Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

  The honeymoon was kind of a funny time. It was, um—I don't have one word to describe the honeymoon by any means. There was a certain amount of hesitancy. There was a little chagrin because Colette was pregnant. We had this sort of feeling of adventure that we were embarking on this great life adventure together, and that somehow we always knew we would do that ever since we met in the eighth grade, and now we were fulfilling that.

  And yet you have to remember it was 19, um, 63, and it wasn't common for college kids, especially at Princeton, to have to get married all of a sudden and have a child. As a matter of fact, we had to ask permission to be married at Princeton at that time. So it was, you know—there was a whole host of confusing emotions.

  We drove up to Cape Cod and—the week is a little blurry, to be honest. I have some great remembrances of us walking together through, I guess it's Provincetown at the end of Cape Cod, and eating the salt water taffy and going in all the shops. It was a quiet time, of course. It was after Labor Day. And it was so beautiful. We had one or two rainy days—no, two or three rainy days out of the week and only two or three sunny days, but we enjoyed both. We were kind of oblivious to the weather. And we had a super time. We were arm in arm, and we would eat a late breakfast and a great big dinner and walk around and shop.

  I had been passed a lot of envelopes all through the reception. People kept, you know, coming up, wishing us congratulations and giving me envelopes like they do at Polish or Italian weddings.

  And when we got to this motel in Provincetown, we sat on the bed and we took out the suitcase—we had thrown all these envelopes and cards and everything, without really looking at them the first night, into the suitcase—and the next night we're up in Cape Cod and we undid all these envelopes and we had almost $3,000 sitting in front of us, which at that time—in 1963—was an extraordinary sum of cash.

  I still remember this very clearly. We were sitting at the edge of the bed—I was, as a matter of fact, on the left side, sitting on the bed looking down toward the foot, and Colette was on the right side and her back was a little to me as she was opening some of the letters, and my back was a little to her.

  We both turned and looked at each other after the first couple of letters and she was squealing sort of with delight as she opened each letter, and I ended up letting her open the majority of them because it was so much fun to watch her, and they kept making this mound of money and cash and checks and, like I say, it ended up to right around $3,000, and we were just stunned.

  We just—it was sort of hilarious—we didn't sort of know what to do with that much money. So we put it all in a big wad and put some rubber bands around it and put it back in the suitcase. But I remember we had a super week.

  One dinner we had was the best of the whole honeymoon. It was, I think, like about the second or third night. We found this Portuguese restaurant which we went back to later in the week, which is always a mistake. You can't really re-create.

  We had a—the second dinner was nice also but the first dinner was like magic. It was the first time we had—we ordered a strange wine, I believe it was a Portuguese wine, and we had a Portuguese dish, and I don't remember what it was, but I remember everything was spicy, and we tried everything, with entrees and soup and the salad and then the main course, which was seafood. We both picked seafood but they were done Portuguese-style and they were very zesty, spicy hot.

  We had the absolute, most delightful evening. It's one of the best evenings I think we ever had. We laughed and giggled the whole time and had the bottle of champagne at least, and then we went back to the motel and had a super night.

  I think we realized then, it was about the third day of the

  honeymoon—although we really had no bad feelings, bad premonitions, we had hesitancy—and at that point, about the second or third day of the honeymoon, we felt that, sort of, we could conquer the world. That the union was so fine and so much fun and held so much promise and fulfillment for both of us.

  6

  The bodies of Colette MacDonald and her two daughters were buried in a Long Island cemetery on Monday, February 23. Immediately afterward, Freddy and Mildred Kassab retreated to the seclusion of their home. They pulled down the blinds to shut out the light and had their phone number changed to prevent any incoming calls. In their grief they wanted total isolation.

  Jeffrey MacDonald's mother did not have the time to plunge deeply into mourning. She left the gravesite and drove immediately to New Hope, Pennsylvania, to meet with a psychiatrist concerning difficulties being experienced by her older son, Jay.

  The previous November, in apparent reaction to a drug overdose, Jay, who was a year and a half older than Jeffrey, and who, like Jeffrey, had been named Most Popular male during his senior year of high school, had suffered a schizophrenic break with reality. This had resulted in his arrest and confinement to a state mental hospital after he had assaulted his mother on a street corner.

  A police report prepared at the time said that Jay "struck his mother several times about the body," and that it had been necessary for officers to "physically subdue" him. The incident had occurred on November 7, at the corner of Windsor Avenue and Montauk Highway in the town of Brightwaters, New York. Jay had been brought to a local precinct house and examined by a police psychiatrist who recommended transfer to Central Islip State Hospital.

  Jeff had been called home on emergency leave from Puerto Rico, where he had been on a training exercise with his Green Beret unit. Jay had been released from the hospital within a week and had returned to his part-time job as a bartender at a Greenwich Village tavern called the Shortstop.

  On the morning of February 17, having been informed by Freddy Kassab that she was to accompany them on the urgent and ominous trip to Fort Bragg, Dorothy MacDonald had tried, unsuccessfully, to reach Jay by telephone.

  The next day, while at Fort Bragg, she learned, that Jay— having heard the news of the murders on the radio—had suffered a relapse and had once again required hospitalization.

  A close family friend named Bob Stern, who was in the computer business and who had access to a private plane, had obtained Jay's release from the hospital in order that the two of them might fly to Fort Bragg to attend the funeral on February 21. Afterward, Stern had flown back to New York with Jay and had helped him transfer his belongings from the Greenwich Village apartment he was sharing with a merchant seaman to the Stern home in New Hope, Pennsylvania, about thirty miles north of Philadelphia. Arrangements had been made for Jay to recuperate at the Stern residence while undergoing psychotherapy as an outpatient.

  Dorothy MacDonald was a sturdy, energetic woman of fifty who was employed as a school nurse. Since her husband's unexpected death of lung disease at the age of forty-eight, four years earlier, she had noted a steady deterioration in her older son's emotional well-being. Since his November breakdown, she had devoted an enormous amount of time and energy to efforts to aid his recovery. Now she was faced with him in a state of relapse and with her younger son, Jeffrey, recovering from injuries sustained during the assault which had resulted in the murder of his wife and children.

  After visiting Jay and the Stern family, and meeting with a psychiatrist in nearby Doylestown, Jeffrey MacDonald's mother drove back to Fort Bragg on Tuesday, February 28, to return to his hospital bedside.

  Jeffrey MacDonald remained in Womack hospital for nine days. He looked pale and said he felt exhausted. He complained of frequent, severe headaches and of an inability to sleep. An armed guard was stationed outside his door to protect him from any attempts at further violence by the four intruders who he said had massacred his family. The chest tube used to re-expand his lung did not function properly, and it became necessary to insert a second tube. He was seen twice by a Green Beret psychiatrist, a major with a shaved head and a handlebar mustache. "Normal grief process continues," the major noted at the conclusion of his second visit.

  On Thursday, February 26, his lung having healed without further complic
ation, MacDonald was discharged from Womack Hospital and was assigned to a room in Bachelor Officers' Quarters. The armed guard that had been stationed outside his hospital room was withdrawn.

  Upon hearing of this development, MacDonald's mother confronted his commanding officer. She demanded to know why the guard had been removed, particularly since, in an unsupervised BOQ room, her son would be in more danger of an attack by murderous intruders than he had been while hospitalized. She was told that law enforcement officials at Fort Bragg did not feel that her son was in danger.

  'That makes it sound," Dorothy MacDonald said, "like you suspect Jeff may be involved."

  The commanding officer assured her, without attempting to explain the contradiction, that her son was not considered a suspect. He said, in fact, that having just gone through such an ordeal, Captain MacDonald was now free to take some time off, and added that Mrs. MacDonald could retain her visitor's suite, in order to remain close to her son, as long as she wished.

  That evening, Jeffrey MacDonald said he found his new room unbearably depressing. He said he could not yet cope with solitude. He spent the night on his mother's couch.

  MacDonald, however, was indeed a suspect at that time. Even before his release from the hospital, military authorities—while continuing to refuse public comment (newspapers reported that a "shroud of secrecy" had enveloped the investigation)—had concluded that the young captain was the primary suspect in the murders.

  In a report never publicly released, the Fort Bragg provost marshal expressed the opinion that "the accuracy, similarity, and location of the wounds strongly indicates actions of one individual with expertise on vulnerability—killing as rapidly and mercifully as possible without creating any noise."

  He added the observation that all the knife wounds were "deep, and in a relatively small area of the bodies," and that there had been "no disfiguring and no sexual molestation," indices which, to him, pointed away from drug-crazed hippies, and toward the one man—husband, father, and physician with an interest in surgery—known to have been in the apartment at the time that the murders occurred.

  The provost marshal's opinion was shared by Franz Joseph Grebner and the two CID investigators—William Ivory and Robert Shaw—who were working most exhaustively at the crime scene. The three of them, within days, had come to believe it highly likely that Jeffrey MacDonald had—for reasons unknown— killed his wife and children and had then—in an attempt to escape detection—staged a scene designed to make the murders look like the work of drug-crazed intruders, even going so far as to puncture his own lung in the process.

  As early as Monday, February 23, the provost marshal had informed the FBI that they could cease their nationwide search for the four killer hippies. He said a preliminary consideration of the physical evidence did not indicate that any civilians had been involved in the commission of the crimes.

  Nonetheless, pending laboratory analysis, the "evidence" against MacDonald was non-existent. Thus, at the beginning of March, when Dorothy MacDonald asked if she could take her son to the seashore for a few days of rest and recuperation, no one at Fort Bragg felt there was any basis for not granting her request.

  So, during the first week of March, Jeffrey MacDonald and his mother drove to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for what she hoped would be a restorative time near the salt water to which he had always been attracted as a child.

  Later, MacDonald would recall that trip:

  "We drove down in my white Chevy, the white '65 Chevy convertible with the black top. It was a really nice car; it wasn't souped up or anything, it was a handsome convertible for the time. I'm sure I did the driving, because that would be my normal personality, and I can see us driving along this two-lane highway. It seemed to run indefinitely. It was almost an extraordinarily long four-hour drive.

  "We talked aimlessly about things, not seriously ever about Colette, Kim, Krissy, or that night. We talked about other things, about Jay. I believe I knew at this time that Jay was having problems. I don't think I was aware of the depth of his problems. I knew there was something going on up north."

  In early March, however, the air was chilly, the sky dark, and many of the better motels and restaurants not yet open.

  "We stayed at a motel which I would rate as one star out of four stars—possibly a half star instead of one. The rooms were drafty and it was a cold weekend on the beach. It was gray, overcast, windy—like forty-five to fifty degrees, which was perfect for my mood. It was just how I felt. It was as though the cumulonimbus that were scudding across the skies were a reflection of me, rather than a clear sky that would draw me out of this depression we were in.

  "We found the food to be sort of unpleasant. I don't remember anything that we ate, but I remember that we were displeased with (A) the accommodations and (B) the food. We had a couple of crummy meals. The town was almost shut down because it was the off season.

  "We did walk on the beach, though. I remember my mother was frustrated and anxious because things were not turning out like she hoped. She had hoped it would be warm and sunny. I think she sensed what I've always known about myself, and what later years proved to be correct: that I do recover with the sun. I need the sun. Basking in the sun rejuvenates me physically and emotionally. A long, sunny weekend is the best possible cure for me. But that was not to be.

  "My mother was trying to give me space, and yet she wanted the weekend at least to have something nice to try to lighten the load, so therefore she was frustrated and anxious, and I was the one who had to turn and say to her, 'Relax, that's okay. We'll just—we'll walk on the beach anyway.' So we did.

  "But actually, walking on the beach was not a good thing for me at that time. It was a melancholy thing. I'm not a beach walker. I'm a much more active person than that. So I was walking along the surf remembering both my father and my family and trying to forget the recent tragedy, and I had to keep turning from my mother so as to not let her see me cry, which is my way, right or wrong."

  As MacDonald's mother recalled it: "The time that was spent at the shore was very quiet. We would have a quiet breakfast, go to bed early, rest, and so forth. He complained of a headache and I'd give him an aspirin, you know, just to reduce it. We picked up shells, and he just walked. He walked for hours along the beach. I did not question him. I never probed. I could not ask questions. I felt that other people had. I was the mother of a young man whose wife and children had been murdered and my concern was to give solace and to try and help him bear this agonizing burden. When he wept, I was trying to tell him that it was really rough and I understood and that we would just have to go on from that point. And sometimes he would weep, and he would say, 'I loved them so much, Mom. You know I loved them so much.' "

  Back at Fort Bragg, on March 6, Jeffrey MacDonald wrote a letter to the Kassabs.

  Dear Fred and Mildred—

  Apparently it was not just a bad dream—the magnitude of our loss is something I'm still trying to comprehend.

  I know this won't help you in your grief but I want you to know that I loved Colette more than anything in the world. I know she was happy as long as we were together, and I will never be the same person without her.

  Although my family is gone, it helps me just a little to remember that Colette and Kim and Kristy and I had as much happiness in our short years together as most families have in a lifetime. Colette truly loved you both and would want you to remember the happier times.

  Love, Jeff

  The Voice of Jeffrey MacDonald

  The year at Princeton was incredibly great. I was in absolute love with Colette and I thought having Kimberly was neat and we had tons of people over to the house. We had just moved into a house on Bank Street, right off Nassau Street, across from the university, and we had some great times: the big dinner that Colette and I learned to cook for all our friends, mainly spaghetti, but we had some others and our house became as I knew my house in Patchogue, where my parents were the entertainers of everyone. C
olette and I had sort of taken over this role at Princeton. We were the hit of the campus, so to speak.

  Of course, that was the year that Bill Bradley became a big star and the next year he went on to superstardom, but we were good friends with Cosmo Iacavazzi, who was the All-American football player at Princeton at the time, and I remember he used to come over to eat and we had a blast together.

  I was so proud of Princeton, and being a member of Tiger Inn, the eating club. It wasn't Ivy or Cottage, which were the rich boys' clubs, but it was, you know, one of the top five for sure, and it was the jock club—Cosmo Iacavazzi was a member—and Colette was proud of me being in there.

  We had some difficult times. I remember there was a football weekend and we had invited my parents and we had tickets for the game and everything, but my father was always an enigma—you never really could figure out what was gonna happen next. He was very ambivalent about a lot

  of things. He was proud of me being at Princeton but he was also upset a little bit that it was maybe too snooty a place—in other words, it was too pseudo-intellectual, and it was perhaps a little bit left-leaning, and more importantly it wasn't the working people, it was the phonies of the world that were going there.

  My father was essentially an unschooled person. He was extremely bright, a voracious reader, an intellectual at heart but one who tried to hide his intellectual—both capabilities and desires—under a barrel. He would have liked the world to have believed that he was rough and tough and non-intellectual, in fact a laborer, and he would occasionally make what sounded like racist comments, either about racism or other religious groups like Presbyterians or Methodists or whatever.