Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

  "Was he on your Christmas card list?" Worheide asked. "I doubt it."

  "Well, during this period, the fall of 1969, were you occasionally seeing Jay?"

  "Yes. Occasionally."

  "Did he ever give you any news of Jeff?"

  "No. Never talked about him."

  "Do you recall Jay having any problems?"

  "I considered him a problem. He was just a changed person from high school. His looks, his weight, his personality."

  "Do you have any reason to believe that he had some involvement in the drug culture?"

  "It's possible."

  "What do you predicate this on?" "Stories, rumors."

  "Now, getting on to February of 1970, how did you become aware of the murders?"

  "It was in the Daily News. I saw the name Jeffrey MacDonald and I said, 'Gee, I wonder if that's the same person.' I didn't know he was in Fort Bragg. So I went further and I saw 'Colette.' And I said, 'Well, it has to be.' "

  "Now, as an old girlfriend of Jeff and as a friend of the family, what did you do?"

  "I sent a sympathy card."

  "Did you receive a response?"

  "Yes. It must have been about two or three weeks after I had sent the card. It was just a very, very short note asking me if I had been contacted by the FBI, and to let him know if I was."

  "Did you respond to this inquiry?"

  "No. I held on to the letter for about three or four days and then I tore it up."

  Penny Wells had moved to San Diego in November of 1970.

  In February of 1971 her parents sent her a newspaper story which mentioned that MacDonald was considering a move to Long Beach.

  "I wrote him a letter, a very short note, and said if you are ever in San Diego, give me a call. A very short time after that he called me from New York and said he may possibly get out to California and that he would call.

  "Then, I guess it was around the end of May, he called and said he was coming out in June. I said I would pick him up at the airport. And I did. And he stayed with me for a while."

  "Tell us about that."

  "I was very disappointed in, I guess, his looks, first of all. Physically, he looked quite a bit different. He was a lot thinner. I don't think he was as good-looking as I had remembered him. And I guess I just got older and wiser and he wasn't what—well, I had no interest in him at all. We had just gone our own separate ways and there was just nothing. I think it was appearance at first and then after a short conversation I just had nothing in common with him. He wasn't as outgoing as he usually is."

  "Did he show any interest in you?"

  "I would say no. Not that he had a chance."

  "You were just the landlady? A convenient place to put up with—"

  ‘ ‘Without putting out."

  "But back in the days when you were dating him, what sort of fellow was he then?"

  "A fantastic person. Fantastic personality. Always was out to help somebody else. In fact he used to even study with me."

  "What was your last contact with him?"

  "Just a change-of-address card after he had moved to Huntington Beach. And at the bottom it just said: 'Super busy. Will call.' And that was the last I ever heard."

  Thus, by the time Penny Wells had completed her testimony, the grand jurors knew not only that it had been she, not MacDonald, who had brought their relationship to a halt during his freshman year at Princeton, but that he had attempted to revive her interest in him both on the day before he married Colette and on the day after Kimberly was born.

  Whether he had also seen her in the fall of 1969—on the Patchogue train station platform or anywhere else—and whether he had planned, or even desired, to see her while accompanying the Fort Bragg boxing team to New Jersey in the spring of 1970 (with Colette thinking that he was in Russia) could not be determined.

  What had been determined, however, was that MacDonald himself, even as he lay in his hospital bed recovering from the wounds inflicted on February 17, was sufficiently concerned about how others might perceive the relationship to have responded to Penny Wells's sympathy note with a query asking if the FBI had been in touch with her.

  And what had also been determined was that—however shortlived and unsatisfying the renewal of the relationship turned out to be—it had been Penny Wells who had met MacDonald at the airport when he flew to California in 1971 to take up residence there.

  As the weeks passed, Victor Woerheide began to try to give the grand jurors a deeper level of insight into the character and personality of Jeffrey MacDonald by presenting testimony both from the various psychiatrists and psychologists who had dealt with him professionally and from members of the MacDonald and Kassab families.

  Mildred Kassab said, "I called Colette on Thanksgiving and she said, 'Well, you can tell Freddy he can cut my throat because I think I'm pregnant.' His joke around the house was that if she became pregnant again he'd cut her throat because she'd had two very difficult deliveries by Cesarean section and in fact almost died from internal bleeding after the second.

  "I asked how she felt about it and she said, 'Well, I don't know. I'm a little unhappy about it but everyone here is very happy.' And she mentioned that they had fourteen for dinner, and Jeff’s mother was there. She said, 'Everyone is very happy about it except me.'

  "Then we went down to visit them for Christmas, and Jeff was short-tempered in testy little ways, such as going into a little storm over, 'I told you, why didn't you pick up my suit?' Little things that were a tempest in a teapot. And Colette never answered and often I would think, why didn't she say something. But she never did, and therefore there were never any arguments when I was present.

  "There were many little things here and there that made me unhappy without saying anything, and Colette would never tell me, she kept her problems very much to herself, but I recall—my sister bought a car for Colette because they didn't have a car and Jeff used it to go to the hospital and to work all the time—this was back in New Jersey or Chicago—and Colette walked with a wagon to do her shopping, carry her laundry, things like that.

  "And one day Jeff stumbled over some bottles and said something about taking the bottles—why didn't she take the bottles back to the store? And she said she would get them back next week or something. I said to her after, 'Colette, he has the car. Why don't you tell him to take them back himself?' She said, 'Mommy, don't ever say anything to Jeff because he cannot stand criticism.' And I never did say anything to Jeff except the time we were down there for Christmas.

  "The atmosphere was very tense for some reason. I didn't realize it at first because Colette—usually she and Kimmy would sit outside and wait for us when we were coming, whether it was Chicago or Bergenfield—if we were coming they would be waiting on the corner for us.

  "And this day as we were arriving we called at twelve o'clock and said we would be there in an hour. Then we had a blowout and had to shop for a tire and we didn't get there until after three. And she and Kimmy were still sitting on the corner, waiting for us. And I thought she seemed rather sad, but I thought it was because she was disappointed.

  "We went in and she had the tree up. I said I was pleased to see it was the first house she'd had a chance to put draperies up, and that it looked nice, but she just didn't respond that much. She was very tense. I don't know why. I suppose it was because of her pregnancy. But there wasn't any laughter or the usual bubbly happiness that you run into when you come down to see one another on Christmas.

  "We went to bed early that night and the next day was Christmas and Jeff took us—at eight o'clock he said he had a surprise. And we went down and there was the pony. And of course I was joyful and the children were. And I said, 'Oh, Colette, this is the beginning for your farm in Connecticut,' because she always spoke of someday having a big old-fashioned house with horses, cows, dogs, et cetera.

  "And I said, 'This is the first live thing for your farm,' and she began to weep. I just thought she was awfully touched at the ide
a of the pony but since then I've decided perhaps she felt there wasn't going to be that happiness in the future.

  "Then Christmas Day, after that, we were only four people and the children, and as a rule it was the custom in Jeff’s family to have a lot of people in. So he suggested calling the next-door neighbors—the people from upstairs—and this was about four in the afternoon. And Colette was preparing dinner and very much into Julia Child's cooking at the time, a very ambitious dinner. Everyone does it once in a while. Chooses too many things that you can't do all at once. So I was helping her and she said, 'Oh, no, don't ask them down because they'll stay and stay, and dinner is started and they'll stay until eight o'clock,' and we had ducks in the oven.

  "But Jeff was impatient about it and called them down anyhow. Well, we were busy in the kitchen, but we took turns going in to sit down. We made drinks and served them. I made eggnog and we sat with them a few minutes at a time.

  "And it did get to be eight o'clock and the ducks were dried up. No one said anything, though. And after they left we put the things on the table, and I didn't realize anything was wrong until I realized the silence and looked up and saw the children were not saying anything and Colette wasn't saying anything. And I said, 'What's wrong?' And Jeff said, 'Oh, she's always that way when I want someone around. It's just darn bad manners to stay out in the kitchen and not come in.'

  "I said, 'Well, Jeff, she told you we were busy.' Colette had told him in advance that she didn't think I would like it, really, because I hadn't come to visit those neighbors and she didn't think they were my type, exactly, and after all since we drove down to see them, why have someone else? I explained that to him but he just pushed his chair away and left the table.

  "The children said nothing and Colette had a couple of little tears and no one said any more about it. I told him I thought he was acting very childish and he just flung out of the room.

  "I think perhaps why things were so tense at Christmas was because this was possibly a time when they were getting along badly and she didn't want anything to erupt before us because she wouldn't want us to know anything was wrong. She would never confide in me if she felt that Jeff was unfaithful. She never would because I had been—too often when we are safe ourselves we become very complacent and we are ready to throw stones, and I was always quite noisy about men who chased around and whose wives were submissive."

  "Do you recall," Victor Woerheide asked, "whether there was an icepick in the house?"

  "Yes, I do. When I was working at the refrigerator—I had brought: some little puff pastry hors d'oeuvres and things down with me for her for the holidays, and they had to go directly into the freezer and it was already loaded and I couldn't move the ice trays. So I got the icepick out, jabbed around until I got the ice trays loose and could use one of them for the pastry. So I know I used the icepick."

  After Christmas, Mildred Kassab said, "my husband felt that Colette might be a little bit angry with him for something because her voice was different when he called her on the phone. He would call her frequently from his office because he had a trunk line, and she had always been very fond of him, since her father died when she was quite young.

  "But after Christmas she didn't sound the same. I would like to mention also that Colette never forgot a birthday, anniversary, Easter, Mother's Day, and all that sort of thing. There were always cards.

  "But January 19th was Freddy's birthday and it was the first time in sixteen years that he didn't get a card from Colette—the first time she ever forgot. She'd always sent Valentines, too, and let the children put their little mark on and we didn't receive any Valentines. We thought about that afterwards. She must have been upset."

  "Do you remember the last time you spoke to her?"

  "Yes, I called her on—it was the day after a big snowstorm, right around the 14th of February, and she said she was alone. Jeff was working.

  "She said they had taken someone to the airport a day or two before, and she said she was wishing she could have gotten on the plane. And Kimmy had asked, 'When can we go to Grandma's again?' And she said they would like so much to be able to come home.

  "And I said, 'Well, the snow is very deep and it's covering the pool.' There was just a light cover of plastic on the pool and I was afraid at that time because there was no indication of where the pool was, and we had just put it in. The children wouldn't know where it was, and I said, 'Wait until spring.'

  "So then she told me Jeff might have to go to Russia with the boxing team and if he did he would go in April and he wouldn't be back until the end of July, and he would be in Russia, so therefore there would be—no one would be able to communicate with him, and she would be alone when she had the baby and would I surely be there on the 18th of July? She really believed that he might forcibly be sent away without asking. In other words, he would have to go. I think she was becoming increasingly worried about the pregnancy. She hadn't been to a doctor yet, and she had already put on twenty pounds, she said, and she was worried about whether it was going to be a very large child.

  "I said, 'I will be there. Regardless of anything in the world, I'll be there.' "

  The former chief of psychiatry from Walter Reed Army Hospital testified. He was the same doctor who had testified at the Article 32 hearing, but the grand jury setting—with its privacy and absence of cross-examination—permitted him far greater latitude.

  "The initial question that was put to me," he said, "was that a civilian psychiatrist had evaluated Captain MacDonald and had stated that he was incapable of committing such an act, and so I was asked if I would evaluate him and testify as to my own opinion as to that issue.

  "The first contact I had was with Captain MacDonald's military attorney, who briefed me for about an hour and a half without Captain MacDonald being present, sort of giving his side of the story.

  "Later that afternoon I was approached by the military prosecutors and by Mr. Ivory, the CID man. They arrived around four o'clock and I was exposed to pictures of the house and the bodies. I considered it a bombardment, and I used that word. Frankly it was rather disturbing to me, having six children of my own. I got out of my office about 6:30. I had a thirty-five-minute drive home and I trembled as I drove. I lived out in Galesville, Maryland, and when I drove home it was getting dark. I trembled and I did not sleep that night.

  "The next day, I saw Dr. MacDonald. I met him at the door and shook hands with him.

  "He was a very cordial, smiling, cooperative, warm person. He expressed his feelings of being upset at having to go through all of this procedure, upset that he was accused, but at the same time he created an impression of being a very engaging sort of person who was very facile in his ability to talk.

  "I deliberately, in my first interview with him, did not discuss February 17 at all. I did the past history. He gave me a very bland past history, of what he considered to be a relatively normal family upbringing. Said that it was a happy family.

  "We talked about his father dying of pulmonary fibrosis. He described his father as a leader, as a very masculine type of person; described his father in an interesting way: as a man who was constantly at battle with the world when he didn't need to be. And he described his father as feeling that women—I've got a quote here: 'That women had taken over the country.'

  "I had the impression that between him and his father, in terms of emotional closeness, there was not much. He described his mother as a very calm, quiet, strong person. He talked about his brother, Jay. Everyone liked Jay, he said. Described Jay as a failure who'd had some fifteen to twenty jobs, who was on amphetamines, who'd had a paranoid schizophrenic break.

  "He talked about Judy, his sister. And I got the flavor that somehow, even though his mother was described as a strong person, that somehow, within the family, women were put down.

  "I asked him about himself. He described himself as a striving person, making the point that he would never have achieved what he had achieved or gotten where he had gotten
if he had not been a striving person. That he was good at athletics. He made a point of never having cheated.

  "Usually, when I ask that kind of question, I'll say, 'Okay, those are some of your good points. Can you tell me some of your bad points?'

  "He described himself as compulsive. And here was the first time that any feeling, or what he called 'affect' came out. He became sad, almost tearful. Said that he was not accepting of his own family. Said not as accepting as a good father should be. He volunteered that he saw that as strange in himself because he was never annoyed by patients. He always could take all the crap that any patient could give him.

  "He talked about what could have been if his family had not been killed. Said he could have had a closer relationship with Colette. He could have had a better relationship with the children. He described his wife as being the best mother in the world: warm, understood the kids completely.

  "He talked about knowing her since eighth grade and dating since eighth grade. They had broken off a couple of times. I did not ask why. I asked him more how he reacted to these breaking-ups. He said that he would feel hurt and he would sulk. That she would cry and that that would hurt him.

  "I obtained a sexual history. He said he'd had his first sexual encounter with the mother of one of his friends when he was fourteen years old.

  "He talked about Kimberly, who was a very feminine child. He talked about Kristy as being a tiger. There was very little affect at this time. I was impressed with his coolness in giving me this information. He talked about his feelings about the Army, the implication being that he had a lot of anger toward the Army.

  "He talked about his family's approach to Jay. He said his parents had been more casual toward Jay's accomplishments. He said that he, Jeff, had gotten more recognition than Jay. He felt bad about that. He felt that somehow that might be responsible for Jay's becoming a bum.