THE OTHER SIDE OF FATAL VISION

The Jeffrey MacDonald Case

1

Jeffrey MacDonald was the son of whom many mothers and fathers might be proud: intelligent, ambitious, and the most popular boy in school. Reaching adulthood, he became a brilliant, hard-working doctor respected by his colleagues and revered by his patients; a patriot who chose for his obligatory military service the toughest division in the U.S. Army, the Green Berets; a father beloved of his wife, Colette, and their two daughters, Kimberly, 5, and Kristen, 2.

And yet this praiseworthy young man, on one dark night in February 1970, allegedly smashed the skull of his pregnant wife several times with a club, and stabbed her twenty-one times with an icepick; clubbed his daughter Kimberly with three blows, then stabbed her no fewer than ten times; and, finally, placed his little blond child, Kristen, across his lap, knifed her seventeen times, and drove an icepick into her tiny body fifteen times.

Could MacDonald have done this? Or was that monstrous butchery executed, as MacDonald has always claimed, by a “hippie” cult with clubs and knives, one of whom scrawled a word in blood—“pig”—across the headboard of his bed?

I had seen that word, “pig,” in blood less than a year before the MacDonald tragedy when, as Chief Medical Examiner of Los Angeles County, I investigated the scene of the gruesome murders at 10050 Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills, where the beautiful actress Sharon Tate and three of her friends had been murdered by the so-called Manson “family.” Now, according to the first news reports from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, an almost identical cult murder had occurred only months later.

I was curious about the case because of its Manson connection—and even more so when later news reports stated that Army authorities now believed that MacDonald himself had murdered his family. The charge was that he had first killed his daughter Kimberly; then, inspired by an Esquire magazine article describing the Manson murders, he killed his wife and their other daughter, attempting to cover up his monstrous crime by faking a similar hippie-cult assault.

I thought that this charge, if true, would be easy enough to prove. Because of my coroner’s investigation of the evidence at the Manson crime scene, I knew, perhaps better than anyone else, how difficult such faking would be. In my opinion, MacDonald would have needed a whole shopping list of evidentiary items on that night to create all the false forensic evidence which would indicate that intruders had been present. When he was acquitted of the charge, I assumed that he was indeed innocent of any crime. Forensic evidence found at the scene had substantiated his version of the events of that terrible night. Yet nine years later he was tried and convicted for the brutal murders of his wife and children. And the proof against him was the same forensic evidence that had led to his earlier acquittal.

How was that possible, I wondered? Forensic evidence can often be misinterpreted or misunderstood. But can it lie? In the strange and haunting case of Jeffrey MacDonald, it seemed to me that forensic science itself was on trial.

2

On February 16, 1970, rain slanted steeply in the night outside the house in which Lieutenant John Milne, a helicopter pilot, sat working contentedly on a model airplane. Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the largest Army base in the United States, had been inundated with the downpour for hours. But near midnight it eased and Milne opened a window to vent the smell of the glue he was using.

A few minutes later, voices outside his house attracted his attention. Milne went to the back door, “looked out and three people were standing ten or fifteen feet from me, going up the sidewalk. These three individuals were wearing white sheets, and I specifically saw the center individual to be a girl and two males on either side, and they were all carrying candles.”

When the three reached the end of his building, they turned left into a walkway that led almost directly to the side bedroom of the house at 544 Castle Drive in which Green Beret Captain Jeffrey MacDonald, his wife and two small children lived.

At 3:45 A.M., SP4 Kenneth Mica, Company A, 503rd Military Police Battalion, was driving through the rain in his jeep toward 544 Castle Drive in response to a call of “trouble.” At the intersection of Honeycutt Boulevard and North Lucas Street, Mica looked through the plastic side window of his jeep and saw a young woman standing on the corner. What was a woman doing at that intersection at that time of night? he wondered. He estimated her age to be in the twenties and noted that she was wearing a wide-brimmed hat, which looked “floppy.”

Mica drove on, and when he arrived at the house at 544 Castle Drive he found three MP vehicles already there. Together with the other MPs, he made a futile attempt to gain entrance through the front door, which was locked. They went to the back door and found it open. They entered the house, passing through a utility room, then walked into the master bedroom—and a scene of madness.

A young woman in bloody pajamas was lying on her back on the floor, her head bloodied and crushed. A man, wearing only pajama bottoms, lay on his stomach on top of the woman’s left shoulder. On the headboard of the bed, a word was scrawled in human blood: “pig.” Both of the people on the floor appeared dead, but when Mica crouched beside them he saw that the man was still breathing. Mica turned him over and heard him gasp, “Check my kids. How are my kids?”

Mica ran down the hallway, turning his flashlight onto the beds of two children in their separate bedrooms. Blood all over. He switched on the lights in the room of the younger child, Kristen. A large stuffed animal with comic eyes stared incongruously at the face of the dead little girl from inches away. Mica checked and saw that her body was bloody from wounds. In the bedroom across the hall, the body of the older child, Kimberly, was in even worse condition. Her head had been crushed, in addition to the stab wounds inflicted on her body.

Mica, shaken, continued down the hallway of this house of horror to the living room. There he saw an overturned coffee table, with magazines strewn across the floor. Back in the master bedroom, Mica found that MacDonald had fainted, so he gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. When MacDonald awakened, his teeth were chattering. Twice more he lost consciousness and Mica revived him. But in his waking moments, MacDonald told Mica through chattering teeth, “I can’t breathe, I need a chest tube…. How are my kids? Check my wife…. I heard my kids crying. I tried to feel my wife’s pulse and I couldn’t find it.…. They kept saying, ‘Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.’”

Mica asked MacDonald how the murders had occurred. MacDonald answered that there were four intruders, one of them a blond female with a big floppy hat, bearing a candle, and three men, one of them black. “I think I hit them,” MacDonald said. “I think I scratched them.”

Later, in the hospital, MacDonald said that he had been sleeping on the living-room couch when he was awakened by screams from his wife and one of his daughters. Opening his eyes, he saw his assailants standing at the edge of the couch, and before he could get up they started hitting him. In the struggle, his pajama top had been ripped and pulled over his head so that it ended up entangling his wrists. He used the pajama top to fend off an assailant who was trying to stab him, until another blow knocked him unconscious. When he awoke, he went to the master bedroom and found his wife horribly slaughtered. He placed his pajama top over her nude and bloody chest, then went to the children’s rooms, where he found them both dead from bludgeoning and knife wounds. He attempted to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to all three victims, but it was hopeless. He called the MPs, then lay down and embraced his wife.

Fayetteville, North Carolina, the site of Fort Bragg, had a relatively large hippie community, numbering about two thousand. The next day, while police filtered through the area, questioning its residents, agents of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Department visited the scene of the crime—and felt a slight uneasiness. A flower pot was standing straight up, but the flower it held was on its side. Why wasn’t the flower pot on its side, also? The coffee table was on its side, too, but when the agents stood it up and knocked it over it didn’t come to rest that way. Instead, being top-heavy, it rolled over on its top every time the agents pushed it. Had the table been placed on its side?

What made it more suspicious to them was that the flower pot and the table were the only signs of violence in a room in which a struggle had allegedly taken place between a man and four intruders. Was it possible that no struggle had occurred? Was it even more chillingly possible that the whole scene had been staged? If so, who did it? Was it the man who had miraculously survived with minor wounds while the rest of the family was slaughtered by multiple weapons?

Among the magazines that had been found scattered on the floor from the overturned coffee table, a copy of Esquire caught the attention of the CID agents. Its March 1970 cover announced, “EVIL LURKS IN CALIFORNIA,” and its featured article described the sensational murders of Sharon Tate and others in Hollywood by members of the Charles Manson cult. Were the MacDonald murders a copy-cat crime commmitted by unknown assailants, or had someone tried to make it look that way?

The next day MacDonald’s closest friend in the Green Berets, Lieutenant Ken Hanson, made the CID agents even more uneasy, revealing that MacDonald had not only read the article on Manson but had been fascinated by it. In a press conference called by the Army to provide information about the surviving victim, who was still hospitalized, Hanson said that two nights before the murders he had visited his friends the MacDonalds, and Jeff MacDonald had eagerly discussed the Esquire magazine article with him, at one point saying, “Isn’t this wild?”

The CID’s suspicions that MacDonald had staged the scene now intensified, but their attempts to collect other evidence were botched from the beginning. Dozens of MPs had tramped through the house on the night of the murders, tracking dirt and grass of their own into the rooms, smudging fingerprints and physically moving evidentiary items. Worse, the CID’s fingerprint expert botched the collection of prints. Incredibly, the camera he used to photograph the prints had malfunctioned. When he returned to redo the photography, he discovered that moisture had crept under the cellophane tape he had used to cover the fingerprints, and most of them were ruined.

Not only that, but a bloody footprint found in Kimberly’s room had been destroyed when a CID man attempted to saw the floorboards to remove it. And the pajama bottoms that MacDonald wore the night of the crime had been carelessly thrown away at the hospital where he had been taken.

Nevertheless, through all the errors, the Army had made some progress, or so it claimed. CID investigators had analyzed the family’s blood and discovered that each family member had a different blood type: A, B, AB and O—“a million-to-one-shot,” according to some reporters who commented on this finding. But pathologists know that the phenomenon is common when the parents have different blood types. Armed with blood-type information, the Army had analyzed the bloodstains in each room to establish MacDonald’s movements that night.

Furthermore, investigators had found fibers from MacDonald’s torn pajama top in each of the bedrooms—but none in the living room, where the garment was supposedly torn, indicating to them there had been no struggle in the living room, as MacDonald claimed. Utilizing both the bloodstain and the fiber evidence, the Army thus created a scenario for murder far different from MacDonald’s.

MacDonald had fallen asleep on the living-room couch while watching television that night, according to the Army’s reconstruction of the crime. Awakening, he went to his room and found that one of his children had wet the side of the bed. An argument with his wife ensued, escalating into a fight. In the words of the investigators, MacDonald “obtained a club” and beat his wife, becoming angrier until he lost “all control in a blind fantastic mindless rage.” Kimberly came into her parents’ room. MacDonald smashed her skull, either “by accident or on purpose,” and then carried her lifeless body to her own bed.

According to investigators, MacDonald then regained his senses and, realizing he needed a cover story for the murder of Kimberly, decided to eliminate the witnesses and blame all the murders on hippies. He clubbed and knifed the body of Kimberly. Meanwhile his wife had gone to Kristen’s room to protect her. There MacDonald hit his wife again, then dragged her back into the master bedroom and stabbed her with both a knife and an icepick. He then returned to Kristen’s room, knifed her seventeen times, and plunged an icepick into her fifteen times. Finally MacDonald stabbed himself to simulate an injury by an attacker, and telephoned for assistance.

The Army formally charged Captain Jeffrey MacDonald with murder.

Protesting his innocence, MacDonald hired a civilian attorney, Bernard Segal, to defend him. Even though the handsome young doctor seemed eminently sane to him, Segal cautiously ordered a psychiatrist to examine MacDonald. When the psychiatrist concluded that MacDonald was not only sane but was also of a personality unlikely to commit such murders, Segal accepted the case. And within days he notified the Army that, instead of waiting for a military court-martial of his client, he would challenge the prosecution at the Army investigatory hearing, which, under military law, precedes a trial.

The hearing was, in effect, a real trial lasting for four months, with witnesses examined and cross-examined on the stand under rules of evidence. Unlike the trial nine years later, it took place when the events were fresh in the memories of the witnesses, and all those witnesses were available to testify. Yet in both trials, MacDonald’s guilt or innocence would rest largely on forensic evidence. Thus, in the defense of his client, Segal first showed how the investigation of the scene of the crime had been botched by the CID almost completely. Footprints and fingerprints had been destroyed, physical evidence had been tampered with—any or all of which might have proved MacDonald’s innocence. Then Segal dramatically presented “proof” that intruders had been in the house. MacDonald said that one of the intruders, a girl, had carried a candle, and Segal revealed that candle drippings had been found in the living room and in Kristen’s bedroom. Furthermore, the wax did not match any of the candles found in MacDonald’s home, so it must have come from outside. In addition, unidentified bloody fingerprints had been found in Colette’s jewelry box, from which two rings were missing.

To fortify his case, Segal next produced witnesses who had seen intruders in the neighborhood that night. One witness testified that she and her husband lived about two hundred yards from the rear of the MacDonald residence, and that night she “heard the sound of running and scuffling outside [her] open bedroom window on the second floor. The voices were of teenagers, two male and one female, in the vicinity of Castle Drive.”

Other witnesses testified that a neighbor had told them that she was awakened that night by the sound of a car running outside her house; that she looked out the window and saw a girl with long blond hair running from the direction of the MacDonald home, and that this girl got into a red or maroon convertible as it pulled away.

The neighbor herself, questioned later in the hearing, said it was true that she was awakened that night by the noise of a car but denied that she saw a girl with long blond hair outside. Her denial may or may not have been influenced by a frightening episode that had occurred the day after the murder, when two young men pointed a gun at her home from a car outside. She had immediately called the MPs and had worried about it ever since.

But the most dramatic testimony by far at the hearings was the identification of a hippie girl named Helena Stoeckley who, Segal believed, was one of the murderers. William Posey testified that he lived in the middle of the hippie community across the way from Helena Stoeckley. He said that Stoeckley normally wore a white hat and a long stringy blond wig. At approximately 4 A.M. the night of the murders, Posey had awakened to go to the bathroom. At that time he “heard a car next door whip in…. real fast” up the driveway. Posey heard laughing and giggling, so he walked to his front door, where he saw Stoeckley get out of a Mach I Mustang. Judging from the sounds, he said, the car contained at least two males.

Approximately a week later, Posey said, Stoeckley told him she had been questioned by the police about her whereabouts on the morning of February 17 and had told them she could not remember where she had been because she was stoned on mescaline. She recalled only riding around that evening.

But Posey’s most sensational testimony linked Stoeckley directly to MacDonald. On the day of the MacDonald family funeral services, Posey said, Stoeckley had worn a black dress, black shoes and a veil and had placed a funeral wreath on her door in mourning.

Finally, Segal presented a motive for hippies to murder MacDonald and his family. Captain James N. Williams, an operations and training officer at Fort Bragg’s medical facility, testified that MacDonald was the group medical drug abuse counselor. He said that one of his enlisted men told him that “they believed their men were being turned in to CID for being on drugs” and that MacDonald had the reputation of being an informer.

In sum, MacDonald’s defense presented evidence that there had been intruders inside his home and in the vicinity at the time of the crime, and that one of them may have been Helena Stoeckley. And there was a motive for the killings—revenge against an “informer.” This, plus the testimony of independent psychiatrists who declared MacDonald sane and a man who did not have the psychological background to commit such a crime, all seemed to point to his innocence.

In contrast, the forensic evidence presented by the Army against MacDonald seemed inconclusive. The presiding officer who functioned as the judge dealt with it the following way in the official report:

The Army said that fibers from MacDonald’s pajama top should have been found in the living room if there had been a struggle, and they were not. The officer noted, “It is unknown when the pajama top was torn…. With the garment wrapped around the accused’s arms, the fibers…. may have, in some manner, remained with the garment until it was opened up to be spread across the chest of Colette.”

As for the bloodstains, which the prosecution used to prove its scenario of murder, the presiding officer commented: “Considering the amount of blood evident in the killings…. it is entirely plausible to consider that some of it contaminated the clothing of the assailants and was subsequently transferred by them from room to room.

Worse for the prosecution, the two forensic items that had triggered the entire investigation of MacDonald turned out to be false alarms. The flower pot had been placed upright not by MacDonald staging a scene, but by an MP with a sense of tidiness. And the top-heavy coffee table that “always” rolled over on its top and never came to rest on its side was personally tested by the presiding officer with the following results: “On [the presiding officer’s] visit to the MacDonald apartment [he] knocked over the coffee table in the living room. The table struck the adjacent chair and landed on its edge.”

On October 13, 1970, the presiding officer issued his verdict:

In the interest of military justice and discipline it is recommended that:

1. All charges and specifications against Captain Jeffrey R. MacDonald be dismissed because the matters set forth in all charges and/or specifications are not true.….

2. That appropriate civilian authorities be requested to investigate the alibi of Helena Stoeckley, Fayetteville, North Carolina, reference her activities and whereabouts during the early morning hours of 17 February 1970, based on evidence presented during the hearing.

Jeffrey MacDonald was a free man.

3

The Army hearing in North Carolina of the MacDonald case and the trial of Charles Manson and his “family” in Los Angeles were held at the same time, although the Manson trial took longer to finish, ending in December 1970. There was certainly no controversy when Manson and his cohorts were convicted—nor was there controversy when MacDonald was declared not guilty. Justice had been served in both cases. My own gut instinct that it would have been too difficult for MacDonald to stage such a crime had been vindicated in a hearing at which all the witnesses and all the evidence had been examined.

In fact, I had almost forgotten about the case until five years later when I attended a medical seminar in Los Angeles. A physician from Long Beach, California, a city on the southern border of Los Angeles, sipped coffee with me during a break between lectures. “You remember that Army captain, Jeff MacDonald?” he asked. “The one who was charged with murdering his family.”

I nodded, and he said, “He’s living in Long Beach now.”

“Is that true?”

“Yes,” my friend said, “and he’s one of the finest physicians I’ve ever known. He’s head of emergency medicine at St. Mary’s and he works ten to fourteen hours a day. He’s always willing to drop everything to rush to the hospital when someone wants him. And he cooperates on all kinds of physician committees engaged in different projects, as well.”

I said that was wonderful, and my colleague continued, “But here’s the funny part. The organization which loves him the most in Long Beach is the police department. Here’s a man who was tried for one of the most gruesome crimes in history, and now in my little town of Long Beach he’s the special pet of the police. They even give banquets to raise money for him.”

I was surprised by his last words, and asked him why MacDonald needed money.

“For his legal costs. Didn’t you know? Some fanatical relatives of MacDonald’s wife have pressured the government into retrying the case.”

“But that’s double jeopardy, isn’t it?”

“That’s what MacDonald says. But the relatives say MacDonald was cleared at an investigative hearing, not a real trial, so double jeopardy doesn’t apply.”

My colleague, a stocky man with thinning hair and rimless glasses, stopped talking for a moment, then said quietly, almost to himself, “How could he have done it?”

“You think he did murder his family?”

“His wife’s relatives think so. The Justice Department must think so, too, or they wouldn’t have called for a grand-jury hearing. But I know him. I’ve met him socially and professionally many times. The man is not only a dedicated doctor but a completely nice guy who never raises his voice, let alone becomes violent. It’s incredible to accuse him of butchering his wife and children in a wild rage. He’s just not the type.”

Driving home that night on the freeway, I ruminated on the controversy. What a strange case! MacDonald, by all accounts, was continuing his reputation as a solid citizen, beloved of colleagues, neighbors and even the Long Beach police.

And yet the Justice Department believed he was guilty of the fantastically horrible murders of his wife and children. I had worked with legal authorities long enough to know they didn’t move unless they were sure of someone’s guilt. They were inundated with too many crimes to waste time on borderline cases.

Had my gut instinct that Jeffrey MacDonald was innocent been wrong?

4

The heat was brutal in Raleigh, North Carolina, in August 1979. Jeffrey MacDonald, intense, sometimes irritable, always bitter, paced up and down one of the rooms in a college fraternity house which his defense team was using for offices. He couldn’t believe this was happening, he told one of the team. He couldn’t believe he was here on trial for his life again, nine years after he had been acquitted of the same crime. Then he stopped pacing and said he had heard that the prosecution was going to admit it could find no motive for the killings. How, he asked, could they prosecute a murder charge without even a motive? Why would he have killed his family without a motive?

But then a member of the defense team soothed him by saying that the forensic evidence that would be used against him was the same as in the first trial. And a judge had ruled in favor of him on that very evidence.

In essence that was true, and it remains one of the most fascinating aspects of the MacDonald case to forensic scientists, making it almost a classic in our field. In 1970 at the Army hearing, bloodstains and fiber evidence had proved inconclusive, but now the greatest forensic laboratory in the world, the FBI’s, had entered the fray. Ever since 1975, when grand-jury proceedings in this long case had begun, FBI scientists, led by a chunky, muscular assistant supervisor, Paul Stombaugh, had been analyzing all the evidence found in the house, and conducting experiments to prove MacDonald guilty.

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

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

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

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

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

5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did he mean?

6

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?” I asked.

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

“Do you mean the FBI covered up?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hospital

Kitten card

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

1970 calendar

Valentine heart

Valentine card

Fort Bragg Catholic Church parish mass schedule

Recipe for holiday bread

School calendar

Child’s drawing—“Kim”

Easter card—“Dad—Love, Kim, Kristy”

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

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.