Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

  "We're just at very different points and places, and I'm having a hard time either making her understand it, or whatever. We're just—we're not meshing gears real well, but lately it's starting to come around, I guess because I'm starting to feel a little better.

  "She has her own apartment, and that relieved a whole lot of tension and pressure that was unspoken between us, because I have no desire to play the father or the protector right now. I'm just doing too many things and sorting out too many of the past years in my head to totally help her, you know, grow up right now.

  "Aaah, let's see. Bringing you up to date on my activities, as incongruous as this sounds, and now seems to me, the Policeman's Benevolent Association of Long Beach has been hounding me to attend all their annual things which occur right around Christmas, so unfortunately—or, fortunately, I guess I should say, as the case may be—over the past four weeks I've been to three functions.

  "One was at the bar owned by Dennis Harrah, the lineman for the Rams, which is the big hit in Long Beach now, it's called Legends. And, ah, big Dennis, all six foot six and 260 pounds of him parades around, eyeing the twenty-year-old blondes who sneak in without proof, and the Benevolent Association had a cocktail party there and I went to it. It was extremely uncomfortable, the only thing that really happened of import was that the assistant director for the Long Beach Grand Prix assured me that he wants me back as medical director for next year's race. I've been medical director for the Grand Prix almost since its inception. I think the second year, I took it over, and we've done well by them and they have done well by us with top-flight medical care,

  "Then Sheree and I went to the Christmas party for the honorary policeman's association and there were five lifetime members, lifetime honorary members, in the history of the association, me being number one for saving a policeman's life who was shot in the stomach and was being mistreated at another hospital. And then Whitey Littlefield who was Frank Sinatra's manager and owner of the beer distributorship for this area, Somerset Distributors, is number two, and there are three other businessmen in town who have become three, four, and five, so there was a big dinner in our honor.

  "We had another. Whitey Littlefield, the same guy I just mentioned, has a birthday party each year. His birthday's at Christmas but he holds it early in December, and so we've been to these police parties, so I'm in this kind of strange frame of mind just coming out of Terminal Island and having a very different feeling about police in general, but still being wined and dined by the honorary and Policeman Benevolent Association group of people, and, ah, so I'm sort of masking some feelings as I'm spending some somewhat social evenings doing these things.

  "I trust you can hear the Medevac in the background—that's a National Guard helicopter going overhead. Ummm, let's see . . . [he shouts] Hey, Babe! [tape recorder clicks off].

  ". . . Excuse the interruption. I just had a pretty young thing stop by to say hello. God, she looked great, too. She's jogging from Cal State past my house, which is a pretty good jog. She's on about a seven-mile run. ..."

  In March of 1981 the Justice Department filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking that the Fourth Circuit speedy trial ruling be reviewed.

  Jeffrey MacDonald continued to report to his parole officer once a week. Except for one trip to Las Vegas, where he served as medical director for the Caesar's Palace Grand Prix auto race, he remained confined to the state of California, under the terms of his bail.

  He sent me a tape in May:

  "A reasonably good friend of mine, Mike Jenkins, was killed recently, and I've been sort of shoring up Pat Kinder, my former head nurse,, who was going with him. They were just getting ready to buy a house in Palos Verdes.

  "He's this ex-Green Beret, CIA-type, a little paranoid. As a matter of fact, and it's in kind of a strange way, we were getting closer together over a couple of issues. One was helping Ted Gunderson out with, uh, this, um, a rapid deployment force—an antiterrorist force for an Arab government, in which we're providing medical support. And Mike Jenkins was, you know, in on this with me. I finished a report for Ted Gunderson recently, which (a) was fun to do, and (b) it may mean a trip to the Middle East when I'm off bail, and (c) it was interesting kind of work for me—the antiterrorist force based on field medicine,

  "So anyway we were working together on that. And also about three weeks before his death I had gotten this call in the middle of the night from Pat Kinder that he had been arrested and [laugh] what should she do about it. And, basically, to make a long story short, he was leaving her house early one morning and there was a police unit nearby and there was—the story diverges here. He says there was a backfire, and the police say they heard a gunshot. So they stopped his van. And of course he always carries a couple of guns, one in the small of his back and one in his sock. He's a little paranoid, like I say. He's an ex-CIA guy for a long time, still identified himself with his code number. Anyway, so they found these guns on him which were not— clearly—not authorized, and so he was arrested. And we had to bail him out of jail in the middle of the night, and Pat Kinder didn't know how to go about doing it. So she called me. And we're old friends anyway and we usually help each other at times of crisis. But [laugh] we eventually got him a lawyer and got the $500, whatever the heck it was, together, and about eight o'clock that morning he was bailed out.

  "In any case, he was killed. He was filming a, uh—he's a free-faller, parachuter, and, uh, kind of heavy-duty. He probably has, I don't know, six-seven thousand jumps. And his business is photography. And he's kind of a famous guy for his free-fall photography. He does a lot of advertising for TV and for the media in which, you know, the shots are of, either of other free-fallers or some product or something, but involving parachuting. And so he makes his money as a photographer, basically involving parachute work.

  "In any case, he was making a commercial over a lake up near Big Bear. And the production crew wanted him to film it over the land, and he said, no, over the water. So he goes out of the plane and his first chute doesn't open. So he cuts it away, takes his knife out of his, um, his, the calf holster that he always carries a knife in for just that reason. And he cut away the shrouds on his main chute, which were all tangled, and he let it go free. And then he opened his reserve and his reserve didn't fully deploy. And he mildly crashed and burned into the lake. The really strange thing is, and the even more sad part of the story is, is that, he, um, was, apparently okay after he hit the water. The people on the shore had binoculars and they saw him hit the water and they saw him actually stand up, apparently on a sandbar. And they saw him cutting his parachute free. And then they turned their back on him and went to get in a rowboat and row out to him, and when they next turned around he was missing. And they found him out in the lake, drowned. Apparently he stepped off the sandbar trying to walk to shore. And he had two movie cameras on his helmet, and they weighed about forty pounds. And apparently he got underwater and couldn't get above water again once his helmet filled with water, and he drowned.

  "The clincher in it, the saddest of all, is that Pat had just taken off to go skiing up in Mammoth. And when she got back there was messages on her answering service to please, not to call anyone, but to call this guy who was her best friend— actually not her best friend but his best friend, who was, a guy who's now a vice-president of a bank out here, and he's kind of a famous guy in the Green Berets. He's called Captain Hook. He's a captain in the Green Berets and in Vietnam got his arm blown off, and he has one of these metal hooks. And he's a free-faller also, and he's a good friend of Jenkins and myself. And he's one of the guys who helped organize this relief mission to Nicaragua and Guatemala that we were doing in the middle seventies. There was a bunch of ex-Green Berets who had gotten together and gotten this relief mission with about 28,000 or 50,000 pounds of medical supplies and dried foods and stuff. And then we were stopped by the CIA because the pilot of our plane was on the outs with the CIA because of some operations in Bangladesh.
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br />   "Anyway, it gets very complicated. But the point was, Captain Hook had left a message on Pat's answering service not to call anyone but to call him. And she was replaying the rest of her messages, and among those other messages was a call from Mike, saying don't go skiing, please call me. And of course Pat immediately felt that she was the cause of his death and had she made the call that maybe he wouldn't be dead today, et cetera, et cetera.

  "So anyway, I had to sort of support her through this and ended up taking her to the funeral, which was an incredibly moving ex~perience. There was this, um, little chapel on the hillside out, fifteen miles from here inland, and it was filed with all these, oh, I would say it was packed to the brim with, you know, some couples and some young people and some old people and some families. But the majority, like 70 percent of the people there, were these strange assortment of CIA and Green Beret and undercover operatives and a lot of guys who'd been in the service together. And a lot of them kind of strange, and a lot of legends attached to some of these guys. And there wasn't a dry eye in the place. Mike is a fabulous person—was a fabulous person—one of these guys who really touched you just by knowing him. He was a high-impact person, without any question, no pun intended."

  He then provided an update on his social life, saying he wasn't really seeing Sheree anymore but was interested in someone else.

  On May 26, 1981, the Supreme Court announced that it would accept the MacDonald case for review, thereby denying him—at least temporarily—total and permanent freedom.

  On July 30, Helena Stoeckley wrote Ted Gunderson a letter in which she said:

  It is my opinion that in the preceding months I have been used as a pawn for your convenience and suitability. I also feel that I was coerced into signing a so-called "confession," and that I was exploited by means of false hopes and empty promises. Never have I seen a bigger mockery made of justice or such a shambles made of an investigation. . . .

  When I finally agreed to cooperate with you ... I gave you as conclusive a review of the events of the night in question as I could. You, in turn, misconstrued and distorted all statements I made to you, to be used against me at your convenience.

  In November, the Princeton Alumni Weekly reported in its notes on the class of '65:

  Sandra O'Connor began her term as a Supreme Court justice with two pending cases of special interest to us. The first is the university's appeal in the U.S. Labor Party case involving Princeton's right to control campus access. The second is the case against Jeff MacDonald in which a lower appeals court overturned his 1979 conviction because it said he had been denied the right to a speedy trial. Let's hope for good news on both!

  On December 8, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments. Jeffrey MacDonald flew to Washington for the occasion and told reporters, "I've been in this fight since I was twenty-six. The Vietnam war has come and gone and the government is still pursuing me. I've spent all of my emotions and most of my money fighting this. It's been a twelve-year struggle. I have no feelings anymore.

  "Brian Murtagh wants to put me in prison, despite the evidence. He is a berserk person being paid with tax money to do this to me. I am the victim of a middle-level bureaucrat run amuck. That gnaws at your innards. I have been told four or five times it was all over. I can't keep bearing this weight."

  He then returned to California and purchased a $200,000 condominium at the Mammoth Mountain ski resort, and traded in his Citroen-Maserati for a Jaguar.

  He was, by now, dating a twenty-year-old student from Long Beach State University. Her name was Randi Dee Mark with and she was, MacDonald said, "the first person I've felt great with since Colette."

  He had met her through her work as a volunteer at St. Mary's Hospital. "It was the day after I'd gone to his lecture on trauma," she told a Long Beach newspaper. "I met him in the hall and said, 'Hi, Dr. MacDonald.' He smiled and said, 'Hi, Randi,' and I couldn't believe it. He knew my name! My heart dropped. My face felt red and hot and I stumbled around for words. I probably said something dumb. ..."

  Despite the difference in age and background, and despite the uncertain future MacDonald faced, romance bloomed quickly. "It was strange," Randi Dee said, "from the very beginning— the sparks we felt. We are both vivacious, energetic people. We both love outdoors and children and music and just being together. We're so in love, so excited and happy with each other."

  In March, they decided to get married. "I dragged him into the drugstore and bought some brides' magazines, and he helped me pick out a dress. Then we made out our guest list. I'd call out a name from his address book and he'd say yes or no, whatever.

  "We decided on a big wedding in Newport Beach. And we decided on children, two of them. Jeffrey loves children."

  On the evening of March 24, 1982, MacDonald invited twenty-four friends to his Huntington Beach condominium. Randi Dee Markwith was already there. Champagne was served in crystal goblets and then four limousines pulled up to the door. Jeff and Randi got into the first limousine—a white one. They pulled out of the Mariner Drive complex and turned left on the Pacific Coast Highway, heading south toward Balboa Island, and their favorite restaurant, where dinner was to be served to the entire group.

  It was a perfectly lovely evening in every way. Just before the first course was served, Jeff stood to make a brief speech. He said that despite the fact that there remained "some clouds on the horizon," he and Randi had decided, "to say yes to each other, to say yes to love, to say yes to life." Then he formally announced their engagement.

  The food, he reported later, was superb. A choice of entrees: filet mignon, stuffed baby salmon, or veal. The only odd part, he said, was his mother. She would not eat. She did not even sample her main course. Having heard the engagement announcement, she just sat there, throughout the dinner, staring down at her plate, saying nothing.

  * * *

  On March 31, 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 6 to 3, that Jeffrey MacDonald's constitutional right to a speedy trial had not been violated.

  Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Warren Burger stated, "The Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial ... is designed to minimize the possibility of lengthy incarceration prior to trial, impairment of liberty imposed on an accused while released on bail, and to shorten the disruption of life caused by arrest and the presence of unresolved criminal charges."

  In the opinion of the court, the period from 1972 to 1974 could not be counted in any consideration of a speedy trial claim, because throughout that time there were no criminal charges outstanding against MacDonald, the Army having dismissed those which had originally been filed.

  'Inevitably," Burger wrote, "there were undesirable consequences flowing from the initial accusation by the Army and the continuing investigation after the Army charges were dismissed. Indeed, even had there been no charges lodged by the Army, the ongoing comprehensive investigation would have subjected MacDonald to stress and other adverse consequences. However, once the charges instituted by the Army were dismissed, MacDonald was legally and constitutionally in the same posture as though no charges had been made. He was free to go about his affairs, to practice his profession, and to continue with his life."

  In a footnote, Burger added, "There is nothing to suggest that the Justice Department acted in bad faith in not securing an indictment until January, 1975. . . . Plainly the indictment of an accused—perhaps even more so the indictment of a physician— for the heinous and brutal murder of his pregnant wife and two small children is not a matter to be hastily arrived at either by the prosecutorial authorities or by a grand jury. The devastating consequences to an accused person from the very fact of such an indictment is a matter which responsible prosecutors must weigh carefully. The care obviously given the matter by the Justice Department is certainly not any indication of bad faith or deliberate delay."

  In a separate footnote, Burger added: "Our analysis of the speedy trial claim is not . . . influenced by consideration of the evidentiary basis of the jury verdict. Th
e jury that heard all of the witnesses and saw the evidence unanimously decided that respondent murdered his wife and children."

  Burger was joined in his opinion by Justices White, Powell, Rehnquist and O'Connor. Justice Stevens filed a separate, concurring opinion, in which he disagreed with Burger's view that MacDonald's speedy trial rights had been in suspension between the Army's dismissal of charges in 1970 and the return of the indictment in 1975. He found, however, that because the murders constituted such "serious offense" the government was entitled to "proceed cautiously and deliberately before making a final decision to prosecute."

  Writing a dissent in which he was joined by Justices Brennan and Blackmun, Thurgood Marshall found that the majority opinion was "not justified by the language of the Speedy Trial Clause or the teachings of our cases, and it is hopelessly at odds with any sensible understanding of speedy trial policies."

  Marshall continued: "The majority's analysis is simple: the Speedy Trial Clause offers absolutely no protection of a criminal defendant during the period that a charge is not technically pending. But simplicity has its price. The price, in this case, is disrespect for the language of the clause, important precedents of this court, and Speedy Trial policies. ...

  "Nothing in the language suggests that a defendant must be continually under indictment in order to obtain the benefits of the speedy trial right. Rather, a natural reading of the language ('In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial,') is that the Speedy Trial Clause continues to protect one who has been accused of a crime until the government has completed its attempts to try him for that crime."