Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

  I finally asked him, once, about the meeting with Penny Wells at the train station in November of 1969. At first he denied— as he had under oath—that any such meeting had occurred. Then he said, "If it did occur, the most had happened is that I ran across Penny. She may have been working in New York at the time, and we ended up getting off the same train or something like that, and I kissed her hello. If I did see her at the train station it was absolutely by chance, and this so-called embrace was simply a kiss hello from an old girlfriend to an old boyfriend."

  I did not even bother to ask him about her meeting him at the airport upon the occasion of his June 1971 arrival in California, because by then I had learned, as had Allard Lowenstein ten years before, that, "He'll say anything to anybody."

  Thus, there had been no making love on the infield of the Saratoga racetrack during Happy Pappy weekend or a later spring visit to Skidmore. The Saratoga racetrack is open only during the month of August, at a time when Skidmore is not.

  And, during the "fifteen days" between the completion of his internship and the date of his reporting to Fort Sam Houston, there had been no vacation to an island he thought might have been Aruba. There had been, in fact, only a single weekend between those two phases of his life—a strained and hectic weekend that had been spent moving Colette and the children from the Bergenfield apartment to Patchogue, where they would be spending the summer.

  There had also been no "most memorable" lovemaking session on the couch in the living room of the Kassabs' Washington Square apartment during Thanksgiving vacation of MacDonald's freshman year at Princeton. The Kassabs did not even move to New York City until the summer of the following year. In fact, throughout her freshman year at Skidmore, Colette had not even dated Jeffrey MacDonald: she had continued to see her high school boyfriend, Dean Chamberlain. It was not until her sophomore year that she and MacDonald resumed their relationship.

  Thus, the entire, vivid recollection—of his first days at Princeton and the sudden excitement of having become an Ivy Leaguer and the impulsive decision to pursue a career in medicine, all being intertwined with his receipt of that first titillating letter from Colette, and of having rushed, with sweaty palms, up to Skidmore—is false.

  A false creation, one might suggest, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain.

  Of course, I was not the only one to whom he told stories that were not true. Having his nose broken four times in high school, and becoming the first Patchogue High School graduate in more than twenty years to attend any Ivy League college—statements he made to Dr. Sadoff in Philadelphia in April of 1970—these, too, were false.

  There was no truth either to the story he told benefactor Bob Stern late one night in August of 1970, toward the end of the Article 32 hearing. This was during the week that the proceedings had been recessed to allow MacDonald to undergo psychiatric interview and testing at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington. In the midst of this trip, he had flown to Philadelphia to visit the Sterns for a weekend.

  At that time—three months before he spoke to Freddy Kassab about it on the phone—Jeffrey MacDonald told Bob Stern that he had already tracked down and killed one of the hippies who had attacked him and had murdered his wife and children.

  Gradually, I came to learn things about Jeffrey MacDonald from other sources: facts of which not even those who had prosecuted him had been aware.

  Such as: he had actually made two trips to California in the summer of 1971. The first, by plane, was when Penny Wells had met him at the airport. But there had been a second trip, after a return to the East, when he had moved out to stay. This second trip was made by automobile and MacDonald had been accompanied by a sixteen-year-old-girl—the daughter of family friends from Long Island, whose parents thought she might find it an enriching experience to traverse the United States in the company of the all-American boy they had known so well ior so long, and who was struggling so hard now to recover from his recent tragedy.

  Throughout the journey—all the way from New York to California—Jeffrey MacDonald had sexual relations with the sixteen-year-old girl.

  I learned also that later that summer, not long after MacDonald had taken up residence in Huntington Beach, he received a visit from a close friend of his mother's—a woman he had known since childhood. She brought with her her ten-year-old son.

  During the course of the visit, which extended over a period of weeks, Jeffrey MacDonald became sexually intimate with his mother's friend. He himself had told me about this during one of my visits to him at Terminal Island. Later, in another part of the country, I located the woman and she confirmed that the story was true, though she was a bit chagrined that he had chosen to make me aware of it.

  I asked her what had caused her to terminate the relationship, expecting her to say either that finally the impropriety of the situation had started to bother her, or simply that summer was ending and it was time to go home.

  Instead, she said she had left abruptly—before she had planned to—because of two incidents involving her ten-year-old son. The first, she said, occurred when MacDonald—angered by the boy's misbehavior inside his apartment—had carried him outside and dangled him by the feet over the edge of the dock, threatening to drop him head first into the water.

  The second incident, the woman said, had occurred later in the summer when she, Jeff, and her son were out for a cruise on his boat. Again, the boy had done something to anger MacDonald. This time, the woman said, MacDonald had grabbed the boy and had told him, in an even more furious and more threatening tone, that upon returning to shore he was going to take the boy's head and hold it over the front of the boat and crush his skull against the dock.

  Eventually, I spoke to the boy—now a young adult attending an Ivy League college—about his recollection of these incidents.

  "You have to understand," he said, "my parents were divorced and when I was growing up, I hardly ever saw my father. So Jeff was not just like a friend, or even a big brother. Jeff was God to me at that point."

  In that context, he said, the first incident had not been unduly alarming. Perhaps just a form of roughhousing that had gone a little too far. But the second episode—the scene on the boat—he said "I remember with real terror to this day." He could not recall what in particular he had done to so anger MacDonald, "but he came at me, yelling, and I remember kind of a fire in his eyes. It really, really was scary. I didn't know what he was going to do. In fact, what he did was to throw me in the water—he threw me off the side of the boat while it was moving and I can remember actually feeling relieved that he hadn't done anything more.

  "But I will never forget it. I will never forget that look in his eyes. You know, maybe as a kid you perceive things more directly, in a way, than you do as an adult. But ever since that moment on the boat I believed that he must have been guilty. Just from seeing that kind of fire in his eyes. And I did not want to stay around him anymore. I was very frightened and I told my mother I wanted to go home right away. And we did."

  4

  On November 27, 1979, lawyers for Jeffrey MacDonald filed a brief with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in which they renewed their argument that MacDonald had been denied his constitutional right to a speedy trial and in which they also cited instances of what they believed to be grievous error on the part of Judge Dupree. Chief among these was Dupree's decision to exclude from trial the testimony of the individuals with whom Helena Stoeckley had discussed her possibile involvement in the murders.

  Oral argument on these points was heard by a three-judge panel of the appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, in February of 1980. Considerable attention was focused on the speedy trial claim, because it was this which had proved so persuasive in 1976 that a separate panel of the same court had ordered the indictment dismissed.

  The question of just what was intended by the framers of the Sixth Amendment when they wrote that every accused was entitled to a "speedy" trial was one which had defied precise
judicial analysis for many years.

  In 1972, however, the Supreme Court had provided four specific criteria for use in the evaluation of such claims. These were: length of delay, reason for delay, the defendant's assertion of his right, and whether or not the defendant had been prejudiced by the delay. (Prejudice was defined as being any consequence of the delay which resulted in "oppressive pretrial incarceration," which interfered with the accused's right "to minimize anxiety and concern," in regard to the accusation, or which created "the possibility that the defense will be impaired.")

  * * *

  On July 29, 1980, by a 2-to-1 decision, the Fourth Circuit panel found that MacDonald's Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial had indeed been infringed upon, and to such an extent that the jury's verdict should be set aside, the sentence of three consecutive life terms in prison should be vacated, and the original indictment dismissed.

  Writing the majority opinion, Justice Francis D. Murnaghan stated that "while we cannot and do not assess the correctness of the jury's verdict," and while "the required judicial balancing process necessary ... has been particularly difficult ... the vital balancing tips the scales decisively in favor of finding a violation."

  Murnaghan based this finding in part upon his belief that the two-year delay between the submission of the final CID report in June of 1972 and the convening of the grand jury in 1974 had been the result of the Justice Department's "calloused and lackadaisical attitude."

  MacDonald's claim, in Murnaghan's opinion, clearly met the first three criteria as established by the Supreme Court. The vital question was the one concerning prejudice, and here the trial testimony of Helena Stoeckley, in Murnaghan's view, provided the definitive answer. He wrote:

  Had Stoeckley testified as it was reasonable to expect she might have ... the injury to the government's case would have been incalculably great. The possible reasons why Stoeckley did not so testify are several. But the principal reason she asserted under oath was failure of memory. The government's inexcusable delay of over two years' duration cannot be eliminated as a potential—indeed a probable—cause of that memory lapse.

  Though he likened Stoeckley's memory to "a light bulb not screwed tight, blinking on and off," Murnaghan wrote, "Still ... the unavoidable principle remains that passage of time generally tends to erase memory," and he found that this "substantial proof of prejudice," when combined with "a showing of unreasonable delay," constituted a violation of constitutional rights serious enough to warrant dismissal of the charges.

  While the decision, he wrote, was "made more difficult by the terrible crime and by the fact that a jury has found MacDonald guilty after a protracted trial," the court could not condone

  "a prosecutorial method of obtaining convictions in violation of the fundamental constitutional rights of future generations."

  This opinion, in which Justice James M. Sprouse concurred, was dissented from vigorously by Justice Albert V. Bryan, Sr., who wrote:

  [MacDonald's] guilt and sanity were established to the satisfaction of the trial jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, this court absolves him forever on this hideous offense, shockingly laying his release exclusively on the failure of the government to prosecute within a shorter time than it did.

  Conceding that the government's rationale for the two-year delay prior to the convening of the grand jury warranted disapproval, Judge Bryan contended nonetheless that "Nothing in the record warrants the assumption that Stoeckley would have or could have given the testimony the majority would ascribe to her had the government secured its indictment earlier. Stoeckley herself in her trial testimony explains that her inability to recall the pre-dawn events of February 17, 1970 resulted from her consumption, earlier in the evening, of large quantities of drugs; she in no way indicated that time had weakened her recollection. . . . Indeed, the record fully upholds the government's contention that any culpable delay on its part had no discernible effect on Stoeckley's testimony."

  It was, however, the majority opinion which had the force of law, and so, by midmorning of the day the decision was announced, champagne was flowing freely in the emergency room of St. Mary's.

  Also pleased, though not expressing elation, was Jeffrey MacDonald's mother. "All I can say is thank God that in this land we still have some intelligent persons—somebody who can bring justice out of chaos," she said. "It's been ten long years and I'm still angry and frustrated. We've suffered and suffered and suffered, and while I'm joyful, I'm also sorry that there was not a total vindication of his name."

  Three thousand miles away, Freddy Kassab termed the decision a "travesty" and said, "I'll still stand by what I said five years ago. If the courts of this country won't administer justice, I will."

  The Justice Department announced its intention to ask for a rehearing before the full Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, but, on August 22—fifty-one weeks after his conviction—Jeffrey MacDonald was released on bail, pending further legal developments.

  He returned to his condominium at 16052 Mariner Drive, where he found his car and boat and Jacuzzi in good working order and Sheree Sizelove and his mother waiting faithfully.

  Even before the brief had been filed with the appeals court, friends of Jeffrey MacDonald had hired a private detective from Los Angeles to conduct an investigation into the case.

  The detective's name was Ted Gunderson, he had spent twenty-eight years with the FBI—having retired as head of the agency's Los Angeles division earlier in 1979—and the walls of his Wilshire Boulevard office were crowded with autographed pictures of such people as Gerald Ford, Johnny Carson, J. Edgar Hoover, Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown, Walter Matthau, Steve Garvey, Roger Staubach, and John Wayne.

  Gunderson had begun work immediately, bringing to his task great energy and enthusiasm, and the appeals court decision did not cause the slightest slackening of his pace. As he told the press the day the decision was announced, "We don't want Jeff to be known as a man who was let out on a technicality. We intend to prove his innocence."

  Gunderson, in fact, accompanied by a female psychic from the Canadian province of Ontario and working with the cooperation of Prince Edward Beasley, the retired Fayetteville detective, had already made contact with Helena Stoeckley.

  On May 1, the trio had located Stoeckley in a J. C. Penny's store in Greenville, South Carolina, where she was trying on nurses' uniforms. The psychic had handed Stoeckley a letter written the night before in which she said, "Five weeks ago, Jeff MacDonald came into my life and my entire world changed. . . . I met a man full of warmth, love, energy and life and I knew that he was innocent and had every right to be cleared."

  In the letter, the psychic pledged that MacDonald's friends would support Stoeckley "in every possible way both financially and emotionally" if she would only cooperate with them.

  At the time, Stoeckley had said, "I can't now. I wish I could." By October, however, she had expressed a willingness to come to California and discuss matters further with Gunderson. On October 25, after spending five days in a Southern California motel, and having been told by Gunderson that he would help her to resettle in a new location, to find a job, and to start a new life, Stoeckley signed a statement in which she admitted that she and five friends—Bruce Fowler, Greg Mitchell, Don Harris, Dwight Smith, and Allen Mazerolle—all members of a satanic cult (two of whom—Fowler and Mitchell—had been questioned, polygraphed, and dismissed as suspects during the 1971 reinvestigation), had entered 544 Castle Drive during the early morning hours of February 17, 1970, and had murdered Jeffrey MacDonald's wife and children in order to punish MacDonald for his refusal to supply methadone to cult members who were heroin addicts.

  On December 18, the Fourth Circuit Court split 5-to-5 on the question of whether to meet in full (en banc, as it is known in legal circles) to review the panel's 2-to-1 decision in the MacDonald case. The effect was (as had been the effect of the 3-to-3 split on the same question in 1976) to allow the panel majority's decision to stand. />
  An exultant Bernie Segal told the press that the vote was "a long-awaited Christmas present for Dr. MacDonald." Ted Gunderson released a copy of Stoeckley's confession to a Fayetteville, North Carolina, newspaper, and told Los Angeles reporters that "She gave names of everybody involved and gave details of the crime. It was a sex-drug-satanic cult and a Manson type murder." Gunderson added that Stoeckley's group had called itself "The Black Cult," and—still active—had committed "at least 13" murders altogether.

  On the East Coast, Freddy Kassab repeated, "If the courts won't administer justice, I will, in no uncertain terms. I'll sit just long enough to see what the Supreme Court does. There's no way that I'm going to let him walk around loose."

  Shortly before Christmas, MacDonald made a tape and sent it to me.

  "I'm sitting out on the dock right now," he said, "having a beer. Trying to tread that fine line between sitting inside a dark room and having some wine and really getting down in the dumps or sitting out in the sun, Southern California-style, and feeling good about life. I don't feel good about life, but I feel a little better than I did a couple of days ago, so I'm sitting in the sun and you're hearing ducks in the background.

  "To bring you up to date, Sheree and I are doing fine. We've come through, I think, a fairly rough period. I would say basically the problem has been that we're at very different stages. You know, I'm thirty-seven and fighting for a new place in the sun and an income and reacceptance into life or whatever, and Sheree at twenty-four bursting forth in the bloom of almost unspoiled youth and beauty.