Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

  "March 18th, 1964—Jeff called us. Kimmy was born! Colette's narrow hips were not meant for babies. She was torn and exhausted before they did a Cesarean, but the moment I walked into her hospital room she lifted the infant from her breast and said, 'Here, Mom. Here is one of your lost little girls.'

  "I had to leave Monday morning. I had an appointment made some weeks earlier to redecorate a funeral home (Kemp's—he buried them in 1970) and had to meet workmen there.

  "Jeff took me to the train in Princeton. I said, 'Take care, I'll be back on the five o'clock train tomorrow.' He looked so proud standing there: a new father. (He only stood until the train pulled out and then drove into N.Y. to meet his girlfriend.) So, the great deception began ..."

  She wrote of her life after the murders.

  "The hunt for her letters . . . Looking at movies and slides to hold on to our memories . . . The feverish planting of roses and more roses . . . The pictures losing their meaning and becoming only pictures . . . Holding on to a dream . . . Tiptoeing through the day to try to keep the dream alive—to no avail.

  "The first couple of years—looking through the fence at the five year old and two year old children next door. Then finally 'borrowing' them for hours at a time: someone to shower with all that bottled up love. It didn't work, though. The two and five year olds became six and nine and fantasy ended . . .

  "Keeping our lives separate from others because our grief contaminated those who were too close to us. Their lives must not be infected by our feelings ...

  "Freddy's company moving from New York to New Jersey but I could not think of moving, of leaving them behind. Living on with Freddy coming home weekends because I couldn't move away and leave them and all of the memories stored in the rooms of that house—they were still there.

  "I wanted every stitch of clothing they ever owned, down to the last torn sneaker. No one else should get to wear those poor, shabby personal things. I kept every single thing, too, until 16 months ago when we moved to a smaller house. I still have a few things from each one that can recall a day or an event we shared. A doll of Kristy's. Kimmy's little purse from the jacket she wore last, with two dollars in it. A couple of colored shells . . .

  "The beauties of the world they would never see, the music they would never hear. The sunsets and the mornings, watching the bird feeder through my binoculars and seeing a pair of courting blue jays strutting and posturing beneath the rhododendron bushes with the sun just rising through the trees ... All so achingly beautiful, and they would never know.

  "I think the reason I have kept my mind all these years is because my greatest grief has been for Colette and her poor, poor life with him. Forgetting my own pain in realizing hers. I pray she knows he is being given some punishment, however small and unbalanced it is."

  The next day, from the witness stand, when asked on cross-examination by Bernie Segal if it were not true that she had become somewhat "preoccupied" by the subject of her daughter's murder, Mildred Kassab replied: "Of course. Wouldn't you be?"

  She also said: "I devoted six years of pregnancy to having Colette. So I can certainly devote nine years to finding her killer."

  From the first days at Kappa Alpha, Jeffrey MacDonald's own mother was a highly visible presence. The nine and a half years of sorrow and fear had rendered her high-strung and gaunt, but her energy and cordiality remained undiminished.

  Whether her task for the day was to drive her son to court in the morning, to take his suits out for dry-cleaning, to aid (or sometimes supervise) Segal's student assistants in the downtown office, to replenish beer, wine, and snack food supplies, or simply to listen sympathetically to the defense's account of what sort of day it had been in court (like other witnesses scheduled to testify, she was prohibited from attending trial sessions), she performed with relentless vigor and a cheerfulness which, under the circumstances, seemed almost as remarkable as her son's expressed certainty that the case could not be lost.

  When her time to testify did come, Dorothy MacDonald impressed all who saw her as a warm, gracious, and courageous human being—the same impression she had made on those who had known her in Patchogue when the MacDonald children were growing up, on those with whom she'd come in contact as a frequent companion to Jeff and Colette after their marriage, and upon all those—including Franz Joseph Grebner, Victor Worheide, Brian Murtagh, and now Jim Blackburn—with whom her life had been at cross-purposes since her daughter-in-law and grandchildren had been murdered.

  No witness—himself included—did more to help Jeffrey MacDonald's cause. Indeed, one juror even remarked after the verdict had been announced that, "I think she swayed many jurors," with her talk of the love that had existed between Jeff and Colette. "By the time she finished," this juror said, "I know that my mind had been changed."

  In addition to Dorothy MacDonald, Segal called to the* stand more than a dozen other character witnesses. Their composite testimony was that MacDonald was a peaceful, truthful, honorable man who not only had dearly loved his wife and children but who had turned out to be a skilled and compassionate emergency physician at St. Mary's Hospital in Long Beach.

  Jim Blackburn did not dispute these assertions. Of most character witnesses, in fact, he asked only a single question: were you inside 544 Castle Drive between the hours of midnight and 4 A.M. on February 17, 1970?

  As each replied in the negative, Blackburn nodded politely, turned away, and said, "I have no further questions, your honor.''

  Segal also called a "mystery witness"—a man from Roanoke, Virginia, who, in February of 1970 had lived within a hundred yards of Castle Drive and who said now, nine and one-half years later, that at about midnight on Monday, February 16, while sitting in his apartment gluing a model plane together (having recently returned from a tour of duty as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam), he had seen two white men and one white woman with long blond hair, all wearing sheets and all carrying candles, walking past his doorway toward Castle Drive.

  There was no doubt that his story was intriguing. It might have been considerably more serviceable, however, if he had told it to investigators on February 17, 1970, rather than waiting nine and a half years. The witness, whose name was James Milne, said the reason he had not mentioned it before was that no one had bothered to ask.

  The prosecution did not seem unduly alarmed by Milne's highly publicized appearance. "I don't know that there weren't three such individuals," Brian Murtagh remarked. "They could have been coming home from choir practice."

  His implication was clear. The essence of the case against MacDonald remained what it had been from the beginning: what was found inside—not who had been seen outside—544 Castle Drive.

  In an attempt to combat this, Segal called a series of witnesses who qualified as experts in the field of criminology. Chief among these was John Thornton, a quiet, bearded, pipe-smoking professor from the University of California at Berkeley. Thornton had been ballyhooed to the press by the defense as "our Stombaugh," but his time on the stand turned out to be an unexpected bonus for the prosecution and also provided the center-stage highlight of the summer for Segal's nemesis, Brian Murtagh.

  Thornton, as anticipated, disputed Paul Stombaugh's contention that bloodstains on the sheet found on the master bedroom floor formed the impression either of hands or of a bare human shoulder. Unexpectedly, however, he conceded that other impressions clearly were those of the cuffs of Jeffrey and Colette MacDonald's pajama tops.

  Bernie Segal tried to explain to reporters that this admission had not been as damaging to the defense as it appeared. "No one can prove when those impressions were made," Segal said. "They're just another of the meaningless facts that exist in this type of complicated case."

  When Thornton resumed his testimony, however, he provided the context for an incident, the implications of which no amount of explanation could neutralize.

  Thornton's central contention was that Stombaugh had been incorrect in his assertion that the absence of tearing ar
ound the forty-eight holes in the pajama top indicated that the top had been stationary at the time the holes had been made.

  To substantiate his claim, Thornton cited the result of a laboratory experiment he had performed in California, wrapping cloth identical in composition to the pajama top—65 percent polyester and 35 percent cotton—around "resilient material," then stabbing through the cloth with an icepick while an assistant jerked the resilient material back and forth. The resultant holes, Thornton said, had been perfectly cylindrical, with no elongated tearing around the edges.

  Brian Murtagh was handling the cross-examination of Thornton. What, he asked, had been the "resilient material" around which Thornton had wrapped the experimental cloth?

  "Ham," Thornton said.

  Murtagh had neither the personality nor the courtroom experience to feign amazement in the histrionic manner of Bernie Segal. His astonishment was genuine.

  "Ham?" he said. "You took a piece of ham! Like in a ham sandwich?"

  Ham, Thornton explained, provided the closest possible replication of a human body in terms of its ability to absorb the impact of a thrust.

  "Ham!" Murtagh repeated, walking away from the witness, toward the prosecution table, shaking his head. Some of the jurors began to smile and even titter.

  It had not been sliced ham, of course, but a whole ham. Still, ham is ham, and no matter how earnest and erudite John Thornton appeared from that point forward—and his credentials were impeccable, his intelligence above question, his reputation in his field beyond reproach—the image that lingered was of this bearded Californian, with utmost seriousness, wrapping a piece of cloth around a ham and calling that a scientific experiment. It was an image which cast a very slight shadow indeed upon the stark, expansive landscape of Paul Stombaugh's earlier testimony.

  At the prosecution table, Murtagh opened a briefcase and took out a blue pajama top. It was not Jeffrey MacDonald's, but it was the same shade of blue and made of material similar to the top MacDonald had worn on the night of the murders. Wordlessly, Murtagh removed his suit jacket and wrapped the pajama top around his wrists, binding his hands.

  He was standing directly in front of the jury. With almost catlike quickness, Jim Blackburn, who had sat silently throughout the entire cross-examination of Thornton, picked up the icepick that had been used in the MacDonald murders nine and a half years before.

  With Bernie Segal apparently too astonished even to object, Blackburn lunged at Murtagh and began slashing at him with the icepick. Using the pajama top as a shield, Murtagh deflected the blows. That is, he deflected all but one. That one made a small cut in his right arm.

  Now, Bernie Segal was on his feet. "Do you need a doctor, Mr. Murtagh?" he said, gesturing toward Jeffrey MacDonald. Murtagh declined the offer of medical aid, though a secretary was dispatched to find a Band-Aid.

  When the laughter in the courtroom had subsided, Murtagh held up the pajama top. Many of the holes were elongated, ragged cuts—not perfectly cylindrical punctures.

  Two persuasive points had been made. First, when a pajama top is wrapped around someone's wrists and used to fend off icepick blows, the resulting holes will not be round and clean. Second, even in a brief, restrained, courtroom demonstration, Jim Blackburn had been unable to avoid inflicting a puncture wound on Brian Murtagh's forearm.

  Had it occurred to the jury to wonder why, in the course of a frenzied attack by intruders in a state of homicidal mania, no similar icepick wounds had been inflicted upon the forearms of Jeffrey MacDonald, though there had been forty-eight punctures in the pajama top which he said he'd had wrapped around his wrists, and which he said he had used as a shield?

  John Thornton described the courtroom demonstration as "silly" and "rinky-dink," but John Thornton was not a member of the jury.

  With his perimeter overrun and with even his inner lines of defense beginning to crumble, Bernie Segal recognized that the time had come to rush a real "mystery witness" into the breach. Helena Stoeckley had saved him—and Jeffrey MacDonald—once before, in 1970. Maybe she—or the invocation of her—could be made to do so again.

  First, Segal subpoenaed Stoeckley's parents. Then Judge Dupree issued a bench warrant for Stoeckley herself on the grounds that she was a material witness in a homicide case.

  Stoeckley's parents came to Raleigh and said they did not know where their daughter was. The last time they had seen her was in early June, when she had come to Fayetteville for a brief visit from a drug rehabilitation center in Columbia, South Carolina. She had said then that she planned to move to the small South Carolina town of Walhalla, to live with a man whom she had met at the rehabilitation center. "I don't know her address," Stoeckley's mother said, "and I don't want to know."

  In a private interview with defense attorneys, the mother also said that even if her daughter were found, it was not likely she could contribute much of value to the trial.

  "She called up, must have been a year and a half ago, four o'clock in the morning, all befuddled. She said somebody was chasing her and had taken her car keys. Then it turned out she'd had a stroke. We got her home, she was like a vegetable. She couldn't talk, couldn't eat, her face quivered, saliva would run out of her mouth. We put her on a strict diet and let her rest and after about three weeks she was improved, but still she was not quite right."

  She had left home again, this time for Daytona, Florida, where she said she planned to work in a hospital. The next thing her parents had heard was that she had been arrested for drunken driving.

  "She's had her gallbladder removed," her mother said, "she's had three liver biopsies, and she's been spitting up blood and passing blood in her stools for years. She's not at all like she used to be. She's a physical and mental wreck. She's not even a human being anymore. You find her now, sure she'll talk. She'll always talk. But I'm telling you, she's gonna talk all kinds of nonsense."

  Chain-smoking Virginia Slims cigarettes, Helena Stoeckley's mother described her daughter's original reaction to the murders. "It really hurt her. She was a very soft-hearted person and she especially loved little children. She said right away, 'Not a hippie around here would do a thing like that. Everybody's gonna pitch in and find out what happened. We've got to find out who did this.'

  "I really believe it was Beasley who first put the idea in her head. Beasley was her Daddy image. He had a terrific amount of influence over her. She told me he had been up to talk to her right after it happened and then she said, 'Yeah, I've been thinking, and I don't really know where I was that night. I might have been there.' And I just knew right then that Daddy Beasley had talked her into it."

  Obviously, it would not suit the defense's purposes to put Helena Stoeckley's mother on the witness stand, but Bernie Segal had assembled a cast of additional characters whose testimony seemed more likely to be useful: William Posey the laundry deli very man, Jane Zillioux and another Nashville neighbor named Red Underhill, and Jim Gaddis of the Nashville police department, as well as the CID polygraph operator who had conducted the 1971 interview with Stoeckley, not to mention Prince Edward Beasley himself—now in retirement and eager to testify about how, nine and a half years earlier, Helena Stoeckley had joked to him about her icepick and had said that in her mind she thought she might have been at 544 Castle Drive while the murders were being committed.

  Then word was received that Stoeckley herself had been located: hiding in the back of a trailer on the outskirts of Walhalla, South Carolina. She was immediately transported to Raleigh in the custody of federal agents.

  * * *

  At four minutes before ten o'clock on the morning of Thursday, August 16, 1979—exactly one month after the trial of Jeffrey MacDonald had begun, and nine and a half years, to the day, since Monday, February 16, 1970—a day which had ended with her taking mescaline in her driveway on Clark Street in Fayetteville—Helena Stoeckley, escorted by a U.S. marshal, walked into a small office on the ninth floor of the Federal Building in Raleigh, where Bernie Segal was
waiting for her, hoping to persuade her to confess.

  She was neatly, even demurely attired in white shoes and a floral print dress. Her hair was black, her complexion sallow. She was many pounds overweight. Her eyes were dull and her thin lips unexpressive. She spoke in a soft voice almost entirely devoid of affect. Her left arm was in a cast. It had been broken in Cincinnati, two weeks earlier, when someone had hit her with a tire iron during a dispute involving narcotics. Her fiancé, Ernest Davis, whom she had met in the drug rehabilitation center in Columbia, South Carolina, paced barefoot, unwashed, and unshaved in a small corridor outside the office.

  For almost a decade, in Bernie Segal's mind, Helena Stoeckley had been a figure of near-mythic proportion. Now here she was, three feet from him, politely declining his offer of coffee and doughnuts. She would, she said, be grateful for a can of diet soda.

  Segal began to speak in a voice so quiet and so gentle that it was as if Helena was sleeping and he did not want to risk awakening her. Yet there was an almost painful intensity to his tone. This woman, he believed, had the power to set Jeffrey MacDonald free and to provide Segal with the greatest triumph of his career. His first words were like surgical instruments. Utilized with the utmost skill and delicacy, they might enable him to stride forth from this room and announce to the judge and the jury—and the press—that there was no need to proceed further with the trial: one of the real killers had just confessed.

  Segal had, at his side, an album containing photographs of the crime scene. He placed it on a table before Stoeckley. The first picture was not a particularly horrid one: all it showed was a portion of the kitchen of 544 Castle Drive. There was a calendar hanging on a wall. The top page of the calendar said February 1970.