Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

  I was being wooed by Northwestern Hospital to be an intern there because my record was so good in medical school, but Colette and I felt that we wanted to get out of Chicago, so I took off on an internship tour with two of my classmates and good friends.

  We went out to the West Coast and we did the Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco tour, and I was kind of impressed, but not as impressed as I thought I would be, but the tour was kind of fun, it was kind of a bachelor night out.

  One of the guys was married, and one was not, and I was married to Colette, but to be honest, we had a blast on this trip. We went out every night and had plenty of beer and drinks, and I remember being a little stunned by the openness of the girlie shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We went to a place called the Body Shop in Los Angeles, and I remember thinking, gee, I hadn't seen anything quite like this, where the audience participation took place.

  And we went to Carol Doda's Condor Club up in San Francisco, and there was some famous competitor of hers then, had a club two doors away and we went to that one and we did this whole tour and had an absolute blast.

  I ended up liking San Francisco General best, as far as the hospitals went. It was the most dynamic, most exciting, most trauma-filled, clearly a knife-and-gun-club atmosphere, the surgeons were clearly in charge, but its ranking wasn't quite yet up to that of some of the others.

  So I ended up, to make a long story short, ranking Columbia Presbyterian first on my application, simply because I felt it was the best hospital that I had seen or heard of except for Mass General, and I had decided that I didn't want to go to Boston. I don't know what I decided that on, I just decided that I really didn't want to go the Boston route, and Columbia Presbyterian always seemed to be number two in the country, behind Mass General, so I applied, had a good interview, liked it—it was a little awesome, the structure is so gigantic and overwhelming that I, um, it was, it's a magnificent place, but I didn't have any warm, dynamic feelings for it like I did for San Francisco General, but when we got ranked that spring I got Columbia Presbyterian, my first choice. I'm not sure Colette was really that happy about it, but it was such a hard-to-get internship, it was so impressive that that overwhelmed us, and I remember my friends, even Bob McGann who got into Mass General, number one in our class, was impressed.

  We worked hard, even in senior year. Colette was taking in papers for typing, and doing lots of babysitting for pay, in addition to taking care of Kimmy and Kristy, and I was having all my odd jobs—working at the Chicago Tribune employees' clinic as well as doing autopsies over at the VA Hospital, and Colette was now taking English classes at Northwestern.

  But we still seemed to find time for each other and for the kids and still to go out socially. We liked Rush Street and

  the nightclubs, and we went to Mr. Kelly's several times, and we even tried some of the jazz clubs in the South Side. And we ate at a lot of ethnic places—there was a little Greek place over near Cook County Hospital, and we tried Mexican food for the first time and we found the Italian places that we liked, and we went to movies and we stayed out late, and we went to the Playboy Club—I had a key to the Playboy Club—and we also had a lot of people over for dinner. Our house was kind of more of a social center than some of our other friends' houses.

  The kids were doing fine this senior year, and the sports teams that we were involved in [laugh] did very well, too. We had a blast, I remember, in the winter tournament in basketball.

  8

  Even after her return from Myrtle Beach, Jeffrey MacDonald's mother did not go home. She took an indefinite leave of absence from her school nursing job and remained with her son at Fort Bragg. They ate breakfast together every morning and dinner together every night. Accompanied frequently by Ron Harrison, they would go on shopping trips in Fayetteville and to the movies in the evening.

  Often, MacDonald and his mother would also go to Franz Joseph Grebner's office to inquire about what progress was being made in the investigation. On these occasions, the young Green Beret captain would wait in an outer office while his mother went in to speak to Grebner. The dominant role she was assuming began to strike the CID chief as peculiar. "She leads him around," Grebner would remark to associates, "like a little kid who's just wet his pants."

  Grebner, however, did not have a great deal of time to devote to speculation about the nature of the relationship between Jeffrey MacDonald and his mother. Even before the MacDonald murders he had been a man under considerable stress. Though the CID detachment at Fort Bragg was supposed to consist of forty-four accredited investigators, it was, through attrition and general understaffing, down to seventeen men during the early months of 1970. This despite the fact that at any given time there were approximately 250 unsolved felonies under investigation at the base.

  There were an average of four murders per month in the Fort Bragg-Fayetteville area for the investigation of which the CID eventually assumed responsibility. And, in addition to numerous

  other deaths due to suicide, training accident, motor vehicle accident, and narcotics overdose, there were rapes, robberies, and—as the Cumberland County sheriff had noted—a narcotics problem which had reached epidemic levels.

  Since February 17, Grebner had felt greatly burdened by the fact that the MacDonald investigation had not gone as smoothly as it should have. Though he personally, like Ivory and Shaw, the agents actively involved in the case, and like the Fort Bragg provost marshal, had little doubt that Jeffrey MacDonald was, indeed, the murderer of his family and that the story of the drug-crazed hippies was fabrication, the number of investigatory loose ends was threatening to unravel the whole case.

  For example, contrary to what the provost marshal had told the press, roadblocks had never been established. As an open post from which there were more than a dozen exits on well-traveled routes, Fort Bragg could not have been sealed in time to prevent the killers—had there been killers—from escaping. All that had been done in the first moments after the discovery of the bodies was to call the morning shift of military police in early and to have them check cars at random, looking for one containing two white men, one black man, and a girl with a floppy hat and long blond hair. By 6 A.M., even this ineffectual attempt at search had been discontinued because of the heavy build-up of traffic on post.

  Still, the first impression Grebner had formed upon arriving at 544 Castle Drive remained with him: there were no hippies; there was only Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret doctor who for reasons as yet unknown had exploded into a murderous rage and .. had then just as quickly regained enough presence of mind to stage the scene, develop his story, and stick to it.

  The case against MacDonald would have to be based entirely upon circumstantial evidence. Under the most favorable of conditions (i.e., a well-preserved crime scene and an impeccably conducted investigation), such cases were difficult to win, and, as Grebner was learning to his increasing dismay, the MacDonald case did not even come close to meeting those criteria.

  MacDonald's pajama bottoms, for example—potentially crucial evidence—had been discarded by a hospital orderly in the emergency room and had been burned with the rest of the hospital trash.

  In addition, the MPs assigned to guard the exterior of 544 Castle Drive on the morning of February 17 had allowed the Fort Bragg trash collectors to empty the MacDonald garbage cans before any CID agent had thought to examine the rubbish for possible evidence—such as a bloodstained pair of disposable rubber surgeon's gloves.

  Such gloves, of course, could as easily have been flushed down the toilet. But before this thought had occurred to agents at the scene (four days after the murders), the laboratory technicians from Fort Gordon had been making such regular use of the toilet facilities as to assure that evidence disposed of by such means would have been long since carried into the main sewer lines and lost forever.

  Blunders by lab technicians had not stopped there. When one, using a saw, had attempted to remove the bloody footprint from the floor of
Kristen's room, the boards on which the print had been made had separated and the print itself had been destroyed.

  Even back at the laboratory, inexcusable mistakes continued to be made. The piece of skin found beneath Colette's fingernail, for instance, had inexplicably been lost. And lost, too, was the vial which contained the blue fiber that had been scraped from beneath the fingernail of Kristen.

  Nonetheless, by mid-March, the laboratory at Fort Gordon was forwarding to the Fort Bragg CID findings which, in Grebner's view, strengthened considerably the case against Jeffrey MacDonald.

  It was proved by microscopic analysis, for instance, that the loose fibers found in the three bedrooms of 544 Castle Drive were, in fact, identical in composition to those used in the manufacture of Jeffrey MacDonald's torn blue pajama top. It was also determined that the rubber glove fragments found in the master bedroom were identical in chemical composition to the surgical rubber gloves that had been kept beneath the MacDonald kitchen sink.

  In addition, based upon comparison with the "known hair samples" taken from the MacDonald apartment, the laboratory reported that the blond hair found in the palm of Colette MacDonald's hand was her own and not that of a blond-haired intruder.

  CID investigators were also informed that no fingerprints— neither Jeffrey MacDonald's nor anyone else's—were present on the handle of the Geneva Forge paring knife which he said he had pulled from his wife's chest. Nor were there prints on any of the other weapons. The club, however, was found to contain paint stains which were identical in chemical composition to paint on homemade bookshelves in the bedroom of Kimberly MacDonald.

  By far, the most important laboratory finding had to do with blood analysis. While examination of a sample of Jeffrey MacDonald's blood and urine "did not indicate the presence of dangerous drugs" and demonstrated that he "was not under the influence of alcohol," it was determined, against all statistical probability, that each of the four members of MacDonald's family had possessed a different blood type.

  Colette MacDonald's blood was Type A.

  Jeffrey MacDonald's blood was Type B.

  Kimberly MacDonald's blood was Type AB.

  Kristen MacDonald's blood was Type O.

  Thus, by mid-March it was possible for investigators to determine where within the apartment the blood of each family member could be found. The thrust of this evidence—the story told by the blood—seemed, to William Ivory, to Franz Joseph Grebner, and to Robert Shaw, to contradict more strongly than anything before it the story that Jeffrey MacDonald had told.

  The laboratory eventually identified the location and type of every stain and drop of blood inside the MacDonald apartment and on the weapons found outside. From this huge mass of fact, a few details stood out in bold relief:

  —The drops of blood which formed the six-inch circle near the entrance to the master bedroom were in the Type AB blood of Kimberly MacDonald. Her blood was also found on the rumpled sheet and on the torn blue pajama top in the master bedroom, and it was her blood which formed the trail of drops between the master bedroom and her own room, in which her body had been found.

  —The Type A blood of Colette MacDonald was found in the bedroom of Kristen. There were spatters of it on the wall above the bed and a heavy stain on the top sheet of Kristen's bed. In addition, the footprint leading away from the bed—a print made by the bare foot of Jeffrey MacDonald—had been made not with Kristen's Type O blood but with the Type A blood of her mother. Colette's blood was also found, in large quantity, on the bedspread and sheet that had been rolled up together and deposited on the master bedroom floor.

  —The Type B blood of Jeffrey MacDonald was found in significant quantity in only two locations within the apartment: on the kitchen floor in front of the cabinet that contained the box of rubber gloves, and on the right side of the hall bathroom sink, in a pattern suggesting it might have dripped from the right side of the chest of a person who had stood in front of the sink while making a neat, clean incision between two ribs—an incision, perhaps, only one centimeter long, and just deep enough to puncture a lung without doing any other damage.

  With the hysteria that had swept over Fort Bragg in the first days after the murders having abated (in the absence of any further homicidal outbursts), Grebner was inclined to proceed cautiously. He wanted as much evidence as possible available to him before he summoned MacDonald for a formal interrogation.

  To himself he could justify this approach by saying that since flight would be an admission of guilt, it was unlikely that MacDonald would flee, and since the murders had been—he was certain—the result of an explosion of rage which had built up within the confines of a troubled domestic situation, MacDonald did not pose a threat to anyone else at Fort Bragg.

  The young doctor had returned to duty and was now in residence in the BOQ room assigned to him, and, for the moment—despite ever increasing impatience on the part of superiors who wanted a quick announcement that an arrest had been made—Franz Joseph Grebner was content to let the matter lie, hoping that the worst of the mistakes had already been made and that the strands of circumstantial evidence, in time, would weave themselves into a noose.

  Besides, the longer he waited, the more Grebner learned. He had learned, for example, that the Valentine found in MacDonald's desk had been sent by Josephine Kingston, the wife of Col. Robert Kingston, MacDonald's first commanding officer, who had been transferred to Vietnam in the fall.

  On Saturday, April 4, Jeffrey MacDonald located an unfurnished apartment not far from Fort Bragg and convenient to the civilian hospital in Fayetteville where he was working emergency-room shifts during his off-duty hours. He decided that he would prefer to live off post.

  On Sunday, April 5, his mother finally went back to Long Island.

  On the morning of Monday, April 6, he was summoned to the headquarters of the Fort Bragg Criminal Investigation Division. Upon his arrival he was directed to the office of Franz Joseph Grebner.

  Six weeks had elapsed since the murders and the Fort Bragg provost marshal, as well as his superiors, both at Fort Bragg and at the Pentagon, were by now extremely impatient. Since the provost marshal's own mind—like Grebner's—had been made

  up long ago, he had grown weary of saying "No comment" when asked about the investigation's progress, and wearier still of reading newspaper stories about how the Army's apparent inability to crack the case was just one more example of the incompetence that was leading to the loss of the war in Vietnam, and to the public's complete loss of faith in the military.

  Daily, the provost marshal would receive pressure from above, and, daily, he would make Franz Joseph Grebner aware of it. By April 6, the CID chief—despite his unease in regard to the incomplete nature of the investigation—felt he had no choice but to act. Perhaps, he thought, once MacDonald was made aware of the evidence the CID had assembled, he could be persuaded to confess.

  In preparation for the interview, Grebner, who before joining the Army had been a school superintendent in South Dakota, summoned William Ivory and the other agent—Robert Shaw—who had done the majority of the investigative work on the case. The two detectives took seats on either side of Grebner's desk. A gray, armless chair was positioned alongside the desk, facing Grebner and the windows behind him. Grebner took a tape recorder out of the desk. Having long ago misplaced the microphone stand, he propped the microphone on top of some books on his desk and asked that MacDonald be sent in.

  MacDonald, in uniform—planning, in fact, to go to his office— stood directly in front of Grebner's desk. He smiled, then looked quickly at the unfamiliar—and unsmiling—faces of Ivory and Shaw. He still had no idea that the Army investigators considered him their prime suspect.

  Motioning to the armless chair alongside his desk, Grebner told MacDonald to take a seat. He then turned on the tape recorder.

  "Before we begin," he said, as the smile faded from Jeffrey MacDonald's face, "I would like to advise you of your rights."

  The
Voice of Jeffrey MacDonald

  Internship year, though, the year at Columbia Presbyterian, was a very tough year, a down year, a brutal year. There were months when I worked the entire month, every other night on. That meant thirty-six hours straight at the hospital and only twelve off, and you never really got the full twelve, it was always eleven or ten or nine and a half, and I had to go home, clean up, eat, see the kids, play with them, see Colette, catch up on the news, fall asleep, then get up at four or five in the morning and go back on rounds at 6 A.M.

  Basically, it was a horrendous year. Really bad from the point of view of my workload, lack of family interaction, and total physical exhaustion.

  Now, that was not my doing. And I refuse to take any, um, negative credit for working too hard. That's just the way it was being an intern at one of the best hospitals in the world. But our apartment in Bergenfield, New Jersey, was hot and cramped and not nearly as pretty as what we had just come from in Chicago, plus the neighborhood was not nearly as nice.

  Of course, intellectually, Columbia Presbyterian was very exciting. As a medical learning experience it was phenomenal, and I became one of the hot interns, there was no question about it.

  On chest surgery I scrubbed at some of the open hearts which were—you know, this was still big news in 1969. These were very tense operations and different surgeons handled the tenseness in different ways.

  One of my most vivid recollections was I was assisting the most brutal of these surgeons—this guy was a pusher and shover and swearer and a knife-thrower, and he had an awesome reputation for pushing interns out of the way and being nasty to them.

  And I was assisting and I did something he didn't like and he pushed me. I didn't say anything, just did my job, and he asked me some questions and I answered them and then something happened that he didn't like—he wanted me to move or something—and he, really hard, gave me an elbow in the middle of the chest and I just sort of gave him a very light elbow back and I said, "I don't have to take that from you. You know, you don't need me here at the table. I seem to be in your way, but if I'm not in your way and you want me here, then you'll have to treat me as a physician."