Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

  "And then he starts talking about them charging him—that, you know, it's a big thing at Fort Bragg. There are two camps: the Doc did it or the Doc didn't do it. Those were his words.

  "And he was saying that they didn't understand why he was lying on the couch and he went into details about his being on the couch and those kinds of things which I didn't have any knowledge of and frankly it didn't make a lot of sense to me.

  "So I asked him would he like to have some time to get himself back together. And he took that time and he composed himself. After that, we began talking about his feelings about the family, and he began telling me of the dreams he'd been having. Dreaming of waking up and hearing the children screaming. And he can still see his wife lying on the floor.

  "But then he tells me that his dreams have changed—his anxiety dreams. Now he has anxiety dreams about Colonel Rock, the guy that's doing the investigation. He dreams of Colonel

  Rock looking at him and saying, 'Did you do it?' And he's saying no, but having this feeling that Colonel Rock couldn't hear him, and he's having to tell Colonel Rock over and over and over again, louder and louder.

  "Then he began telling me again about hearing the screams in his dreams. And in spite of my letting him compose himself he's crying again. Then he says he now has nice dreams about his family. About riding the horse—about seeing Colette ride the horse. She was like a big kid. She loved surprises. Then he says he doesn't want to share those dreams, doesn't want to talk to people about them.

  "He thinks all this—people asking him about him and his wife is really an invasion of his relationship with her. He thinks people are being kind of morbid in asking him about it again and again. And, actually, I hadn't asked him about this at all.

  "Well, I was taping this interview and at that point the reel ran out and I had to turn it over and he began to compose himself more. He really did begin to get himself together. He said it's okay for women to cry, but men shouldn't cry, which is a fantasy that most Green Beret people have.

  "Then he began to talk about his sexual history. That his first sexual experience was somewhat alarming to him, and—oh, yes, as a teenager he once had two girls offer to have sex with him at the same time and it really repulsed him. He said it wouldn't repulse him now. In fact, he described having one-night affairs with two women.

  "I asked him about his immediate sexual life and he told me that some woman had offered to come and have relations with him, and he had refused because he didn't think that would be quite right, given the circumstances.

  "Then he talked about as a child either wetting the bed, or masturbating and having wet dreams, and hiding the sheets. He can remember doing that—hiding the sheets from his mother.

  "Tasked him specifically had he ever been impotent and he said yes, he had at one time with a girl who was very attractive but very pushy. And he was concerned about that. Then he said, well, this could have been because he had been drinking some Cold Duck and he was too drunk to have relations.

  "Then he talked to me about his sexual relations with his wife. Having relations three or four times a week. He immediately says that he was never impotent with his wife and that he and Colette were always able to have relations, but that at the time of her death their sex life was not all that great. She was five months pregnant and that bothered him. He didn't have much interest in sex with her.

  "I asked him if his wife knew about his extramarital affairs, and he said no, and that's not important. Then he qualified that and said maybe she did know about the airline stewardess down in Texas, but they never talked about it.

  "Then I went back and began in terms of homosexual experiences and I'm sure the question I asked was the standard question— have you ever had any homosexual experiences.

  "He said he never had. He talked about his experiences with homosexuals on Fire Island while he was driving a taxi. He said he made extra money by fixing up homosexuals with other homosexuals. He kind of did whatever people would pay him to do. He said that sometimes the homosexuals would travel with a female companion, and he said after he fixed the guys up with other homosexual friends, he would take their girls out. There was a phrase he used: 'Two hundred dollars, plus playmates.' I think he was describing what his compensation would be for a weekend's work."

  "Did you come to an assessment of your own," Victor Woerheide asked the psychiatrist, "as to his character and personality and what kind of man he is?"

  "Yes. I see Dr. MacDonald as an individual who is striving constantly to be a superman. He's very bright and he's very, very talented, but he's constantly striving to be the best—to be a superman. To be a he-man, and going in the Green Berets and all of this business. Underneath that, in my opinion, is very definitely a defense against latent homosexual desires.

  "By homosexual desires I don't mean he's a practicing homosexual. Far from it. But that he has that drive to be a homosexual which he doesn't act on. He's not a homosexual, but he has homosexual desires and also certain psychopathic tendencies: that is, telling me about his extramarital affairs. Again, almost being too much of a man.

  "He is not a man without defect, which is essentially what his own psychiatrist was telling Colonel Rock. You know, 'Here's a guy who couldn't possibly do this.'

  "What we were saying and what we continue to say is, whether or not he did it is not up to us. But we disagree very vehemently with his own psychiatrist's conclusions that he could not possibly have done it."

  "Would you think," a grand juror asked, "that a questioning or challenging of his manliness would pose a threat of setting him off?"

  "Challenging his manliness in the sense of Colette maybe not liking too much his having become turned off sexually as her pregnancy began to show itself and accusing him of, you know, not having it as a male and that's why he doesn't want to sleep with her, yes. This guy's a Green Beret tiger in black boots and I think that would be quite a challenge."

  "An area where he would be particularly sensitive?" Victor Woerheide asked.

  "Yes, sir. That's my opinion."

  "And if some remark were made along this line: 'You're not a man. Let the kid sleep here and you sleep on the sofa' or something like that, that might be sufficient under conditions of stress, such as fatigue?"

  "Right."

  "The fatigue coming from not only the strain of being twenty-four hours on duty at a hospital, coming back home at six o'clock in the morning, spending a full day working and playing basketball—all of these things put together. Here is a man who should be tired, ready to go to bed at eleven o'clock when his wife goes to bed. But he's up. He's up until two o'clock in the morning reading a Mickey Spillane mystery."

  "It's puzzling. I can't, as a professional, do any more with it than you can."

  "But doesn't it indicate some stress? Some strain?" Woerheide asked. "Sure."

  "And this fatigue and stress, stemming from such conditions, -making a man particularly subject—"

  "That I can testify to. Yes. What stress does is it exaggerates those sort of basic personality qualities that we have. When you're exhausted is when those things that you perhaps don't like about yourself or that you would wish were different, and that you're normally able to maintain control over—under stress, that's when those things come out."

  There was only one other question, this one from a grand juror. "At any time, during MacDonald's talking to you, when he was talking about Colette's kindness and gentleness, did he ever say to you that he loved her?"

  "No."

  "He never said that?"

  "That word was not mentioned. That word was not used. I thought that was remarkable, too."

  Jeffrey MacDonald's sister testified. She was asked first about seeing her brother in the hospital after the murders.

  "I walked in and he was alone in the room. He was laying, looking out the window, and as I walked in he turned, and he said, 'Oh,' and I saw him and we both started to cry. I went over and started stroking his forehead and we both
just started saying, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,' and I came out with some insane statement like, 'Well, at least the time you had was good.'

  "Then other people came in the room—all sorts of peripheral people were arriving, and we would go out into the hall and start making jokes about something. We'd start laughing and crying. I think everyone was hysterical, but instead of crying we were, like, laughing hysterically, or—I was."

  "Did he talk at all about what happened?" Victor Woerheide asked.

  "No."

  "He told you nothing about it?"

  "Someone had the TV on in the room, and what would happen is we'd go in and someone would turn the TV on and there'd be maybe eight people in the room staring at the TV and nobody was talking directly about what had happened.

  "The only facts—my mother never discussed it. Jeff never discussed it. Freddy never told me anything. I just knew what I got from the paper. I would read a paper and I'd find out what had happened."

  "All right, now since then it's been more than four years. Has he ever told you anything about it specifically in the intervening years?"

  "No. The only thing I would do is I would point out to him that his personality is the type that elicits anger from other people. And that he should be careful. Hoping by what I said to him I would get the message through, so he would open up and tell me. Because I wanted to know where this much hatred came from—this much energy to destroy—if he was aware that he created a lot of anger in a lot of people. But he didn't think that."

  "And he never opened up—"

  "No."

  "—and told you the story?" "No."

  Woerheide then asked about Colette.

  "I think she liked her life. I think she liked, you know, having a man, and having a baby, and having a closeness, having a unit. I was involved in how many cool guys had asked me out and, you know, that type of thing, a different world. So we really didn't communicate too much.

  "She seemed to feel comfortable being a woman. She was a very sophisticated and a nice person. She wasn't any dum-dum. She was a fully developed human being. She was a very strong person. I admired her. I sort of modeled myself from her.

  "They didn't have a lot of money and they didn't have a lot of time together because Jeff worked hard, but she always seemed to accept that and say it's okay because he's working toward something good. She didn't seem to need instant gratification.

  "She said, 'When Jeff’s through his internship and his residency, we'll have everything. We'll have time together and we'll have money. We'll have everything at thirty-five that most people don't get in a lifetime."

  "Tell us about Jeff now."

  "I think he puts up a big front, you know, a big show of being confident and the great rescuer. But I think inside he's a feeling, sensitive person. I have never seen him be cruel. I've heard him be critical, but I've never heard him be cruel.

  "I've seen him selfish in the ability to, like go to Princeton, which was using quite a lot of money, say, from our family, and that made me feel—like, I would feel guilty if I had to do that. But he said, 'No, I'm working hard and I will become a wage earner and I certainly will help Mom and Dad out then. So I don't feel guilty about it.'

  "But as far as selfishness when it came to harming someone, or degrading someone—when I say degrading, he would give information to someone that I would say the person could be degraded by. But, from his point of view, it was realistic information, like, 'You can't eat ten doughnuts and expect to lose weight.' And that was a fact. I would get insulted but it was a fact. But he would never say to me, 'You little fat thing!'

  "And he didn't push people out of the way. And he never—he never—if you needed help, you needed to talk, he was never, say, too busy to listen. He'd listen and he'd usually find a good answer.

  "I felt that he was very adult. I think that he and Colette were very adult with each other. In the setup of marriage with a guy like that, it would be very easy for a woman to become Little Bunnie Doe, and Colette wasn't Bunnie Doe. She was very adult. She was a very three-dimensional person, an extremely well-adjusted person, and very sensitive, a very deep person.

  "When someone spoke to her, she didn't just hear what they said. She understood that they were coming from their life experience and who they were. She had a very good way to really understand what somebody was asking.

  "And so it was very good, she with Jeff, because he would be sort of—come out with something, an immediate statement or something and she would say, 'Now, Jeff/ And she'd, you know, usually push for more clarification.

  "It was very nice because it was helpful. They supported each other. Their temperaments—they were a very—they were very—an ideal—well, not ideal—well, they were adults. They were grownups. They weren't like two little lost kids in the world. They knew what their responsibilities were. They had a child. They had educational requirements to meet. They did it and they didn't complain about it. They didn't act like martyrs. They really enjoyed—if they were, say, struggling as students at Princeton, they were very quick to point out that they also had Cosmo Iacavazzi or whatever having dinner with them or that they would attend a very good concert or they would be with Bill Bradley on the weekend. They would point out, no, it's really okay. This is really okay with us. We're enjoying it.

  "And in Chicago she would point out to me that this living was temporary and that it was not—you know, money wasn't important at this particular stage of her life, or in Jeff's life. And the fact that he did compete—she said it was good because then when he came home he had things to share with her. He wasn't a husband who was just sitting at home watching TV, drinking beer."

  "In your conversations with Colette, did she ever indicate that there were any little, let's say, irritants in the relationship?"

  "Yes. There was one. My brother felt that people who smoked were not using their heads. Every time he came home from a party, even if it was raining, he hung his suit outside to get the smell of smoke out. It seemed funny to see them hanging out on the clothesline, and Colette thought it was very funny, because she and I used to sneak smokes in the bathroom or something and blow it out the window. But that was just something funny, very childlike. It wasn't, you know—it was just something amusing.

  "The only other thing that got him upset was the way that people ate. Sloppy eaters—he always thought that was repulsive. That was the only time I can remember seeing him being a very heavy-type parent person. He was very judgmental when somebody ate sloppily."

  "Did you know Penny Wells?"

  "I never had much contact with Penny because I thought, compared to Colette, she was a ding-dong."

  "Was there any, let's say, rivalry between Colette and Penny Wells as far as Jeff was concerned?"

  "I don't think so, because I think Colette's opinion of Penny was comparable to mine: that she wasn't a serious contender for anything except maybe Playgirl of the Year."

  "After February 17th, did the thought ever enter your mind that Jeff might have killed Colette?"

  "No. When I found out that someone else had a suspicion, I was shocked. I was really shocked. But then I began to process it and think, well, is it possible? For my own sanity I had to know. I had to check out that possibility. And I thought about it, and the only conclusion I could come to was that you'd have to be crazy to stab someone thirty-seven times. And he wasn't crazy. I don't think there was anything in his nature that could justify destroying people like that."

  "Do you think he's capable of an act of violence?"

  "Well, the CID asked me that and I said, 'He's going to Vietnam, and if you're going to Vietnam, you have to accept the consequence that you could kill somebody. So in that sense, yes, because he was a Green Beret, but when you say violence, like, you know, he wasn't the type of person who had angry outbursts."

  "When he went into the service, why did he opt for Special Forces?"

  "Well, because of the adventure and to be the greatest. You know, to be the best. It was
like when my brother Jay went. My father said, 'If you're going to do it, be the best. Be a Marine.' So Jay became a Marine and then realized that he wasn't exactly Marine on the inside.

  "But, you know, it was stressed to be the best. It was stressed to achieve. And there was a stress within yourself. You know, you'd feel better—that you were half dead if you didn't achieve."

  "Do you remember seeing him on the Dick Cavett show?"

  "Yes. He called up and said make sure to watch and to call some people in the area and tell them to watch because he was going to be on. And I watched, and personally I don't agree with mass presentations of something. I don't like people who talk about tragedy in front of millions of viewers. I don't agree with that.

  "But I also knew at that time that he was not a person that everyone would love to invite to a cocktail party—because people didn't know. I mean his case was dropped because of insufficient evidence, which was saying that this guy might have killed his family. And he's walking around the streets of New York as the guy who might have killed his family, and while I felt that it was inappropriate in regards to the feelings, you know, the horrible tragedy, the fact was that there was so much anger, too.

  There was so much helplessness. What could we do? How were we going to get some action? How were we going to get people to actually follow leads?