffering from symptoms of drug addiction. Her father told a military psychiatrist that she was “a girl who was always seeking constant attention.”

  The psychiatrist noted, “Using Seconal, heroin, and many other drugs, she said she would shoot up almost constantly.” He found that “currently, she feels terribly worthless and unwanted.” He recommended that she be transferred to the University of North Carolina Medical Center, in Chapel Hill, for “long term psychotherapy.”

  She was admitted and placed on methadone. She told the admitting psychiatrist that she had been taking “everything available, including heroin, opium, LSD, cocaine, methadone and barbiturates.”

  The Chapel Hill doctors’ final diagnosis was “narcotics addiction in a schizoid personality.” Stoeckley was discharged in May. Less than a month later, she was readmitted to Womack with hepatitis.

  Pruett and Kearns devoted months of attention to Helena Stoeckley. They learned that she’d supposedly told a neighbor in Nashville, “I can’t ever go home again. I was involved in some murders. My family don’t want me around.”

  Then she’d said to the neighbor, “I don’t know whether I did it or not. I’ve been a heavy drug user and when you are on drugs you do funny things. … And other things that you think happened really didn’t. So I don’t know. I can’t remember. When I came to myself I was in the rain. It was raining and I was terrified. So much blood, so much blood. I couldn’t see or think of anything except blood.”

  The neighbor, Jane Zillioux, told investigators that Stoeckley had said the men she’d been with had killed a woman and two small children, and that she’d been wearing a blond wig and white boots.

  Pruett and Kearns located another Nashville acquaintance of Stoeckley’s, a man named Charles “Red” Underhill, who’d once heard her scream, “They killed her and the two children! They killed the two children and her!”

  In January 1971, Stoeckley wrote to the narcotics detective, Prince Edward Beasley, whom she sometimes called Daddy. “What does the CID want of me? I didn’t murder anyone?!! Are they going to keep hassling me?”

  In March, the Nashville house where Stoeckley was living was raided by narcotics detectives. Stoeckley approached one of them, a tall, handsome man named James Gaddis, to tell him that she was a suspect in the MacDonald murders and that she’d like to work for him as an informant.

  Gaddis began to use her in that capacity. She talked incessantly about the MacDonald case. “She told me a lot of things,” he reported to the CID. “She also contradicted herself. On one occasion she told me that she definitely knew who had killed the MacDonald family but she didn’t give me any names. On another occasion she told me that she only had suspicions. … On one occasion she even told me that Dr. MacDonald did it himself.”

  On April 23, 1971, a CID agent and an Army polygraph operator went to Nashville. Stoeckley agreed to take a polygraph examination but said she wanted to talk to Gaddis first.

  “She again told me she wasn’t involved in the murders, but that she knew who the killers were,” Gaddis said. “She said she had been there and had witnessed the murders, but she wouldn’t give me any details. She also mentioned that Dr. MacDonald had once refused to give one of her addicted friends any methadone.”

  The polygraph examiner reported that “she repeatedly acknowledged knowing the identity of the persons who committed the murders,” but that her heavy drug use prevented him from evaluating her truthfulness.

  Stoeckley took another polygraph. This time she described frequent dreams in which she was on the couch in MacDonald’s living room with MacDonald standing over her, holding an ice pick that dripped blood. She repeated that she knew the killers and that if she received a grant of immunity she’d provide both names and motive. The CID told her she would not get immunity. She retracted her previous statements and said MacDonald had killed his family himself.

  That night, at the behest of the CID, Gaddis took her out to dinner. At the end of the meal, he snuck her wineglass into a napkin and put it in his pocket. Then he took her to a local lover’s lane and embraced her, running his h
ands through her hair, thereby obtaining a hair sample to go along with the fingerprints she’d left on the wineglass. He turned both over to the CID. Laboratory testing revealed that neither the hair nor the prints matched any found at 544 Castle Drive.

  On April 26, 1971, Stoeckley arrived for a third polygraph examination, but then refused to take it. The next day, she wrote to Gaddis: “Please believe I was not in that house!!!!! I really and truly don’t know anything about the whole mess.”

  The polygraph operator, Robert Brisentine, reported that, “due to Miss Stoeckley’s state of mind and excessive drug use during the period of the homicides, a conclusion could not be reached as to whether she knew who committed the homicides or whether she was present at the scene.”

  The CID eventually tracked down, interviewed, and polygraphed every person whom Stoeckley had ever named as possibly being involved in the crimes. All denied involvement, and all denials were supported by cross-checking stories and through polygraph results.

  The one person who flunked his polygraph was Posey, the delivery man. His results indicated that his Article 32 testimony had not been truthful. Posey then admitted that he had not, in fact, seen Stoeckley get out of a car during the early-morning hours of February 17. In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d seen her at all that day. He’d been trying to collect the reward.

  After months of investigation, Pruett and Kearns tallied up what they’d learned about Stoeckley. She was a drug addict who, even without the drugs, was mentally disturbed. She had a reputation for making up stories. She desperately craved attention. She had no information about the murders that indicated she’d ever been anywhere near 544 Castle Drive. Some days, she said she might have participated; other days, she said she knew MacDonald had committed the crimes. Not a single investigator who focused on Stoeckley came away believing that there was even the slightest chance that she or anyone she knew had been involved in the murders.

  Pruett and Kearns also knew that the more sensational the crime, the more semi-demented people crawl out of their lairs and try to gain a moment’s notoriety by falsely claiming involvement. In addition, the reinvestigation and fresh analysis of crime-scene evidence by the FBI were turning up more and more information that strengthened the case against MacDonald.

  After one of the most exhaustive and extensive investigations they’d ever conducted, Pruett and Kearns decided that they could safely discount Stoeckley as a suspect.

  For Errol Morris or anyone else to say, forty years later, that “the girl in the floppy hat” was never fully investigated is preposterous.

  4. The Speedy Trial Seesaw

  Jeffrey MacDonald was convicted of murder in August 1979 because incontrovertible physical evidence demonstrated his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

  The evidence presented at trial was far more compelling than the preliminary version the Army was still assembling at the time of the Article 32 hearing in 1970. By 1979 the FBI had shown that MacDonald had stabbed Colette twenty-one times with the ice pick through his pajama top after placing it on her chest; that he’d wrapped her body in a bedspread in Kristen’s room and carried it back to the master bedroom, leaving a footprint in Colette’s blood on Kristen’s floor; that the bent paring knife he said he’d removed from Colette’s chest had never been in her chest; that the forty-eight holes in his pajama top were clean and cylindrical and could not have been made while the top was in motion, being used to fend off blows from intruders. There was much, much more.

  As Murtagh said years later, “The jury convicted him on the basis of physical evidence that could only have come from him … and which could not be explained by the actions of intruders. The only thing that ever separated MacDonald from being a murderer was the purported credibility of his account of intruders.” That evaporated when the jury heard him testify that an account he had given to Freddy Kassab of having gotten some buddies together to torture a confession out of one of the intruders and then kill him had been “a lie of incredible proportions.”

  The jury decided, as I did, too, that almost nothing MacDonald said about the murders was not a lie.

  Initially, MacDonald’s lawyers didn’t want to address the evidence. Instead, following his conviction, they renewed their claim that he’d been denied his constitutional right to a speedy trial.

  In July 1980, again by a 2–1 vote, a Fourth Circuit panel agreed. Writing for the majority, Judge Francis D. Murnaghan found that the Justice Department had “vacillated over and postponed decision on whether to seek indictment” to such an extent that it constituted “sheer bureaucratic indifference.” He and the concurring judge, James Marshall Sprouse, ruled that the two years the Justice Department had taken before convening a grand jury constituted “unreasonable and inexcusable” delay. “It contributed to the dissipation of recollections,” Murnaghan wrote.

  Particularly disturbing was the effect of the delay on the memory of Helena Stoeckley, who testified at the trial that she couldn’t remember the events of February 17, 1970. “In a bizarre way,” he wrote, “she had made remarks to others on several occasions in 1970, 1971, and 1979 which, while far from precise or complete, indicated that she was one of a group of intruders whose supposed entry into the MacDonald home and killing of his wife and children constituted the essential defense offered by MacDonald.”

  Murnaghan found that “the consequences of having put on a witness who was to have verified MacDonald’s own version of a Manson-like intrusion, only to have her fail to do so, may well have been disastrous to the defense. … The possible reasons why Stoeckley did not so testify are several. But the reason she asserted under oath was failure of memory. The government’s inexcusable delay of over two years’ duration cannot be eliminated as a potential, indeed a probable cause of that memory lapse.”

  In a stinging dissent, Judge Albert V. Bryan noted that MacDonald’s “guilt and sanity were established to the satisfaction of the trial jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, this court absolves him forever of this hideous offense, shockingly laying his release exclusively on the failure of the government to prosecute within a shorter time than it did.”

  Bryan was not persuaded that Stoeckley would have testified differently if the case had come to trial sooner. “Stoeckley herself in her trial testimony explains that her inability to recall the pre-dawn events of February 17, 1970, resulted from her consumption, earlier in the evening, of large quantities of drugs; she in no way indicated that time had weakened her recollection.” He characterized the statements Stoeckley had made over the years as “vague, fragmented and contradictory” and observed that “they do not indicate simply a gradually fading memory, eroded by time.”

  On August 22, three weeks after the Fourth Circuit decision, Dupree approved MacDonald’s release on bail of $100,000.

  MacDonald returned to work at St. Mary Medical Center, in Long Beach, California. He traded in his Citroën-Maserati for a Jaguar, purchased a condominium at the Mammoth Mountain Ski Area to complement his waterfront condo in Huntington Beach, and began dating a new girlfriend.

  The federal appellate process permits the side that loses a decision made by a three-judge panel to request that the full court consider the questions on which the panel ruled. In August 1980, the government filed a motion seeking such a review, known as an en banc rehearing, in the Fourth Circuit.

  In December, in a 5–5 tie vote, the Fourth Circuit effectively denied the government motion. (A majority must agree to hear the case en banc, or before the full bench: in this game, a tie goes to the side that’s already won.)

  But the lack of resolution was a clarion call to the Supreme Court to again consider issues raised by the MacDonald case. It was a call that the nation’s highest court soon answered.

  * * *

  In March 1981, the Justice Department filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court. That’s legalspeak for asking the Supreme Court to review a circuit court decision—in this instance, the Fourth Circu
it panel’s decision that had set MacDonald free.

  Ninety percent of petitions for writs of certiorari are denied. Rule 10 of Rules of the Supreme Court of the United States, titled “Considerations Governing Review on Certiorari,” states in part that “a petition for a writ of certiorari will be granted only for compelling reasons.” On May 26, 1981, the Supreme Court granted the writ. Oral arguments were heard in Washington on December 7.

  On March 31, 1982, by a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court reversed the Fourth Circuit panel. In his opinion, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote that the facts of the case were not at issue. He noted, however, “The jury that heard all of the witnesses and saw the evidence unanimously decided that respondent murdered his wife and children.” Focusing on the speedy-trial claim, the chief justice wrote:

  Once charges are dismissed, the speedy trial guarantee is no longer applicable. At that point, the formerly accused is, at most, in the same position as any other subject of a criminal investigation. …

  In this case, the homicide charges initiated by the Army were terminated less than a year after the crimes were committed; after that, there was no criminal prosecution pending on which MacDonald could have been tried until the grand jury, in January 1975, returned the indictment.

  Burger also absolved the Justice Department from any blame for the delay. He wrote:

  Plainly the indictment of an accused—perhaps even more so the indictment of a physician—for the heinous and brutal murder of his pregnant wife and two small children is not a matter to be hastily arrived at. … The care obviously given the matter by the Justice Department is certainly not any indication of bad faith or deliberate delay.

  Thurgood Marshall, who wrote the dissent, disagreed. He cited “indifference … and neglect” on the part of the Justice Department. He also found that the majority’s decision was “hopelessly at odds with any sensible understanding of speedy trial policies.”