Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

  magazines don't land under the leading edge of that table, either. They land out on the floor."

  "Couldn't this table have been pushed around during the struggle?"

  "It could have been, but it would have been upside down when it stopped. And the plant and the pot always go straight out and they stay together in all instances."

  "Well, what—what are you trying to say?"

  "That this is a staged scene."

  "You mean that I staged the scene?"

  "That's what I think."

  "Do you think that I would stand the pot up if I staged the scene?"

  "Somebody stood it up like that."

  "Well, I don't see the reasoning behind that. You just told me I was college-educated and very intelligent." "I believe you are."

  "Well, why do you think I would—I don't understand why you think I would stage it that way if I was going to stage it."

  "And your glasses, which are over there underneath the drapery. They could have gotten there, but you weren't wearing your glasses when you went into the bedrooms. And they are lying with the outer edge of the lens down on the floor, yet on the face of that lens there's blood."

  "Maybe someone knocked them over."

  "But how did they get the blood on them?"

  "I assume from the person who knocked them over."

  "Another feature here. There's an Esquire magazine laying there. There's a box laying on top of it. And on this edge, right underneath the box, there's blood on the edges of the pages. This whole thing here was staged."

  "That's a pretty powerful statement. Changes things around, doesn't it?"

  "Yes, it does."

  "Well, I can't help you," MacDonald said. "What do you want me to say? You are telling me that—that I staged the scene and that's it. It is a little ludicrous."

  "You must understand," Grebner said, "that I am looking at this from the point of an investigator, past experience."

  "I understand that."

  Grebner gestured toward another photograph. "Notice the rug right there?" "Right."

  "It slips and slides and rolls up very easily. In the position it is in, that's where you would have been having this struggle, pushing against three men."

  "Well, at the edge of the bed [sic] and on the end of the hallway." (This was the third time MacDonald had said "bed" when he had apparently intended to say "couch.")

  "This rug was undisturbed," Grebner said.

  "Well, what do you want me to say? I don't—I'm not an investigator. You are telling me that—that I staged the scene and I—I'm telling you that things happened the way I told you."

  "You know," Grebner continued, "you as a doctor and I as an investigator have seen many people come into emergency rooms and they are pretty badly hurt."

  "Right."

  "I've seen people who were shot directly in the heart with a .38 run over a hundred yards. You had one icepick wound— apparently from an icepick—punctured your lung to the point that it collapsed 20 percent. You had one small bump on your head."

  "No, correction, I had two."

  "Two? Okay, two. Not apparently wounds or bumps that would have been caused by this type of club that we have in this instance if anyone was swinging with any force."

  "Well, I can't agree with you there, medically. I have treated patients who have died and there's nothing but a little abrasion on their forehead."

  "That's probably true, but here you are. You've been hit twice by now. This didn't knock you out. This is according to your story. You're at a point here where the old adrenaline is pumping into your system—you are fighting for yourself and your children—and yet you pass out here, according to your story, at the end of the hallway."

  "It wasn't exactly passing out, Mr. Grebner. I was hit on the head a couple of times."

  "But that didn't knock you out. You were still pushing and fighting against these people and—''

  "Well, apparently it did knock me out, though."

  "—for an unexplained reason you passed out."

  "No, no, I didn't pass out. Apparently I was knocked unconscious."

  "By a third blow?"

  "I don't—I don't know how many blows."

  "But this weapon was used on Colette and Kim. It is a brutal weapon. We had three people here that are overkilled, almost. And yet they leave you alive. While you were laying there in the hallway, why not give you a good lick or two from behind the head with that club and finish you off?" "Well, maybe I was—"

  "You saw them eye to eye. They don't know that you wouldn't be able to identify them at a later date. Why leave you there alive?"

  "I don't know. Maybe they assumed that—that I was dead, and the frenzy got worse and worse. I—I don't know. I've thought about this. I've spent many sleepless nights in the last six weeks, you know."

  "Then we have the fibers from your pajama top directly under your wife's body."

  "Sir, I told you I can't—I can't explain some of those fibers. That's—that's beyond my capabilities. I just told you the only thing I know and obviously the implication is real bad for me, but I can't—how can I explain that? I don't know."

  "And as we enter the bedroom we have Kimberly's blood on that rug. To the right of the door we have the top sheet and the spread from your bed, and on the sheet are both Colette's blood and Kimberly's. And on the bedspread it's Colette's blood— large quantities. Now, hippies don't—they let bodies fall where they may."

  "Right, I agree with you."

  "So it is another staged scene, probably. Kimberly was returned to her bed—it's a possibility—carried in that sheet. And there was absolutely no evidence that could be found—even though we had technicians in there for five days—of an alien being in that house. You get that many people in a house that small, you're going to have evidence of it."

  "I don't know what you expect me to say here."

  "That club," Grebner continued. "You said you had never seen that before? Do you know there is paint on it that is the same as paint on the sidewalk in back of the house?"

  "Look, ah—"

  "It is the same as the paint on scraps of wood which you have in your locked storage room. It is the same as the paint on a pair of surgical gloves that were in the locked storage room. That piece of wood came from the house."

  "It might have," MacDonald said. "I haven't seen the piece of wood. I didn't recognize it from the picture. Jesus Christ, this is getting—what's this called? Circumstantial evidence? Yeah, well, go ahead," MacDonald said sarcastically, "what else do you have?"

  "I was just throwing out things for you to consider."

  "What you are doing is you are sitting here telling me that I killed my wife and kids! That's un—that's unbelievable. Christ's sakes, what's my motive? What'd I do that for?"

  "We can conjecture a lot of reasons perhaps."

  "You think I wasn't happily married?"

  "I'm happily married, too. Sometimes I get pretty mad at my wife. Particularly when I was younger and more easily angered."

  "You think I could get mad enough at someone to do that?"

  "I have known it to happen before."

  "Holy Christ! I'll tell you what it looks like to me. It looks like you've run out of ideas, and—and you are picking out someone—the easiest one. You've got to solve it by the end of the fiscal year so when the report goes in there's a one hundred percent solved rate."

  "No," Grebner said. "I've been at this for twenty years and I'm going to stick one more. So I'm not in any hurry. It is just that we have all this business here that would tend to indicate that you were involved in this rather than people who came in from the outside and picked 544 Castle Drive and went up there and were lucky enough to find your door open. I've spent many a night out on this post and 1 know one thing: with the number of dogs we have around, you don't go rattling doors here to find one that's open so you can come in and for no apparent reason knock off three people. At that hour of the morning, the patrols we have around
, there wouldn't have been four or five people—a group like that—wandering through the housing area—"

  "Oh, that's a lot of baloney," MacDonald interrupted.

  ‘—or driving through

  "I've never seen a patrol there at night and I've been here since August."

  "Well, I can assure you, they are there. You probably weren't looking for them." There was a pause.

  "Well, where do we go from here?" MacDonald said. "It's up to you."

  "It's not up to me. I told you what I—what I know. You put some pictures in front of me, tell—tell me they are staged and that I did it."

  "Let me tell you something," Shaw said. "I don't want to step out of line here, and if I am, I'm sorry. I don't know that you did it, Captain MacDonald. I don't know it at all. But my experience tells me that what you say isn't right."

  "You mean because it is an unusual, bizarre crime?" MacDonald said.

  ‘‘No, no. By the physical evidence that is in this house."

  "And the lack of physical evidence," Ivory added.

  There was another, longer pause. Jeffrey MacDonald whispered, ‘‘Wow." Then he said, ‘‘Step one, you lose your family. Step two, you get blamed for it, huh? That's terrific. Great."

  ‘‘You are the only one that was left alive there," Grebner said.

  ‘‘Oh, well," MacDonald said, the sarcasm now heavy in his voice, "that's—that's pretty significant."

  ‘‘It sure is from the way the others were taken care of."

  ‘'How was I supposed to have gotten my wounds?"

  "You could get these wounds, the ones you had, the puncture— you could have done it yourself.''

  "A couple of blows on the head and a lot of little puncture wounds and a little cut on the abdomen and a couple of stab marks in the arm and—and a puncture wound in the lung. That's reasonable. Or else I paid someone—that's another way.

  ‘‘Well, I don't know what you men want me to say. I don't have much to lose, do I? I lost everything else. You men are making an awful lot out of this circumstantial evidence that can probably be explained, I can tell you that."

  ‘'That's why I'm bringing it up," Grebner said. "To see if you can explain."

  "I mean I can't—I can't explain the scene. It just seems to me that in a struggle anything would be possible, you know what I mean?" There was a pause. ‘‘Jesus Christ," MacDonald said, ‘‘when did you people start thinking like this?"

  "The scene in the living room," Grebner said, "I questioned when it first came up. I thought it was very odd."

  ‘'But it took—but it took—but it took—but it took your office six weeks to question me about these things? Oh, man," MacDonald said softly. "Jesus Christ. This is a nightmare. This is like Edgar Allan Poe."

  There was a pause. He whispered, "Wow."

  There was another pause. "Apparently," he said, "you don't know much about my family and myself, I'll tell you that, to come up with that conclusion. Or me, for that matter," MacDonald said.

  ‘‘What kind of man are you, Captain?" Shaw asked. "You say we don't know much about you. What kind of man are you?"

  ‘‘Well, I'm bright, aggressive, I work hard, and I had a terrific family and I loved my wife very much. And this is the most asinine thing I've ever heard in my whole life. It's almost as bad as the next morning, thinking about this and thinking it was a dream."

  Suddenly, he started to sob. "Jesus Christ . . . you can ask any patient I've ever treated. I go way out of my way. I've spent my whole—you know, my whole medical career—it isn't that long, but to date I've never had a problem with a patient. Always gone out of my way, always worked extra hours, always helped people.

  "I loved my wife more than any couple I know. I've never known a couple that's—that's as happy as our family, and you come up with this shit. Goddamn it!"

  He paused and began to cry. Almost a full minute passed before he spoke again.

  "Goddamn it, how do you come up with that? We even had plans for a farm in Connecticut."

  There was another long pause while MacDonald sobbed audibly.

  Then he said angrily, "Well, that's a load of bullshit, I'll tell you. Goddamn it!"

  "Jeff," Grebner said, "I have to go on what evidence is available to me."

  "Yeah, bull shit. Looking at some circumstantial things and making a mountain out of a molehill."

  "During an investigation," Grebner said, "we have to look at the circumstantial evidence—the real evidence. And we try not to make mountains out of molehills."

  MacDonald continued to sob. Then he said, "What—what—no one ever had as good a life as I had. What the hell would I try to wreck it for? Christ, I was a doctor. Jesus, I had a beautiful wife who loved me and two kids who were great. We were just over all the hard things. It just doesn't—it just doesn't make any sense." He broke off again and continued to cry.

  Then, with his voice once again under control, and looking the CID chief directly in the eye for the first and only time all day, he said, "Look, Mr. Grebner, what I told you is what I remember from that night, and that's the truth. All I can say to you is that, ah, you know, maybe things weren't exactly as I said, simply because of the excitement, but I told you what I know. In other words, there—there are some minor details that maybe are a little hazy and confused. But the gist of what happened is what I told you to—to the best of my abilities, and that's all I can say. I mean, I don't—I don't know any more. And the rest of it is pure bullshit."

  There was another extended silence in the room—broken, once more, by Jeffrey MacDonald.

  "What—what possibly could I have gained from this? I mean, what—Jesus Christ, what would I have gained by doing this?"

  Slowly, Franz Joseph Grebner reached into his desk and took out an envelope containing additional photographs. He opened the envelope and handed MacDonald pictures of an Army nurse named Tina Carlucci.

  There was another long pause. When MacDonald finally spoke, his voice was dull.

  "She looks familiar, but—Tina. The nose looks familiar. She looks familiar, but I don't know who she is. Oh, I—let me see that. It looks like a girl I knew in San Antonio. I was with her one night, did not have intercourse, no big deal. She wrote me one letter and I ripped it up and threw it away. That's her."

  There was a short pause.

  "You are more thorough than I thought," MacDonald said, almost inaudibly. "What?"

  "You guys are more thorough than I thought."

  On March 20, a Women's Army Corps private had told the Fort Bragg CID that while stationed at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, the previous December, she and a friend named Tina Carlucci had been approached at a post drinking establishment by two Green Beret officers, who had invited them to a party at the Westerner Motel in San Antonio. The officers had said they were at Fort Sam Houston only for the weekend, participating in a Special Forces parachute jump. One of them—the one whom her friend, Tina, had accompanied—had been Captain Jeffrey MacDonald.

  Tina Carlucci had been located at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, in early April. She remembered the occasion very clearly. The date had been Saturday, December 6. She and MacDonald had spent the afternoon watching the Arkansas—Texas football game on television. That evening, as part of a larger group, they had gone to dinner at a restaurant called Valerio's. MacDonald had immediately taken charge, "ordering wine and the whole bit." He had seemed "very intelligent and well-mannered," and "right at home with a strange woman, very much at ease."

  He had mentioned that every time he went on a trip he went out with other women. His wife, he said, knew all about these adventures. She had never told him she knew but he simply "knew" she was aware. He made particular reference to a party that had been held at the Sheraton Hotel in San Antonio the previous summer, when he had been at Fort Sam Houston, attending the physician's basic training course.

  Nurse Carlucci recalled that when the group had returned to the motel after dinner, MacDonald had called his wife.

 
"He told her he would be home the next evening. Told her he missed her and that he loved her. Then he asked about her pregnancy check. He wanted to know if it was positive or negative. She told him she was definitely pregnant."

  Later in the evening, while MacDonald was taking a shower, one of the other guests at the party took a picture of Tina on the motel bed, wearing MacDonald's Green Beret.

  "I was sick that night," she said. "I had a bad cold and didn't feel like doing much of anything. He tried to make love to me once and I told him I didn't feel like it. He didn't try to force himself on me. We took our clothes off and fondled each other but there was no intercourse. We were together until 6 A.M. Sunday when he left for the parachute jump. He gave me some tetracycline and suggested I go on sick call Monday morning."

  After seeing the photograph of Tina Carlucci, Jeffrey MacDonald was not quite so certain that he wanted to take a polygraph examination.

  "Well, let me ask you a few questions here, men. Ah, you guys have been posing all the questions. What's the—what's the fallibility of this polygraph thing? You know, you guys with your circumstantial evidence here, you know—ah, what happens with normal emotion?"

  "That's taken into consideration, of course. When people are challenged, there's a little more nervous tension than usual."

  "Absolutely," Grebner said. "Murder is much more serious than stealing an M-16 or something."

  "I'm just trying to, ah, prevent, ah, any more things like this, that's all. I can see what's going to happen if there is a little jig in the line. You and the provost marshal are going to jump and say ah-hah! We found our man."

  "The provost marshal won't be reading the charts, and neither will I. We will call a polygraph operator who is not involved in the case. Operators can be obtained—probably come out of Washington—and are very competent and is a disinterested party. He won't care how it comes out."