MacDonald, Jeffrey - Vanity Fair article on con...
The Devil and Jeffrey MacDonald
Debate still rages over whether handsome young Green Beret captain Jeffrey MacDonald slaughtered his pregnant wife and two young daughters in one of the most hideous murders of the 1970s. Now MacDonald—whose case has inspired countless articles, a best-selling book, and a top-rated TV movie, and who has rigidly professed his innocence—may finally get a new trial.
Jeffrey MacDonald isn't trying to charm today.
Usually, he's unhurried with the visitors who come to see him at the Federal Correctional Institution in Sheridan, Oregon, letting them know by his attention how important they are to him.
How was the flight? he'll ask, blue eyes riveted, perfect teeth set in an appealing grin. The food good? The hotel O.K.?
As likable as a next-door neighbor, he'll go on from there, talking sports, if his callers are fans; literature, if they like books; personal computers, if they're so inclined—though that's a wonder Jeff MacDonald, now in the 18th year of a three-consecutive-life-term sentence, has never seen. He can chat engagingly about anything, from homeopathic healing (a new interest of his) to his Princeton classmates, whose doings he keeps up with in the alumni news. Should mention be made of a relative who's ailing, he can even pass along some well-formed opinions. He was, after all, a very famous doctor in the Green Berets.
Only after he has done all that will the man whose high-school class in Patchogue, Long Island, voted him "most popular" and "most likely to succeed" begin to tell how the government of the United States came to convict him of butchering his pregnant wife, Colette, and their daughters, Kimberly, five, and Kristen, two.
But there are no soothing preliminaries this afternoon. Instead, Inmate 00131-177 is frowning at his watch.
He's bursting to talk, and there's a lot to talk about—starting with an appeals court's recent decision to allow DNA testing on two tiny hairs found beneath the fingernails of his murdered children. Nearly three decades ago, microscopic examination determined they weren't his. If the tests show they didn't come from anyone else in the household, either (and O. J. Simpson's expert Barry Scheck is already drawing up the exam procedures), he has his best shot yet at a new trial.
Or so his attorney Harvey Silverglate has been telling him. And Silverglate, who is also defending "Boston Nanny" Louise Woodward, is not the only one giving MacDonald reason to hope. A Florida congressman has taken up his cause, the press has been proclaiming his innocence, and encouraging letters by the hundreds have been pouring in—including a batch of crayoned good wishes from grade-schoolers of San Pedro, California. In the wake of an inspector general's report excoriating the F.B.I. lab that helped convict him, he's also back on the talk-show circuit, and Errol Morris, whose The Thin Blue Linegot a Texas inmate released from death row, is thinking of doing a film about him. Disney is considering a movie, too, and his supporters—who've ranged from Catholic nuns to the Long Beach Police Officers Association (he's an honorary, lifetime member)—have even erected a Web site, where, after checking out "The Top 10 List of Suppressed Evidence," interested parties are counseled to direct prayers to Mother Teresa or Princess Di. And, of course, there's the case to discuss, and all the reasons why Alan Dershowitz has been saying that "there are individuals in the government who may end up being indicted if this story comes out."
M acDonald's keepers, however, have allotted this visitor only four hours—hardly enough time to ingratiate, much less persuade. Uncharacteristically for someone whose grace while handling a powdered doughnut has been remarked on, he fumbles with the mint-green folders he's brought with him, and fumbles again as he opens one. As you watch him, he seems different. Not only from the yellowed newspaper photographs that show a young man of movie-star looks flanked by U.S. marshals and wearing handcuffs, but also from the tanned, confident figure who appeared on Larry King Live just a few months back. He has somehow gotten suddenly older—flabbier, jowlier, silver hair thinned. Even the khaki uniform he irons every day to keep the creases crisp has growing sweat ponds under the arms, though the room is comfortably cool. You wonder if, after 27 years, 11 months, and 5 days, the bloody occurrences at 544 Castle Drive, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, are at long last grinding him down.
With a relieved sigh, MacDonald extracts his prize, a lined sheet of tablet paper topped in doctor's scrawl by the word "Points." He scans the items below, then leans in close. "I'm running out of steam," he says, voice cracking. "This is my last chance."
Jeffrey Robert MacDonald, M.D., has had many chances since the day a North Carolina jury rejected his story that Manson-style intruders beat him unconscious, then murdered his family. Seven times his case has been to the U.S. Supreme Court in one form or another—a modern record for a criminal proceeding. In his appeals, he has raised claims about the impartiality of his judge, the ethics of his prosecutors, the validity of the more than 1,000 pieces of evidence used against him. He has also noted, time and again, that others have confessed to the crimes he insists he did not commit. And still Jeffrey MacDonald, whose case has been the subject of countless articles, a best-selling book, and a top-rated TV movie, sits in prison.
"I am a decent human being," he says, seemingly on the verge of tears. "My guilt was over not being able to defend my family. They died. I didn't.… I didn't have the luxury of choosing my assailants and telling them the foot-pounds per square inch they were to apply to my head and chest."
There are many who believe him. The Jeffrey MacDonald they see is not the murderous psychopath of Joe McGinniss's best-seller Fatal Vision, but the very embodiment of the American Dream: a handsome young man from working-class roots who starred on the football team, went to Princeton on scholarship, became a doctor, married his high-school sweetheart, and volunteered to serve his country in the Green Berets—then had his life snatched away in a hideous miscarriage of justice.
"He is the American Dreyfus," says Bernard L. Segal, the first of more than 20 attorneys who have represented him through the years. "The country tromps on him because a handful of players decide that their place in the sun is linked to destroying him.… It is everything we worry about in our government come true."
It has always been a puzzle, the MacDonald case, and to begin to unravel it requires going back some … to the cold, rainy night of February 16–17, 1970, and a one-story garden apartment on the grounds of Fort Bragg, where a young Green Beret captain then lived with his pretty wife and their two pretty daughters.
The evening, in MacDonald's telling, began in picture-book domesticity. Knocking off after his regular shift at the base hospital, he took Kimberly and Kristen to feed a pony he'd bought them that Christmas; then he went home, showered, and changed into a pair of blue pajamas. After a quick dinner with Colette and the girls—quick because Colette was heading off to a child-psychology class—he put Kristen to bed. Then, worn out by the 24-hour shift he'd worked the day before—moonlighting at a civilian hospital—he fell asleep on the living-room floor while watching television. An hour later, Kimberly awakened him and asked if they could watch her favorite program, Laugh-In. She went to bed when the show was over, and 40 minutes later Colette came home. They had liqueurs in front of the television; then, as Johnny Carson was brightening the screen, Colette, four and a half months pregnant with their first son, turned in for the night. Unready for sleep, MacDonald finished watching the Carson show and returned to a Mickey Spillane novel he'd been reading, only to be interrupted by Kristen's crying. He calmed her with a bottle of chocolate milk and finished the book around two a.m. Then, after washing the dinner dishes, he padded into the master bedroom, where he found Kristen sleeping next to her mother. He also found that she'd wet the bed. Not wishing to rouse his wife by changing the sheets, he carried Kristen back to her room and grabbed a blanket. Then he lay down on the living-room couch and immediately fell asleep.
The next thing MacDonald remembered was being awakened by Colette shouting, "Jeff, why are they doing this to me?" and Kimberly screaming, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!" Snapping his eyes open, he saw four figures standing over him: a black man in a fatigue jacket with E-6 sergeant's stripes on the sleeve, two white men, and a woman wearing a floppy hat over "stringy" blond hair. She held a flickering light in front of her face that appeared to come from a candle, and she was chanting, "Acid is groovy, kill the pigs."
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As MacDonald began to rise, the black man brought a club crashing down on his head. A second later, MacDonald felt a sharp pain on the right side of his chest; looking down, he saw the glint of an ice-pick blade. Hands pulled at him as he struggled up, yanking his pajama top over his head and onto his wrists. He used the top to fend off some of the blade thrusts, but the black man kept clubbing, and, finally, MacDonald went down on the steps of the hallway that led to the bedrooms.
When he awoke, MacDonald found Colette sprawled on the master-bedroom floor, the handle of a knife sticking out of her chest. On the headboard of the bed, someone had used a finger to write PIG in blood. MacDonald pulled the knife out and laid it aside before giving his wife mouth-to-mouth. Then, covering Colette's half-naked chest with the pajama top, he went to check on the kids. Both were lying bloody in their bedrooms. "We've been stabbed," he gasped into the phone. "People are dying."
Arriving M.P.'s found a charnel house. Colette had been stabbed with a knife a total of 16 times in the chest and neck—and 21 more times in the chest with an ice pick driven in to the hilt. She'd also been hit at least six times in the head with a club, and had had both her arms broken, apparently while holding them up to shield herself. In terms of sheer horror, the children were even worse. Kimberly had been struck in the head with a club at least six times. One blow shattered her skull; another—to the left side of her face—was delivered with such force that it splintered her nose and cheek, leaving a piece of bone sticking through the skin beneath her eye. While near death, she'd also been stabbed in the neck with a knife several times, so closely and precisely that a pathologist could only estimate the number of wounds at 8 or 10.
Kimberly's sister, baby Kristen, whose finger was cut to the bone by one wound (suggesting she'd been holding up her hand to protect herself), had a total of 33 stab wounds: 12 in the back, 4 in the chest, and one in the neck by knife; 15 more by ice pick in the chest.
The sole survivor was Jeffrey MacDonald, who was found lying with his arm around Colette. "Four of them," he whispered. "She kept saying, 'Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.'"
By the time the sun had risen, the army's Criminal Investigation Division (C.I.D.) didn't believe him.
There were a number of things that bothered 30-year-old William Ivory, the first C.I.D. agent on the scene. Apart from a tipped-over plant and a top-heavy coffee table lying on its side (a position it would never assume in subsequent tests), the tiny living room was undisturbed. Odder still, given all the supposed blade thrusts directed at MacDonald, just a single fiber from his pajamas could be found. In the bedrooms, however, there were dozens, including several found beneath Colette, others under Kimberly's sheets, and two more in Kristen's room—one lodged under her fingernail. The trouble was, MacDonald said that he hadn't been wearing the pajama top when he went to his daughters' rooms—he'd already laid it over Colette.
The blood in the house was also suspicious. There were buckets of it in the bedrooms (including Kristen's, where a bloody footprint matching MacDonald's was found exiting the room), but none on the living-room floor and only a drop too small to be typed on the hallway steps. MacDonald's glasses, located near the living-room drapes, did have a speck on the front of one of the lenses. But testing would match the blood to Kristen's. That was very odd, since MacDonald had said he wasn't wearing the glasses when he went to her bedroom.
Ivory later found the tips of surgical gloves beneath the headboard where PIG had been written in blood; they would eventually be judged identical in composition to a supply in a cabinet beneath the kitchen sink. On the floor alongside the cabinet, Ivory had also discovered drops of blood—the same type as Jeffrey MacDonald's. Outside, near the back door, there was another find: an ice pick, a sharp-edged Old Hickory–brand kitchen knife, and a bloody piece of wood the size of a baseball bat. All, testing would find, had been used in the murders. All, it would also be determined, came from the MacDonald apartment.
O ver the next six weeks, more evidence pointed in MacDonald's direction—not least his own statements. Three times shortly after the murders he'd said, "Be sure to tell the C.I.D. I took the knife out of my wife's chest." Why was he so fixated on the bent-bladed knife? investigators asked themselves. Their wonder deepened when tests indicated that the knife had never been in Colette's chest.
MacDonald's injuries raised eyebrows as well. According to a staff surgeon, MacDonald's most serious wound was a "clean, small, sharp" incision in the right chest, which caused an easily remedied partial deflation of a lung. There were some other, comparatively minor things, but no sign of any ice-pick punctures. His spirits did not appear to have been damaged much, either. Colette's stepfather, a New Jersey egg salesman named Freddy Kassab, learned that, while hospitalized, MacDonald had enjoyed a bottle of cold duck with some Green Beret buddies.
What MacDonald did not know then was that he and the members of his family all had different blood types—a statistical anomaly that allowed C.I.D. agents to track what had happened in the apartment. The scenario they put together had the fight beginning in the master bedroom, the likely trigger being some assault on MacDonald's masculinity. Colette, they speculated, got in the first blow, whacking her husband in the forehead with a hairbrush. As MacDonald retaliated by clubbing her with a piece of lumber recently used for some household chores (Colette perhaps swiping back with the bent-bladed knife), Kimberly—whose brain serum was found in the doorway—was struck, possibly inadvertently. Believing Colette dead, MacDonald carried his mortally wounded daughter back to her room, with no choice but to finish the job. After stabbing and bludgeoning her (Kimberly's blood was discovered on the pajama top MacDonald said he hadn't been wearing while in her room), he went to Kristen's room, intent on disposing of the last remaining witness. Before he could do so, Colette—whose blood was found on Kristen's bedcovers and on one wall of the room—regained consciousness, stumbled in, and threw herself over her daughter. After killing them, MacDonald wrapped his wife's body in a sheet and carried it back to the master bedroom, leaving a footprint of Colette's blood on the way out.
Then, the C.I.D. theorized, the cover-up began, with MacDonald taking his cues from articles on California and the Manson murders in a blood-smudged March 1970 edition of Esquire found in the living room. First, he fetched a disposable scalpel blade from a supply in the hallway closet. He then went to the adjacent bathroom and carefully stuck himself between his seventh and eighth ribs, an area with little sensation. Putting on the surgical gloves, he proceeded to the master bedroom, where, after dipping his finger in Colette's blood and writing PIG on the headboard, he laid his pajama top over his wife's chest and repeatedly stabbed through it with an ice pick. Finally, with the gloves still on, he used the master-bedroom and kitchen phones to summon help; threw the club, the ice pick, and the Old Hickory knife out the back door; messed up the living room; and flushed the gloves and scalpel blade down the toilet (or threw them in the garbage, which the C.I.D. allowed to be carted away before inspection).
It all seemed very tidy. The C.I.D.'s investigation, however, was anything but. There was a miasma of errors—from failing to seal off the crime scene (26 people tramped through before it was finally secured, including an ambulance driver who stole MacDonald's wallet), to losing the blue fiber found beneath Kristen's fingernail and a piece of skin taken from beneath one of Colette's nails, to letting a doctor turn over Colette's body and move the pajama top. Incredibly, investigators also allowed 40 sets of fingerprints to be destroyed (the bloody footprint was lost, too, in the process of removing it) and potentially critical pieces of physical evidence to be discarded. Even the significance of the Esquire articles—which, according to investigators, contained 18 similarities to the murders, including a blonde, candle-carrying hippie woman—wasn't realized until various C.I.D. men had spent days flipping through the blood-marked magazine.
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Hoping a confession would make up for the miscues, the C.I.D. formally advised MacDonald of his rights seven weeks after the murders. He displayed strikingly little emotion about his family during questioning, but did agree to take a polygraph. Ten minutes after leaving C.I.D. headquarters, however, MacDonald called to say he'd changed his mind. Within hours, the army put him under armed guard.
It would be three months before an "Article 32" hearing was convened—the army's equivalent of a grand jury. MacDonald's mother hired a civilian attorney, a former A.C.L.U. lawyer from Philadelphia named Bernard L. Segal, to defend her son. Like the C.I.D. investigators, Segal was struck by his client's almost total lack of affect while describing the murder night. Only when MacDonald talked of discovering Kristen was there even a flicker of feeling. Guessing that the flatness was MacDonald's doctor-trained way of dealing with horror, Segal had him evaluated by a psychiatrist, who found "possibly some latent homosexual conflicts," as well as "some narcissistic need to be famous or infamous." Overall, though, the psychiatrist was "fairly certain" that MacDonald had not killed his wife and children.
His conclusion was one of the centerpieces of Segal's defense, which also focused on the Inspector Clouseau–like aspects of the C.I.D. investigation and the "all-American boy" nature of MacDonald's character. The latter was attested to by a parade of witnesses, led by Freddy Kassab. "If I ever had another daughter," he said, tears running down his face, "I'd still want the same son-in-law." Kassab then announced a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the real killers. Shortly thereafter, a 22-year-old deliveryman named William Posey went to Segal with an amazing story. While living in the hippie district of nearby Fayetteville, Posey said, he'd had a neighbor he knew only by the name "Helen." During a trip to the bathroom around four a.m. on the night of the murders, Posey said, he'd looked out the window and seen a Mustang pull in next door, carrying Helen and two or three males. About two weeks later, Posey went on, Helen mentioned that she was going to have to leave town because the police had been "hassling" her about possible involvement in the MacDonald killings. The trouble, Helen said, was that she'd been so high on mescaline and LSD that night that she couldn't remember what she'd done. Posey told something else to Segal as well: Helen had been in the habit of wearing a floppy hat and blond wig, but after February 17 he never saw her in them.
The C.I.D., it turned out, knew all about "Helen," whose real name was Helena Stoeckley—and who would be the center of all of MacDonald's later claims of innocence. The daughter of a lieutenant colonel who'd thrown her out of the house for using drugs, Stoeckley, then 18, struck William Ivory as "a space cadet." Nonetheless, he'd interviewed her a few days after the killings, and again after hearing Posey's story. Neither time did she say anything useful—just that she no longer had the floppy hat or wig. She was sure, though, that she hadn't been inside MacDonald's house—she didn't know the address. So inconsequential was the information, Ivory didn't take notes. A lot of women in Fayetteville had blond wigs and floppy hats—including Colette MacDonald.
The colonel presiding over the Article 32 hearing, however, took Stoeckley much more seriously, and a recommendation that "appropriate civilian authorities" investigate her further was one of two findings in his final report. The other was that, in the absence of a demonstrated motive and a competent investigation, the charges against Captain Jeffrey MacDonald "are not true."
Everything would have ended there but for Freddy Kassab. Heartsick over the killings, and enraged by the army's hounding of MacDonald, he set out to get to the bottom of the case—much to the unease of his son-in-law. Having immediately applied for an honorable discharge, MacDonald had disposed of most of his family's possessions in a yard sale and moved to New York, where, in between socializing with Countess Christina Paolozzi Bellin and searching for a journalist who would pay for his story, he made wisecracks about army investigators on The Dick Cavett Show. Kassab, however, was not easily put off. So, reluctantly, MacDonald humored him, first by telling him that he and several other Green Berets had tracked down one of the killers and put him "six feet under," then by providing the transcript of the Article 32 hearings Kassab had been requesting for months.
Both were mistakes.
Finecombing the testimony, Kassab found items which couldn't be true, such as MacDonald's claim that he'd seen blood bubble from Kimberly's chest—the room was dark and Kimberly's chest had no wounds. A check also found no victims of MacDonald and his Green Beret friends. Beginning to believe the worst, Kassab called the C.I.D., which, with a cadre of more seasoned agents in place, was turning over the case as well, partly in response to the Cavett show. Soon Kassab was at 544 Castle Drive, going over the crime scene inch by inch. When he emerged, Jeffrey MacDonald's most outspoken defender had become his most determined enemy.
As yet unaware of Kassab's transformation, MacDonald had begun working as an emergency-room physician at the St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, California. While he acquired the accoutrements of swinging bachelorhood, including a yacht and a marina-front condominium, the second C.I.D. investigation kept grinding away. It turned up a number of things, among them the fact that MacDonald's marriage had not been as picture-perfect as advertised. He'd had at least 15 girlfriends, most seduced while he was on "training missions." Colette, says her sister-in-law, Vivian "Pep" Stevenson, knew of the affairs and complained bitterly about them. "I give up," Stevenson quotes her as saying. "I don't want to do this anymore." Colette was so upset, says Stevenson, that when MacDonald informed her of another upcoming sojourn—an unbroken three months traveling as a physician for the Fort Bragg boxing team during the last stages of what was expected to be a dangerous pregnancy—Colette phoned her mother, saying she wanted to come home with the kids. Wait until spring, her mother said; two days later, Colette was dead. According to a Fort Bragg secretary, not even that dulled MacDonald's libido. She told the C.I.D. of having sex with MacDonald "as often as possible" while he stood accused of murdering his wife and children.
'I did step out on Colette," MacDonald tells his visitor, with a wet of his lips. "None of which I am proud of." Then, in a cascade, the explanations tumble out: "I don't think they were real girlfriends. … They were one-night stands.… I never had a love affair with anyone where we planned weekends away or divorce.… I wore my wedding ring.… It was the temper of the times.… I like women and I wasn't thinking of the consequences.… I had high testosterone.… Among guys around me and people in medical school and the service, I wasn't doing anything unusual.… It was '68, '70, and a lot of things were exploding."
He lowers his voice and adds: "I essentially wasn't screwing around. It's not true. Colette had no fears or worries. There weren't any."
J ust as eye-opening was what investigators were discovering about Helena Stoeckley, whom classmates were describing as a disturbed, sad little girl who liked to make up stories to get attention. One of those stories, it developed, was her claim to Posey that she had to leave Fayetteville to avoid the cops. In fact, the police were not looking for her, though Stoeckley did leave town two months later to enter a hospital for drug addiction. "The prognosis for this patient seems poor," the psychiatrist wrote on her discharge form; beyond taking heroin eight or nine times a day—along with a grab bag of barbiturates, stimulants, and psychedelics—Stoeckley, he said, was a "schizoid personality."
Posey, the C.I.D. learned, also had a knack for inventing stories, including the one about seeing Stoeckley getting out of a Mustang not long after the murders. The truth, Posey admitted after flunking a lie-detector test, was that he wasn't sure about seeing Stoeckley that night, and had glimpsed the Mustang only in a dream two months later.
The C.I.D. found a seemingly more credible source in Prince Beasley, a Fayetteville narcotics detective who'd been using Stoeckley as his principal informant. "Helena would do anything to get me to pat her on the back and act proud of her," Beasley said. "That's why she turned in some of her best friends." Thinking she might have a lead on the MacDonald case, Beasley added, he'd stopped by her house the day after the murders. But the only things she had to offer were the addresses of several hippies who fit the descriptions of the alleged intruders—and that she had a black friend who sometimes came over to shoot up heroin, and who always wore a fatigue jacket. As for her own whereabouts the night of the murders, Stoeckley said nothing. Beasley hadn't asked.
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As if making up for this lapse, Beasley—whom MacDonald's supporters would come to regard as one of the most important truth tellers in the case—volunteered to accompany a C.I.D. agent to Tennessee, where Stoeckley was now informing for the Nashville P.D. She was happy to see Beasley, and over the next two months she spun a welter of contradictory stories. She was only doing what Beasley had advised her, Stoeckley told the C.I.D.: "Tell them anything, just get them off your back." After failing to match her fingerprints or hair to anything left at the crime scene, the C.I.D. prepared to submit a 3,000-page report, once again naming Jeffrey MacDonald as the murderer.
But lead investigator Peter Kearns wanted to interview one more witness, a recently discovered MacDonald girlfriend. To do so, he needed the approval of a lawyer in the Washington headquarters of the army's judge advocate general. The one he chanced on was Brian Murtagh, a 27-year-old Queens native whose nebbishy looks reminded people of Woody Allen. "Don't bother to read," said Kearns, dumping a pile of papers on his desk. "Just sign here." Recalls Murtagh, "I was green, but not that green. I told him to leave it."
As Murtagh immersed himself, Kearns kept bringing more materials, culminating with the crime-scene photographs of Kimberly and Kristen. "I was feeling sick looking at them," says Murtagh. "I must have made then some kind of emotional commitment that however long it took—whatever it took—I was going to do nothing that, either through act or omission to act, was going to see this guy get away with this."
But as Freddy Kassab had discovered, believing MacDonald guilty was one thing, finding someone willing to prosecute him something else. No matter that MacDonald admitted that his story of killing one of the intruders had been a lie ("I was keeping Freddy happy," he explained. "The man is a fanatic") or that the C.I.D. reinvestigation had turned up substantial new evidence—trying MacDonald, Freddy and Murtagh were repeatedly told, was a loser.
Then, in 1974, things turned around. Tired of the heat Kassab was generating, the attorney general handed the case over for review to Victor Woerheide, whose handling of last-resort causes had made him the Justice Department's junkyard dog. Murtagh offered his services, and a grand jury was impaneled in Raleigh. After seven months of testimony and evidence, it indicted Jeffrey Robert MacDonald, M.D., on three counts of murder.
MacDonald quickly summoned Bernie Segal, who persuaded the Fourth Circuit to throw out the charges on the ground that his client had been denied his right to a speedy trial. Woerheide appealed to the Supreme Court, but for a year there was only silence. In the interval, MacDonald thought less and less of Kristen, Kimberly, and Colette. The "nightmare" he'd been subjected to, he said, "was over."
I n fact, it was just beginning. In June 1977 the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the government's appeal, and 16 months later MacDonald's indictment was reinstated. Presiding over the trial would be Judge Franklin Dupree, who ordered jury selection to begin in July 1979, nine and a half years after the murders.
MacDonald appeared to regard the upcoming proceedings as an annoyance at worst. Woerheide—"that Nazi"—had dropped dead of a heart attack during the appeals wrangling, so all MacDonald would be facing was Assistant U.S. Attorney James Blackburn, a mild-mannered minister's son from Winston-Salem, who was trying his first homicide case. "Chickenshit," MacDonald called him. To be sure, Blackburn would have the help of Brian Murtagh, but the "little viper, totally lacking in the social amenities," as MacDonald termed Murtagh, had been in a courtroom only once before—as second chair in an obscenity case the government lost. And who'd be arguing for the defense? Bernie Segal, who had run rings around MacDonald's accusers at the Article 32 hearing. A North Carolina jury, particularly one composed of the law-and-order types Segal's polling favored, might not appreciate the fact that the attorney was longhaired, liberal, Jewish, and a Yankee. But if hominy was required, Wade Smith, Segal's banjo-playing local co-counsel, could ladle on the drawl.
Satisfied that all was in order, MacDonald occupied himself with finding someone who would write his life story—and who would turn over a hefty share of the royalties in the bargain. An early choice was Joseph Wambaugh, the L.A.P.D. sergeant turned best-selling crime novelist. But that approach fell through after a meeting. "I had interviewed dozens and dozens of people who were survivors of horrific crimes—some immediately after the event, some many years later," Wambaugh recalled. "I had never, in all my experience, seen anyone describe an event like that in the almost cavalier manner that Dr. MacDonald described it." So MacDonald settled on Joe McGinniss, another renowned author (The Selling of the President, 1968), who'd written of frequently cheating on his wife, and of dreaming about the violent demise of their children.
Now all that remained was the trial, which did not go well.
Partly it was on account of Segal, whose theatrics set Judge Dupree's eyes rolling, even as he denied all 24 defense motions. Partly, too, it was because of MacDonald's own witnesses, one of whom testified that a bloody imprint on the sheet used to transport Colette came from MacDonald's pajama cuff—certifying one of the prosecution's most damaging claims. The government scored points, too, by bringing in an F.B.I. expert who reported that when MacDonald's blood-soaked pajama top was folded just so, its 48 perfectly round holes lined up with the 21 ice-pick wounds in Colette's chest. To drive home the point, Murtagh wrapped his wrists in a similar pajama top, and Blackburn flailed at him with the ice pick. When the re-enactment of MacDonald's version of events was over, the pajama top had long, jagged tears, and Murtagh had a bleeding cut—unlike the defendant, whose forearms hadn't been so much as nicked.
Segal hoped Helena Stoeckley would save them. But no amount of threatening or cajoling could prevent her from telling the jury that she had been too stoned to remember where she'd been between midnight and 4:30 a.m. on the murder night. Out of the jury's hearing, six witnesses swore that Stoeckley had said that she might well have been in the house. But Dupree refused to let them repeat their stories in open court. Not only were Stoeckley's statements "clearly untrustworthy," he ruled, but "this tragic figure" had made most of them while heavily drugged, possibly while hallucinating.
The final blow to the defense was struck by Jeffrey MacDonald. He was choked and tearful on the stand—so overwrought at times he couldn't speak. It was a stark difference from the way he appeared on the tape the prosecution played of the eerily detached young captain parrying his C.I.D. interrogators almost 10 years before.
'On cross-exam, I got real testy—no question," MacDonald recalls. "My mom used to tell me, 'You always look cool, except when you are really nervous. Then you get a little smile.' And that combination was not good for me.… Bernie said I did fine. My mom, my secretary … all said I did fine.… He said, 'You are the Establishment. You're a captain in the Green Berets. No one is more established than a person who volunteers for the army, then airborne and Special Forces. You are not a radical. You don't wear a ponytail. You never wore an earring. You don't have tattoos. You are exactly what that doctor's son is, exactly what that cop wishes he could be.' … He said, 'This is the best jury money can buy. They will understand.'"
It took the doctor's son and the cop and 10 others just six hours to make up their minds. MacDonald, who only moments earlier had been mulling whether to rent the Queen Mary for his California victory party, seemed stunned by the verdict—guilty of second-degree murder in the deaths of Colette and Kimberly, first-degree in the death of Kristen—and stunned again when Dupree sentenced him to the maximum.
"He has himself to blame," says Brian Murtagh, looking back on the case. "If he had kept his mouth shut, we could not have convicted him."
But the saga of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald was far from over; it was only taking a new and tangled turn. For even as he was settling into the first of a series of federal prisons, his friends in California were hiring the former chief of the F.B.I.'s Los Angeles office to reinvestigate the case. At $100 an hour, bluff, braggadocian Ted Gunderson did not come cheap. Fast, though, he was; within 24 hours, he told his employers, "Has your boy been railroaded."
Continued (page 5 of 8)
To prove it, Gunderson enlisted Prince Beasley, who had not been prospering the last six years. First, state police had discovered him passed out drunk in the middle of an intersection. This had led to his "retirement" from the Fayetteville force and hospitalization at a V.A. facility, where he was diagnosed as suffering from progressive "non-psychotic organic brain syndrome." Among the manifestations of his illness, doctors found, were "confusion" and "confabulation"—making up stories without realizing they are being made up. The good news was that Beasley still had a line on Stoeckley, who had married and moved to South Carolina.
Acting on this intelligence, Gunderson secured MacDonald's approval to dispatch a Canadian psychic, the notion being that her paranormal powers would put Stoeckley on an airliner. Stoeckley proved resistant, however, even after the psychic told her that she'd "fallen in love" with MacDonald and that the psychic could "foresee a beautiful life" for her—if she aided in clearing his name.
With Stoeckley temporarily out of the picture, Beasley turned his attentions to her husband, a violence-prone hippie named Ernie Davis, who at the moment was residing in the Fayetteville jail, thanks to an assault charge filed by his wife. According to Davis, Beasley presented himself at the lockup and promised to post bail and fly him to L.A. All Davis had to do was promise to tell Beasley and Gunderson "what they wanted [me] to" about the MacDonald case. Soon enough, Davis was in L.A., where, after more sweeteners (including the prospect of a book-and-movie deal), he signed a statement repeating the incriminating claims Stoeckley had been making since the killings.
Gunderson, however, still wanted Stoeckley, who remained the sine qua non of proving MacDonald's innocence. He found the means when Beasley discovered that Davis—whose total remuneration had been $21 for a bus ticket—had jumped bail and was in South Carolina with Stoeckley. Beasley tracked them down and slapped Davis in handcuffs. On the ride back to Fayetteville, Davis let slip that he'd blabbed to Gunderson. This commenced a fight, concluding with Stoeckley offering to tell all.
Not pausing even to pick up a change of underwear, Beasley whisked Stoeckley to L.A. to begin five days of near-round-the-clock interrogation. Homer Young, an ex–F.B.I. agent assisting Gunderson, later told the bureau that there had been "an element of duress" in Stoeckley's questioning, and that his boss had employed "unethical means and tactics in a very important case." The methods, though, got results. Assured that she'd be resettled in California with a new house, job, and identity—even a part in the forthcoming movie—Stoeckley signed a statement not only implicating herself in the murders but naming five other killers (later referred to as "Black Cult" members) as well.
According to Stoeckley, the group decided to "annihilate the MacDonald family" because of his refusal to treat heroin and opium addicts. The prime target was Colette, followed by her two children. "Human sacrifice involving a pregnant woman is the most prestigious for the cult members," Stoeckley explained, "followed by children, women, and lastly men." As the lone, bottom-of-the-totem-pole male in the house, MacDonald was to be spared, as long as he furnished them with drugs.
Early on the night of the killings, Stoeckley said, she was deputized to make a "pretext phone call" to the MacDonald residence. Colette answered, said that she was headed out to class, that a baby-sitter would soon be arriving, and that her husband would be returning home later. Afterward, the group, which had decided to stage a Manson-style murder, conducted a satanic ritual, then—unaccountably neglecting to take along any weapons—drove to the MacDonald apartment, arriving around two a.m.
W hile two male companions went into the master bedroom to deal with Colette, Stoeckley said, three other males roused MacDonald and tried to get him to sign a prescription for Dexedrine. MacDonald was "belligerent," but after being roughed up a bit, he agreed to call a friend who would procure the drugs. Instead, he dialed the post operator in an attempt to summon the M.P.'s. This brought on a second, heavier beating, during which Stoeckley chanted, "Acid is groovy, kill the pigs, hit him again."
Afterward, Stoeckley said, she proceeded to the master bedroom, where Colette was being bludgeoned as Kimberly lay next to her, sleeping through it all. The sight was too much for Stoeckley, who said she started "ranting and raving," prompting Colette's attackers to depart for the living room. Soon, Stoeckley said, she joined them. But after seeing MacDonald lying unconscious—half on and half off the couch—she went to Kristen's bedroom, where she observed the younger MacDonald daughter dozing as peacefully as her sister. After a final inspection of Colette, Stoeckley stated, she returned to the living room and said to her friends, "Let's get out of here. She isn't breathing anymore."
Stoeckley's story had major problems. The biggest by far was that it didn't come close to jibing with MacDonald's. Nonetheless, it suited Gunderson. Alternately threatening her with 40 years in jail and promising that any statement she made was strictly for use in a movie, in December he wrung a second statement from her (this one adding a sixth cultist to the crime, a character named "Wizard") and soon got movie negotiations into gear. Beasley—who hadn't been paid a nickel by Gunderson—laid his own plans, agreeing to help with a book being written by a former Green Beret sergeant major and Fayetteville Times reporter named Fred Bost. Offered 20 percent of the proceeds, Stoeckley joined the project as well, but pulled out after signing a contract in exchange for five dollars. Still eager for publicity of his own, Gunderson instructed Beasley to make her available to The Washington Post. That turned out to be a blunder. Objecting to the tone of the piece, Stoeckley recanted her confession to the F.B.I. and fired off a letter to Gunderson, who, she'd now deduced, was "a member of the Mafia." "Never," she wrote, "have I seen a bigger mockery made of justice, or such a shambles made of an investigation."
The blast did not deter Gunderson, who had begun rounding up witnesses to corroborate Stoeckley's story. The most crucial—as far as MacDonald's supporters were concerned—was a MacDonald neighbor, who testified at the Article 32 hearing that sometime on the night of the murders (she couldn't recall just when) she'd glanced out her window and spotted the taillights of a passing car. Under questioning by Gunderson, she remembered considerably more—not only the time of her sighting (between two and three a.m.) and the type of car (a blue Mustang, just like the one Stoeckley claimed to have been riding in) but the fact that it was parked beside two other cars, one a military jeep driven by a black man. More startling, the neighbor, who was observing the scene at a distance of 70 to 80 feet on a rainy night, described a man in the Mustang's passenger seat. "I remember him specifically because of his piercing, deep-set eyes and the sneer on his face," she told Gunderson. "I could pick him out of a crowd today." Shown drawings compiled from a recent hypnotic session with MacDonald, she selected one that, according to Stoeckley, was Allen Mazerolle, a former friend and fellow cult killer.
MacDonald, meanwhile, was experiencing ups and downs. In July 1980, the Fourth Circuit overturned his conviction on the same speedy-trial ground it had used to throw out his indictment. He went back to doctoring in California, where he bought a ski condominium and dated an actress (she also happened to be the daughter of the chairman of the U.S. Parole Commission) before getting engaged to a 22-year-old stewardess. Twenty months later, however, the Supreme Court reversed the Fourth Circuit ruling. He applied for bail and sentence reduction, but the lower courts turned him down, impressed by neither Stoeckley's statements ("She was like a light bulb which hadn't been completely wound in," said one judge; "she blinks back and forth") nor his lawyers' contention that "the 1970 murders constitute the only blot on his record."
Worn out by the case, Bernie Segal retreated to teaching at a San Francisco law school. While a new set of lawyers prepared further appeals, Gunderson resumed his pursuit of Helena Stoeckley, who by then was destitute, pregnant, and an alcoholic. But with an appearance on 60 Minutes in the offing, she was back in a confessional mode. She also had new details to divulge—including a claim that a fellow drug addict named Cathy Perry had participated in the murders as well. "Cathy freaked out," as Stoeckley put it. "Even the guys had trouble controlling her."
Continued (page 6 of 8)
But Stoeckley's biggest shocker—except for her claim that one of the killers was an undercover C.I.D. agent (an idea suggested to her by Gunderson)—was that three and a half weeks prior to the murders she'd stolen a bracelet from Colette's jewelry box. This came as news to MacDonald.
Just as boggled was Brian Murtagh, who was being inundated by confessors far and wide—six altogether, in addition to Stoeckley. "If you put everybody in that room who confessed," he said to a reporter, "there would hardly be room in there for Jeff." All the same, Murtagh had the F.B.I. check them out, along with the ever expanding number of cult members Stoeckley had placed at the crime scene. Gunderson, however, was finished. His departure from the case came around the time Stoeckley's coven supposedly made an attempt on his life—by pricking his car's steering-fluid drum with a pin.
MacDonald's friends hired a former New York homicide detective to replace him, but he quit after concluding that "all directions pointed at MacDonald." Unfazed, MacDonald's friends put another ex-cop to work; he labored, though, without the assistance of Helena Stoeckley. Six months after the alcohol-related death of a heroin-addicted former boyfriend she'd implicated in the crimes (and who now and again appeared to implicate himself), Stoeckley's decomposing body was found in a low-rent South Carolina apartment complex. She was 30, and she and her baby had lately subsisted on peanut-butter sandwiches. Gunderson suggested to reporters that she'd been murdered. But an autopsy had determined that the cause of death was acute pneumonia complicated by cirrhosis of the liver. "Helena was like a puppet on a string," said Ernie Davis, who was now doing a 15-year stretch for first-degree sexual assault. "She knew it was all lies, but she … said if she didn't tell them what they wanted to hear they'd bother her even more."
Stoeckley's death was a setback for MacDonald, but he was not abandoning hope. Any day now, Joe McGinniss would be publishing his book.
They'd become exceptionally close during the four years the project had been going on, McGinniss frequently writing to assure MacDonald of his belief in his innocence. "There could not be a worse nightmare than the one you are living through now," went a typical McGinniss missive. "But it is only a phase. Total strangers can recognize within five minutes that you did not receive a fair trial." Good friend Joe, MacDonald was sure, would give him "ultimate vindication."
He learned otherwise during an interview with 60 Minutes shortly before Fatal Vision hit the shelves. According to MacDonald, Mike Wallace asked, "How would you feel if I told you that Joe McGinniss says you're a homicidal maniac?"
"Joe McGinniss?" MacDonald blanched. "I don't believe you."
Well, said Wallace, reaching into his briefcase, "I have the manuscript right here."
It was indeed a damning document, recording not only MacDonald's lies and infidelities but also a chilling incident that had occurred on a California cruise with yet another girlfriend and her son. Infuriated by something so minor no one could recall it, MacDonald grabbed the boy, screaming that he was going to crush his skull between the gunnels and the dock. In the end, MacDonald settled for throwing him overboard. But the episode—which resulted in the abrupt departure of the girlfriend and her child—was terrifying enough. "I will never forget that look in his eyes," said the boy, now grown to a young adult. "Kind of a fire."
Hailed by the critics as a true-crime masterpiece, Fatal Vision rocketed to the top of the best-seller list. The docudrama that followed on NBC in the fall of 1984 did even better. Watched over two nights by an estimated 60 million Americans, it was the network's highest-rated non–sports show of the year. MacDonald, who had wanted Robert Redford to portray him, wasn't happy with Gary Cole in the lead role. "I thought he was wooden," he says. "I thought I was more expressive than him."
MacDonald's only solace was that Helena Stoeckley's supposed cohort Cathy Perry had confessed. Her story was less than airtight, however. Among other things, it had the intruders subduing MacDonald with the injection of a narcotic (none was found in his system), then going "upstairs" (the apartment had no second floor), where, after beating one of the two boys (they were, in fact, both girls), Perry herself had slain Colette by stabbing her stomach and legs (among the few areas on her body left undamaged).
That Perry had trouble getting her facts straight was understandable. She was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic—a condition which had put her in a mental hospital on more than one occasion, and which caused her to hallucinate and hear voices. Once dosed with Thorazine and under a doctor's care, however, she was sufficiently coherent to deny to the F.B.I. any knowledge of the crimes.
MacDonald's attorneys conceded that Stoeckley's story had some holes. But those, they claimed in a 1984 habeas-corpus petition for his release, only made her more believable. As for the fact that MacDonald himself had contradicted her story, that could be explained by an affidavit they'd secured from a psychologist. She speculated he might be suffering from retrograde amnesia.
For MacDonald, it was all downhill from there. The bottom came when Brian Murtagh—now driving around with the customized license plate VIPR—introduced a sheaf of F.B.I. reports accounting for the murder-night whereabouts of all of Stoeckley's alleged accomplices. The most ironclad alibi belonged to Allen Mazerolle, whom Beasley identified as having been with Stoeckley early on the night of the murders; who she said had stabbed MacDonald with an ice pick; and whom MacDonald's extraordinarily observant neighbor had picked out as being the character she'd seen sitting in the blue Mustang only moments before the killings. At the time of all these sightings, records showed, Mazerolle was in jail on charges of possessing 1,000 hits of LSD. The records further showed that he'd been put there three weeks before by none other than Detective Prince Beasley, acting on a tip from his favorite informant, Helena Stoeckley.
"It's a devastating blow," MacDonald said moments after the Fourth Circuit denied his appeal. "But I cannot and will not roll over and play dead." Instead, with a new set of lawyers, he went back to court—not to seek freedom this time, but to charge Joe McGinniss with contract fraud to the tune of $15 million. When the jury hung, the case was settled for $325,000. MacDonald's real victory, though, was with the press. Until then, reporters had generally treated his protestations with skepticism. Now the mood was different, thanks in large measure to New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, whose book-length scalding of McGinniss, The Journalist and the Murderer, set minds wondering: If the "bible" of the case could be founded on such deceit, was it not possible that its chief protagonist was telling the truth?
The consequence was a growing flood of TV shows and articles told from the defense's point of view. MacDonald's unfailingly cheerful California friends fed the effort with streams of material on supposed new evidence. Nothing was denied a sympathetic opinion-maker, including a look at Helena Stoeckley confessing from the grave, through the miracle of videotape.
But the most compelling witness for Jeffrey MacDonald was Jeffrey MacDonald. "There's a sweetness about him," says Jeffrey Elliot, who interviewed MacDonald for Playboy and later testified in his behalf in the McGinniss trial. "After meeting him, you would say, 'This is a travesty. This is a good, decent, kind, thoughtful man, and the system has failed.' You might be willing to do things to help him."
'I am that overachiever personality," MacDonald is telling another visitor years later. "I set up a goal and say, 'That's the next goal.' … I don't sit and bemoan fates and say, 'Woulda, coulda, shoulda … I don't have deep insights into life.… My skill is medicine.… By me helping a person, I help myself. I hope that doesn't sound selfish.… I think that's all good. It's how I am … an overachiever, a very good physician. I am not patting myself on the back. Please. I am telling what is a fact. People like me, and I work very hard."
He nods at the diagnosis. There is a smile, as cool and confident as his words. "Generally speaking, I say to myself, 'You are a good guy. You didn't save your family, but that doesn't make you bad. And, generally speaking, you tell the truth. So stop beating yourself up.'''
Continued (page 7 of 8)
L istening to his matter-of-fact tone, many would come to help him, and while going over 10,000 pages of government documents, they found a prize—a pre-trial memo in which Brian Murtagh asked two questions of a young law clerk named Jeffrey Puretz: whether the prosecution was obliged to turn over to the defense the data that underlay F.B.I. lab reports, and when the government had to disclose exculpatory materials. In his reply, Puretz said the government was legally in the clear as long as it gave the defense an opportunity to examine the evidence.
Murtagh then moved that the defense be permitted to do just that. Dupree agreed, and three weeks before the start of the trial a MacDonald criminologist was ushered into a holding cell containing a dozen cardboard boxes of evidence. Had he looked inside one labeled "Black/Black & Gray Root/Synthetic Hairs," he would have found an envelope marked "Synthetic Hairs, Blonde." Within, mounted on an evidence slide, was a 22-inch-long, blond-colored strand of saran, recovered from the hairbrush of Colette MacDonald.
Her husband, Jeffrey, was certain where it came from: the wig of the woman who had chanted, "Acid is groovy, kill the pigs." He was certain, too, that the Puretz memo was proof that he had been framed. Reading over the papers MacDonald sent him, Harvey Silverglate agreed. The Puretz memo, he proclaimed, was "the smoking gun." Two former federal prosecutors concurred, as did his old law-school professor Alan Dershowitz. With these talents arguing for MacDonald, the habeas-corpus petition they filed in 1990 seemed a slam dunk.
Before the Fourth Circuit, however, the government quoted an affidavit from MacDonald's own criminologist stating that he'd been given "unfettered access" to the evidence. Moreover, according to the F.B.I. lab, saran was fine for doll hair, but not for human wigs. "Unless the defendant wants to maintain that Ken and Barbie did it," a government attorney said, "I don't see how this hair helps them very much." The justices agreed. "At some point," they ruled, "we must accept this case as final."
Though still in jail, MacDonald was not lacking for female companionship. He had at least three would-be paramours: a radio talk-show host from Tucson, a law student from Michigan, and, strangest of all, an Ohio woman who claimed that she'd witnessed her lover killing Colette and the girls during a fight over her. MacDonald admits that he knew all three women, and that he had sent them stripped-to-the-waist beefcake pictures of himself, tucked inside sexually graphic billets-doux studded with "happy faces." In the case of the talk-show lady, the letters alternated between reminiscences about her intimate odors and suggestions about how she might try to catch William Ivory and Peter Kearns in a lie while interviewing them. Predicting a Pulitzer Prize if she could spring him, MacDonald recalled "the hot stuff" of their last get-together in the attorney-client room. "You almost got a handful," he later wrote. "Believe me, it would have been such a wonderful release."
N o woman worked harder at freeing him, though, than Lucia Bartoli, whose modest Laguna Hills, California, apartment was hung with pictures of the celebrated prisoner, with whom she had "a personal relationship." One showed them holding hands; another, her sitting on his lap; the third and largest—which hung over the living-room entertainment center, not far from the MacDonald coat of arms—an idealized drawing of her head resting contentedly on his chest. She, too, was going to share a life with Jeffrey MacDonald. (They'd already planned their first postprison date—McDonald's, naturally.) But, unlike her predecessors, she'd found a potential cell-door key: a textile executive who said that saran was, in fact, used for human wigs.
Yes, the executive lived in Mexico City. Yes, the wigs were made for Christmas pageants. And, yes, the only example she could lay her hands on was black and came from an anthropology museum. Still, it was a saran wig. Which was fine for Silverglate, who had begun to school himself in the human-wig-making uses of saran through two texts from the Boston Public Library. Both were also in the F.B.I.'s collection—a fact omitted from the government's 1990 pleadings. For MacDonald, who had legally exhausted his habeas-corpus petitions, it was just as well, for now he had a new basis for appeal: Silverglate could claim the F.B.I. had committed "fraud on the court."
O ther things were flowing MacDonald's way, too. For one, Jim Blackburn was now working as a waiter, following imprisonment on a charge of embezzling clients. Just as delicious, Joe McGinniss was being roasted by the critics over his new biography of Teddy Kennedy, a volume part plagiarized, part made up. (McGinniss declines to comment about MacDonald.) And if that were not enough to compensate for the leading defense-team member who had been caught peddling his belongings in the classifieds of Soldier of Fortune, Fred Bost had finally published his book.
Compiling the 479-page Fatal Justice was a 15-year struggle, one that had recently seen the death of Prince Beasley—"the star detective," Bost calls him. But with a new partner, a California artist named Jerry Potter, Bost had done it. A point-by-point rebuttal of the prosecution's case, mixed with conspiracy theories involving the army, the Justice Department, and the F.B.I., the book glided over the most ominous evidence, and said next to nothing about the peculiarities of MacDonald's witnesses and investigators. But reviewers were ecstatic. "A quietly convincing book," said Janet Malcolm, who was now corresponding regularly with MacDonald and admitting she'd become one of his "groupies."
The press also seized on Fatal Justice, and soon MacDonald's innocence was being argued in outlets from Jack Anderson's column to The Wall Street Journal. "The poor guy," says Ruth Shalit, author of a 1997 New Republic article drawn from material provided by Bost and Silverglate. "He has not had good luck."
But fortune was beginning to smile. An inspector general's report was out, and it was withering in its assessment of the F.B.I. saran expert's testimony in an unrelated case. Even better for MacDonald, in October 1997 the Fourth Circuit granted the DNA testing.
What it turns up will likely not be known for months. Fund-raisers to finance the $100,000 exam have to be held first, and the few labs that can handle the work are jammed. Brian Murtagh isn't worried, whatever the results. In a ground-floor apartment where two active children played, he says, the hairs beneath Kristen's or Kimberly's fingernails could have come from anyone—including themselves.
He'll argue that if there's a retrial, he's ready to reopen lockerfuls of evidence long stored away. MacDonald's forces are preparing, too, with new theories of what occurred at 544 Castle Drive. Maybe, they say, the pajama top had so many ice-pick punctures and MacDonald none because Helena Stoeckley was only pretending to stab him. Maybe the kids were left in their beds, their dolls and blankies tucked in neatly with them, so a second group of Satan worshipers could perform a ritual. Maybe one of the arriving M.P.'s was part of the plot, and he wiped clean the knife and phone. Maybe—and this, they say, would explain everything—Jeffrey MacDonald locked himself in a closet while the whole thing was going on. "Only God and Dr. MacDonald," one of his many lawyers solemnly says, "will ever know what happened."
You leave the Federal Correctional Institution in Sheridan, Oregon, with the mint-green files Jeffrey MacDonald was pawing through that morning. They contain case materials mostly, and, as expected, all suggest that he was framed. But there's also a brochure on flax oil—a substance which, it is claimed, will alleviate everything from cancer to itchy scalp. "Read that and take 14 capsules every day," the doctor said as he crunched your hand good-bye.
If he holds to his promise never to apply for parole (for that would require admission of guilt, and the federal system seldom grants it anyway), he will not be eligible for release until the year 2071. Even then, the debate about him will probably be unresolved. Because Bernie Segal has it wrong: MacDonald is not Dreyfus, about whom the facts are known, but Sacco and Vanzetti, Bruno Hauptmann, Judge Crater, and the Rosenbergs. He's also a man, an increasingly old and narrowed man, says his friend and college roommate, Michael Malley, who helped defend him during the Article 32 hearing, and who thinks he'll never get out. "He has a world defined entirely by his own problems," says Malley. "He's reminded of them e