Similarities of MacDonald’s personality to Peterson’s are striking. Both men were “golden boys” (MacDonald’s Long Island high school in Patchogue not only voted him Most Popular but also Most Likely to Succeed), appeared to all to be loving, upstanding family men and husbands, and lied with particular aplomb. Especially intriguing in McGinness’s book are chapters in MacDonald’s own words, based on tape recordings the surgeon made after his murder conviction and describing his life and his relationship with his wife and children. He talks of some tough times raising a family amid training and work, and recognizes his wife’s difficulty being in charge of two young daughters, sometimes living with his parents, during his long work hours and army assignments. Yet he focused largely on his own work and a future that would bring him the most excitement and satisfaction with little concern for his family. He decided after medical school to join the army, noting he and Colette were cranky and “we didn’t have sex as much.”5 He looked at joining the military as an “adventure,” whereas Colette saw it as an “abandonment of the family and a chance for me getting killed,” he noted. “At the time, this didn’t bother me at all.” He also presents himself as a steadfast, loyal husband and father, yet witnesses and women stepped forward after his crime to reveal that he had serial casual affairs. He alludes vaguely to it himself when he noted at one point that he and Collette were “really recommitting ourselves to each other” and that there “weren’t other contributing things. . . . I wasn’t dating any nurses, I wasn’t seeing people on the side.”6 As an alibi, MacDonald’s tale of murderous hippies stands out as particularly over-the-top, much like Peterson’s overheated, recklessly exaggerated lies to Amber. In fact, Peterson came off in his trial as a pathological liar, who, as Amber said in the taped phone conversation with him played in court, “lied about lying.” Peterson seemed to lie simply as default mode. Once police began tracking his locations via cell-phone towers and calls, it was clear he often lied about his location with no clear reason why. Tracking showed him close to the Berkeley Marina when police were searching for Laci’s body, but he told his family he was hundreds of miles away. “Where are you?” his mom asked at one point. “West Fresno,” he told her. Hours later he called Sharon Rocha, who asked him, “Where are you headed now?” “Well, I’m actually in Bakersfield now,” he told her, but he was actually 220 miles away from there. He later also told his dad he was in Bakersfield, and two pals that he was in the town of Buttonwood. And his lies to Amber were so grandiose that it seemed impossible to maintain the subterfuge for any length of time. While he appeared to be cultivating a long-term relationship with his mistress, how would Peterson ever reconcile his lies about his parents’ Kennebunkport compound, fly-fishing stints with his dad and brothers, and trips to Europe? Yet he seemed to maintain a blind faith in his lies. When police confronted him with a photo of himself at a Christmas party with Amber, he told his family that it was “amazing” how much the “stranger” in the photo resembled him. Both Peterson and MacDonald seemed to have a preening arrogance when it came to their crimes. They were both overly confident that they could outsmart police and forensic evidence with very little effort. Peterson was so lackadaisical about his alibi that he couldn’t quite decide which one he was using—golf or fishing—and hadn’t bothered to work out the details of his fishing story.
Neil Entwistle, another killer dad who shares similarities with MacDonald and Peterson, shot his wife, Rachel, and baby daughter, Lillian, as they cuddled in bed in the family home in Massachusetts in 2006. Entwistle, from England, met his bride while she was studying abroad. They appeared to have an ideal marriage, and Entwistle was an affectionate, engaging husband who looked to be remarkably successful in his work as a computer-programmer whiz. The young couple rented a spacious, expensive home close to Rachel’s parents, Joe and Priscilla Matterazzo, who were crazy about their son-in-law and new granddaughter.
Police were contacted by Rachel’s worried parents when they were unable to reach their daughter. By the time an officer discovered Rachel and Lilly shot dead in the master bedroom, Entwistle had already fled home to England. Phoned there by Massachusetts State Trooper Robert Manning, Entwistle sounds eerily calm in an audiotape of the call that was played at his murder trial. He responds quietly, “Oh, yes, yes,” when the trooper asks if he’ll answer some questions. He tells of walking into his home to find his wife in bed looking “very pale.” When he pulls down the covers, he sees blood. “Lilly was a mess,” he adds, and says he realized instantly the two were dead. He offers no theory about the murders. “I don’t remember seeing the house disturbed,” he notes helpfully. Entwistle claims he had “no way of contacting” Rachel’s parents to alert them—“I didn’t know their numbers”—so he drove to their empty home, took a knife from the kitchen drawer and thought briefly of suicide (police said he had actually taken a long-barreled .22-caliber Colt revolver from the Matterazzo’s Carver home and was returning it after shooting his wife and daughter). Then he drove around aimlessly . . . “I’m not sure what was going on in my mind at that time,” he says on the tape, and “ended up at Logan Airport.” He sat for a time in the parking lot. “I wanted to kind of let the emotions out but nothing would come out,” he recalls to the trooper on the phone. “It just didn’t seem right what had just happened. I haven’t even cried yet,” adding, “I don’t know what I’m thinking at the moment. It doesn’t even seem real.” The trooper snaps, “Let me tell you, it is real,” and “something happened over here. I have a hard time understanding why you didn’t call 911.” Entwistle responds, “Yeah, I can see that.” He later asked if Rachel and Lilly could be buried together because “that’s the way I left them—I mean, that’s the way I found them.”
Investigators discovered he was deeply in debt and had no job in Massachusetts. He spent long hours on the Internet selling what he could on Ebay and running a porn business pushing things like “penis pumps”—and searching for new sex partners for himself. Detectives found extensive escort-service searches on his computer, apparently on his own behalf, before the killings, as well as searches on “euthanasia” and “smothering.” Entwistle agreed to return to the United States and was tried and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Several press reports remarked on his preternatural calm at his trial. At one point, while crime-scene photos of his dead wife and daughter were shown in court, the Boston Herald reported that he “broke down,” but in fact seemed to be giggling, and covered his mouth and lowered his head to hide his facial expression. Several newspapers reported that he was “laughing” or “smirking,” comments that drew a sharp rebuke from the defense. “Some of you were reporting our client, Neil Entwistle, was smiling or laughing,” said attorney Elliot Weinstein. “We are offended by that kind of reporting.” His co-counsel Stephanie Page added, “There is no way Neil would be laughing. He’s grieving. He lost his wife. He lost his baby.”
Judge Diane Kottmeyer spoke to the pure shock of Entwistle’s crimes when she sentenced him in 2008. “These crimes are incomprehensible,” she said. “They defy comprehension because they involve the planned and deliberate murders of the defendant’s wife and nine-month-old child in violation of bonds that we recognize as central to our identity as human beings, those of husband and wife, and parent and child.”
Entwistle and his parents still insist he’s innocent of the murders, and claim that Rachel murdered her baby before committing suicide. In the summer of 2012, Entwistle lost an appeal of his conviction, arguing that police had conducted an illegal search of his home.
On Saturdays the parking lot outside the mosque at the Islamic Center is a sea of black suits and colorful hijabs. Wendy Wasinski is sometimes among the crowd. She prefers a pale, purple veil (though she also wears light green) because it’s one of her favorite colors. Each morning, she first carefully tucks in her hair beneath an under scarf that keeps wisps from straying outside her hijab. She says her prayers in the mosque like millions of other Muslims around
the world. But worshipers at the Islamic Center also have very particular characteristics that set them apart. Some of the families will head to Country Kitchen for scrambled eggs and hash browns after services, a few of the kids will leave their parents to skateboard. Almost every one of them speaks English, and most talk with the flat A’s, rounded O’s, and the twang of an American Midwestern accent. The Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, Michigan, was the first and remains the biggest mosque in North America, and it’s in the heart of the largest concentration of Muslims in the United States. Nearly a third of Dearborn’s 100,000 residents are Muslim, and it’s not unusual to see signs in Arabic in the city or in nearby communities, like Warren, where Wendy lives. Most of the original Muslim families initially immigrated largely from Lebanon, but also from Yemen and Iraq. The new Americans, like earlier Americans, were drawn to the region by the promise of good jobs in the automobile industry.
The region is so concentrated with Muslims that it has become an unfortunate target in the Islamic-Christian cultural clashes in the United States, and a focus of Americans furious over a Muslim influence in the country. Right-wing evangelical preacher Terry Jones came to Dearborn to burn a copy of the Koran while the faithful raged in protests nearby. The YouTube anti-Islam video “The Innocence of Muslims” that sparked violent protests across North Africa and the Middle East in 2012 was particularly offensive to local Muslims, and hundreds took to the streets to protest—and were quickly accused online by conservative blogs like Atlas Shrugged and Jihad Watch of protests against the First Amendment.
One sign of assimilation, an indication that the community may have truly “arrived” in the United States, at least in the world of American pop-culturedom, was having its very own reality series—TLC’s All-American Muslim. The series focused on members of five Lebanese-American families in Dearborn, featuring a high-school football coach, a Dearborn cop, a young married couple, two sisters with very different attitudes about their religion and culture, and a young mom who married an Irish-American Catholic who planned to convert to Islam (and struggled fiercely with fasting during the holy month of Ramadan). Despite portrayals that made the families appear most strikingly like average Americans, the series instantly triggered controversy, and at least two advertisers withdrew their support after they were contacted by the Florida Family Association, a born-again Christian group opposed to featuring Muslims on national TV, arguing that it provided a conduit for “Muslim propaganda.” Lowe’s was the first advertiser to bail, though executives insisted it wasn’t because of pressure from any one particular group. While Lowe’s apologized for upsetting people with its action and emphasized that it was “committed” to religious and cultural diversity, a company statement released December 10, 2011, explained: “Individuals and groups have strong political and societal views on this topic, and this program became a lightning rod for many of those views. As a result we did pull our advertising on this program. We believe it is best to respectfully defer to communities, individuals and groups to discuss and consider such issues of importance.” The action triggered calls in turn by civil-rights groups, celebrities, and politicians to boycott Lowe’s. The Florida Family Association claimed other advertisers were fleeing the program. TLC stood by All-American Muslim, but the program was cancelled in 2012 after its initial season of eight episodes.
Beneath the headline-grabbing, glitzy reality-program battle that year was a far more gruesome culture clash that involved a murder—initially labeled by officials as one of a small new crop of North American “honor killings.” It involved a conflict between a Muslim man and his stepdaughter, arguments about wearing the hijab, and a rape. Wendy Wasinski’s 20-year-old daughter, Jessica Mokdad, was in her grandmother’s home where she had been staying in Warren, when the murder occurred the afternoon of April 30, 2011.1 She had just placed a box of her things on her bed. As the young woman stood there, ear buds playing music into her ears, her stepdad, Rahim Alfetlawi, 46, walked up behind her and shot her in the head. “I don’t know how you do that,” Macomb County Assistant Prosecutor William Cataldo told the judge at Alfetlawi’s sentencing a year later. “He walked up behind her, put a gun to her head, and blew her away.”
Figure 14.1. Jessica poses for a photo in a hijab and the modest clothing that her stepdad preferred. Courtesy of Wendy Wasinski, in memory of her loving daughter and best friend, Jessica Amanda Mohamad Mokdad.
The murder made national news because the media quickly labeled it as an honor killing in which Jessica was murdered to save her stepfather’s “honor.” He thought she was becoming “too Westernized,” said Cataldo after Alfetlawi was busted. “I think this was a very nice young lady wanting to experiment with Western culture without control and without abuse.”
But the “honor killing” label was immediately contentious. The brand angered many in the local Muslim community, who emphasized that the homicide had nothing to do with them, with their religion, or with their cultural beliefs. Jessica’s biological father, Mohamed Mokdad, and his wife complained to the press and went on TV to denounce the label, calling Alfetlawi a sick man obsessed with Jessica whose attack had absolutely no connection to Islam. County officials quickly responded to and removed the “honor” issue from the killings. This “has little or nothing to do with Arabic culture,” Cataldo clarified. “It has everything to do with male domination of women, something that transcends cultures.”
The case was complicated. Details emerged that Alfetlawi was obsessed with managing every aspect of Jessica’s life, to such an extent that he arranged to have spyware installed on her computer and phone, and he hid recording devices in their home and in family cars in which she traveled so he could track her every move. A frightened Jessica confided to a passenger she met on a train shortly before her death that she fought with Alfetlawi over her decision to go out without her hijab—and that she feared he would kill her one day.
Americans were on the alert for any hint of honor killings. There had already been a handful of the notorious honor murders of daughters by their dads in the United States. But as the circumstances of Jessica’s murder became clearer, it defied easy categorization as an honor killing. Even though he had raised her and treated her like his own daughter, Alfetlawi was Jessica’s stepdad, which raised issues about the sometimes-fraught relationships between fathers and stepchildren and the increased potential for violence uncovered by researchers Martin Daly and Margo Wilson. Other information emerged that Alfetlawi’s relationship was hardly a typical father-daughter interaction, and that the murder may have been the furious violence of a male losing control over a young woman he considered not a daughter, but a sex partner. In a particularly disturbing development, prosecutors revealed in court that Alfetlawi had raped Jessica at least once. Jessica told her mother of the attack the night before she was killed, Wendy told me in an interview. “He said that if I tell you, he would kill you, Mom,” Wasinski quoted Jessica as saying. Investigators believe Alfetlawi decided to kill Jessica in part to stop her from reporting the rape to police. “That’s what put him over the edge,” said Cataldo at Alfetlawi’s trial, though the prosecutor also pointed out that Rahim would be “embarrassed” if information about his rape became known, which could also represent a threat to his honor.
The crime became a locus of heated debate in the culture wars. Many argued that officials were too quick to brand Jessica’s murder an honor killing, while others then criticized law enforcement authorities for a “whitewash” after too hastily backing off the label because they were too concerned about “political correctness” in the face of anger by the Dearborn Muslim community. Some argued that branding the case an honor killing was a distraction from the serious problem of domestic violence and child abuse throughout the country, while others argued that it was one more nuance in a range of domestic murder that demanded a thorough examination. Jessica’s murder—yet another iteration of the murder of a child by her stepfather—did involve unique cultural aspects
of Alfetlawi’s background, but it also concerned the more common domestic-violence ingredients of American-style paternalism, access to guns, and sex abuse.
Jessica’s mom, Wendy Wasinski, was born in Hamtranck, Michigan, to a Polish-American Catholic family in Michigan, but grew up with Muslim friends. She met and fell in love with Mohamed Mokdad. They married and had a baby, Jessica, a “girlie girl,” as her mom described her daughter to me, who loved to wear dresses and play with dolls. “She was a compassionate, thoughtful girl. Jessica was always the kind of kid who would hold doors open for people, or get a shopping cart for an elderly woman at the grocery store,” said her mom. Wendy worked for a time at a daycare facility for elderly people and often took Jessica with her. “She had a blast with the old people, and they loved her,” said Wendy. Wendy and Mohamed divorced, but she then met Rahim Alfetlawi when Jessica was seven years old. Rahim raised Jessica like his own daughter, and the girl eventually donned the head-covering hijab veil of her faith in heartland America. “He cared for her, he watched after, he protected her,” recalled Wendy, who had converted to Islam just months before she met Rahim and quickly donned the hijab herself. Islam intrigued Wendy. She was impressed by the families of her Muslim friends. “Ironically, I especially appreciated how close their families were,” she told me. “They helped one another. You didn’t have to leave the home at 18. They were always there for each other.”
Figure 14.2. Jessica snuggles up to her mom, Wendy. Her mother, born in Michigan, converted to Islam before she married Jessica’s stepdad. Courtesy of Wendy Wasinski, in memory of her loving daughter and best friend, Jessica Amanda Mohamad Mokdad.
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