Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

  At Mildred's, you know, everyone sat in certain places and you stood behind a chair until the table was all ready to go and then we all sat down and certain, ah, ceremony was always performed with the wine, and, ah, it was much more formal.

  We kind of enjoyed it. Colette and I were learning from it and it seemed very chic, although we used to occasionally make light of it and think that Freddy and Mildred were blowhards about it, that they were a little pretentious.

  But the other thing I remember about that night is when Mildred and Freddy went to bed, Colette and I sat up. I was sleeping on the couch in the living room. It was a long, I believe, green couch which they'd had for a long time. It was a very expensive couch. Colette had set up the bed— you know, set up the sheet and the pillowcases and the pillow and blanket and stuff, and we were sitting out there talking and we began kissing and ah, making out, as it were, um, and Colette, ah, got a little flustered and said that she really shouldn't be doing this at home.

  She didn't want Freddy walking out or Mildred walking out and, you know, I said fine and she went to bed, and I remember it was very strange because this was a little atypical of Colette: she came out about twenty minutes later and lay down on the couch with me, very quietly and a little apprehensively, and we began kissing and—and caressing each other.

  We ended up making love, and I remember it was one of those exquisite times where we were trying to be so incredibly quiet, and it was one of those times that Colette, ah—it was sort of the excitement of doing something, I guess, ah, that we shouldn't have been doing, and in a place where we shouldn't have been doing it, and the threat of Mildred and Freddy walking out at any moment, but it was more exciting than even usual, and she was sort of like giving herself to me by coming out of her room and getting into bed with me, and it was the first time that this had ever really happened because we had just recently begun making love, and we—it was a—incredible, very exciting session. We talked about this for years afterwards, in fact, as one of our most memorable lovemaking sessions.

  We never openly discussed whether she or I had slept with anyone else. She always avoided the subject of Penny Wells. She was not really jealous of Penny. She always felt, like, unthreatened by her, but she didn't see any need to discuss it. I think she wondered what the attraction was between Penny and I, but we never talked about it. I never told her that we'd had a tremendous physical thing going and, you know, we never discussed it. We sort of avoided those topics.

  We did talk about her feelings for Dean. Never about potential lovemaking with Dean. I'm not sure if she made love with Dean Chamberlain or not. My strong impression is that she didn't. She always implied that in conversation. We never talked—I never said to her, "Were you a virgin?" I never said to her: "Did you ever make love to Dean Chamberlain?" It always seemed like sort of a too-jealous thing to ask, and too immature, and I—we always tried to respect each other more than that. She never, for instance, said to me: "Did you make love with Penny Wells?" I think we tried to be honest with each other and so we skirted that type of question.

  We did make love in some wild places, though. I remember one Saturday morning I was up seeing her—as a matter of fact, I believe it was Happy Pappy weekend at Skidmore, and Freddy Kassab did not go up, I went up. I believe this episode was Happy Pappy weekend. I may be incorrect. Happy Pappy weekend possibly was during the winter.

  But in any case, on Saturday morning—it may have been a later weekend in the spring, because it was warm—she took me out to the Saratoga racetrack. They were either not running or the horses were running later in the day, but there were workouts going on at the track. In other words, there were grooms working horses and I remember there were, oh, you know, probably fifty or a hundred people wandering around the stands, and there were people cleaning up. There were people mowing the lawn and doing the hedges and stuff like that, so the horses must have been in session.

  And Colette and I were walking in the infield, carrying a blanket, and, I believe, lunch, and we ended up making love under the blanket in broad daylight, very slowly and gently. We thought, of course, being very secretive and no one could possibly see us, but I'm sure anyone who passed within two hundred yards of us could see that we were making love.

  And I remember that summer one night we went down to a park in Patchogue—we were watching a big softball game. I was playing on some softball leagues, and Colette used to love to come and watch me play. But this was not one of my games. This was like an A-League game—these guys eventually went to the Jones Beach world tournament.

  But we went down to watch and got bored around the third or fourth inning and we walked out into the outfield, behind the fence, and we eventually ended up making love under our blanket while the game was going on—just out of the arc lights, just at the fringe of the lights. And I remember thinking what an adventure it was, and Colette felt the same way—that here we were making love only 400 feet from this whole crowd of people watching this big softball game.

  5

  The laboratory team from Fort Gordon spent four days inside 544 Castle Drive.

  In addition to the eighty-one blue threads in the master bedroom, they found nineteen in the bedroom of Kimberly MacDonald, the majority of them under the covers that had been tucked up around the dead girl. Two threads were found in Kristen's bedroom, but in the living room, where Jeffrey MacDonald had said his pajama top had been torn during his struggle with the intruders, no fibers from it were found. A CID agent with a magnifying glass spent hours on his hands and knees, searching through the nap of the living room carpet, but all he found was some confetti from a child's game and a few strands of tinsel which had fallen, weeks earlier, from the family Christmas tree.

  Investigators found not only fibers, but splinters. These splinters, which were bloodstained and which appeared to have broken off the club that had been found outside the back door, were located in all three bedrooms of the apartment, including Kristen's, although Kristen had not been attacked with the club. No splinters, however, were found in the living room, where Jeffrey MacDonald said the intruders had struck him.

  There was, of course, a great deal of blood in all three bedrooms.

  In the master bedroom, in addition to that which had soaked the carpet, sheet, and bedspread, several drops of blood—forming a circle about six inches in diameter—were found just inside the room, near the doorway that led to the hall.

  There were also spatters of blood on the walls and one more blood-streaked indentation on the ceiling—a mark which suggested to investigators that a club from which blood had already been dripping had been raised high above the head of whoever had wielded it, in preparation for the striking of a particularly forceful blow.

  A similar indentation was found on the ceiling of Kimberly's bedroom and spatters of blood were found high on the wall above her bed. Additional, larger drops of blood formed a trail in the hallway between her room and the master bedroom.

  Across the hall, in Kristen's bedroom, there were blood spatters on the wall above the bed, blood in large quantity on the top sheet, blood stains on the side of the bed, and a large, heavy stain on the floor next to the bed. This, of course, was in addition to the bloody footprint which led away from her bed toward the doorway.

  Blood also was found elsewhere in the apartment. There were traces on the door to a hall closet that contained a large stock of medicinal supplies, such as prescription drugs, syringes, hypodermic needles, and disposable scalpel blades.

  Several drops, as Ivory had noted, had dripped onto the right side of the sink in the hall bathroom, and, as Ivory had also noted, five drops, each about the size of a dime, had dripped onto the kitchen floor, beneath the sink, directly in front of a cabinet. When Ivory got down on his hands and knees and opened the cabinet door, he found, in the extreme left rear corner, tucked away behind a can of Ajax, a sack of potatoes, some scrubbing brushes, and a pile of old rags, an opened box which contained several packages of Perry Pure
Latex Disposable Surgeon's Gloves.

  There were certain places, however, where blood was not found.

  No blood was found, for instance (nor were any fingerprints), on either of the two telephones that Jeffrey MacDonald had said he'd used to call for help after checking the blood-drenched members of his family for signs of life and attempting to resuscitate them.

  No blood was found on the floor of the hallway where MacDonald had said he'd lain face down and unconscious after having already been stabbed in the chest.

  And, with two small exceptions, no blood was found anywhere in the living room where MacDonald had said he'd been attacked. The two exceptions were the speck on the outer lens of the eyeglasses which were identified as belonging to MacDonald, and a bloody smear, having roughly the configuration of a fingertip, across the top of the March 1970 issue of Esquire magazine—the issue with Lee Marvin on the cover.

  Examination of the word PIG on the headboard led technicians to conclude that it had been written by a right-handed person in full control of his motor faculties who had used the first two fingers of his right hand, those fingers encased in a thin covering such as a rubber surgical glove, and who had found it necessary to return to the source of the blood at least once in order to obtain sufficient quantity to enable him to complete the writing of the word. Jeffrey MacDonald was right-handed.

  Examination of the blood on the kitchen floor—focusing on the extent to which it had splattered—led the CID to the conclusion that it had dripped from a height of between twenty and thirty inches—as it would have if someone bleeding from a small wound in the chest had crouched or knelt in front of the cabinet in order to remove something from inside it.

  William Ivory paid a return visit to Jeffrey MacDonald's next-door neighbors. He asked again if they were certain they had heard nothing from 544 Castle Drive during the early morning hours of February 17. The warrant officer's wife said no, she was not certain at all. She was, in fact, now certain that she had heard sounds coming from the apartment, but in the first shock of learning what had happened she had been afraid to mention it.

  The way the apartments were laid out along Castle Drive, the neighbors actually lived above the MacDonalds, although the entrances to the apartments were adjacent to one another. The master bedroom of the upstairs apartment was, thus, directly above the MacDonald master bedroom. The warrant officer's wife now said she could remember having been awakened by the sound of Colette MacDonald's loud and angry voice. She could not recall what words had been spoken, but she emphasized the anger in her voice.

  Her sixteen-year-old daughter also spoke again to Ivory. Her bedroom was directly above the MacDonald living room. Often, in the past, she had been able to hear conversations from the apartment below, or the sound of a phonograph or television.

  Sometime after she had gone to bed on the night of Monday, February 16, she said, she had been awakened by a sound from below. It had not been either the phonograph or television. Nor had it been the sound of a struggle between Jeffrey MacDonald

  and four intruders who were clubbing and stabbing him. She had heard nothing of the sort.

  What she had heard, she said, had been the sound of a male voice—it had sounded to her like the voice of Jeffrey MacDonald— either sobbing loudly or laughing hysterically.

  When asked at a press conference whether MacDonald was considered a suspect in the murders of his family, the Fort Bragg provost marshal said, "There are a lot of suspects. Captain MacDonald is certainly a witness."

  The Voice of Jeffrey MacDonald

  Interestingly enough, Colette and I do think that we know exactly when she got pregnant with Kimberly. It was sometime in late July or early August after sophomore year. I don't remember the exact date but I remember the moment very clearly.

  We were at her Aunt Helen's, where Colette was staying for that summer. We had been spending every available moment—I mean every waking moment—together. I would stay over there until 11 or 12 or 1 every night and then go home. We were by now sleeping together fairly openly but we were not, of course, taking precautions except haphazardly—occasionally using condoms and occasionally using withdrawal, and trying the rhythm method, but our lovemaking had increased greatly through the trips up to Skidmore and her trips down to Princeton and our vacations together and now the summertime, and our love was in full bloom, there was no question about it.

  We were already talking at this time of when would we be getting married. Never from the viewpoint of—I never said to her, "Colette, will you marry me?" It was from the viewpoint of, when do you think it would be possible for the two of us to really be together, and it was always done in a sort of roundabout, mildly mysterious fashion. We never openly said to each other, "We're going to be married for the rest of our lives," but we talked in this kind of code about right after college we would—it would be permanent, and, um, you know, won't—isn't life fantastic now that we're together and seeing each other almost every day.

  But we were absolutely positive that Kimberly was conceived when we were making love one night about 11:30. Helen had gone to bed and we were sitting in the car at Helen's house and I was kissing Colette goodnight at the back door and we kept kissing each other and kissing each other and finally we moved over to the hammock, believe it or not, that was in the backyard, and we were in the hammock, fooling around—I mean, you know, kissing each other, basically—and then we started petting and gradually more and more clothes came off and by now it was probably 12 or 12:30 at night and we were in the hammock and Colette was very gently saying no, you can't, you know, we're not taking any precautions, and I was saying we have to, we have to, I promise I'll pull out—as usual—and we were extremely passionate, you know, passionately making love and it—we sort of exploded and we lay there in each other's arms and we did something which for us was not that common. Umm, normally we made love once and occasionally, like especially on the honeymoon I remember we made love many times in one day, but we did not have this, this, this, ah, like need between us to make love two or three times a day. We usually made love once, or something like that.

  But I remember this specific night we lay there and twenty minutes later we were making love again, and we stayed there until about 1:30 or 2 in the morning, in the hammock, in each other's arms, and I remember neither of us felt any, like, ah, guilt or, um, negative feelings about this.

  We were totally in love at this point. We really were throwing ourselves at each other and there was a feeling that both Colette and I had that it was just such an explosion that it had to have been that night that she got pregnant. Colette always said that she could tell.

  Anyway, it wasn't two weeks later that Colette came to me, kind of embarrassed and apologetic, and said she was two or three or four or five days late on her period and that she was going to have to go see the doctor. I told her at first that that was nonsense and, with more hope than fact, I told her she was just missing her period because she was scared. And she—you know, we were scared, there's no question about it. We didn't know what it meant for her schooling, for my schooling, our life, and yet there was this element of, ah, sudden excitement between us.

  I'm not saying we were proud of what we did. We went to my mother and father first and told them with much fear and trepidation and were vastly relieved when they seemed to handle it so gracefully, ah, and gently. Ah, there wasn't even like a burst of anger.

  There was, ah, some sadness and resignation but actually I remember being astutely surprised—acutely surprised—at my father and mother handling it so gently, talking to us that we had to make a decision, um, marriage number one, adoption number two, and abortion number three.

  We immediately in our own minds threw out adoption. We wrestled for a day or two with the thought of abortion, but, ah, we clearly were opposed to that. Colette and I were very much in love. Neither of us at the time, ah, really believed in abortion. Colette was much more anti-it than I was. I wasn't pro or anti, I just had nev
er thought about it, but when it was us facing it, it was an uncomfortable and an ugly thought. Neither of us liked it, neither of us really wanted it. We struggled with it for several days, and we mutually came to that conclusion—that we would not have an abortion, that we couldn't get an abortion, that we just couldn't face each other, and that we didn't want that and we loved each other and why shouldn't we just go ahead and get married.

  Freddy, on the other hand, and Mildred, were very clear that the decision should be, ah, number one: abortion. Their explanation, which was very open, was that the pregnancy and marriage at this time would hurt my career. They were worried about my medical career and they stated it. But once we decided to get married, then Mildred made no bones about the fact that she wouldn't mind having a physician as a son-in-law.

  Our wedding day was a little bit-overcast. We were afraid that it wasn't gonna be a nice day but it ended up being nice. It was a little windy, but it was September in New York and it was beautiful. It was a little cool, too, as I remember. I don't think it ever really got hot that day, but I remember being in a nice breeze and it was a beautiful day and the wedding went off very, very smoothly, very beautifully. Everything was just super. It was a really nice wedding.

  We stayed that night at the Hotel Pierre up on Central Park South, had a nice room, and despite the fact that we had just left the reception we decided to really show off and order from room service, so we ordered, I believe, like at ten o'clock at night, steak sandwiches and champagne and it was something like $60 or some incredible cost like that and she and I both almost fell over.

  It was a very exciting time. We had a very lovely night. It was a funny night because we were tentative, despite the fact that we'd been sleeping together for at least a year and she was already pregnant. It seems a little silly but in fact we really were—it really was like a honeymoon night. We were very tentative and I'd say gentle with each other. It was sort of the beginning of our real life together.