Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

  So frequent did these driving lessons become that Carta's mother eventually came to suspect a deeper—possibly intimate— level of involvement. She told investigators that she considered MacDonald's attentions to her daughter to be "excessive" and said, "He took her out many places and seemed to be a little friendlier than an ordinary neighbor would have been."

  Even the sixteen-year-old babysitter who lived upstairs came in for her share of attention. She told investigators that "He made one comment about if he had known girls like me when he was sixteen, he'd like to still be in school." Given the manner in which the remark had been made, the young woman said, she had considered it offensive.

  By January of 1970, however, changes in MacDonald's manner were being noted. "I remember seeing Jeff looking very white and very tired and very serious," one neighbor said. "He wasn't his usual jolly self—you know, friendly and outgoing. ' He was moonlighting—holding down two jobs besides his Army job—and he just looked so tired."

  The sixteen-year-old babysitter also noticed a change in both

  Jeffrey MacDonald and his wife. "After January,'' she said, "Colette hardly ever even said 'Hi' when I went over to babysit. She never smiled and Jeff wasn't too friendly either. When I saw them together, I just sensed they weren't happy. They didn't yell at each other, but now I look back and they never really smiled."

  Colette, of course, was certain by now that she was pregnant. And though, to some friends, she had expressed enthusiasm at the prospect of having a third child, there were others who developed a different perception. One Fort Bragg acquaintance said, "I don't know how the subject came up, but she told me she had sort of gotten pregnant by mistake because she had forgotten to take one birth control pill. You know, at the time, I laughed. I sort of said, The joke's on you,' type of thing. She laughed, too, but I didn't get the feeling that she was overjoyed about it."

  Also, by January, of course—according to what MacDonald himself had told Pruett and Kearns in one of the Philadelphia interviews—he was moonlighting at Cape Fear Valley Hospital "every night." In addition, he had made arrangements to begin a second moonlighting position at Hamlet Hospital on weekends. And he had also begun to work out with the Fort Bragg boxing team.

  "He came into the arena on January 4," the boxing coach said, "saying that he wanted to work out and lose some weight. I saw him thereafter on January 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, and 20. There might have been a couple of days during that period when he came in which are not reflected in my logbook but those dates reflect the majority of his visits. As far as I can determine, January 20 was the last workout he participated in.

  "When he came in the first time, the team members were going through a five-minute heavy bag drill. This is exceedingly strength-sapping and it generally takes months to build up the endurance to punch for the full five minutes. Captain MacDonald, however, during his first workout, participated in this drill and lasted the five minutes. Although he was winded at the end he did not seem to show the effects. I thought this was an outstanding performance for someone who had not been participating in any type of boxing program on a regular basis.

  "Captain MacDonald was much stronger than the average individual and in much better physical condition when he started the program than the average soldier would be. He also had a considerable amount of drive and determination. After only a very few workouts he sparred with our middleweight champion and held his own during the minutes he was in the ring.

  "He was very well accepted by the members of the team and very well liked. In fact, after his first few workouts, I asked him if he would like to become the team physician. As I remember, he accepted without much persuasion.

  "I don't recall exactly when I told him, but I did inform him of our upcoming road trips, starting on or about February 20 through to the last of April or the first of May. For the boxing staff this would be continuous traveling. We would go to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for the U.S. Army trials, then to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for the Inter-Service matches, and then on to Trenton, New Jersey, for the National AAU matches.

  "On the 12th or 13th of February, I called Washington and requested that Captain MacDonald be considered for acceptance as team physician. The colonel I spoke to said he would look into it and if Captain MacDonald's unit did not object, he would be so assigned. As I recall, that same evening, I called Captain MacDonald at his quarters and told him of my conversation with the colonel. I cannot recall his exact comment but as I remember he seemed pleased."

  Colette, however—contrary to MacDonald's assertion in his "diary"—apparently had not been pleased. Not only had she mentioned her apprehensiveness to her mother and to the Long Island friend to whom she wrote in January, but she spoke of it to the friend who had begun to accompany her to the child psychology class in early February. "She told me that when her husband first was in the Army she'd had to stay home while he had gone down for his training and she didn't like being away from him. She sort of dreaded the thought of being separated again, but he was going somewhere with the boxing team."

  The "somewhere"—Jeff had told Colette—was Russia. Not Fort Dix; not Trenton, New Jersey. The team coach, however, informed the CID reinvestigators that no trip to Russia had ever been planned or even discussed. "There was nothing scheduled for the Bragg or Army teams regarding Russia," the coach said. "The National AAU team had gone to Russia, departing on or about the first of February, but I had no conversation with Captain MacDonald regarding his desires to go with them and there was no travel scheduled for the Army team after the national championships in New Jersey."

  Gradually, Pruett and Kearns drew closer to the time of the murders. MacDonald had said repeatedly that despite having worked a twenty-four-hour shift at Hamlet Hospital and having put in a full day at his office and having then played basketball for an hour, he had not been overtired on the night of Monday, February 16.

  The woman whom Colette had driven to class, however, recalled Colette's commenting that Jeff had seemed totally exhausted. "She said—I forget if he was sleeping, or laying on the couch when she left. But she said he was really tired because he had worked all night the night before and then he had to go to work at Fort Bragg all day."

  Having had, at the most, a half-hour nap on the living room floor before Kimberly had awakened him to watch Laugh-In, MacDonald had become so revivified during his wife's absence that upon her return he not only stayed up watching television with her until 11 but even after she went to bed he stayed up—to watch more television, to finish Kiss Me Deadly, and even to wash the dinner dishes at 2 A.M.

  Like the unexplained sojourn to Texas and the non-existent trip to Russia, this sudden infusion of energy puzzled Pruett and Kearns. With MacDonald no longer willing to talk to them, however, these did not seem matters which they could pursue. Instead, they focused on Colette's child psychology class.

  Normally, she was not an active participant in class discussions, but on the evening of Monday, February 16, she posed a question.

  "She raised the question," her friend said, "about her youngest child coming into bed with her and her husband in the night. She wondered whether they should allow the little girl to stay the night or if they should put her back to bed or what kind of solution they should try. It seems to me she said her husband felt that the little girl should stay in bed with him and, you know, that she should go and sleep on the couch."

  Another member of the class recalled that "Mrs. MacDonald outlined the situation as one in which a little girl crawls in bed with her parents and pushes her mother out of bed. This was done by the child crowding the mother so far to the edge of the bed that she was no longer comfortable.

  "The instructor asked Mrs. MacDonald if it was her child. She replied that it was. The instructor then asked if the child knew that Mrs. MacDonald was pregnant. She said yes. The instructor than asked the child's age. I think she told him two or three. The instructor then asked what she did about the child. Mrs. MacDonald told him mat she had
to go to sleep on the couch.

  "The instructor asked Mrs. MacDonald what her husband thought of her sleeping on the couch. She replied that it was her husband's decision that the child stay in their bed and that she sleep on the couch. The instructor asked how often this happened. Mrs. MacDonald said a few times in the last two months.

  "There was a general discussion about the problem, and the consensus was that after a short time the child should be taken to its own bed and made to understand that that's where it belonged. I remember Mrs. MacDonald sitting there smiling and nodding, apparently happy with the decision of the class. It was about this time that class ended. About five minutes later, I saw her at the Shopette. The next day I learned that she and her two children had been killed."

  Colette had begun the course at the North Carolina State University extension at Fort Bragg on February A—a course not in "something literature," as Jeffrey MacDonald had told the CID when first asked, and had repeated to the psychiatrist, Dr. Sadoff, but a course in child psychology, designed to give a basic overview of the relationship between childhood event and adult behavior.

  Pruett and Kearns looked closely at Colette's class notebook. On her first night she had made notes concerning two basic personality types: "Sadistic authoritative—the personality that wants to make other person his dependent" and "passive dependent—relinquishes self-esteem to the other person."

  The class met again four days later to consider the oral, anal, and phallic stages of pregenital development, "in which the libido," Colette noted, was "all directed toward self (narcissistic)," creating a "megalomaniacal attitude" in the child, who believed himself to be "omnipotent." Eventually, the normal child would pass beyond this stage to the point where "ego develops as some libido energy is directed toward other people."

  A note on "ways of coping with anxiety" such as "regression" wherein the "individual reverts to more infantile behavior" was followed by a description of the phallic stage in the three- to four-year-old male:

  a. identification with father up to this point

  b. at this point father becomes a rival

  c. little boy wants Mommy all to himself

  d. Oedipus complex—kill father, marry mother

  e. castration fear that father will take away his penis

  f. this stage seems to set the stage for determination of homosexual or not—can he identify with father or not—most critical period of life for child.

  Whether Colette might have come home from these classes eager to share with her husband some of the new knowledge she was acquiring could only be grounds for speculation, but the possibility that at least some portion of the final few hours of her life had been devoted to conversation with the man suspected of having killed her about either a specific problem concerning one of her children or the more general subject of the psychosexual development of the human being caused her notes from Monday, February 16, to be read with particular care.

  The class had begun with a continuation of the earlier discussion of human defense mechanisms, such as:

  fixation on earlier stage of development . . .

  insulation: withdrawal into a shell of passivity and isolation . . .

  compensation: covering up of weakness by overcompensating in another area

  and acting out—reducing anxiety concerning forbidden desires by allowing their expression.

  Colette had written that such defense mechanisms were "denials, distortions or falsifications of reality," and "functions which occur in the ego's attempt to deal with infantile anxieties," and that they "always operate unconsciously."

  There were later notes under the heading "Psychosexual Development and Psychopathology," including a paraphrase of Theodor Reik's description of the father in Western society as one (Colette wrote) "who feels unconscious guilt for impregnating his wife and also unconsciously wants her to go through the pains of childbearing. He . . . goes through the tortures of hell when she is in labor to punish himself for these feelings."

  The last words she would ever write dealt with psychological disorders which manifested themselves in the genital stage of development.

  Her final notes included references to such categories as:

  Obsessive Compulsive—obsessive collecting or neatness . . . Melancholic—feel guilty about aggressive impulses . . . Paranoid Schizo—have high I.Q. . . .

  Manic—megalomaniacal psychotic. Everyone likes them, they think. The world is great. Very busy, hyperactive.

  Then she bought some milk for the morning and went home.

  As they pressed forward, Pruett and Kearns turned up a hitherto undisclosed fact regarding Jeffrey MacDonald's conduct after the crimes. During the Article 32 hearing—as he'd stood accused of the murder of his wife and children—MacDonald, while confined to Bachelor Officers' Quarters, had entered into a sexual relationship with Bonnie Wood, a young civilian woman employed at Fort Bragg.

  Aware of who he was—as was virtually everyone else at Fort Bragg—she had frequently seen him sunning himself on his front porch during lunch breaks. One day she offered him a tuna fish sandwich and sat with him in the sun. Soon, he was able to persuade the MPs assigned to guard his quarters to permit her access to his room.

  When questioned, Miss Wood said she had been "frankly attracted" to MacDonald. "He's handsome, he has a great body, and he was the most exciting thing around."

  She said she had visited him in his room throughout the summer and fall, and that the relationship "certainly wasn't a secret." After the charges against him were dropped, she said, he even took her out to dinner once, double-dating with one of his former escort officers.

  "Probably," she said, "if you had asked me at the time, I would have said I was in love with him." She said she could not recall specifically how many times they'd had sex, but that it was more than once and less than "dozens of times."

  Other than being a violation of the terms of his restriction, this conduct could not be construed as criminal on MacDonald's part, but, to Pruett and Kearns, given the circumstances, it did indicate a certain lack of sensitivity.

  The reinvestigation, of course, involved more than just character evaluation. The physical evidence which had from the start been at the core of the case against MacDonald, but which, in Colonel Rock's opinion, had been insufficient to bring him to court-martial, was thoroughly re-evaluated, and the quest for new evidence was renewed.

  William Ivory lay on the floor beneath Kimberly MacDonald's bed, within the still-sealed premises of 544 Castle Drive. As he looked up at the underside of the mattress, he noticed that it was supported by slats. He removed the slats and sent them to the CID laboratory at Fort Gordon, where a microscopic examination of the wood proved conclusively that the club used in the murder of Colette and Kimberly had been sawed from one end of a piece of wood that had been used to make one of the mattress slats.

  Pruett and Kearns sent other portions of the physical evidence to the FBI laboratory in Washington. Paul Stombaugh, chief of the chemistry division, put Jeffrey MacDonald's blue pajama top under a microscope. He examined the icepick holes in the garment. Altogether, there were forty-eight. Each was cylindrical and smooth-edged.

  To Stombaugh this indicated that the holes had been made while the pajama top was stationary. There were no ragged edges, and none of the tearing that would have resulted had the icepick been thrust through the garment while it was in motion, as it would have been if it had been wrapped around the wrists of a man who was using it as a shield to ward off thrusts from an icepick during a struggle.

  Stombaugh also discovered that the two paring knives—the Geneva Forge knife with the bent blade that had been found on the master bedroom floor (and that MacDonald had said he'd removed from his wife's chest) and the Old Hickory knife with the straight blade that had been found next to the icepick under the bush twenty feet from the back door—made distinctly different types of cuts in fabric.

  The blade of the Geneva Forge knife was dull and made ragg
ed cuts.

  The blade of the Old Hickory knife was sharp and made smooth, clean cuts.

  Microscopic examination of the cuts in the clothing worn by Colette, Kimberly, and Kristen MacDonald—as well as a study of the autopsy photographs which showed the knife wounds in the bodies—proved, to Stombaugh's satisfaction, that all three victims had been stabbed with the Old Hickory knife and none with the Geneva Forge knife.

  In other words, the knife Jeffrey MacDonald claimed to have removed from the chest of his wife had never been in her chest. The only cuts consistent with the blade of the Geneva Forge knife were those in MacDonald's own pajama top, leading Pruett and Kearns to deduce that MacDonald might have used that knife to inflict at least the superficial wounds on himself, and that he had then fabricated the story of removing it from his wife's chest in case his fingerprints were found on the handle.

  As for the wound which had caused the partial collapse of MacDonald's right lung—this was consistent with the type of cut that could have been made by one of the many disposable scalpel blades which MacDonald had kept in his medical supply closet just outside the hall bathroom—the bathroom in which drops of his blood were found on the right side of the sink.

  But it was Paul Stombaugh's third finding which was the most significant of all: the single piece of circumstantial evidence which, in 1971, most clearly seemed to contradict the story—or stories—that Jeffrey MacDonald had told.

  When Stombaugh realigned the sections of the torn blue pajama top to restore it to its original shape, certain of the bloodstains on the garment—stains made with Type A blood of Colette MacDonald—formed a perfect, contiguous whole.