The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

  Stombaugh’s testimony on this forensic evidence stunned the defense and, for the first time, turned the case around against MacDonald. Before his appearance on the stand, prosecution witnesses withered under the cross-examination of Bernard Segal, who again headed the defense and again brought out all the incredible sloppiness of the Army’s investigation. But Stombaugh was FBI, one of the masters of the finest crime laboratory in the world. And, in soft tones, he annihilated MacDonald as he reported the results and analyses of his tests.

  Example: Fibers from MacDonald’s pajama top had been found in the children’s rooms. This fact, discerned by the Army in 1970 but ignored in the prosecution, was important evidence against MacDonald. because he had said that when he found his wife dead he placed his pajama top on her chest, then went to the other bedrooms to check his children. If so, how had fibers from this pajama top that he had left in the master bedroom gotten into the other rooms? Obviously, he had torn the pajama top not in a struggle with intruders in the living room, where no fibers were found, but in a struggle with his wife. Then he had worn it as he went to his children’s bedrooms to finish the slaughter. Only later had he taken the top off and placed it on Colette’s body.

  Example: A crumpled bedsheet and bedspread had been found in a corner of the master bedroom. The Army in 1970 had made nothing of this. But the FBI had examined the sheet and found that it contained the bloody imprint of Colette’s neck, shoulder and pajama sleeve, as well as the cuff of MacDonald’s pajama sleeve. This was evidence that supported the prosecution’s murder scenario, Stombaugh said, because it showed that MacDonald had killed Colette in Kristen’s bedroom, then used the sheet and the bedspread to carry his wife back to the master bedroom, again as part of his staging of a crime committed by intruders.

  But it was Stombaugh’s next testimony that rocked the court, a report on a creative forensic experiment that had taken weeks to perform. Stombaugh said that one of his technicians, Helen Green, had folded MacDonald’s pajama top “as near as possible” to the way it had been found on Colette’s body. When that was done, it was seen that the forty-eight puncture holes in the folded pajama top exactly matched the twenty-one wounds in Colette’s chest. In other words, the pajama top had not been punctured in a struggle with intruders. Nor had MacDonald gently covered his wife with the top in grief after he found her dead. This new evidence proved that he had cold-bloodedly stabbed her through it twenty-one times.

  Jurors hung on Stombaugh’s every word and his description of that test. In fact, Stombaugh created incredible difficulty for the defense. In the military hearing in 1970, Segal had been able to concentrate on evidence indicating intruders: candle-wax drippings, unidentified fingerprints in the jewelry box, witnesses who saw a blond woman and other intruders in the neighborhood of Castle Drive. But Stombaugh’s forensic test, together with his other forensic evidence, so clearly labeled MacDonald a liar, and therefore a murderer, that Segal had to focus all his efforts toward proving that the FBI’s experiments and analyses were wrong.

  5

  Segal’s team of forensic scientists was headed by the distinguished Dr. John Thornton, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley as well as author of dozens of articles on ballistics, bloodstains and other forensic fields. Before the trial began, a local newspaper had billed the future courtroom proceedings as a personal war between two forensic giants, Stombaugh, and Thornton. And so it was.

  Thornton and his colleagues on the defense team were certain that Stombaugh’s new forensic analysis of the evidence was totally invalid, but they lacked the manpower and resources of the magnificent FBI laboratory to prove it. None of them could afford to spend weeks patiently folding and refolding a pajama top, as an FBI technician had done. But Thornton, a youthful-looking, bearded man with a quiet demeanor, had managed to perform some vital experiments and make some important analyses of the evidence. For example, Thornton said that if MacDonald had struck Colette with a club, as alleged, tiny droplets of blood would have sprayed on his pajama sleeves in “aerosol” fashion. But no such blood spatter was found on MacDonald’s pajama top, indicating he had not struck her. It was discovered, however, on the bedsheet next to Colette, so why not on MacDonald’s pajamas?

  And in reply to Stombaugh’s forensically electrifying folded pajama top, with forty-eight holes going into twenty-one, Thornton detonated a bombshell of his own. He claimed that Stombaugh himself, years before, in preparation for a grand-jury hearing in 1975, had examined the holes in the pajama top and charted certain of them as “inside-out” or “outside-in”; that is, each puncture revealed whether the icepick had been thrust into the garment from the outside or from the inside. But when the top was folded in the new FBI experiment by Green, the results did not agree with Stombaugh’s own findings; that is, when Green folded the garment to achieve her forty-eight holes aligned with twenty-one wounds, many of those holes contradicted the “directionality” of the thrusts. That meant the garment was folded wrong in her famous experiment and immediately cast doubt on its conclusions.

  Stombaugh’s forensic analysis, in my opinion, had been intelligent and remarkable—but I believe Thornton should have scored just as heavily with his rebuttal. However, testifying in open court under the cross-examination fire of a clever lawyer can be perilous. Thornton was in midstride in his testimony when he was overwhelmed by a lawyer’s favorite stunt—a courtroom demonstration.

  In my time I too have seen laboratory research turned into mockery by lawyers with a clever sense of theater. So it happened to Thornton when he was explaining an experiment which showed that if the pajama top had been jabbed by an icepick while in motion, the holes would be round. The prosecution contended that such holes would be jagged and that the round holes in MacDonald’s pajama top had not been made in a struggle with intruders, but when he had stabbed his wife through it. To prove his point, the prosecutor, Brian Murtaugh, held up an identical pajama top and asked the judge whether he and his fellow prosecutor, James L. Blackburn, could perform a demonstration.

  When permission was granted, Murtaugh wrapped the pajama top around both of his wrists, as MacDonald said it had been wrapped, then swung it wildly in front of him while Blackburn slashed at it with an icepick—and the jury stared wide-eyed. The demonstration ended with Murtaugh saying “Ouch!” as the icepick nicked his arm, and even Segal couldn’t help joining in the fun of the moment. “Do you want a doctor?” he asked Murtaugh, and pointed to MacDonald.

  Murtaugh then held the pajama top up for the jury to see. Needless to say, the holes were torn and jagged, not round, which indicated to the jury that MacDonald’s tale of an intruder’s thrusting at him in a fight was a lie. Thornton’s experiment in his lab had shown just the opposite, and he insisted in vain that the courtroom demonstration was not valid because there were no scientific “controls.” The prosecutors had wanted to produce ragged tears, so they had slashed away, rather than stabbed—but the damage had been done. Newspapers reported the next day that the jury was obviously impressed with the prosecutors’ dramatic demonstration.

  That night Thornton made notes for his next day’s testimony: “A rational scientist does not conduct an experiment when there is no intrinsic means of testing or evaluating the data derived. There is a seductive appeal to ad hoc experimentation of the Murtaugh-Blackburn type—but science must ultimately be…. judged in terms of process, not product.

  “Seductive appeal,” however, won the day in court.

  There was to be one more dramatic development in the case. For days anticipation had been building after it was made known that Helena Stoeckley had been found, and would testify. Potential witnesses had told defense lawyers that she had confessed to the murders many times. But others said that she was a dope addict who made up stories. What would she say on the witness stand?

  The courtroom was hushed as she spoke in a monotone in response to Segal’s questions. Where was she on the night of the murders? She didn’t remember
. Was she inside MacDonald’s house? She didn’t remember. Had she and friends committed the murders? No. And because of her denials the judge refused to allow other witnesses to testify about her confessions, under the “hearsay evidence” rule.

  Later, on many occasions, both to friends in private and on television in public, Stoeckley again confessed her guilt in the murders and even named another of the killers, a man named Greg Mitchell. She said she had been forced to testify otherwise at MacDonald’s trial for fear of physical harm from her cohorts. It is interesting to note, in the light of her later confessions, that she did appear on the witness stand with a cast on her arm, an indication of violence never explained. And shortly after her appearance on television, both Stoeckley and Mitchell died, in different cities.

  Stoeckley had been the defense team’s last hope, because Stombaugh’s recreation of the folded pajama top had obviously so impressed the jury. Their fears were confirmed during its deliberations when a request arrived from the jury to have the pajama top brought in for examination. Later they found that on the first ballot less than a majority of jurors had voted guilty. After examining the pajama top, together with photos of Stombaugh’s folded-pajama-top recreation, they eventually voted unanimously to bring in a verdict of guilty. In effect, that one forensic test had convinced them.

  Jeffrey MacDonald, the “All-American Boy,” stared at the jury as if uncomprehending. Nine years before, he had been found innocent of murder at the Army hearing. Now on the same evidence, he was declared guilty.

  A few days after the judge announced his sentence, it was a bitter Jeff MacDonald who spoke his last frustrated words to the judge before sentencing: “I don’t believe the jury heard all the evidence.”

  What did he mean?

  6

  In October 1984, I went to Berkeley, California, to interview my forensic colleague Dr. John Thornton. Amiable, shy, dressed in casual clothes, Thornton greeted me in his modest basement office on the campus where he teaches forensic science. He sat down behind his desk and said firmly, in answer to my first questions, “MacDonald did not get a fair trial. In fact, the physical evidence in this crime points more to his innocence than guilt. But that fact never emerged at the trial. The only new evidence the FBI produced at the trial was the folded pajama top, which Stombaugh did—and I think even the FBI was suspicious of that. I remember taking a walk with one of Stombaugh’s FBI superiors one day and he said, ‘Either Stombaugh did the best forensic work I ever heard of or it’s bull.’”

  Then Thornton said to me, “Look at this chart.” He handed me a chart of Stombaugh’s 1975 findings on the directionality of the thrusts in the pajama top as compared to the way the holes were aligned in the refolding experiment. The chart showed that in 1975, at the time of the grand-jury hearing, Stombaugh’s microscopic examination had been able to determine the directionality of thirteen holes in the pajama top. FBI technician Green’s refolding experiment years later placed seven of those thirteen holes in direct opposition to the direction of the icepick that went through them.

  “The pajama-top reconstruction was the single most devastating evidence against MacDonald,” Thornton said. “But directionality meant it didn’t happen that way.”

  He paused, leaning back in his chair, then said, “As a matter of fact, the whole case may be wrong.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “The whole case may be wrong because it’s based on the Army’s bloodstain typing. The FBI built its scenario against MacDonald on the bloodstains identified by the Army’s CID.” Thornton leaned foward. “There’s a person I know who was working at the Army Crime Lab in 1970, at the time of the murder, when those bloodstains were typed. He told me that in 1970 the FBI had looked at the Army’s blood typing and found it was different from the FBI’s own blood typing. To my knowledge, this was never disclosed. And if the Army was wrong, it changes the whole case against MacDonald. Remember, both the Army and the FBI in 1979 used the Army’s bloodstain typing to ‘prove’ where MacDonald went and create their murder scenario.”

  “Do you mean the FBI covered up?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m satisfied in my own mind that the FBI knew about the variance at the time.”

  Then Thornton added, “Bloodstain typing is treacherous, anyway. I would be astonished if mistakes weren’t made, with all those stains. Very probably there could be technical errors. But here a man’s life was at stake.”

  I asked him if any other new information had come to him since the trial. “Well,” he said, “there’s a witness who will blow the fiber evidence out the window.”

  The prosecution had scored heavily on fiber evidence at the trial, pointing out that MacDonald said he left his pajama top on Colette’s body before checking on the children. If so, how had pajama fibers gotten into both Kristen’s and Kimberly’s rooms?

  “You remember MacDonald’s pajama bottoms had been thrown away at the hospital?” Thornton said, with an air of excitement. “I’ve just learned recently that a hospital technician who was on duty the night of the murder is now ready to talk. He’s told Brian O’Neill, MacDonald’s new attorney, that MacDonald’s pajama bottoms were ripped from crotch to knee. You understand the significance?”

  I understood at once. If the fibers came from the pajama bottoms, then their presence in the children’s rooms was innocently explained. MacDonald had visited all three bedrooms in those pants, after placing his pajama top on Colette just as he had said, and the fibers came from the pants.

  And, suddenly, I saw the case against Jeffrey MacDonald in a new light. The prosecution hadn’t proven an affirmative case of murder against him. Instead they had proved only that MacDonald “lied” in his story. But that proof rested on three foundations: bloodstain typing, fiber evidence and the directionality of the thrusts through the pajama top. And now all three were either suspect or subject to very different interpretations.

  “Then you think MacDonald is innocent,” I said.

  Thornton paused before answering. “I don’t know. The only thing I know for sure is that MacDonald didn’t get a fair trial.”

  He stood up and moved toward another office. “Want to see a model of MacDonald’s house?”

  I followed him, and saw on the floor, a three-dimensional wooden model, about six feet long, of the MacDonald house, complete with miniature furniture. There was the living room in which MacDonald had or had not fought with intruders, the children’s bedrooms where they perished, and the master bedroom where MacDonald was found, stabbed and incoherent, half lying on the body of Colette.

  Using the model, Thornton and I discussed the movements of MacDonald that terrible night as they were reported by him and, contrarily, as they were alleged by the prosecution. Then he took me back to his office and began to assemble a pile of large file folders filled with documents, and manila envelopes containing hundreds of photos of every kind, ranging from the CID pictures of the crime scene on the night of the murders to personal photos of the defense team at work in Raleigh, including Segal, Thornton himself, the defendant Jeff MacDonald—and a smiling picture of Joe McGinniss, who had written the best-selling book about the case, Fatal Vision. Both the book and a television mini-series based upon it reflected the prosecution’s view of the case and left little doubt about MacDonald’s guilt.

  Thornton said he was still a friend of McGinniss, despite the book. “We don’t agree on the case, but I respect his motives. We correspond from time to time.” Then he added. “I also hear from Jeff MacDonald.”

  “What kind of letters does he write?” I asked.

  “The usual, I’m afraid. Filled with grievances. I feel sorry for him, but I wrote him last time that I will still help him to the best of my ability, but I can’t keep devoting so much time to it. I told him it’s a case—not a cause—for me.”

  I understood now why Thornton was piling up mountains of original notes and documents, as well as pictures, for me to take away. It was as if he were e
xorcising the case by giving me his valuable original material.

  Back in my room, going over the material, I found a notebook which contained an inventory of the objects Thornton had found when he visited the MacDonald house with his forensic team during the trial. The list began with a reminder of the husband and wife’s last happy moments together, on the night of the murder, sharing a drink. “Two liquor glasses in the drying rack to the left of sink in kitchen.”

  Then these items found on the walls and a bulletin board, speaking, as if in voices from the grave, of the everyday life of this typical American family:

  Coloring book picture—“I Love you Dad”—and heart Instructions for expectant mothers. Womack Army

  Hospital

  Kitten card

  Note and drawing—“I Love You to Mom and Dad”

  1970 calendar

  Valentine heart

  Valentine card

  Fort Bragg Catholic Church parish mass schedule

  Recipe for holiday bread

  School calendar

  Child’s drawing—“Kim”

  Easter card—“Dad—Love, Kim, Kristy”

  The MacDonald tragedy remains an agonizing mystery. If MacDonald destroyed his own loving family, then on this one occasion an otherwise normal man behaved with the almost inconceivable rage and cunning of a psychotic. But if he too was a victim, then the real perpetrators of the crime have gone unpunished, and MacDonald is serving a life sentence in prison for a horrible crime he did not commit.