"I did not."
"Doctor MacDonald, with respect to the Hilton bathmat that you have seen in the courtroom, do you recognize that?" "Yeah. Yes, I do."
"You all had a Hilton bathmat, I take it?" Blackburn's courtly Southern manner was standing out in bolder relief against MacDonald's sullenness as the day wore on.
"Apparently so."
"Well, do you recall where it was the night of the murders?" "I do not."
"Did you place it on Colette?"
"I don't recall doing that." "Could you have done that?" "I could have done that."
"Should the jury find from the evidence that the blood on the Old Hickory knife was wiped off on that bathmat, and also that the icepick that was found outside the house was wiped on it, do you, sir, have any explanation for that?"
"Not unless the assailants did that."
"Doctor MacDonald, suppose the jury should find from the evidence that the blood in the bathroom sink is Type B, your blood. Do you have any explanation for that?"
"No."
"Doctor MacDonald, at any time, did you in any way take a scalpel, or any instrument, and inflict any injury on yourself while at the bathroom sink?"
"I did not."
" "Suppose, sir, that the jury should find, from the evidence that no Type B blood—your type blood—is found in the living room area where the struggle with the intruders allegedly occurred, and you were allegedly stabbed: do you have any explanation for that?"
"Nothing other than the obvious one. The wounds weren't bleeding very much."
"Suppose the jury finds from the evidence that you were stabbed and the wounds weren't bleeding very much, and that you did not go into the bathroom until you had passed through, by your own account, five other areas of the house and that B-type blood is found in the sink, do you have any explanation for that?"
"Your honor, I object to the form of the question," Bernie Segal said. "It is compound, confusing."
"Overruled," said Judge Dupree.
"Do I have an explanation why there was B-type blood on the sink?" MacDonald said, his edginess increasing. "Is that the question?''
"Let me ask you again, if you want me to," Blackburn said. "Fine."
"Suppose the jury should find from the evidence that your blood is Type B, and that the reason that there is no B-type blood in the living room is because the wounds don't bleed very much, as you have stated, and that you do not go into the bathroom until your sixth stop, and that they find from the evidence that there is B-type blood on the inside of that sink: do you have any explanation for that?"
"Well, when I checked myself, I saw my own chest wound
that was bubbling. That is the only obvious answer that I can give."
"Doctor MacDonald, suppose the jury should find from the evidence that there was no blood in sufficient quantity to be typed on either the telephone in the master bedroom or the kitchen, and that they should find from the evidence that you went there and used the phone as you have indicated: do you have any explanation for why there would be no blood?"
"No. There was blood on my hands. I used the phone. I have no explanation for that lack of finding."
"Doctor MacDonald, let me show you again the blue pajama top. Suppose that the jury should find from the evidence that, one, there are approximately seventeen puncture holes in the back of that pajama top, and secondly, that you have no injuries, puncture or otherwise, in your back. Do you have any explanation for that?"
"Well, I know why I don't have any puncture wounds in my back. I was being stabbed from the front."
"With respect to my question, sir, do you have any explanation for how those holes got in the back of that pajama top?"
"Just that it had to have been when it was around my wrists and hands and fending off blows."
"Would your answer be the same with respect to the number of holes—over thirty more in this right area of the pajama top?"
"That is correct."
"Doctor MacDonald, suppose the jury should find from the evidence that Colette MacDonald was beaten and stabbed a multiple number of times, that Kristen was stabbed a number of times, and that Kimberly was stabbed and beaten a number of times.
"And suppose, sir, that the jury further finds that the injuries that you sustained were not consistent in degree of seriousness with those that they sustained, and that you are quite obviously still alive. Do you have any explanation for that?"
"Your honor," Bernie Segal shouted, "that is objected to as argumentative! That is not a question at all!"
"I will sustain the objection to that question," Judge Dupree said.
"Doctor MacDonald," Blackburn continued, still with the same gentle, almost apologetic manner, "should the jury find from the evidence that what has come to be known as the FBI reconstruction of the blue pajama top—suppose the jury with respect to that should find that the forty-eight puncture holes in your blue pajama top correspond or match up with the twenty one puncture holes in Colette's chest: do you have any explanation for that?" "No."
"Your honor," Blackburn said, turning away from MacDonald, "that concludes the government's cross-examination."
Bernie Segal and Wade Smith were exultant. "He stoned you with popcorn," Smith said gleefully, after court had recessed for the day.
MacDonald agreed. "Like I told you, Blackburn's chicken shit. I think he was really afraid of me."
6
When, on the morning of Tuesday, August 28, it came time for Jim Blackburn to make his closing argument to the jury (following an hour and forty-five minutes during which Brian Murtagh had summarized the physical evidence and its significance in detail), he began by stressing again the discrepancy between the injuries sustained by Jeffrey MacDonald and those inflicted upon the members of his family. As it had been throughout the seven weeks of trial, his tone was much more one of sorrow than of anger.
But he made his points: both of Colette's arms had been broken by the club as she had attempted to defend herself; her skull had been fractured; she had been stabbed over and over again with the knife—the Old Hickory knife, not the Geneva Forge knife that MacDonald had said he had found in her chest—and she had been stabbed twenty-one times in the chest with an icepick.
"Let's think about Kimberly MacDonald—the five-year-old," Blackburn said softly. "She also got hit by this club. It fractured her skull. The base of the skull—you saw that really just horrible picture of the back of her skull that was cracked in six to eight places. Her nose was broken and pushed off to the right."
It was obvious to jurors and spectators alike that it pained Jim Blackburn to have to talk about such evil, tragic matters; but it was obvious, too, that he felt a profound sense of duty—a moral, as well as a legal, obligation—once again to focus the attention of the jurors—nice people, all of them, his manner said; the sort with whom he would be happy to be friends; the sort with whom he would much rather be discussing happier things—upon the grisly details of the murders committed at 544 Castle Drive nine and a half years before, because only by doing so might some measure of justice be achieved.
And so he reminded them once again of the stab wounds in Kimberly's neck, and of the knife and icepick wounds in the chest of the two-year-old, Kristen.
"She didn't get hit with the club," Blackburn said. "She was the only one that didn't, but she got hit a lot with the knife and a lot with an icepick. At least thirty-three times somebody raised a hand and came down in her body with both a knife and an icepick.
"You remember also, that she had some cuts in her fingers. One, in particular, sort of long cut was in the nature of a defensive wound. You know what that suggests, ladies, and gentlemen? It suggests that before Kristen MacDonald died, she knew—she knew what was going to happen, and she tried to fight back."
The eyes of several jurors shifted quickly from Blackburn to Jeffrey MacDonald and back again.
Blackburn held their attention as he summarized the testimony of those physicians at Womack Hosp
ital who had examined and treated MacDonald: he reminded the jurors that the defendant had sustained only a bruise on the left side of his head, scratches down the left side of his chest, two knife cuts so superficial that they did not even require stitching, and the injury to the right side of the chest which had caused the pneumothorax.
"Well, I am not going to stand here today and argue for long, ladies and gentlemen, over whether a pneumothorax is or is not potentially life-threatening," Blackburn said. "That could go on all day long. But I do submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, even if the government concedes—which we do not—that that was a potentially life-threatening wound; even if we concede—which we do not—that point: how many—how many did he get compared and contrasted with the number his family got? One.
"How many icepick wounds did Dr. Bronstein say he saw in Jeffrey MacDonald's chest? None. How many icepick wounds did the emergency room orderly, the first person who washed up the defendant, say he saw in MacDonald's chest? None. How many icepick wounds did the chief of surgery say he saw? He said that he didn't observe any.
"Now, I am not trying to suggest by and in and of itself that because the defendant was not killed, he is, therefore, guilty of the slaughter of his family. I don't think that is sufficient evidence. I am not saying that. But I am saying that when you compare and contrast his injuries to their injuries, it certainly should raise in your mind the question as to why he was not hurt worse.
"And, ladies and gentlemen, let me ask you some other questions. Why, if these intruders had some particular grudge against the defendant, why didn't they kill him? Why, if they came there for wanton destruction, didn't they kill everybody? Why do you kill a two-and-a-half- and a five-year-old and don't kill the one who could identify you? Why? Why did the intruders leave the defendant alive?"
Blackburn then shifted his focus to the pajama top, holding it up, once again, in front of the jury. "Ladies and gentlemen, according to the testimony of Paul Stombaugh, this thing has forty-eight puncture holes in it. Is the defense saying that in a life-and-death struggle—that in a life-and-death struggle—you stand there with it in a stationary position while somebody comes at you with an icepick—I don't know how many times—and doesn't hit your wrists and doesn't hit your arms? Where are the icepick injuries to his hands? Where are the icepick injuries to his wrists and arms? By everyone's testimony on this subject, there were none. I submit that that story is not worthy of your belief.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest that the evidence shows that there was, in fact, a life-and-death struggle in the house that night—there truly was.
"I suggest that there were at least two white people involved in it. I suggest the evidence shows that there wasn't a black person involved. There was only one white male and one white female. The white female was Colette MacDonald and the white male was her husband, Jeffrey MacDonald. I suggest to you that some of the injuries that Jeffrey MacDonald sustained could well have been inflicted by his wife, Colette. We know from the evidence, ladies and gentlemen, that she fought—she fought mighty hard before she died. You don't get both of your arms broken by standing there waiting to be killed. You don't get all the injuries she got just standing there waiting to be killed. You just don't do it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant's theory of defense in this case has sort of been like this: i tell a story and you are to trust me. I am telling the truth. I loved my family. I loved Colette. I loved Kimberly and Kristen. Trust me. I couldn't have done this. I could not have done this. There has been a lot of character testimony. They say I can't do this; and therefore, because I am not the type of person, I couldn't do that.'
"Ladies and gentlemen, if we convince you by the evidence that he did it, we don't have to show you that he is the sort of person that could have done it.
"The other part of their theory is to attack—attack the Kassabs, attack the CID, attack the Justice Department, and even attack the government prosecutor. What they really want to do, ladies and gentlemen, they want to create confusion.
"But I suggest to you, ladies and gentlemen, that if we prove to you that that was MacDonald's footprint in A-type blood, if we prove to you that Colette's blood got on that pajama top before and not after it was torn, then it doesn't make any difference if there were five thousand hippies outside Castle Drive at 4 o'clock in the morning screaming, 'Acid is groovy; kill the pigs!'
"Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant, by all the evidence, is an outstanding doctor. I don't think anybody could dispute that. In 1970, he had a lot to live for. His wife, Colette, had a lot to live for, too. She had a dream, according to his testimony, of a farm in Connecticut with five children, and cats and dogs and horses. The children had a dream, too. They wanted to grow up. They wanted to be alive. They didn't get that chance. The defendant did. And the defendant wanted to continue, I suggest, his career.
"If we are correct—if we are correct, and the defendant did what we claim he did—if he could murder his family, think for a moment what he would do on the witness stand to save his life and his career. Think, ladies and gentlemen, about that when you judge the testimony and credibility of all the witnesses and you put his to the same test to which you put Paul Stombaugh, or any of the others. I can only tell you from the physical evidence in this case that things do not lie. But I suggest that people can and do."
There was a fifteen-minute pause for the morning recess. In the suite of offices reserved for the defense, Jeffrey MacDonald expressed impatience at Blackburn for taking so much time with what was so patently a preposterous line of argument. The highlight of the trial, from MacDonald's point of view—the three hours that would almost make the whole nine and a half years seem worthwhile—was going to be Bernie Segal's closing argument, in which he would not only dismantle the government's physical evidence piece by piece but would say all the things that MacDonald himself so badly wanted to say—about how narrow-minded, vicious, power-hungry bureaucrats had inflicted almost a decade's worth of needless suffering upon a great and compassionate physician, thereby depriving him of the opportunity to try to recover from the most grievous personal loss a man can suffer.
The afternoon would bring Bernie Segal's finest hours ever in a courtroom—there was no doubt in MacDonald's mind about that—and he could scarcely contain his irritation at being made to sit, as if in a waiting room, while Blackburn nattered on about irrelevancies.
There was, however, in Blackburn's manner, when he resumed his closing argument at 11 A.M., a gravity and intensity which made it plain that no matter how Jeffrey MacDonald might view it, he, Jim Blackburn—in the last hours now of the first murder case he'd ever tried—did not intend to fill the remainder of the morning with idle chatter.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he began, "when you take all seven weeks that you all have been here and all these charts and all this testimony and all the bench conferences and you pour them all out the window, you are left with two things on which I suggest that you have got to make a decision.
"One is the defendant's story and his credibility. If you believe it is true, if you believe everything he said, then your task is relatively simple. You will acquit him.
"If, on the other hand, you contrast that with the physical evidence and somehow it doesn't wash, it doesn't make sense, then you have got a little bit more of a difficult task and it might take you a little longer.
"I suggest that when you compare and contrast his story versus the government's story, you have got to come down on one side or the other, because I suggest to you that the evidence in this case—if it shows nothing else—shows that what he said and what the physical evidence says are not reconcilable. They are diametrically opposed.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I am not about to suggest that the burden of proof ever shifts to the defendant, because it doesn't. It stays with us.
"But you recall on cross-examination that we asked the defendant a lot of questions—that if the jury should find this and that, did he have an explanation. An
d you recall essentially his testimony: 'It would be pure conjecture,' or 'No,' or 'I can't recall.' Perhaps he does not have to explain, but think for a moment if you were on trial for your life and the only thing that made your story perhaps not believable was its inconsistency with the physical evidence.
"Don't you think if you could explain it, you would? Don't you think for one moment if you were on that stand and somebody asked you a question like I asked Dr. MacDonald and you could tell me, 'Mr. Blackburn, you are an idiot. Here is the answer. Bam': doesn't it make sense that you would do that? I suggest that it does.
"What about the blood—the Type A blood that Paul Stombaugh testified was on the pajama top before it was torn? Did you hear any defendant's experts say that there wasn't Type A blood on the pajama top before it was torn? Did you hear that? No, you didn't. And don't you know if they could have had an expert here from somewhere to say that they would have, because, ladies and gentlemen, the defendant's story is that he placed the pajama top on Colette after she was dead.
"All of the evidence, however, suggests that that pajama top was ripped before and not after it was placed on top of the chest of Colette MacDonald. Well, what does that suggest to you?
"It suggests, ladies and gentlemen, that Colette MacDonald bled on that pajama top before it was torn. We asked the defendant if he had an explanation for that, and he said not to his knowledge. Don't you know that if he could have explained it, he would have?
"We even know that Kimberly's AB blood type was on the pajama top. How did it get on there? Well, we know—if you believe the defendant's story—that on the first visit to the master bedroom—the first circuit—he took it off and put it on Colette's body and then he went to check Kimberly and then he perhaps got Kimberly's blood on it. But he did not see Kimberly until he had the pajama top off. How does the AB blood walk from Kimberly's room to the master bedroom and get on the pajama top? We asked him that question, and his response was, 'It would be pure conjecture.'
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