Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

  "I know it's going to be very difficult for twenty-three normal people to say, 'Well, Jesus, how can we believe this guy when the Army and all these investigators and the FBI spent all this money and time and they didn't find anything.'

  "They never set up any roadblocks! And then the CID implicated me because a group of assailants that were in my house that night were never found. I suggest that they weren't found because of that initial couple of hours where unbelievably bad decisions were made.

  "And I also suggest that later on when they got information about at least what sounds like good potential leads—I'm not saying that the leads pan out or anything; I'm not saying Helena Stoeckley is guilty—I'm not saying that. I'm saying that that indicates the type and the scope and the way that investigation went on.

  "I don't mean to harangue the grand jury, I honestly don't, but some of the stories of the handling of this case are so bizarre that it is beyond belief. They never set up any roadblocks!

  "Well, I'm on the stand. I'm not going to—I mean my life is—was shattered like, you know—you can't conceive of what was going on in my mind or anything. And it doesn't make any sense.

  "But I do suggest to you that I'm a little confused about the line of questioning about the girl in the BOQ. This is half a year later, after I've been through an unbelievable thing. And for someone to visit me in the BOQ—even if it did occur before my release from custody, which I don't think it did—is totally meaningless.

  "Well. I hope I'm getting my point across. To say that I committed homicide and murdered my wife and kids because they couldn't find any grass or mud in the house is the most atrocious, insane reasoning. And for me to be here today is

  crazy. This is insanity! The Army reinvestigation was done a year and a half ago—two million dollars and ten thousand pages, three thousand pages, or whatever it came to—making sure that we can't prove that the CID makes mistakes. That's what they did.

  'if you add it all up, it sounds terrific. They've had two Army investigations—in their words, the biggest investigation the Army has ever had. And they can't find the group of four assailants so therefore I'm guilty.

  "All I'd like to say, sir, is, you know, you haven't asked me, but, you know, I didn't murder my wife and kids."

  2

  Jeffrey MacDonald returned to California, but the grand jury remained in session until January of 1975. More than seventy-five witnesses testified.

  Gradually, a picture of Jeffrey MacDonald began to emerge: a context into which the grand jurors could place the man they had seen and the story they had heard during MacDonald's week on the witness stand.

  Benjamin Klein, the surgical resident who had examined MacDonald in the emergency room in 1970, said, "I didn't feel he was in any great danger, medically. He was not suffering from shock and his wounds were not bleeding very much. He was able to sit up by himself and to talk without being short of breath."

  Merrill Bronstein, who had been staff surgeon on call in 1970, said, "He was clinically stable. He didn't have a lot of things besides the pneumothorax and even with that he was not having any difficulty breathing and there was no change in his pulse, blood pressure, or other vital signs.

  "He had the bruise on his left forehead, the superficial stab wound of the left upper arm, the stab wound in the left upper abdomen, and the stab wound in the right chest." This last Bronstein described as being a "clean, small, sharp" incision. It was only one centimeter in length.

  "He had no other stab wounds on his body," Bronstein said.

  "Would you say he did or did not have fourteen icepick wounds around his belly button?" Worheide asked.

  "He absolutely did not have any icepick wounds anywhere,

  and I saw his entire body because while I was there his pajamas were removed and I examined him from head to toe."

  "Were you concerned about, let's say, his ability to survive the effects of the injuries?" Worheide asked.

  "No. I was concerned about his emotional status. That was the thing that affected me most, the thing that impressed me most, the thing that I had the greatest difficulty, as a physician, in dealing with. If he had had more medical problems, then I could have dealt with him clinically and gotten my mind off the situation."

  "In your opinion, it was not an emergency?" "No, sir. The most remarkable thing to me was that he was so upset."

  Bronstein added that MacDonald had been transferred out of intensive care to a private room the next day. "I would stop by and ask how he was and chat for a few minutes. I certainly saw him every day he was in the hospital."

  "Did he have visitors?"

  "Yes, sir. His mother stayed with him a lot. She was up quite a bit. And I met a friend of his named Ron Harrison, whom he introduced me to in his room."

  "Tell us about Ron Harrison."

  "He was an unusual person. I never knew many people like Ron Harrison. He impressed me as being—and this is a surgical opinion, I'm a surgeon, I'm not a psychiatrist—he impressed me as being disturbed.

  "I was worried when I met Ron Harrison. He told me that he was a killer. And he told me that he was going to kill the people who were responsible for this crime.

  "He was a paranoid person. He was always worried about people being around. He said, 'Jeff wants me to find them and kill them.' And from him I took this seriously. I mean, I really did.

  "He was in every day for sure. And I saw him after that. I was out with my wife one night, and he was in the same restaurant and he frightened my wife. It was just the way he appeared—the things he said. He said things that—my-wife is a very gentle person. She would never think of killing anyone. She would not think of harming anyone. And he was talking about that.

  "I have friends—or I had friends—who were in Special Forces, and I had friends who were not physicians in Special Forces, people that I socialized with, who I was in their homes and they were in mine. But they certainly, you know, would not choose as a topic of conversation or point of discussion with me, killing and death. They certainly would never discuss it in the presence of my family."

  In fact, Bronstein said, it was the apparent closeness of the relationship with Ron Harrison which first caused him to doubt MacDonald's innocence. "Overall," he said, "I think I could have accepted Jeff’s story without too much trouble. But I was worried after I met Ron Harrison. He was a frightening guy. I mean, he physically frightened me. I just didn't know how he could be Jeff’s friend."

  MacDonald's next-door neighbor, the wife of the warrant officer and the mother of the sixteen-year-old babysitter who had heard no sounds of struggle, testified.

  "He was the boss," she said. "He was the king of the castle and he was—when he told her to do something, she did it willingly and obligingly, a very good wife. She was a very obedient wife." Until, the woman said, the early morning hours of Tuesday, February 17, 1970. "I came out of a deep sleep and I heard Colette's voice," she said, "and it woke me up. The voice I heard was mad enough to kill."

  "Could you distinguish the words?"

  "No, but I got the gist of it, and I would swear on the Bible that it—that what—what it was like she was saying was, 'What do you think I'm going to be doing while you are doing all of this? Do you think I am going to be standing here doing nothing? If you touch one hair of those children's head or my head, I'll kill you!"

  The sixteen-year-old babysitter herself—now a young woman of twenty-one—also testified. Asked to describe her impression of the relationship between Jeffrey and Colette MacDonald, she said, "At the time I thought they were pretty happy because they didn't yell at each other. But now I look back and they never really smiled. Colette never smiled and Jeff wasn't too friendly after about January. Now that I look back, after January, Colette hardly even said 'Hi,' when I went over to babysit. I don't know. When I saw them together they weren't—I just sensed that they weren't happy."

  In regard to the children's sleeping arrangements, the former babysitter said, "Sometimes Kim would a
sk Kris to come into her bedroom. Sometimes Kim would want to go into her parents' bed. I'd let them sleep wherever they wanted to. Kristen usually had a second bottle at night, and she would wake up and cry for it. Kim would wake up and cry, too. I'd have to go in and talk to her. She would just cry, I think Colette's name: 'Mommy.' She would hardly say anything when I went in there. I'd just tell her her mother and father would be home. She just listened to me."

  "Did Kimberly ever wet the bed that you know of?"

  "I think once."

  "How about Kristen?"

  "She would wet the bed pretty often."

  The former babysitter also testified—after first saying she had no recollection—that the MacDonalds did, indeed, have an icepick. That, in fact, it was usually kept on top of the refrigerator and that she would use it, on occasion, to chip away ice in the freezer in order to take out popsicles or ice cream for the children.

  The newspaper reporter who had covered the Article 32 hearing and who had interviewed MacDonald on the morning the charges against him were dropped also agreed to testify.

  "You have to understand what it was like to cover that case," he said. "For anybody who was an attorney or newsman or investigator, anybody who was connected with it—it began to pretty well dominate your thoughts.

  "I was there every day for eight hours, ten hours a day, and it sort of dwells on your mind after a while and you start to wonder when you go home at night. You say, 'Gee, I wonder what the facts are.' And it really eats you up.

  "I think almost anybody that has been involved with this since its beginnings is almost overly interested in the outcome. I am. I can't let it go. I keep thinking about it.

  "I spent a great deal of time discussing ten thousand theories about why he would have done it, if he did it, or how he could have done it, or whether these four people existed at all, and if they did, where did they come from.

  "And it's never left me, the feeling of wanting to know what happened. I'm just as much involved right now, and feel just as much a part of this now as I did then. You know, no matter what I'd be doing—if I was selling hot dogs, I'd still feel like I was part of this.

  "So all I can tell you is what I saw, what I felt, and what I perceived through that whole thing and since.

  "First, I should say that I never met anybody who knew Jeffrey MacDonald on a social basis who didn't think he was totally innocent of these crimes. Who wouldn't back him a hundred percent and said he was just a number one guy. They supported him fully and said he was incapable of committing these crimes. And at the beginning I felt pretty much the same way.

  "It was kind of strange, because we were fed spoonfuls of his personality throughout a lot of the proceedings, and you spend five months with anybody and you start to get to know them and you develop whether you like them or don't like them. I happened to like Jeff MacDonald very much. That's what caused the great emotional turmoil.

  "You know, Jeffrey MacDonald was just unbelievable. Here was this guy who was handsome, and all-American, and a doctor, and a Green Beret, and all these things and, you know, he was always very sunny in his disposition, and—the whole thing was just unbelievable.

  "I mean, one thing was, Segal and his assistant—the civilian assistant—were a couple of clowns. One day the assistant brought his kids down from Philadelphia. He had this really cute kid, and somebody went in the PX and bought one of those little fatigue suits—you know, a Green Beret—a total Green Beret uniform with a real green beret and a major general's insignia on it, and of course everybody took pictures of him, and it went out on the wire services all over the place, and so that was—you have to understand the carnival atmosphere that was going on down there. It was just a really strange thing. There was no sense of reality to it.

  "What we had here was an investigation into three brutal murders, and if you ever started thinking that way, it really got to you. It would happen to me at night sometimes. I'd go home after clowning around with these people and I'd think, geez, we've got three dead people here and somebody's going to have to answer for it, and that will kind of get to you after a while because that wasn't what was going on during the day. It was kind of a light, frivolous thing.

  "Anyway, once it was over I did a lot of in-depth investigation of the drug culture in the Fayetteville area. I grew a beard and hair and everything and was living in the Haymount section for months, and for one thing, that's a very small community and the word moves through it like wildfire, and you know, if those four people came from Fayetteville and if they were hippies and they were drug people, somebody would have known it, somebody would have known something, somebody would have heard something.

  "And another thing was, the terminology was just not right. 'Acid is groovy. Kill the pigs.' People who lived in the drug culture—they call themselves heads—and I can't think of a head that would be so uncool as to say that. 'Acid is groovy,' which was an old word even then, because even then groovy was not a cool thing to say.

  "And also, four people who are doing acid couldn't organize a trip to the toilet, let alone organize a murder of three people. Besides, LSD normally doesn't make people violent. The only drug that I can think of that causes that kind of reaction in people is an amphetamine of some kind."

  The grand jurors learned a bit more of what had happened—if not on February 17, 1970, itself, then at least during some of the months before and after—when they heard testimony from Jeffrey MacDonald's former girlfriend, Penny Wells.

  She began by describing Jeffrey MacDonald as having been, in high school, an "all-American, fantastic person," whom she had dated and with whom she had been physically intimate during their junior and senior years.

  "Now, at the end of high school, do you recall Jeff taking a job?" Woerheide asked.

  "I guess that's when he started over at Fire Island."

  "Will you tell the grand jurors what Fire Island is? What sort of place it is and what peculiar features it may have? And what Jeff was doing over there?"

  "It is a place where people from New York City go on weekends. And there are a lot of gay people in certain communities. I don't know which section Jeff was working in, so I really don't know. They party all the time. Jeff was driving a beach taxi over there."

  Miss Wells said that at the end of the summer of 1962—the summer after Jeffrey MacDonald's freshman year at Princeton— the relationship ended, because she'd learned that he had been "apparently dating or living with someone over there."

  "Another girl?"

  "Right."

  "And this disturbed you?"

  "Yes. I approached him and I told him what I had heard. And he denied it. And I left."

  "I take it you didn't believe him?" "No."

  "When was the next time you saw him?"

  "It was somewhere around Thanksgiving of that year. I heard he was in town, somebody warned me that he was in town looking for me. I was in a restaurant with a girlfriend of mine and I saw him walking in so I walked out the other door. He saw me and came over to me and I just ignored him. I just ignored him and took off."

  "When was the next time you saw him after that?"

  "The day before he and Colette got married he came into the office where I was working and said he was getting married the next day. When I went out to my car there was a note. And it sad something about receiving a gift."

  "Something about your receiving a gift?"

  "Right."

  "And in whose handwriting was the note?" "It was in Jeffs handwriting and it was signed with his initials.'1

  "Did you in fact receive a gift?"

  "It "was left in my car. It was a negligee. It was red and black."

  "Red and black. Were those your high school colors?" "Yes, they were."

  "Do you recall Jeff having made any remark concerning your dressing in red and black?"

  "Yes, he did. He liked me in red and black."

  "With the negligee, was there a note?"

  "Yes, there was a little sa
ying printed on the note."

  "Sort of a rhyme or verse?"

  "Something to refer to the negligee."

  "Now, let's go to April of 1964. Colette is in the hospital. She's just given birth to Kimberly. Do you recall hearing from Jeff, or seeing him?"

  "Yes, I believe it was a phone call that I got and he asked me to meet him for lunch, that he was in the area. So I said okay. We had lunch. And he knew I liked clothes and he asked me about a suede coat, about me wanting one, and I said, 'No, thanks, I can buy my own.' It was only a short lunch and that was it. I don't really recall what we talked about."

  "Did he talk about you or did he talk about himself?"

  "Probably about himself."

  "And when was the next time you saw him?"

  "I attended a birthday party for his mother, I think it was in June 1969. I had dated his brother, Jay, a few times, and he had asked me to his mother's party. I had no idea that Jeff and

  Colette were going to be there. And it was a little embarrassing. I was in one section of the yard and they stayed over at the other side. Mrs. MacDonald finally sat down to open her gifts and I was sitting right across the way from her and I think I handed the gifts to her to open."

  "Now, directing your attention to the fall of 1969," said Worheide, "do you recall seeing or meeting or hearing from, directly or indirectly, or having any contact with Jeffrey MacDonald?"

  "No. I had never seen him." Not on the Patchogue train station platform, she said, nor anywhere else.