After further research and reflection about the case, I am now forced to echo the words of my colleague Dr. John Thornton. Is Jeffrey MacDonald innocent? I do not know. Did he receive a fair trial? No, if the blood typing was indeed wrong and the FBI recreation of the folded pajama top was not valid. And doubly no, if the FBI was aware of a discrepancy in blood typing.
In the MacDonald case, forensic science was indeed on trial. But in convicting MacDonald, did it lie? Again, I do not know. But in light of the controversies that still cloud the forensic evidence presented at his trial, I strongly recommend that further investigation be undertaken by legal authorities before Jeffrey MacDonald is forced to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
THE LOVE-TRIANGLE MURDER
The Buddy Jacobsen Case
1
The alleged “love-triangle” murder of John Tupper on August 7, 1978, by Howard “Buddy” Jacobsen over the affections of Melanie Cain, twenty-three, a stunningly beautiful young model, was, on its face, an open-and-shut case. Tupper had been shot, stabbed, and beaten to death. Jacobsen’s apartment, on the same floor as Tupper’s, contained evidence of violence, such as a shattered mirror and a bullet shell in the wastebasket which matched a bullet found in Tupper’s body. Even more damning, Jacobsen was later spotted at a trash dump in the Bronx next to a crate in which Tupper’s body was burning.
In sum, all the factors leading to a verdict of guilty were present: a motive (jealousy), forensic evidence, and the testimony of a key witness, Melanie Cain, who placed Jacobsen at the scene of the crime.
Despite the apparently overwhelming evidence against him, Buddy Jacobsen said he did not kill Tupper. In fact, Melanie was just “another girl” to him, one of dozens. Tupper, he said, was a narcotics dealer, and had been killed in an argument over drug money outside the apartment of Joe Margarite, a reputed drug dealer who lived on the same floor as Buddy. Then his body had been dumped into Buddy’s apartment. Buddy, believing that he was being framed for a murder and panicky that a police investigation would ruin his model-agency business, did not call the police. Instead, he had his construction workers take the body to a Bronx dump, then went up there himself to check what they were doing. It was interesting that Margarite disappeared the day of the murder. But the press, the public and, eventually, the police preferred the love-triangle motive, as outlined emotionally by Melanie Cain.
Buddy Jacobsen, the shrewd, streetwise boy from Queens who had grown up to make it big in Manhattan, was arrested and charged with murder.
2
Buddy Jacobsen’s life was shaped by his famous uncle, Hirsch Jacobs, who was one of the most skilled horse trainers in the history of thoroughbred racing. Early in life, Buddy went to work for his uncle, learning how to care for skittish thoroughbreds. Then he went on his own as a trainer. Lacking the capital needed to purchase thoroughbred foals of famous sires at auctions, he created a new plan: to buy promising horses at claiming races and develop them into winners. This he did so successfully that for three years, from 1963 to 1965, he saddled the most winners in the country.
Then, an underdog himself, Jacobsen championed the rights of stable hands to a pay raise—and led a strike against the major tracks. Thoroughbred racing in this country was, and is, controlled by members of an establishment elite. Furious at the ethnic young Jacobsen, an outsider who was stirring up so much trouble, they waged a battle against him and his strikers, and won. Jacobsen lost his license and was barred from training horses at all the important tracks.
But Jacobsen not only survived a blow that would have crushed other men, he prospered—and in two ways. Financially, he turned his attention to real estate, and soon owned an apartment house at 155 East Eighty-fourth Street and another large property nearby. Personally, he discovered the joys of lovely young women, moved to Manhattan from Queens, divorced his wife and began the life of a playboy.
As a landlord, Jacobsen instituted a novel policy: only beautiful young models and actresses, aged eighteen to twenty-two, would be allowed to rent apartments in the building. When Jacobsen opened a model agency of his own on the first floor, the final ingredient for amorous fun was in place.
But future tragedy arrived in the person of Melanie Cain, a lissome blonde, only eighteen years old, who was an immediate success in Manhattan’s competitive modeling world. The two fell in love. Melanie moved into Buddy’s apartment on the penthouse floor and, in the process, became the leading model, and the co-owner, of his agency.
By Melanie’s own account, Buddy was far from faithful. Once she actually caught him in flagrante delicto in the apartment with another one of the beautiful models. Tiring of his infidelities, she turned her attention to the tall muscular John Tupper, a friend of Jacobsen’s from Queens, who described himself as a restaurateur. After his death, the FBI described him otherwise, as a “subject reportedly head of a group that smuggles cocaine into U.S. from South America.”
The mutual attraction between Tupper and Melanie Cain blossomed on a romantic trip to the Bahamas, but upon returning they had a problem. Tupper’s apartment was on the same floor of the building as Jacobsen’s. They would be living in close proximity to the man she had just abandoned, and Jacobsen was angry. He wanted Melanie back.
Thus the stage was set for a love-triangle murder. But, bizarrely, another tragedy would intervene—and cast its shadow over the future Jacobsen case.
3
Cheryl Corey and Scott Shephard were in love. Cheryl was a young model at the Elite model agency, owned jointly by Buddy Jacobsen and Melanie Cain. She also lived on the fourth floor of the apartment house at 155 East Eighty-fourth Street owned by Buddy, where Melanie was now residing in the apartment of her new boyfriend, John Tupper.
On the night of August 5, 1978, the two young lovers were on a seventeenth-floor balcony of an apartment house on East Eighty-fifth Street, perhaps embracing, perhaps just leaning against the railing of the terrace. Perhaps, also, they were pushed. No one knows for certain, because the railing collapsed, and the two youngsters fell through the air, clinging to each other. Their bodies plummeted through the back roof of a supermarket before striking the ground.
According to Jacobsen’s later recollection, news of the tragedy to a tenant struck him like a thunderbolt when he heard about it the next morning. He knew that the police would soon be making inquiries, and the last thing he wanted for 155 East Eighty-fourth Street was police attention. The reason? Too many of his male tenants had underworld connections, from Tupper to Joe Margarite.
Knowing that Melanie might soon be questioned by the police because she was co-owner of the model agency which employed Cheryl, he went around the corner and down the hall to her apartment. Melanie told the rest of the story in court, at Jacobsen’s trial for murder, which began on January 30, 1980.
The prosecution faced a problem at the trial. Even though the forensic evidence in Jacobsen’s apartment was damning, the “drug angle” constantly kept intruding. Tupper had been fingered by the FBI as a narcotics smuggler; Joe Margarite had disappeared; and, worse, there were bullet holes found in Margarite’s apartment, outside of which Jacobsen claimed the killing had taken place. So Melanie Cain’s testimony would be crucial to the prosecution—both in establishing a motive and in showing Jacobsen’s movements on the morning Tupper was murdered.
Melanie delivered handsomely. As to motive, she told of harrowing face-to-face confrontations and emotional telephone calls with Jacobsen, who was determined to win her back from Tupper and even offered a bachelor’s last sacrifice, marriage. Yes, she said, he was jealous of Tupper.
But her account of the events of the critical morning was even more damaging to Buddy because:
1. It placed him in his apartment at the time of the murder. (Jacobsen’s alibi was that he was out of the apartment house completely at that time, checking the construction work on the building at his other lot.)
2. It revealed that his apartment was a shambles at the time she returned to
it, shortly after Tupper was murdered.
3. It showed that Jacobsen attempted to cover up the crime.
This was Melanie’s dramatic account of that eventful morning. She awoke just before 9 A.M. on that Sunday. Tupper was still asleep, so, after enjoying a cup of tea, she prepared to shower, and found there was no hot water. She left 7C, where she and Tupper lived, and went around the corner to 7D, where she and Jacobsen used to live, and banged on the door. Jacobsen listened to her complaint, checked his own water, then checked an apartment neighboring 7C, leased by a blond stockbroker, Leslie Hammond, who was away for the weekend. Hammond’s water, like his, was hot. “Wait awhile,” he told her. “The hot water will come on soon.”
But, according to Melanie’s story, it didn’t, so she dressed in a gray-blue man’s shirt, white painter’s pants and Frye boots, and at 9:45 went back to Jacobsen’s apartment to complain again. This time he asked her where she was going, and she said she had an appointment with a real-estate agent to sign a lease for a new apartment for her and Jack Tupper.
A few minutes later, Melanie told the court, Jacobsen knocked on her door to tell her that Cheryl Corey had been killed the night before. Melanie said she thought he was joking and slammed the door in his face, but later reconsidered and went to his door again. There Jacobsen told her that Cheryl Corey’s two roommates on the fourth floor had telephoned him to say the police had informed them of Cheryl’s fall from the balcony. Melanie said she would stop in at the police precinct house after signing the lease and find out more details of the death. She then testified that she reminded Jacobsen that the police would be questioning him because he had been out with Cheryl just two nights before.
On her way out of the building, Melanie visited Cheryl’s roommates, who said they would go to the precinct house and find out everything, then went to the real-estate agent’s, where she signed the lease for her and Tupper’s new apartment. She said she then telephoned Jacobsen from an outdoor booth.
Why did she telephone her ex-lover whom she had been seeing all morning? Why couldn’t she wait until she returned to the apartment house? Melanie claimed the real-estate agent had told her of a radio newscast which said that the Cheryl Corey tragedy was an accident, not a murder. Showing unexpected concern for the man who allegedly had been frightening her, she said she called him right away because she knew he would be worried.
Defense attorneys were suspicious of that call, because it was too convenient for the prosecution. It placed Jacobsen in his apartment at the time of the murder. Not only that, Melanie claimed Jacobsen’s voice was short of breath, panicky and high-pitched. She told him she wanted to talk about what happened to Cheryl but he barked, “I can’t talk to you, I’m on the other line,” and hung up.
Arriving back at the apartment house approximately an hour and a half after she had left it, Melanie, for some reason, didn’t go to her own apartment to tell her new lover about the lease and talk about their new apartment. Instead she banged on Jacobsen’s door again. No one responded, but, she claimed, she heard whispering and clanging noises inside.
Later, after talking again to Cheryl Corey’s roommates about the accident, she returned to the seventh floor—and found Jacobsen on his knees in the hallway, cleaning up the rug, which was now splotched with white paint. Jacobsen stood up and walked into his living room, and she followed him in. There she saw a shattered mirror, cushions from the couch strewn on the floor, and a fire in the fireplace—in August—and noticed that a rug was missing.
Apparently unconcerned about these obvious signs of violence, she returned to her own apartment, and found that Tupper was missing. Still unconcerned, it would appear, she dozed for almost two hours before setting out to look for her new lover. After checking around the neighborhood, she returned once again to Jacobsen’s apartment and banged on the door. This time she heard not whispers but the sound of a floor sander, and no one responded to her knocking.
Later, back in her apartment, she heard noises. She looked through Jacobsen’s peephole and saw Jacobsen engaged in activities the police would later term a “cover-up.” Jacobsen and his son, Douglas, were cutting up the paint-splotched rug into fragments and stuffing them into plastic garbage bags. She also saw Jacobsen enter Margarite’s apartment and emerge with paper towels.
The significance of the paint-splotched rug was obvious, according to the prosecution. The paint covered bloodstains, and Melanie had seen Jacobsen attempting to destroy the evidence.
The defense attorneys were vastly suspicious of Melanie’s story, and in cross-examination they attacked it on many levels:
1. The sheer profusion of her alleged visits, and calls, to Jacobsen’s apartment, many of them so convenient for the prosecution, was bizarre.
2. The telephone call to Jacobsen from an outdoor booth. What was so urgent? A radio news report? Had she really made the call, or had she said she made it to place Jacobsen at the scene at a time that he said he was not there? The defense pointed out that in a preliminary court proceeding over a legal motion, Melanie had not mentioned the “radio report.” Instead, according to the transcript:
Q. Did you talk to Mr. Jacobsen while you were down there [at the real-estate agency]?
A. Yes, I did. I called him at a phone booth. To inform him about a previous death of a model that was in our agency who had fallen off a terrace building that night.
The defense pointed out that Jacobsen already knew about the death; in fact, he had informed Melanie about it, in person, before she left the house.
3. Her visit to Jacobsen’s apartment immediately upon returning to the building also inspired suspicion. The defense attorney said, “You had just signed a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-month lease for a new apartment for both of you, and instead of going to Tupper’s apartment to tell him, you went to Jacobsen’s…. I’ll tell you why you didn’t go to Tupper’s apartment. Because you knew Tupper wasn’t there!” This implication was based on Jacobsen’s apparent belief that Melanie knew more than she was saying about Tupper’s murder.
4. Melanie’s subsequent visit to Jacobsen’s apartment, when she saw the apartment a shambles. The defense said Jacobsen’s allowing her to walk right into the apartment, where he had supposedly just murdered her lover, was a strange action indeed. But, again, it was so useful to the prosecution.
Nevertheless, as Melanie left the witness stand, most courtroom observers believed she had survived intact, if slightly battered. After all, the forensic evidence in Jacobsen’s apartment supported her story of violence there.
The defense had a different story to tell. It began its counterattack on the entire prosecution case with forensic evidence of its own, stating that blood had been found on a table in Joe Margarite’s kitchen, a bullet hole in his closet, and two other suspicious holes in his bedroom window, all of which indicated that the shooting had begun in Margarite’s apartment, and culminated in the hall outside when Tupper attempted to flee.
I was part of the prosecution’s counterattack.
4
In January 1980, I received a telephone call from one of Jacobsen’s attorneys, who asked me if I would analyze the blood found in Joe Margarite’s apartment. Also, he told me, the police had found what they believed to be one of the murder weapons, a sledgehammer discovered in the trunk of a car belonging to one of Jacobsen’s construction workers, Sal Prainito. (The gun and knife also used in the brutal slaying had never been found.) He wanted my opinion as to whether that hammer had been a murder weapon.
Medical examiners are officers of the county or other legal components of the state, and rarely receive an opportunity to testify for the defense in a murder trial. Instead, we’re most often called upon to assist the prosecution with analyses of evidence. I told Jacobsen’s attorney I would be pleased to give testimony at the trial, but that it would, of course, be impartial—and this proved more prophetic than I had expected.
Needless to say, if blood of Tupper’s type had been found in Margarite’s ap
artment, it would be crucial evidence in favor of Jacobsen’s version of events. But the analysis of the blood done by my toxicological experts (for which Los Angeles County was reimbursed by Jacobsen’s attorneys) showed that the bloodstains discovered in Margarite’s apartment were not of the blood type Jacobsen hoped to find—that of Jack Tupper. Instead we analyzed it as Type O, while Tupper’s was Type A.
Nevertheless, somewhat to my puzzlement, I was asked to testify at the trial, and a month later Buddy Jacobsen, a lean, smallish man with a mustache, a quick smile, and an attractive young lady on his arm, met me at the airport in New York. As he drove me into the city, Jacobsen talked pleasantly and seemed neither bitter nor tense. He struck me as very personable.
In court, because my bloodstain analysis had not produced the desired results, I found myself in a rather peculiar position. Very soon after beginning my testimony, I realized the defense attorney wanted me to say that the blood testing I had done for him was, in fact, not valid because it was not one hundred percent accurate.
It was easy for me to testify to that because all pathologists know that blood typing is treacherous.
The three steps in analyzing blood are: (1) Is the stain blood? (2) Is it human blood? (3) What type is it?
Until very recently the benzidine test was used to discover whether a red or brownish stain is blood. To test a dried stain in the laboratory, we take a sharp instrument and peel off a crust. This crust is dissolved in a saline solution, then applied to a Q-tip. Blood contains hemoglobin. (“Hem” is an organic substance containing iron, and “globin” is a protein.) When hemoglobin contacts benzidine it turns blue, and we know the stain is blood. Recently, however, benzidine has been declared carcinogenic, so we now use phenolphthalein, which is less sensitive, to determine whether or not the stain is blood.
We next discover whether the blood is human by a precipitation test. Rabbits injected with human blood, which is foreign to them, develop antibodies. We take the serum containing the antibodies and pour it into a test tube on top of the suspected human blood dissolved in distilled water. If it is human blood, a faint white zone appears between the blood solution and the rabbit serum.
The Coroner Series Page 27