Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

  "Just one final point, Doctor. His current lifestyle apparently involves working in an emergency room on the West Coast, he has a very nice apartment, he associates with attractive people, attractive girlfriends. He has an expensive sports car, he has a large boat. And he apparently is leading a lifestyle entirely different from the kind of life he had when he was married. Do you have any comment?"

  "It strikes me," the psychologist said, "that the style of life you're describing is perhaps one of the few viable alternatives left for him, given his adjustment.

  "That is to say, Captain MacDonald wanted to go into a residency in surgery. In view of what he went through, it seems to me very unlikely that he could be accepted for a residency in surgery. So his professional goals—the thing he had planned for a long time—were undoubtedly quite upset.

  "Now, there are some people who would react to that in one way and others who would react in another. Again, from what I've said about Captain MacDonald, I would expect him to react to that by denying that it was an upsetting thing. To quickly reconstitute his defenses and set up a life where he was perfectly happy, content, relaxed, and appeared to be an adequate, competent man.

  "What's available to him? To retreat to the golden-boy style of life he led in school? Now you can't be a golden boy by getting good grades or that sort of thing when you're not in school. But you can live in an open, relaxed, Southern California style: nice cars, women.

  "That doesn't surprise me. It seems to me that's quite consistent with the way he might be expected to react to it."

  "And by being a single swinger—"

  "I don't think he would be a terribly effective swinger, by the way."

  "Ostensibly the swinger, let's say."

  "Yes. I think, again, it's quite superficial."

  "But without a wife who would make demands on him?"

  "Right."

  "And without children who would make demands?"

  "Exactly. I think, in fact, it's probably a very adaptive response for him. He's probably a lot better off living that style of life for the time being than trying to get married again."

  When Freddy Kassab was called to testify, he said, "Jeff was a nice boy from all I ever saw. He used to come over on the weekends and cut the lawn. When he and Colette started going again, Mildred and I were very pleased. We liked Jeff. When Colette told us she was pregnant and that they wanted to get married, we tried to talk her out of it only because Jeff was going to medical school and she had only put in two years of college. But when Mrs. MacDonald came in and talked to us, we said, ‘We don't have anything against it. They should go ahead and get married if that's what they want.' Which they did.

  "My belief in his innocence was based on the fact that I knew the boy. However, I knew nothing about what occurred that night, nor did my wife. Nobody told us a thing. We were just going on the assumption that how could a man such as we knew do such a thing to his wife and baby children.

  "And of course the worst thing of all, in a way, was to turn around and write in blood on the headboard of the bed. This is something that is just inconceivable. But when you sit down with the facts and you analyze them and you see that his whole story is a fabrication, you are left with only one conclusion.

  "We knew prior to this of what we considered a failing he had, but we didn't put too much stock in it. But the fact is that Jeff has complete disdain for anyone and everyone that I have ever known him to know. He has contempt for everybody. Out of their sight, though. His disdain is not in their presence. In other words, the minute somebody walked out the door that's who he talked about. Jeff had a habit of doing this at all times. He is mentally, in his mind, superior to most people. This, you know, was the only thing we ever knew about him that we didn't care for. But what the heck. You know, we've all got our faults, so we just overlooked this.

  "But he would never criticize anybody to their face. He never had the guts to do it. He never fought me to my face. He never came back when I started accusing him of all this stuff and confronted me with anything. Never. Never. And he knew about it, because I got to the point where I sat his mother down in my kitchen after he moved to California and I said, 'I think there are a few things you ought to know.' So he knew about my thoughts. But he never called me and said, 'What's this all about?' He just wrote me a couple of letters and said, you know, 'I'm out here doing fairly good.' "

  Toward the end of his testimony, when asked if he had any theories about what might have precipitated the murders, Kassab said, "That area is a dark area. Something happened that caused an argument. I believe that it was an instantaneous thing. He may have socked her and she may have picked up the hairbrush and hit him back. And that just sent him into a blind fury, to be hit by a woman.

  "But nobody will ever know, because I assure you, Jeff MacDonald will never tell you."

  There was, however, one person who was willing to try to fit together the pieces of the puzzle: Paul Stombaugh, chief of the chemistry section of the FBI laboratory, who had first been shown evidence pertaining to the MacDonald case in 1971.

  In the summer of 1974, Victor Worheide and Brian Murtagh had again presented Stombaugh with the physical evidence collected at the scene and had asked for a more exhaustive analysis. Having obtained permission from Freddy Kassab, who had legal title to the cemetery plots in which Colette and Kimberly and Kristen MacDonald were buried, they had also asked Stombaugh to supervise exhumation and take hair samples from the head of each body.

  Having done so, and having made microscopic examinations, Stombaugh determined conclusively that the blond hair found in the palm of Colette MacDonald's hand had—without question— been her own, and not that of a blond intruder.

  Toward the end of the grand jury hearing—it was by now, in fact, January 15, 1975—Paul Stombaugh was summoned to Raleigh to report on his laboratory findings. He first summarized the results of his 1971 analysis:

  —That there were forty-eight puncture holes in Jeffrey MacDonald's blue pajama top that could have been made by the icepick that had been found outside the house. Further, that the holes had been made when the top was stationary. None had the tearing at the edges which would have resulted from their having been made while the garment was in motion. Similar icepick holes in Colette MacDonald's pink pajama top had been made while that garment was stationary.

  —That some of Colette MacDonald's blood had stained the pajama top before it was torn.

  —That the cuts in all garments other than the blue pajama top had been made by the Old Hickory knife, despite the fact that it was the Geneva Forge knife MacDonald had said he'd pulled from his wife's chest.

  Stombaugh then described the results of the more extensive analysis which he had just completed.

  He had discovered, he said, that certain of the bloodstains on the Hilton hotel bathmat found on Colette's abdomen matched outlines of the Old Hickory paring knife and of the icepick, indicating that those two weapons, while bloody, had been laid temporarily—and perhaps even wiped—on that bathmat.

  He had discovered also, he said, that certain of the bloodstains from the sheet found rumpled on the master bedroom floor matched the sleeves of Colette's pajama top, and that still others seemed to have been made by a pair of hands and by the bare left shoulder of an adult human being.

  The implication, Stombaugh said—the inescapable implication— was that someone wearing Jeffrey MacDonald's blue pajama top (which had already been stained by Colette's blood) had covered Colette's body with that sheet and then had picked up her body and carried it.

  Stombaugh stepped down from the witness stand and stepped to a slide projector. The room was darkened. A slide was displayed on a screen. In garish, awful color.

  "Now, this is Kristen's room," Stombaugh said, his voice perfectly even and controlled. "And I'd like to direct your attention to this area right here, this is the top sheet on that bed, and it has a huge bloodstain on it. Yet there is no bloodstain underneath, on the bottom sheet.
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  "In reading the reports, it was reflected that the huge bloodstain on the top sheet in Kristen's room was Type A blood—is Colette's blood type. Kristen had Type O blood, and the rest of the blood in that room, the bulk of it, was Type O.

  "Now, in examining this stain, it was not one that would have been put there just by somebody's hand. It's a huge stain, as you can see. An awful lot of blood flowed there. The only way you get staining such as this is from a steady flow right down onto it."

  The lights came on, Stombaugh returned to the witness stand, and the multicolored bedspread, which also had been found rumpled on the master bedroom floor, was laid out before the grand jurors.

  "At one time," Stombaugh said, "this had a very heavy flow of blood from a Type A person directly onto it. In fact, even today, there's a large cake of blood on this—a specimen of Type A blood.

  "Now, if this bedspread had been placed down on the floor of Kristen's room, and Colette's body were lifted off the bed where she was bleeding, she would have bled directly on the spread. Then her body could have been covered with this sheet, and as the person lifted it up, he stepped on the blood in this bedspread.

  "The spread, you see, is very heavy, and blood does not soak through it. It acts like a little bit of a well in there, and holds it. If he stepped in that and carried Colette's body out of this room, he would leave a bloody footprint."

  There was a short silence in the grand jury room as this image lingered in the mind.

  Then Victor Woerheide said, "In addition, you looked at Kristen's bedspread, didn't you?"

  "Yes, sir, I did."

  "That bedspread, it's been testified to, had marks of blood on it that were in the blood type of Kimberly. It's also been testified that there is Kimberly's blood type—Type AB—on the club. Can you offer a possible explanation of how the AB blood might have gotten on that bedspread?"

  "Yes. This stain is not a result of direct bleeding. It's been a transfer of blood. In other words, a very bloody object having AB blood on it was placed here. It could have occurred by resting the club, in a bloody condition, on the bedspread."

  "All right," Victor Woerheide said. "Now from your observations and the evidence that you studied, is it reasonable to say that there was a struggle involving a person wearing the blue pajama top in the master bedroom at which time the blue pajama top was torn? And is it reasonable to say that Colette MacDonald, having suffered an injury and bleeding, was in a position on the bed of Kristen MacDonald over near the wall where she bled directly on the top sheet of Kristen MacDonald's bed?"

  "Yes, sir, and I'd like to point out one other thing in that regard. If I can have the pajama bottoms?"

  Victor Woerheide removed Colette MacDonald's pajama bottoms from a plastic bag and handed them to Paul Stombaugh, who displayed them to the grand jury.

  "The only injuries Colette MacDonald suffered," he said, "were from her waist up. She had no injuries from her waist down. Now, what puzzled me was how her pajama bottoms—the front of them—got so much blood down on the legs. And according to the laboratory report this is all Type A blood, her own blood.

  "It's direct bleeding and it's a lot of bleeding, and we have two places where we find this type of thing. One is the top sheet of Kristen's bed and one is on these.

  "This would indicate to me—due to the fact that this bed is only thirty-six inches wide—that Colette MacDonald was probably knocked across the bed, up against the wall, and fell forward, causing the blood to drip down onto the top sheet and onto the pajama bottoms."

  Stombaugh moved on to the next order of business, removing a large photograph from an envelope.

  "This," he said, "was a photograph taken at the time of autopsy, and it shows the damage to Colette MacDonald's chest. If you'll notice—I guess the people in the back can't see too well—we have twenty-one icepick wounds.

  "According to the autopsy report she suffered twenty-one icepick wounds to the chest. They were deep and penetrating. In studying the wounds, we see a group of five in her right chest and a group of sixteen in her left chest area. Now, in studying the pictures of Colette as she was found on the floor, we see that she has this blue pajama top draped over her."

  In refolding Jeffrey MacDonald's pajama top "exactly" as it appeared in the crime scene photographs, Stombaugh said, it was observed that the forty-eight icepick holes in it could have been made by twenty-one thrusts of an icepick and that those twenty-one thrusts seemed to be in alignment with the twenty-one icepick holes in Colette MacDonald's chest—sixteen on one side and five on the other—indicating strongly that she had been stabbed with the icepick after the blue pajama top had been laid across her chest.

  "Now, we can't say positively this happened," Stombaugh said. "We're pointing out this is a possibility. It could have happened. Because all the holes are accounted for, and we did come up with the same number and the same locations."

  "Now, Mr. Stombaugh," Woerheide said, "on the basis of your analysis of the physical evidence that you have referred to here today, have you developed any theory of how all these things fit together? What happened that night?"

  "Some events," Stombaugh said, "I guess, we'll never know. But it would appear to me that the fight started in the master bedroom. I believe Dr. MacDonald probably struck his wife in the face with a fist, knocked her down. This would cause the blood to start flowing. She probably had a bloody nose, and through a struggle there, this is where her blood got onto his pajama top before it was torn.

  "Kimberly might have awakened, due to the screaming, and come up and tried to help her mother. He might have pushed her aside, and—this is just supposition on my part, but I feel probably this club—I imagine it could have been kept in the utility room which is a very short distance from this bedroom.

  "I sort of suspect, possibly, Colette might have picked this club up and socked Jeffrey with it, which could account for the bump on his head.

  "He was a bruiser, so he took the club away from her and went to swing at her and probably—accidentally or on purpose— struck Kimberly on the side of the head with it, causing her to bleed, and this would account for the AB blood found near the entrance to the room.

  "In the doorway here, in the rug, it had soaked through pretty much, indicating someone had lain here bleeding a good bit.

  "When he did that, I think our little bent knife comes into play, because this is the type of knife that's very dull, and the type a lot of people, including myself, keep around for painting because it makes a good thing to scrape paint with when you drop some on the floor.

  "I think this was near the club in the utility room and I think Colette grabbed it and attacked Jeff with this thing, possibly causing the little cut in his left abdomen. That cut was slight and was made with a tearing action. A knife such as this would do that.

  "And when she did that, he leveled her with this club. Then things, I think, sort of quieted down, because I believe Colette undoubtedly had to have been unconscious at that time.

  "I think he picked Kim up, carried her into her bed, and, due to the AB blood spatters on the wall, I believe he hit her again with the club and killed her.

  "While this was going on—or possibly before that—I think Colette came to, came into Kristen's room, to protect the only child that is not dead, and he caught up with her in there and really let her have it with the club again.

  "This possibly is where both her arms were broken, because they're defense wounds, and she was knocked across to the wall, and we know that she was here at some time in order to have bled this much here.

  "I guess he kind of got himself oriented, picked up the bedspread and the blue sheet from the master bedroom and carried them back into Kristen's room, reached over and picked up Colette.

  "Now at this time his pajama top had been torn, but it probably wasn't too bloody, and I believe all the blood that's on the pajama top—the bulk of it—got on there when he reached across the bed and picked her up and put her down on this bedspr
ead.

  "Then he covered her with this sheet, and, having blood on him—fresh blood, wet blood—and also on his hands, he reached down, picked her up, carried her back into the master bedroom, where she eventually was found.

  "After that, he probably went to the kitchen, and he could have been bleeding by this time from the cut in his abdomen, and he got the rubber gloves and picked up the Old Hickory knife, and went back in and did the job on the rest of them, and ended up with the icepick on Colette.

  "I think when he put her body down is when he took his pajama top off and threw it across her body. Then, I believe, he put the bathmat down next to her and put each weapon down on the bathmat as he was finished using it, and then as he left, he put the bathmat on her body, and went out the back door, and threw the knife and icepick out."

  "In regard to some of the specifics," Victor Woerheide said, "all we can do is speculate. And," he said to members of the grand jury, some of whom had begun to embellish or expand upon Stombaugh's theory, "your guess is as good or better than mine.

  "But it seems to me there's no question there was a struggle. I do think that Colette, she was a healthy woman and not a weakling, and I think Colette did attempt to defend herself.

  "I think it's consistent with her defending herself that she would pick up the club and swing it at him and hit him on the forehead with it. Not the sort of blow that was strong enough to break the skin or anything, but to raise a lump.

  "At some point, I do think that Colette, in defending herself, did inflict some injury on him. And it seems to me the ones that are most likely to have been inflicted by Colette are the bruise on the forehead, and the cut in the abdomen. As to the other wounds, I think that they are most likely to be self-inflicted.

  "All we can do at this juncture is speculate as to some of the details, but the circumstances, it seems to me, lead to the inevitable conclusion that there was a struggle; that the struggle involved a man wearing that pajama top, and that serious injuries were inflicted on Colette and the girls, and Colette ended up bleeding very heavily in Kristen's room; and the club was swung there; and the club was swung in Kimberly's room; and somebody wearing those pajama tops and carrying Colette, whose pajamas had blood on them that was transferred to the sheet, carried her out of that room and made that footprint, and you have heard testimony saying that that's the footprint of Captain MacDonald."