Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

  To Stombaugh, and to Pruett and Kearns, this proved that at least some of Colette MacDonald's blood had been on her husband's pajama top before it was torn.

  This could not have happened if the top had been torn either during MacDonald's struggle with four intruders in the living room, or when he had removed it from his wrists after discovering his wife's bloody body on the master bedroom floor.

  It could have occurred, however, if MacDonald, while wearing the still untorn blue pajama top, had struck his wife—perhaps during an altercation in the master bedroom—causing her blood to stain it before she reached but, in anger or self-defense or some combination of the two, and ripped the garment down the front, tearing loose the pocket and showering the rug with dozens of fibers.

  As the fight had worsened, the pajama top could have become more heavily stained with Colette's blood. And it could have been to account for the presence of her blood in such quantity on his pajama top that MacDonald had laid it across her bloody chest prior to the arrival of the military police at 544 Castle Drive.

  By the middle of March 1971, Pruett and Kearns began to receive support from a source they considered almost as unlikely as MacDonald himself: his father-in-law and staunchest defender, Freddy Kassab.

  Upon receiving his copy of the Article 32 transcript in early February, Kassab had been transformed. The transcript became for him a universe. At times he seemed its sole inhabitant. He read by day, he read by night. He read with the pure and ferocious attention that a biblical scholar might bring to a first encounter with the Dead Sea Scrolls. For a full month he did little but read.

  As he read, Kassab began to underline, then to make notes in the margin. Most of these notes were on the pages containing Jeffrey MacDonald's testimony. By mid-March, Kassab had read these pages a dozen times. His marginal notes had spilled beyond the borders of the transcript and had grown into lists compiled on separate sheets.of paper—lists of inconsistencies, of contradictions, of elements of MacDonald's story which Kassab either knew from direct experience to be false or which, simply as a matter of logic, he found impossible to believe.

  He then went back to the beginning and drew up an indexed summary of every statement contained in the 153 pages of MacDonald's testimony. Next to each which he disputed he made a note.

  Page 8. He volunteered to go into the Army. Jeff told Colette he had been drafted.

  Page 24. He got a blanket and went to sleep in the living room. Jeff normally slept with a pillow. Why did he not have one on the living room couch?

  Page 25. He heard Colette scream, then say, "Help, help, Jeff. Why are they doing this to me?" and then repeated it at least once. Colette could not have cried out after the severe stab wounds to her neck—the trachea was cut.

  Page 26. He heard Kimmy screaming, "Daddy, Daddy," over and over. Going on the assumption that Colette and the children were attacked first, Kimmy sustained several severe skull fractures and according to medical testimony these were inflicted prior to the knife wounds. It would have been impossible for her to cry out as Jeff says she did after the massive blow which caused the severe skull fracture. Also, at the time he says he heard her cry out, the club with which she was attacked was in the living room.

  Page 29. He says he literally saw stars and was knocked back flat on the couch. He felt like he was blacking out. The account of this first blow with the club would certainly lead one to believe that Jeff was temporarily stunned. If so, why did the assailants not pounce on him? Why wait for him to recuperate and start to sit up again? Also, the blunt trauma wounds to Colette and Kimmy were very severe, yet Jeff received only a slight blow to the forehead, in spite of the fact that he had just come out of a sound sleep and was in a semi-sitting position.

  Page 30. He described a "rain of blows" on his head, neck, and shoulders. Yet he received only one wound that was over a ¼ inch deep. It is very strange that Jeff did not receive any knife wounds to his head, neck & shoulders, since his attackers were standing over him, swinging. Also, a person cannot be stabbed 10-12 times in the abdomen while in a seated position & especially leaning forward, if the person stabbing him is standing. Furthermore, not one drop of his blood was found in the living room from any of the approximately 23 incised wounds he claims to have sustained. Also, with the profusion of blood in those bedrooms, if there were assailants they would have gotten much blood on their hands and clothing. Why then was there no blood in the living room, where the struggle was supposed to have occurred?

  Page 31. During the struggle, his hands were bound up in the pajama top. How did the pajama top get pulled over his head or torn from the back so that it would end up around his arms and hands when there was no one behind him, and when the pajama

  top was torn down the front?

  Page 38. From master bedroom he went to Kim's room. He did not put lights on. Why would a father—especially a doctor— going into a room where his child was so brutally injured not put the lights on to try to treat her? He could see her chest and neck. How could he when she was covered to the neck with a blanket? He stopped mouth-to-mouth breathing because air was coming out of her chest. Kim had no chest wounds. Also, how did Kimmy's blood get on Jeff’s pj top since he did not have it on when he examined her in her bedroom? And why were both children found lying on their sides if Jeff gave them mouth-to-mouth?

  Page 51. He claims four blunt trauma injuries to his head. The doctor who examined his head saw only the one contusion over his left eyebrow. That is the only one I saw at the hospital at approximately 2 P.M.

  Page 83. He thinks he wore gloves to wash dishes. To the best of my memory, I have never seen Jeff wash a dish. Even if he did he is not the type who would put on rubber gloves to-do them.

  Page 84. He gave Kristen a bottle. She cried while Johnny Carson was on. He turned set down when he heard her crying. Why didn't Colette hear her? On p. 90 he says Colette, not he, responded to cries from children 95% of time. Why not this time, especially since Kris cried loud enough for him to hear over TV?

  Page 104. His description of his exact position on hall floor upon regaining consciousness is remarkable. Also, how do you fall up the stairs and around a corner? Also, there was no blood found on floor. Also, the attackers did not panic and run after attacking Jeff. They carried Kimmy back to her room in a sheet, put her in bed, covered her up, then took the sheet back to the master bedroom. They even took the time to write on the headboard. Why then was the attack on Jeff not more severe? Why was he not reattacked as he lay on the hall floor?

  Page 121. He said he was at the kitchen sink either before or after he used the kitchen phone. If it was before, why was no blood found in the sink? If after, why was there no blood on the phone?

  Page 124. He didn't call the neighbors for help because "I didn't know them that well.,, How well does one have to know someone to call for help when your whole family has been murdered? Besides, he knew them well enough to invite them for cocktails when we visited at Christmas.

  Page 140. Denies ever seeing the icepick and says it couldn't have come from his kitchen. Mildred saw an icepick and used it during our Christmas visit.

  On a new sheet of paper, Kassab began to jot additional questions and notes as they occurred, often in the middle of the night, as he lay awake, going over in his mind what he had read.

  One knife and the icepick were found side by side just outside the back door and the club just a few feet away. Assailants running from the scene of a crime could not all together at one time in the same place drop their weapons. . . .

  The rubber gloves that were used were never found except for a few small pieces. They were either flushed down the toilet or taken away. Why would the assailants do this, if they left their weapons behind? . . .

  How did Kim's blood get on the bathmat that was covering Colette?

  Jeffs blood on the kitchen floor is very odd, since some time passed between the attack on him and the time he went into the kitchen. . . .

  It was prove
n conclusively that Kimmy was first attacked in her mother's bedroom, which means she heard her mother scream, woke up and ran into the bedroom. Why then did Jeff not hear Colette's screams when his head and the sofa were only a few feet from Kimmy's head? . . .

  With a minimum of 6 persons (Colette, Kim & 4 assailants) fighting in the master bedroom in the dark, how is it that nothing is disturbed?

  It was no single thing; it was everything. By the third week of March, against his will—for, given the spontaneity and consistency of his support, what could he have been less willing to believe?—Freddy Kassab, like Grebner and Ivory and Shaw a year earlier and now Pruett and Kearns as well, began to understand why Jeffrey MacDonald was a suspect. He began to see why MacDonald had been accused. He began, even, to think the unthinkable: that for all its mistakes, the CID might have been right; and he, in his blind faith and ignorance, might have been as wrong as a man can be.

  Kassab placed a call to Colonel Pruett. He described the doubts—the torments—caused by his study of the transcript. He said there were two things he would like to do.

  First, he wanted to travel to Fayetteville to check for himself every newspaper file, hospital record, and police report that might support Jeffrey MacDonald's claim that on Friday, November 16, 1970, he had participated in the killing of one of the people responsible for the murder of his family.

  Second, Kassab said, he wanted access to the MacDonald apartment. In the company of authorized investigators, he wanted to test for himself the words of Jeffrey MacDonald against the physical reality of 544 Castle Drive.

  Kassab flew to Fayetteville on March 27. He was met by Pruett and Kearns. On the first day, they established to their own satisfaction—through a check of police and hospital records— that neither Jeffrey MacDonald nor any of his Green Beret friends had killed a young white hippie without a mustache— or anyone else—anywhere in Cumberland County, North Carolina, at any time during November of 1970.

  On the second day, they went into the apartment.

  Thirteen months earlier, Freddy Kassab had sat alone in the driver's seat of Jeffrey MacDonald's white convertible, staring at the exterior of 544 Castle Drive, watching a neighbor come out to the front steps in his pajamas to pick up his Sunday newspaper.

  He now stepped through the front door for the first time since Christmas of 1969. As a crime scene under continuing investigation, the premises had remained sealed.

  Kassab was not maudlin. He did not express horror. He did not display symptoms of grief. Those responses were by now months behind him. He was at Fort Bragg, he felt, as a technician, with certain tasks to perform.

  All day, Kassab made measurements. He took notes. He paced off distances, referring again and again to the lists he had brought with him and to photographs of the crime scene provided by Pruett and Kearns (refusing to look at only those which depicted the bodies still in place) and to the copy of Jeffrey MacDonald's Article 32 testimony which he kept securely tucked under his arm.

  The club used in the murders was 31 inches long. Kassab was 5’ 10", the same height as the black intruder MacDonald had described. Standing between the coffee table and the couch, Kassab tried to raise a 31-inch stick over his head, as MacDonald had said the intruder had done with the club. It was not possible. The living room ceiling was too low.

  MacDonald had said that between 3:40 and 3:42 A.M. on February 17, 1970—between his first and second phone calls, in other words—he had looked out the back door in an attempt to detect any signs of the intruders, had gone to the hall bathroom to check his own wounds and wash his hands, had looked into the hall closet for medical supplies, had returned to the master bedroom to check his wife again for signs of life, had administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and had checked for pulses at various points on the bodies of both his daughters, and had then, possibly even crawling for a time, gone to the kitchen, possibly even washing his hands again at the kitchen sink.

  Kassab first walked through, then walked through more quickly, then ran through the actions MacDonald had said he'd performed. No matter how cursory the checks for signs of life, no matter how perfunctory the look out the back door and the washing of hands, it was not possible. No one could have performed those functions within a two-minute time span.

  In the afternoon, Kassab went upstairs. With the permission of the current tenants, he lay on a bed in what had been the bedroom of the sixteen-year-old babysitter, directly above the MacDonald living room. Pruett and Kearns carried on a conversation in normal tones. Kassab could clearly hear the sounds. How likely, then, was it that a sixteen-year-old girl would have remained asleep through the sounds of a struggle between a Green Beret officer and at least four intruders, in which the officer was wounded twenty-three times by club, knife, and icepick? No more likely, Kassab believed, than it would have been for greeting cards on the dining area table to have remained standing through it all.

  As he stood on the steps that led from the hallway to the living room, Kassab stamped his foot. Greeting cards on the table fell down.

  In the evening, Kassab went with Pruett and Kearns to eat dinner at the Fort Bragg Officers1 Club. Then the three men returned to the apartment. Some of his work, Kassab knew, could only be done in the dark.

  He turned on lights only in the kitchen and hall bathroom. According to MacDonald, these had been the only two lights lit at the time of the attack.

  Kassab then lay down on the couch. His head was toward the front door and his feet were toward the hall, just as MacDonald's would have been.

  Pruett and Kearns stood above him, crowding between the couch and coffee table. Kassab looked up. Wide awake and already well acquainted with the two men, he could scarcely tell who they were.

  In that light, Jeffrey MacDonald, who needed glasses to read or drive a car, and who would have been just emerging from sound sleep, could not possibly have seen sergeant's stripes on the sleeve of a black man's jacket, or a mustache on a white man's upper lip, or the glint of a blade, or the color of boots, or a flash of knee, or the color or length of anyone's hair.

  Next, Kassab stood in the doorway to Kristen's bedroom. Except for the section of floor that had been removed in a futile attempt to preserve the bloody footprint, and except for the absence of the bloody sheets, the room was exactly as it had been when the two-year-old girl had bled to death from stab wounds in her heart on February 17, 1970.

  The room was dark. Absolutely dark. It received no illumination whatsoever from the light in the hall bathroom adjacent to it.

  Jeffrey MacDonald could not have stood in this doorway with this room in darkness and seen his younger daughter on the bed, covered in blood.

  Yet MacDonald had insisted—against all logic—that he had not turned on the light. Kassab thought he now understood why: by his own account, MacDonald's hands would have been covered with blood as he had entered this room. He already had handled the bodies of Colette and Kimberly and he had not yet gone to the bathroom to wash. But no blood had been found near the light switch. In reconstructing a story which would fit the physical evidence as he had then understood it, MacDonald had had no choice but to say that he had allowed the room to remain in darkness.

  Freddy Kassab stepped to the edge of the bed in which Kristen MacDonald had died. He leaned over, just as Jeffrey MacDonald had said he'd leaned over in order to administer mouth-to-mouth

  resuscitation. Kassab still could see almost nothing. Just as, in the darkness, thirteen months earlier, Jeffrey MacDonald could not have seen blood bubbling from his younger daughter's chest.

  Kassab remained in the apartment until midnight. By the time he emerged he was not only thinking the unthinkable, he was convinced.

  With the conviction there came a strange, icy calm. At last, Kassab knew who his enemy was. The anguish, rage, and frustration that had consumed him for more than a year began to fuse into a new and quite different emotion: a commitment so powerful, so concentrated, that its essence would sustain him for t
he next decade and more as he carried forward a single-minded, obsessive, and often solitary crusade to see Jeffrey MacDonald convicted of murder and imprisoned.

  'it won't be easy," Pruett told him as they stood on the front steps of 544 Castle Drive.

  It was, Pruett explained, an entirely circumstantial case, and to make it more difficult, serious mistakes—as Kassab was well aware—had been made in the original investigation. The Army's own investigating officer had found the charges to be not even worthy of presentation at court-martial.

  With Jeffrey MacDonald now a civilian, a new prosecution could be initiated only by the Justice Department, which, given the complexity of the case and the time that had already elapsed and the mistakes that had already been made, was not likely to give the matter a high priority. There was too much chance for failure, too little chance for success, no matter how persuasive Pruett's evidence might prove to be.

  "It could be a long haul," the CID colonel said.

  "That's all right," Kassab said, staring into the darkness, "I'm only fifty-two years old. Besides, I've got the patience of Job."

  4

  To Mildred Kassab, the shock that accompanied her acceptance of the probability that Jeffrey MacDonald had killed her daughter and grandchildren was not much less devastating than the initial trauma of their deaths.

  At first, she had not wanted to listen to her husband when he had begun to speak of his suspicions. She had been through so much already. This would be too much to bear.