The Journalist and the Murderer

by Janet Malcolm

  Now, in Bostwick’s office, I felt the familiar stir of something I hadn’t felt since my dismissal by McGinniss—something I recognized with delight, like the return of appetite after an illness. This was the feeling of gratified vanity that American journalism all but guarantees its practitioners when they are out reporting. In our society, the journalist ranks with the philanthropist as a person who has something extremely valuable to dispense (his currency is the strangely intoxicating substance called publicity), and who is consequently treated with a deference quite out of proportion to his merits as a person. There are very few people in this country who do not regard with rapture the prospect of being written about or being interviewed on a radio or television program. Even someone as smart and self-possessed as Bostwick said yes to me when I telephoned him from New York to ask if I could interview him and his client. His first step in the minuet was to say that his side of the lawsuit had not been fairly represented in the press, and that he hoped I would be more fair-minded. My first step, since I did not want to lose him and MacDonald as I had lost Kornstein and McGinniss, was to say that fairness was an ideal rather than something one could give or withhold at will—and anyway it was not a quality that writers had a very big stake in cultivating. He then murmured his appreciation of this “honest” answer—with which, of course, I had simply taken ingratiation to a higher level. Throughout my stay in California, I maintained the posture of the bluntly honest reporter who says what she thinks and never tells a Wambaughian untruth. I believe that the meaning (or meaninglessness) of this posture was completely understood by Bostwick and his associates, and, later, by MacDonald and his various friends and followers. I think that by the time I arrived on the scene everyone involved in the MacDonald-McGinniss lawsuit had become thoroughly familiar with the deepest structures of the journalist-subject encounter, and was under no illusions about a new journalist with a new cover story. But how many of us with no illusions left about the nature of romantic love will for that reason turn down a plausible lover when one comes along? Don’t a rare few affairs not turn out badly? And isn’t the latest lover invariably different in kind from all the previous ones?

  In Bostwick’s office, I knew it wasn’t only the fine California climate that was giving me such a feeling of well-being. The metaphor of the love affair applies to both sides of the journalist-subject equation, and the journalist is no less susceptible than the subject to its pleasures and excitements. In our talk and in the transcript of the trial, McGinniss had made a point of distinguishing between the reporting and the writing phases of the journalistic enterprise, speaking of them almost as if the one had nothing to do with the other, and as if the reporting and the writing were done by two different people. While this confession of doubleness was McGinniss’s undoing at the trial—the contradiction between the nice guy who had lived in the fraternity house with MacDonald and had written to him in prison and the coldhearted “best-selling author” of Fatal Vision was simply too grotesque—it is in fact an accurate description of the general journalistic case. An abyss lies between the journalist’s experience of being out in the world talking to people and his experience of being alone in a room writing. When the interviews are over and the journalist first faces the labor of writing, he feels no less resentful than the subject will feel when he reads the finished text. Sometimes the labor seems particularly hard. In 1985, in answer to an interrogatory by the plaintiff, McGinniss wrote of “too many sleepless nights, too many terrible dreams, too many blank, dull, empty mornings spent staring out the back window of my house, cold coffee in hand, postponing for another minute, another five, another ten, the dreadful task of going back upstairs and again confronting the chilling realization which, against my will, was forming itself.…” The realization was that MacDonald had murdered his wife and children; but no writer can read this passage without recognizing in it the feeling of not wanting to get to work on something that may not come out well—and McGinniss had special reason to feel anxious about how Fatal Vision would come out.

  But now, as I waited for Bostwick, the problem of writing was for me, as it had been for McGinniss in the early days of his encounter with MacDonald, like the problem of death: it did not interfere with the pleasures of the present. From Bostwick’s repeated references to his mother in the trial transcript and from the sound of his friendly, Plains States voice on the telephone, I had formed an image of him as a distinctly salt-of-the-earth type, and had imagined his office as being fittingly unpretentious: a couple of amiably seedy rooms, say, over a diving-equipment-rental shop on a commercial drag. The actual Bostwick office, in a building at the westernmost end of Wilshire Boulevard, was a place of the most advanced and sleekly expensive design. Beyond a reception room where Mozart was playing on a tape deck and an elegantly dressed receptionist sat at a light-gray counter, a conference room furnished with a lacquer table and ten chairs of a vaguely Oriental design was visible through a glass wall, and beyond that was a breathtaking view of the Pacific, which looked as if it, too, had come from an authoritative postmodern design firm.

  Bostwick had put a room at my disposal, where I could peruse a looseleaf book of trial exhibits, which were not yet in the public domain, and had assigned an assistant to look after me. Toward noon, he called in to say that the case was settled. That evening, Bostwick, his wife, Janette (a pretty, delicately boned, soft-spoken woman, who is a Gestalt therapist), and I went out to dinner together at a restaurant near the office. The occasion had a light, celebratory atmosphere. Bostwick reminisced about the early days of the case. “When MacDonald first came to us, we told him that his libel case was worthless because he was libel-proof,” he said. “How can you damage the reputation of someone who has been convicted of murder? But when MacDonald gave us his letters from McGinniss, immediately on reading them—since we already had the news articles in which McGinniss told reporters he had decided MacDonald was guilty during the trial—we said, ‘This is a classic case of fraud.’ I took a deposition from McGinniss in 1985, and after an hour in the room with him I knew we had him. I just rubbed my hands with glee from that day forward, because I knew what I could do on cross-examination. It wouldn’t even have to be a very good cross-examination.

  “That first deposition was in New York,” Bostwick went on, “and then, a year later, I followed it up with another, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which is close to Williamstown. McGinniss had refused to come to New York for the second part of his deposition. He said, ‘Last time, I was courteous to you and came to New York. This time, you’re going to have to do it in Massachusetts.’ The law says that you can’t drag a person too far from his home, so I went. As it turned out, it was a great trip. It was late October, just after the Mets had won the World Series. My flight went right up the Hudson to Albany, and it was the most beautiful plane ride I’ve ever had. It was a crystal-clear day. From Albany I drove to Pittsfield. Kornstein had a much harder time getting there. He left Manhattan about the same time I left Los Angeles. It was more trouble for him that it was for me.” Bostwick laughed. “Can you imagine lawyers posturing over this sort of thing—‘Well, they won a victory on that one, making us go to Massachusetts’? That happens so much in this business you’d be shocked. People fight bitterly over these things, and then find themselves waist-deep in mud and asking themselves, ‘How did I get here? What happened?’ You acted like an ass, that’s what happened. Sometimes I wonder about being a lawyer. I wasn’t always one—I was a Peace Corps volunteer and a translator and an engineer and an Army officer first.”

  Bostwick traded his empty plate for his wife’s half-full one, and as he took an appreciative forkful of blackened catfish he said, “McGinniss said he owed it to Colette and to the kids to write the book, but—as I said in my closing argument—it wasn’t them he owed, it was the Bank of New England. If you read those letters to MacDonald, you’ll see that he was in financial trouble the whole time. That’s why he had to keep deceiving MacDonald into cooperating with h
im until he could write his best-seller. He had taken the publisher’s advance and spent it. He wasn’t free to tell MacDonald the truth.”

  I was interested to see that, even though the lawsuit was settled, Bostwick was still in the grip of the dislike and contempt for the defendant which had informed his work in the courtroom. Evidently, to be a good trial lawyer you have to be a good hater. A lawsuit is to ordinary life what war is to peacetime. In a lawsuit, everybody on the other side is bad. A trial transcript is a discourse in malevolence.

  I asked if Bostwick didn’t think it possible that McGinniss had been telling the truth in his letters to MacDonald—that he had loved him as well as hated him.

  Bostwick, as if suddenly remembering that he was no longer in the courtroom and could relent toward his adversary without risk to his side, nodded agreement. “Things weren’t simple for him. He had conflicted emotions.”

  Janette, who hadn’t spoken very much, now said, “In my work, a patient will come in and say, ‘This is the truth about me.’ Then, later in the therapy, a significant and entirely opposite truth may emerge—but they’re both true.”

  “It’s the same with the judicial process,” Bostwick said. “People feel that it’s a search for truth. But I don’t think that is its function in this society. I’m convinced that its function is cathartic. It’s a means for allowing people to air their differences, to let them feel as if they had a forum. You release tension in the social body in some way, whether or not you come to the truth.”

  “But in a criminal trial,” I said, introducing the subject to which every discussion of the MacDonald-McGinniss lawsuit inevitably leads, “isn’t there only one truth? Didn’t MacDonald either commit these murders or not commit them?”

  “I don’t believe he did,” Bostwick said, “and I wouldn’t have taken the case if I thought he had. I probably explained it best to my daughter when she started being harassed at school because of my involvement in the case. I said to her, ‘Look, nobody knows. I’m not saying I know he didn’t do it. Only God and Dr. MacDonald know, and neither of them is talking. But I believe he didn’t do it. His descriptions of the four intruders matched people seen within five or six miles of his house a couple of hours before the murders. I’ve never had it explained to me how he was able to describe those people.”

  At the trial, Bostwick had pressed McGinniss on his certainty that MacDonald had committed the murders, reading aloud a passage from Fatal Vision in which McGinniss, referring to MacDonald’s mother, wrote, “There were too many things I could not say [to her], for instance that I knew her son had killed his wife and children.” Then Bostwick said to McGinniss, “You don’t really know he killed his wife and children, do you?” The exchange continued:

  A: Well, I know that he’s been convicted, and the conviction has been confirmed by every appeals court that’s considered it.

  Q: That’s not what it says in here, though, Mr. McGinniss. That’s why I asked you the question in your own words. You don’t really know, do you?

  A: I know to my own satisfaction, yes, after the four years of intensive investigation I did.

  Q: Did you ever talk to anyone who you believe knows that Dr. MacDonald committed the crimes?

  A: Well, the victims are dead. Can’t talk to them. And I came to believe that MacDonald simply didn’t tell the truth.

  Q: Have you ever talked to anyone who knows that Dr. MacDonald committed the crimes?

  A: Well, I think you’re getting into an area of epistemology here, Mr. Bostwick.

  Q: That’s right. I agree with you.

  A: Yes.

  Q: Did you ever talk to anyone who knows?

  A: I couldn’t talk to Colette. Couldn’t talk to Kimberly.

  Q: Did you talk to anyone who knows, Mr. McGinniss?

  A: Yes, I did.

  Q: Who did you talk to?

  A: I talked to MacDonald.

  Q: You know that he knows?

  A: I know in my heart that he knows.

  Q: Did he ever tell you that he did?

  A: He certainly didn’t.

  Now, at the restaurant, Bostwick spoke of his own willingness to live with doubt. “Given the facts as I know them—and there’s a lot of evidence on both sides—I prefer being uncertain to taking the easy way out and getting rid of my discomfort by being absolutely certain. I don’t know, and no one on this earth can be absolutely certain of the truth here. Anyone who professes to be absolutely certain I really distrust.”

  MY FIRST sight of MacDonald—which took place the next day—was of a tall, well-built man in a light-blue cotton jumpsuit negotiating a feat of poise. A prisoner at Terminal Island is brought to the visitors’ room in handcuffs; he is released from them when he puts his wrists through a slot in a barred door so a guard on the other side can remove them. Meeting a visitor under these circumstances would not seem to offer much scope for a soigné entrance, but MacDonald somehow managed to get through the humiliating ritual as if he were an actor swiftly shedding his costume before greeting friends in the green room, rather than a prisoner coming out of solitary confinement for a few hours. He had been transferred to Terminal Island from the federal prison in Arizona where he was serving out his sentence so that he could attend the McGinniss trial, and had not yet been sent back. During the trial, for bureaucratic reasons, he had been kept “in the hole” at the prison, and was still being held there. His cell was five feet by nine, and was furnished with a bunk bed and a toilet; he was allowed out for exercise for one hour a day.

  MacDonald and I sat facing each other across a small, plastic-topped table in a very small room that was separated from an identical visitors’ room (which remained unoccupied) by a glass partition. The rules had changed at Terminal Island, and journalists were now allowed to bring in notebooks and tape recorders; thus a tape recorder sat on the table between us. MacDonald had brought a clipboard to which a thick sheaf of papers was attached, and he talked rapidly and relentlessly, like an executive or a politician with a prepared line of patter always at the ready; he used “we” a lot, instead of “I.” However, unlike many compulsive talkers, who regard what you may occasionally say as an annoying interruption, he would fall silent and pay very close attention whenever I spoke. I could almost feel the intensity of his listening, and I was struck by his intelligence as an interlocutor. Only gradually would the string of his interest in what I was saying slacken and would he relapse into the old, armored, obsessed, aggressive story—“unjust conviction,” “biased judge,” “suppressed evidence,” “new witnesses”—by which his existence had been shaped for the eight years since his conviction.

  Both in the prepared story and in his unpremeditated responses MacDonald used language that was at curious odds with his person: he himself bristled with tense aliveness, but his language was dead, flat, soft, clichéd, unnuanced. The discrepancy became even more marked when, back in my hotel room, I listened to the tape recordings I had made in the prison. Isolated and stripped of the man’s strong gestural presence, the plain words had an awful puerility. In Fatal Vision, a great many pages are given over to excerpts from the tape recordings that MacDonald made for McGinniss in prison, and I recognized the language: “The year at Princeton was incredibly great,” a section entitled “The Voice of Jeffrey MacDonald” begins, and goes on, “I was in absolute love with Colette and I thought having Kimberly was neat and we had tons of people over to the house.”

  A few months after seeing MacDonald, I had dinner with Michael Malley, and at the end of the evening he brought up the problem of MacDonald’s speech. “Language is not one of Jeff’s skills,” he said. “He doesn’t express his feelings well, and he doesn’t express subtleties. If I were to remake Jeffrey MacDonald, I’d start with his language—simply to make him more expressive. Language is what makes people human, and it is the primary way we have of knowing who other people are. I think there were two reasons why Jeff lost the criminal trial. One was that the judge hamstrung us in the evidenc
e we could present. And the other reason was Jeff. He didn’t have the ability to make the jury believe him. This is an idea that Jeff doesn’t like. He thinks he tells his story well. But I always say to him, ‘The best time I ever heard you tell your story was at the Army hearing, when you broke down and stopped talking, when you couldn’t go on talking’—and that grizzled Army colonel and those three Army officers sitting up there with him choked back their sobs.”