Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

  Please believe I was not in that house!!!! I really and truly don't know anything about the whole mess. I'm sorry I had to leave but I couldn't listen to them lie any more, especially with you there. I'm only begging you to believe me. I'm telling the truth. Thank you for the meal. I'm sorry I let you down. Don't let them arrest me—please."

  Thanks & love, Helena

  In his written report, the polygraph operator concluded that, "Due to Miss Stoeckley's state of mind and excessive drug use during the period of the homicides, a conclusion could not be reached as to whether or not she knew who committed the homicides or whether she was present at the scene."

  In the weeks that followed, CID agents located, interviewed, and gave polygraph examinations to all the people whom Stoeckley had named, at various times, as being possible participants in the crime. All denied any involvement and in each case the denial was supported not only by the cross-checking of stories but by the results of the polygraph tests.

  Agents also spoke to the two young women from New Jersey with whom Stoeckley had been sharing her Clark Street apartment. One said Stoeckley had not returned to the apartment at 4:30 on the morning of the murders but had been away until much later in the day—thus casting doubt on Posey's recollection. This roommate also said that Stoeckley had enjoyed being mentioned in newspaper stories about the killings.

  William Posey was found in Birmingham, Alabama, in June of 1971. One of seven children of a career Army man, Posey— the CID had learned—had been arrested for housebreaking in 1968 and on four separate occasions in 1969 had been arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct.

  A polygraph examination indicated that Posey's testimony at the Article 32 hearing had not been truthful. When confronted with this result, Posey admitted that he had not seen Stoeckley get out of an automobile on the morning of February 17, 1970, but had only seen her walking from an automobile to her apartment. He also said he did not know that the car had been a Mustang. He said that a month or two after the murders he'd had a dream in which a Mustang had appeared, and for that reason he had testified that this was the car from which Stoeckley had alighted.

  He further said that he was no longer positive that the morning he'd seen Stoeckley had been the morning of February 17, and that it had not occurred to him that she might have been involved until at least a week after the murders, and that the opinion he had formed at that time was the result of Stoeckley's telling him that she had been on drugs the night of the killings and could not remember what she had done.

  Having absorbed all of this information, Pruett and Kearns discounted Helena Stoeckley as a suspect and began to probe more deeply into the background of Jeffrey and Colette MacDonald.

  3

  From mid-November through March of his sophomore year of high school, Jeffrey MacDonald had been absent from Patchogue. With no advance word to teachers or friends, he had abruptly departed for Bay town, Texas, to live with a family named Andrews—friends of the Stern family of New Hope, Pennsylvania, but people whom MacDonald himself had met only briefly and casually.

  As they deepened their probe into MacDonald's background, Pruett and Kearns were struck by this event. It seemed odd to them that an outstanding student and athlete who was having no disciplinary problem of any kind should suddenly be removed from his high school and be sent more than 1,500 miles away, to remain away—through both Thanksgiving and Christmas—for almost four months.

  Their questioning of former teachers and acquaintances did not turn up a definitive explanation but there were recurrent rumors of difficulty within the MacDonald family—including one to the effect that Jeffrey had been banished by his father in the aftermath of a brutal fight in which he had badly injured his older brother, Jay. One family friend even remarked that MacDonald's mother had often said, "One of Jeffs goals in life is to flatten Jay," so great was his envy over favoritism shown his older brother said to be.

  Whatever its cause, the unexplained and prolonged absence from home was considered worthy of attention by Pruett and Kearns, for it was the first hint that a more turbulent level of emotion might have lain beneath the tranquil "all-American" surface of the MacDonald family.

  Years later, Jack Andrews, Jr., a contemporary of Jeffrey MacDonald's and the son of the man who had extended the invitation to Baytown (and in whose home MacDonald resided during his stay) would recall that, "He never mentioned his family. It became apparent rather quickly that this was something he did not want to talk about.

  "The story was that my father had just invited him down for a visit. But I knew there must have been some other reason behind it. At first, he was just supposed to stay for a couple of weeks. Then—I don't know quite how it happened—after he'd been here those couple of weeks it was just sort of decided that he was going to stay on.

  "It wasn't my doing. Frankly, he and I did not get along well at all. Right from the start, he was always stepping on my toes. A couple of times it even led to some pushing and shoving. Once, I remember, was kind of serious—we got into a real tussle, right in our family living room. It wasn't too long after that that he went home.

  "The thing I remember most clearly about Jeff is that he was always striving to be the center of attention. And not just in the normal way: you know, the new kid in town, showing off. With Jeff it was like a crusade—he had to try to look the best at everything.

  "The first week or two after somebody would meet him, they'd always be tremendously impressed. But then—with guys, especially—it would eventually end up in a clash. Mostly because of the way Jeff had of insisting that every little detail always be just his way."

  Jack Andrews, Sr., the Humble Oil engineer who had extended the invitation, had later died in an automobile accident, but his ex-wife, Mary C. Andrews, was able to recall certain details surrounding the event.

  Her husband, she said, had met the MacDonald family through his friend and business associate Bob Stern, while on an extended trip to the Northeast. In the fall of 1958, she had joined him in New York for a time. One evening, she remembered, her husband had invited the MacDonald boys—Jay and Jeff—to come into New York City for dinner.

  Unaccompanied by their parents, the two teenaged boys had ridden in from Patchogue on the train and had dined with the Andrews couple in Greenwich Village. The occasion had proved so festive that after dinner the foursome had gone to "a couple of clubs," at one of which a photographer employed by the establishment had taken a commemorative picture.

  Soon afterward Mary Andrews had flown back to Baytown. Within a couple of weeks she was informed by her husband that when he returned he would be bringing young Jeff MacDonald with him for a visit.

  The two of them—Jack Andrews, Sr., and the high school sophomore, Jeffrey McDonald—left New York on November 11 and drove cross-country to Baytown, which is on the Gulf Coast of Texas. When later asked what had led to this sudden venture, Mary Andrews replied, "I think my husband Jack was just attracted to the boy."

  MacDonald's stay in Baytown continued long enough for him to be enrolled in the Robert E. Lee High School there. "He stayed right through Christmas, I'm sure," Mary Andrews said. "I even remember the present he gave me. He knew I liked glass bottles so he bought me this tall, thin, blue glass bottle for Christmas. It really was very pretty."

  Mrs. Andrews said she had the feeling that "Jeff never felt appreciated at home." That "he was someone who was really trying very hard to please all the time but that he felt he just didn't fit in his own family. That everyone liked his brother Jay the best."

  She said she had never discussed it with either of Jeffrey's parents, but "frankly it seemed real strange to me that the family would just let him come down to stay for so long with people they scarcely knew. In fact, I had never met the parents at all—just the boys that one night at dinner."

  Mrs. Andrews added that she could not remember precisely what had led to MacDonald's departure but that by March his presence in her home had become "a strain." She said, "It
just got to be an uncomfortable situation."

  The relationship between Jay and Jeff, however, was referred to by many acquaintances of the MacDonald family with whom the two agents spoke, including one woman who, since childhood, had been a particularly close friend of Colette's.

  "I always thought Jeff and Jay were close," she said. "They had like a real close family type. The mother always gave the impression that, you know, they were really the ultimate as far as scholastics, sports, and everything. They were really tops in everything, and they gave that impression to a lot of people. You speak to people in town and they will tell you the same thing. They were really right up there as far as everything was concerned. You know, one was right after the other.

  "But then, Jay—in high school he was the big man, right?

  And then he kind of just went to the other end. He was more or less like the flop out of the family, getting involved with the wrong type of people. Now he's a bum. He hasn't a very good reputation, between his drug use and in and out of different type jobs.

  "Now, Jeff—he was a domineering type person as far as, you know, Colette and stuff. She seemed to be very devoted to him. But I knew through the grapevine that, like most guys, he wasn't so, you know, devoted back.

  "Jeff was very well liked in school. He was voted Most Popular and stuff. He had his hang-ups. Everybody does. But I don't think he was an embittered, hateful person. They had arguments, yes. Nastiness from him a couple of times, but nothing violent.

  "Just one time, I remember, he hit Colette. It was such a long time ago. We were maybe seventeen, sixteen. I think it was at my house—my mother's house at the time—and I just remember him reaching out and giving her a slap, and she was crying and got all upset over it and stuff, but that—it's so blank. It's not that vivid that I can say what they were talking about, but it sticks in my mind, the fact that he did.

  "Colette, you know, she was very intelligent, extremely bright, very active—a good swimmer, and stuff like that—but she wasn't the type of person to spill her feelings to anybody. When she lost her father she became very inward and she very rarely expressed her innermost feelings. When her father committed suicide, she kept it all in."

  As an adult, the friend said, Colette was "not much for housekeeping but lots of time for the kids. The last letter I got from her was about a month before the incident. It was a very newsy type letter. She said they were finally together as a family and Jeff was making extra money moonlighting. Financially, I think, they had really struggled because, of course, he was working while he was going to school.

  "She was really delighted about being pregnant again. She said she was so happy. She said she just hoped and prayed that it would be a boy, for Jeffs sake. She said then the family would be complete.

  "The only thing—she said she really hoped he would not go with this team—the boxing team?—on some kind of a trip. She really hoped he wouldn't go because she would be due around that time, but he was supposed to go and he kind of had his mind set on it and that was it."

  * * *

  Agents spoke also to the wife of Colette MacDonald's older brother. She said, "Colette was an extraordinarily sensitive person. I don't think she ever hurt another human being's feelings. She didn't make enemies. She was never a competitor in terms of feminine wiles. She just wanted to be with her man and that was it.

  "She always loved Jeff. She was just crazy about him. And she was always into getting married and having babies. Like the thing of going to Skidmore. Her mother wanted her to go to Skidmore, but Colette would have been happy to just get married and have babies.

  "She was great with her kids. She wanted a big family, lots of babies, but she had a very tough time having them and that cut it back.

  "She lived with her brother and me one summer while she was at Skidmore—after her freshman year—and she and I used to sit down and she used to talk about Jeff a lot, and ask me if she should start going out with him again, and I said 'Yeah, go ahead,' because I knew where she was at. She was crazy about him. She was very much into Jeff. That was just where it was at with her.

  "After they were married, I didn't see her as much. Just once in a while—when Jeff was at Columbia I saw her once or twice at Mildred's. Jeff was always working and Colette would go and be with her parents in order not to be alone, because Jeff worked these screwy hours all the time.

  "The last real contact I had with her was when Jeff got his thing saying he had to go into the service the day he finished his internship. I was on the phone with her then for a few days because she was very upset—that he was going to have to go away, that he was probably going to have to go to Vietnam.

  "Then Jeff called her from Texas and said he had enlisted in the Green Berets, and so he did not have to go to Vietnam. I don't think she was too thrilled about the Green Berets. She knew she could talk to me about it because I am anti any kind of violence and war and she knew that and she felt that way also.

  "She was very antiwar—the Green Berets and the connotation and whatnot. She was very anti violence. Their father, you know, he died a horrible death. He hung himself. I don't know if Colette saw him or not, but my husband did. He was fourteen at the time. She was eleven. And after their father died, forget it. That was the end of the world.

  "After that, she and her brother just started keeping things inside. They have always been people to hide the bad things.

  They both found it very difficult to express their emotions. Like I remember one time they sat down and discussed, you know, their father's death, and they both got very upset and there was too much emotion. It was too much of a hassle to remember all the bad times and they would stop it. Shut it down and drink coffee. That's the way they did it. Mildred is that way, too. She was that way about her husband, and now she's that way about Colette. She doesn't talk to anybody, she doesn't see anybody, doesn't talk to anybody about it. This is the way the whole family is emotionally. They stay very much to themselves.

  "The MacDonalds were just the opposite. Their house was always full of people and the door was always open. There were six people coming in the front door and four people going out the back, and Colette was very excited about this—being with a family and lots of people—so she spent a lot of time over at the MacDonalds' because she did not have that at home. Holidays were a big thing in that house and she liked to be there.

  "Mr. MacDonald—Mac—he was a big rapper. Oh, I loved him. He would sit around and bullshit, you know, and she liked this. He was a nice kind of a guy and she liked him, and Jeff was everybody's friend. Even at their wedding, Jeff was the kind of guy that always had people around him, lots of buddies and so on.

  "Jeff was very uptight about hippies, from what I could see. Jeff was very straight. He didn't drink, he didn't smoke. Colette smoked, and he made her stop. Colette herself was very straight and stable and always wore little shirts buttoned up to the top and a straight skirt, but she didn't have that kind of prejudice.

  "I don't imagine she and Jeff ever argued because, you know, she just—ll don't want to discuss it. It's a hassle.' She would be hurt more. She was easily hurt, but she would be hurt rather than angry. If somebody said something to her, to cut her, instead of coming back in a slandering fashion, you know, she would feel hurt, and she would withdraw and back out. She was never a pot-thrower or anything.

  "When she was growing up, there were no fights in her house, no arguments. She was never struck. She was not disciplined by Freddy or by Mildred. You know, she didn't have anything of that nature in her life. Everybody was very protective of her. Colette was a very protected child. Her relationship with her mother was a real mother-daughter kind of thing. Colette and her mother were very close, and Mildred shielded her from all kinds of things. She was just smiling and happy and up and if something was bothering her, she kept it to herself.

  "Her letters were about the good things, always about the good things. She said she had it good at Fort Bragg. Everybody had a bedroom and she
was going to have another baby and the sun shined a lot and the kids had a pony and it was the nicest thing they had done together. It was the first break, in terms of normalcy—her first chance to settle down.

  "I got a Christmas card from her, said she was very happy and she was making a baby. It was just a very up kind of card. Mildred and Freddy went down to visit, and Mildred said when she came back that she was so pleased how Colette was cooking, and, you know, cleaning house, and that she seemed very happy. She was excited that Jeff surprised everybody with a pony. It apparently surprised Colette, too. They wanted to have a farm and that pony was the first thing toward that farm.

  "Of course, Colette was the kind of person that would always make everything seem very right. She would never expose a problem or unhappiness that would reflect on Jeff or that would reflect on their marriage. She would do everything to make sure that everybody saw that they had a very good relationship. She didn't confide in me in terms of things like that. I don't even know if she did with her mother, because she was always very protective of Jeff and their private relationship."

  Pruett and Kearns then talked to Colette's brother, who worked as a sales representative for a computer company.

  'They were both very conservative people," he said. "For example, Jeff was highly—he disapproved of anything to do with drugs on any level. This was very absolute. And Colette, in terms of being contrasted with me, was always drastically more conservative, in my eyes sometimes to the point that her eyes were not open to enough things. Colette was very content to be a housewife and a mother. Many women today, they seem to want just about everything, but she was, from an early age—wanted babies and just wanted to strive toward motherhood.