During the autopsy, a male fetus of four to five months' gestation was removed from her womb, a blond hair, about six inches long, was found stuck with blood to the palm of one hand, and a piece of what appeared to be human skin was removed from beneath a fingernail.
Kimberly had died from being hit with a club, at least twice, on the right side of her head.
The blows had shattered her skull and caused extensive bruising of her brain. The largest-fracture line extended almost the entire length of the right side of her skull, and there were many other, smaller fractures. The blows had been of such severity as to have caused coma, and quite likely death, soon after they were delivered.
It was apparently after she was already unconscious and near death that she was stabbed with a knife on the right side of her neck. The pathologist could determine this from the relatively small amount of bleeding at the wound sites, indicating little or no blood pressure at the time these injuries were sustained.
The neck wounds cut through her windpipe and some came out the other side. Because of overlapping, it was not possible to obtain an exact count, but there appeared to be eight to ten separate incisions.
Kimberly also had been hit once with a club on the left side of her face. That blow had been delivered with such force that it produced multiple fractures of the cheekbone and nose, and left the piece of cheekbone protruding through the skin.
Thirty-three separate incisions were found in Kristen's body.
She had been stabbed twelve times in the back with a knife, four times in the chest, and once in the neck. Two of the knife wounds were deep enough to have penetrated the heart.
In addition, she was found to have approximately fifteen shallow puncture wounds in her chest, such as could have been caused by an icepick, if the person wielding it had been stabbing with minimal force.
Kristen also had a number of cuts on her hands—in one instance, down to the bone of a finger—indicating that she, like her mother, had been holding her hands up in front of her, trying to protect herself.
A blue thread was found beneath one of her fingernails.
An investigator was sent to Jeffrey MacDonald's office, to examine the contents of his desk drawers. He found an envelope that had been mailed from Honolulu on February 14—Valentine's Day—with no return address.
Inside the envelope was a Valentine's card. Printed on it were dozens of reproductions of a woman's lips: bright red, slightly parted, poised for a kiss. The printed message said, "Thinking of You." The card was signed, "Love, Jo."
Also in the envelope was a copy of a column Joan Didion had recently written fox Life magazine. Titled "A Problem in Making Connections," the column described-how Didion and her husband had gone to Hawaii for a vacation in lieu of seeking a divorce.
Jeffrey MacDonald's mother and Colette's mother and stepfather reached the hospital in early afternoon, still not knowing why they had been summoned.
As soon as he saw them, MacDonald cried out: "They're all dead! Colette and Kimmy and Kristy are dead! They killed them all!"
Colette's mother stepped to the side of his bed. He looked up at her and started to sob. "I couldn't protect her," he said. "She was so good and you gave her to me and I couldn't take care of her."
The Voice of Jeffrey MacDonald
That was the weekend, by the way, that first weekend up at Skidmore, that Colette and I first made love. We had not made love in high school. Colette was a very private person and maintained a tremendous code that she was true to, and, you know, it took a long time to get past that first kiss at the back door.
To this day, I think that she probably had not made love with anyone, but she may have. She may have slept with Dean Chamberlain. I suspect she probably did sleep with the sophomore from Purdue that summer on the beach, but that's not for sure. I suspect more likely that she did sleep with Dean Chamberlain in their later romance in high school. But again that's not for sure. She was a delicate, feminine person and you didn't want to upset her or go too far. It was this delightful combination of wanting to spend more time with her and be more physical, and wanting also to live up to her standards and not do that right now because maybe she didn't think it was right then, or her inhibitions were too high at that moment.
I had made love with a few girls that I had been dating in high school, but far and away the only girl that I really made love to at any length was Penny Wells. Junior year ended up being the heavy year together. It may have been senior year, actually. It was part of the senior year. At that point, Penny had a new car, I did not have a car, and she eventually ended up picking me up sometimes and driving me around in her new Chevy—her father was a Chevrolet dealer.
We had a good time together, especially physically. In our senior year we were sleeping together, and, um, we had an incredibly physical thing. Very torrid, as a matter of fact, regards our physical attraction for each other. It was instantaneous and long-lasting and repetitive. Anywhere—in the car, the drive-in movie, at parties, at her house, at my house, on dates, the whole bit. And it was just sort of endless, we just couldn't stop.
Penny was a—is a very beautiful girl. She was sort of a plastic princess. I don't mean to say that derogatorily— she's an extraordinarily good-looking woman. I don't know if she's still good-looking now, but she certainly was then. She was a little bit of an airhead, maybe, but she was very dependent on me and I liked that.
I always liked Penny. I'm not sure I was ever in love with her as I see love now, but I suppose I was in high school love with her, whatever that means. I thought of her a lot. There was a tremendous amount of tumultuous physical energy between us and we had an amazing amount of sexual experience together, which was not my first time, but it was certainly my first real affair with anyone: the first time that there was any sustained amount of sexual energy passing between myself and any—and a woman. And it was without question the first time for Penny.
In the fall, Penny came down to Princeton for two weekends, but it became clear that something was missing in the relationship. Penny seemed out of place at Princeton. I know that—I don't mean that to sound snobby, it's just that things didn't fit.
She seemed ill at ease, she was a little uncomfortable with my friends, she didn't understand that on other weekends we were hitchhiking into New York and going down into Greenwich Village and seeing the beatniks and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and people like that. She seemed to come from working-class Patchogue and not to be changing at all.
And the fact that she was studying to be a dental technician—it just seemed like such a different world. The difference in our approach to life, I think, intellectually was sharpened all of a sudden. It crystallized. We really didn't have that much to say.
We did make love. We made love endlessly. I remember one weekend when she arrived we had a particularly tumultuous episode on the, ah, on the, ah, on my bed in my little room up on the fifth floor of Witherspoon Hall. And as a matter of fact, Penny came down for weekends, I believe, all the way into the spring of that year.
But her letters were this incredible disappointment in which nothing really was said except we talked about the weather and how her training was going and how my school was going, but there was none of the discussion of events or thought processes, or meaningful discussions of any kind, whereas I got these brilliant letters from Colette in which there was so much said and unsaid and so much between the lines. And her Skidmore life sounded so exciting. With Penny, though we made love extremely vigorously and openly and passionately many, many times, sometimes in succession—we had the strength and vigor of incredibly sexed seventeen-year-olds—there just wasn't any of the mental meeting of the minds that Colette and I always had.
In any event, regards Colette, our first episode was very, very tentative. There was no forceful taking. She never flung herself upon me. It was hesitant on both our parts, Colette especially so, but myself also, which is not my usual nature, and, for instance, not the way Penny and I had made lov
e.
The first episode with Colette was in the motel room I was staying at in Saratoga Springs. And, strange as it sounds, the ah—she did it kind of as a joke, I think—she always laughed about it afterwards—the motel she got me a room in was the Grand Union, believe it or not. We first made love in that motel.
She was very frightened. I was caring for her and babying her and gently taking her through it. She was totally unfamiliar with, for instance, the actual act itself, and positioning. I remember it seemed like an eternity of patience on my part—I'm not patting myself on the back at all—it just seemed like it took hours and hours to gradually get her to relax. Her legs were shaking and she was extremely frightened.
As a matter of fact, she cried quietly—just like in the movies, I'm embarrassed to say—afterwards. And I remember consoling her and holding her very tightly for a long time and asking her why she was crying, and she said, emphatically, that she didn't have any pain, it wasn't that at all. It was sort of, she said, a cry of happiness—that she seemed so fulfilled.
The weekend, then, was an extremely romantic one. We walked together, we had dinner together in restaurants. I remember coming over to pick her up and waiting in the waiting room at her residence at Skidmore and feeling sort
of flushed and in love, and her roommate and her friends would, one by one, come down to the sitting room and sort of giggle and look at me, and some of them came in and said hello. And I remember the discreet and some not so discreet smiles as they went back and discussed me.
But I felt proud to be with Colette and it was a new and very exciting time for us, and I remember we did go back to the motel probably three times to make love. It was not easy at all. Like I say, it was so apprehensive and so slow, um, and we did it so gingerly and I didn't want to hurt her and she seemed to be easily hurt. She seemed to be extremely tender and more feminine than at any time I had ever known her. It just increased all my feelings for her probably tenfold.
4
OFFICER'S WIFE, CHILDREN FOUND SLAIN AT FORT BRAGG, said the headline across the top of the front page of the Fayetteville newspaper, in the largest type used since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, VICTIMS OF HIPPIE CULT?
The story said that the wife and two daughters of Jeffrey MacDonald apparently had been murdered by members of a "ritualistic hippie cult" who burst through the rear door of the residence, "shouting, 'LSD is great! LSD is great!' while the family slept."
The provost marshal was quoted as saying, "During the struggle, the captain managed to make his way to the bedroom but was stabbed several times and finally knocked unconscious by a blow or blows on the head."
Fort Bragg is the largest military base in the United States. In addition, it is an open post, meaning that access is unrestricted. No guards monitor visitors and no fences separate the more than 50,000 residents from the surrounding civilian population.
Not including tank trails, there are more than thirty points of entrance to and exit from Fort Bragg, at least half of them on well-traveled roads. A four-lane state highway traverses the base, passing within 100 yards of Castle Drive. Thus, it had been no simple matter to launch a predawn search for four suspected killers described only as two white males, one black male, and one white female with long blond hair, high boots, and a floppy hat, and an Army spokesman said that despite military police roadblocks which had been thrown up around the base within minutes of the discovery of the bodies, the killers had managed to slip away. A massive search had been launched, however, and it was expected that the assailants would be quickly apprehended. In the meantime, Captain MacDonald was reported in "satisfactory" condition at Womack Hospital.
An accompanying story described the rapidly worsening drug problem in the Fayetteville area, the result of American soldiers smuggling back large quantities of narcotics from Vietnam. The county sheriff was quoted as saying that more heroin arrests had been made in the six months leading up to the murders than in the preceding fifteen years. He estimated that up to two thousand "hippies" had recently taken up residence in and around Fayetteville, living in "ramshackle houses."
"They mob up together," the sheriff said. "They live like animals, with quilts on the floor. They don't have any bed. They paint all kinds of pictures and decorations."
That such individuals were capable also of grotesque acts of violence had been graphically demonstrated less than six months before by members of the Charles Manson cult.
While the Manson killings had horrified, however, and no doubt, in some instances, titillated, they had not threatened in any significant way. That satanic cult members could murder a Hollywood starlet in her Beverly Hills home was certain to produce lurid headlines and extensive reportage, but it was an occurrence which seemed light years removed from the world in which most Americans lived.
This new outburst of homicidal violence was, in some ways, more alarming. Sharon Tate had been a prominent movie actress whose fame, conspicuous beauty, and opulent lifestyle might much more understandably—insofar as such madness can ever be understood—have attracted the twisted, pathological attention of the devil-worshiping misfits who made up the Manson cult.
Colette MacDonald, on the other hand, had been the childhood sweetheart of the all-American boy. Her mate had been not an outre film director, but a Princeton man, a doctor, a dedicated young Army officer. One of the very best and brightest: a Green Beret. If she and her children—asleep in their own beds on the largest military base in the United States—could not be protected from drug-crazed demons in the night, then there was no longer safety anywhere. Not only was America losing the war in Vietnam, it was faring no better at home.
At first, then, in addition to being so ghastly and horrid in themselves, the MacDonald murders were widely perceived as yet another clear sign among many—indeed, a particularly lurid sign—that the disintegration of the American social fabric, which had accelerated so rapidly and flamboyantly through the mid and late 1960s, would continue—in an even more destructive form— into the decade that had just begun.
After two days had passed with no arrests, the local papers reported that "waves of terror" had engulfed Fort Bragg, especially in the vicinity of Corregidor Courts. Husbands refused to report for night duty. Doors were double- and triple-locked. Military police, attempting to query neighborhood residents, found women afraid to open their doors, even in daylight, even to uniformed personnel. More than ninety new gun permits were issued on the base within forty-eight hours of the murders, and pawnshops throughout Fayetteville reported an unprecedented demand for firearms.
The obvious similarities to the Manson killings—intruders in the night chanting "Acid is groovy," the word PIG written in blood, the fact that Colette MacDonald, like Sharon Tate, had been pregnant—brought dozens of out-of-town newspaper reporters to Fayetteville. With little hard news to report (on February 18, the Army's only announcement was that a "specially trained team of criminologists" had arrived from the Fort Gordon laboratory), such papers as the New York Daily News resorted to running stories on the city's ambience.
"Young girls from all over the country follow the Green Beret glamor and the highly polished jump boots into this town," one feature began. They lived in "rickety old wooden houses on the outskirts," the rent for which was paid "by young men from Fort Bragg who want to get away from military life.
"Speed, hash, whammies, pot, pills—they're all here. Carried into the communes by vets of Vietnam who have seen plenty of action and already at 18 or 19 are looking for a way out of it all."
The desire for information about the background of Jeffrey MacDonald—the Green Beret doctor from the Ivy League who had somehow survived the bizarre, maniacal assault—became almost insatiable.
An interview with his immediate superior yielded the information that MacDonald was "an unusually good soldier, willing to work eighteen to twenty hours a day."
MacDonald's younger sister, arriving from her home in Schenectady, New York, described him as an
"athletic intellectual" who had "breezed through Princeton in three years" and who loved to read—"especially adventures, philosophy, and poetry.'' She said he had become a doctor because of his compassion for humanity. "He just didn't like to see things die."
On February 19, under considerable media pressure and with no suspects yet apprehended, the Army made Lt. Ron Harrison available for a press conference, at which it was expected that—as the Green Beret who had known the family best—he would provide a more intimate glimpse of the family's life at Fort Bragg.
Harrison began by saying that Jeffrey MacDonald was ‘ ‘ an outstanding person in any walk of life. A very intelligent, very perceptive person, very kind, and, I'm certain, a great father."
He liked to help people, Harrison said. ‘‘He was always available for counseling." He was also a man interested in many things. Harrison mentioned several: 'Special Forces, parachuting, baseball, football, boxing, the kids' horse, what Kimmy did yesterday afternoon, Colette's class at school."
Colette had been, quite simply, ‘'Number one," Harrison said. ‘‘A very innocent person, very, very sweet." She and her husband, Harrison added, had been extremely happy about her new pregnancy.
Then he described for the press his final visit to 544 Castle Drive on the night of Valentine's Day. Nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, just a couple of Green Berets sitting around eating Jell-0 and cookies—but there had been one incident which, in retrospect, struck him as ’odd" and ‘‘ironic."
Fatal Vision Page 5