Fatal Vision (1983)
In the early hours of Tuesday, February 17, 1970, the military police headquarters at Fort Bragg, ten miles south of Fayetteville, North Carolina, received a call reporting a stabbing at 544 Castle Drive, the ground floor residence of one of the military base’s Green Berets, twenty-six-year-old Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald. Military policemen (MPs) were dispatched to the address and found a brutal murder scene. There appeared to be evidence of an intrusion. The furniture was in disarray. MacDonald’s wife, Colette, lay on the floor next to the bed in the master bedroom; she was covered in blood, her nightdress ripped and punctured. Dr. MacDonald lay next to her, dressed only in his pajama bottoms, his head on his wife’s chest. The word “PIG” had been scrawled in blood on the bed’s headboard.
MacDonald roused as the MPs entered the bedroom; he managed to say, “Check my kids.” A policeman went into the next room and found five-year-old Kimberly, covered in stab wounds, lying on a blood-soaked bed. Backing out into the hall, the MP shone his flashlight into the bedroom opposite and saw that two-year-old Kristen also lay in a pool of blood. Back in the main bedroom MacDonald was trying to speak. He spluttered that there were “four of them. One was a woman. She was chanting, ‘Acid is groovy…. Kill the pigs!’” (McGinniss 15).
MacDonald’s wife, who was five months pregnant, and both his children were dead. MacDonald was rushed to hospital. He was hysterical; he said Colette had been screaming “Help me, Jeff!” as she was being stabbed. He wanted to see his children. When he got to the emergency room, he was treated for a wound to his chest, which had caused his lung to partially collapse. His other wounds—a bruise on his forehead, shallow stab wounds on his abdomen and left arm—did not require urgent attention. Far worse appeared to be his emotional state; he was screaming, angry, confused, lashing out. The doctors had to sedate him.
In the hours that followed, MacDonald’s widowed mother, Dorothy, and Colette’s parents, Mildred and Freddy Kassab, were contacted, and they made their way to Fort Bragg. Meanwhile, the army’s Criminal Investigation Department, headed by investigator William Ivory, began to try and piece together what had happened at 544 Castle Drive.
The MacDonalds had been the young, all–American family. Jeffrey was handsome, charming, and popular. He was the high-school hero, the blond-haired jock—girls liked him and guys wanted to be like him. He’d excelled both at sports and at his studies; he’d been voted “Most Likely to Succeed.” With dogged determination, he’d overcome modest beginnings and made it to medical school, studying first at Princeton University, then at Northwestern University. As a student he married his childhood sweetheart, Colette. Soon after, she gave birth to Kimberly. With a young wife and baby to support, and with little income, he continued to push himself, working all hours to put food on the table and pay the rent while completing an internship at Columbia Medical Center in New York.
MacDonald was a patriot, and he supported the U.S. war effort in Vietnam. After his internship, he enlisted in the army. Colette was not keen on him joining up, but she went along with it. In September 1969, MacDonald became the Green Berets’ medical officer at Fort Bragg, moving his wife and (now) two small daughters out to Fayetteville. Colette seemed to come around to the idea; their life started looking up. In a Christmas card to friends that year she wrote: “Life has never been so normal nor so happy … been having such a good time lately that we are expecting a son in July” (McGinniss 9). Two months later she and her unborn son were dead.
According to Jeffrey MacDonald, at around 2 o’clock on the morning of the murders, he awoke to the sound of Colette and Kimberly screaming. Earlier that night he had found his youngest daughter asleep next to Colette and saw that she had wet his side of the bed. He’d taken her back to her room and, rather than changing the bed sheets and disturbing his wife, he went back to sleep on the couch. Now as he roused in the semi-darkness he saw four figures standing above him: two white men, a black man in army fatigues, and a woman with long blonde hair wearing a floppy hat and holding what looked like a candle under her chin. As she chanted her hippie mantra, the black man started clubbing him. Another of the group stabbed him with an ice pick. MacDonald fought back against the blows and tried to crawl away but eventually collapsed in the hallway. When he came to, the intruders had gone and he saw the carnage in the bedrooms. He tried to attend to his wife and children, but his own injuries had left him weak and disorientated; in between bouts of unconsciousness he placed the emergency call to the MP headquarters.
The next day, however, as the young doctor recuperated in the hospital, William Ivory concluded that MacDonald’s account of the events of the night before was a lie. A number of things didn’t add up, and this list grew as the days passed. The disarray the furniture was in looked too careful, not like it had been caused by the kind of chaos that would accompany an invasion by four violent and presumably drug-addled strangers. Just a single fiber from MacDonald’s pajamas was found in the living room, yet he claimed he’d been violently stabbed in there. In the bedrooms, however, many of his pajama fibers were found, consistent with a violent scuffle. Each of the MacDonald family had a different blood type, but none of Jeffrey MacDonald’s blood was found in the living room. Some was found in the kitchen and in the bathroom. Added to this was the superficiality of his injuries. His wife and daughters were effectively massacred; MacDonald escaped with just one wound that needed treatment, the puncture to his chest that had led to the partial deflation of his lung. It was a wound that a doctor, the CID believed, could easily inflict on himself. And most likely, they concluded, he inflicted it carefully in the bathroom, where his blood was found near the sink. The crazed hippie story seemed contrived too, even more so when the latest issue of Esquire magazine—featuring a long article on the Charles Manson-ordered hippie killings of actress Sharon Tate and her houseguests that had occurred in Hollywood the previous year (where the killers had written “PIG” in blood on the front door)—was found in MacDonald’s living room.
The army put their allegations to MacDonald. He stuck firmly to his story. An Article 32 hearing—the military equivalent of a grand jury—was arranged. MacDonald had strong support from his friends, colleagues, and family, not least his father-in-law Freddy Kassab, who was devastated by the killing of his beloved stepdaughter and grandchildren. At the hearing, Kassab tearfully announced for the record that if “I ever had another daughter, I’d still want the same son-in-law” (McGinniss 143). MacDonald’s defense lawyer Bernie Segal pointed to the plethora of investigation blunders the army had made at the crime scene. No one had an idea of how many military policemen had traipsed through the apartment that night. Crucial evidence had not been processed for fingerprints. One MP stood up a flower pot that had been knocked over. Another replaced the dangling telephone receiver MacDonald had used to make the call to HQ. A section of carpet containing a bloody footprint was retrieved from the crime scene and then lost. And Segal had received a tip about a woman named Helena Stoeckley, an eighteen-year-old drug addict who lived in Fayetteville. She had been out with two or three men in the early hours of February 17 and couldn’t account for her movements. More intriguingly, one of the MPs, Kenneth Mica, said he saw a young woman in a “wide brimmed hat” standing alone on a street corner as he rushed with the others to the MacDonald residence after the emergency call that fateful morning. But the CID had since questioned and discredited her—Stoeckley was well known as unstable; she was an attention seeker, a fantasist.
In October 1970, the army was obliged to dismiss the charges against MacDonald because of “lack of evidence.” MacDonald was honorably discharged; he didn’t waste any opportunity in criticizing the army’s incompetence in the investigation. But he also wanted to put Fort Bragg far behind him; he moved to New York and began work as a hospital doctor.
Colette MacDonald’s stepfather Freddy Kassab thanked God that the charges had been dismissed. Now he could join MacDonald in the fight to bring the real killers to justice. He waited impatiently for news of an FBI investigation into the murders, and he asked MacDonald to arrange for the full transcript of the Article 32 hearing—more than one thousand pages—to be sent to him so that he could get to work on piecing together the recorded evidence. But MacDonald started putting some distance between himself and the Kassabs. He gradually stopped replying to their calls and letters; it seemed that all Freddy Kassab wanted to do was talk about Colette and the kids and the search for the killers. MacDonald found all this too upsetting. The Kassabs became bemused and frustrated. It didn’t look like MacDonald was in any hurry to see a civilian investigation get off the ground. Freddy was further unnerved by MacDonald’s appearance on the Dick Cavett talk show, broadcast on ABC on December 15, 1970. Although continuing to rail against the army’s treatment of him and outlining again his account of the events of February 17, MacDonald appeared at times to be enjoying the interview, smirking at the audience, even making jokes. Freddy was shocked. He and his wife continued to put pressure on MacDonald; they needed his cooperation to get the murder inquiry properly re-launched. But MacDonald continued to evade his in-laws for months. Eventually, however, he visited them with some incredible news. Following a tip, he said, he and some Green Beret pals had scoured Fayetteville one night and found one of the killers, who had confessed to being a part of the murders. MacDonald and his friends killed the hippie, burying his body where no one would find him. With this he was gone again (McGinniss 183–84). This incredible story just confused and infuriated Freddy Kassab further. Why would MacDonald kill one of the people who could finally prove his innocence? Why not get a full account of the night in question from the hippie before killing him? And why not get the hippie to identify who he was with that night? MacDonald later admitted that he’d made up the story to try to appease Kassab. It had the opposite effect. And when Kassab finished studying the Article 32 transcript, all one thousand pages of it, which he finally received in February 1971, he found to his horror that he was in agreement with the army: he was convinced that his son-in-law was guilty. Once MacDonald’s staunchest defender, Kassab was about to become his fiercest enemy.
Kassab set about trying to get the case re-opened in civilian court. MacDonald, meanwhile, put the Kassabs and his old life behind him. He moved to Long Beach, California, to work as an emergency room physician. He acquired the accoutrements of a well-off bachelor life: a beachside condominium apartment, a yacht, a succession of beautiful girlfriends. Three thousand miles away, Kassab lobbied Congressmen and senators and tried to put his case in front of the Justice Department on both the East and West coasts. It took three years of tireless campaigning to get anyone to take up the case, but, finally, Kassab succeeded. MacDonald was brought before a grand jury in August 1974; the objective of the procedure was to decide whether or not to indict him for murder in civilian court. He could not disguise his acute frustration in the face of his crusading ex-ally, Freddy Kassab, a man who seemed almost inhumanly determined to bring him to account. Over the course of the grand jury hearing, the famously charming, all-American MacDonald began to lose his cool. On the final day of the hearing he raged: “I didn’t kill Colette. And I didn’t kill Kimmy and I didn’t kill Kristy…. I loved them then and I love them now and you can shove all your fucking evidence right up your ass!” (McGinniss 357). Three days later MacDonald was indicted on three counts of murder.
It took four more years for MacDonald to go on trial. During that time, he returned, on bail, to his otherwise agreeable California lifestyle. He tried to enlist an author to tell his story. He approached Joseph Wambaugh, writer of the celebrated The Onion Field. MacDonald believed what had happened to him was as potent and remarkable as the story at the center of that true-crime classic. Wambaugh replied that if he was to write it, it would be his story, and asked, “What if I … did not believe you innocent?” He added that there would be no guarantee that the resulting book would reflect MacDonald’s version of the truth, and he maintained that MacDonald would have “no editorial prerogative” (Malcolm 29). MacDonald did not seem deterred, and he continued, on and off, to try to recruit Wambaugh for the project. Then Joe McGinniss came into his life.
Joe McGinniss had made a striking entrance on the literary scene when, at age twenty-six, he published The Selling of the President in 1968. The book detailed the behind-the-scenes activities of Richard Nixon’s promotional team as Nixon made another bid for the presidency. It was a slick, humorous, and modishly cynical piece of reportage, a fascinating and prescient insight into the unsettling union of marketing and politics before such things were widely accepted. To research it, McGinniss had gained full access to the advertising agency representing Nixon. Although it was written with the Nixon camp’s cooperation, McGinniss made no attempt to flatter his subject. When the book became a bestseller, there was some outrage among Nixon’s allies about how McGinniss had portrayed him. But as Nixon had gone on to win the presidency, the ill feeling remained generally muted.
McGinniss’ career had subsequently struggled to live up to his sensational debut. His next two books were failures, but his fourth, Going to Extremes, a journalistic voyage through Alaska, was better received. By the time he finished it in 1979, he was working as a columnist for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner; it was there that he came across the story of Jeffrey MacDonald, whose long-delayed civilian murder trial was just about to start. McGinniss went to interview MacDonald for his Examiner column. MacDonald asked the author if he’d like to attend the trial in Raleigh, North Carolina, with him, and report on it from within, having full access to his defense team. McGinniss agreed. The two men shook on a deal that would see McGinniss pay MacDonald a share of the book’s proceeds. This was an unusual arrangement, but MacDonald’s legal bills were mounting up—he definitely needed the money. And, sniffing another bestseller, McGinniss knew there would be plenty to go around if the thing came off. The project quickly found a publisher and McGinniss received a $300,000 advance, 26.5 percent of which he gave to MacDonald.
McGinniss set off with MacDonald for Raleigh. Over the next two months, the author was to live with MacDonald and his defense team. The two men grew close, eating, drinking, working out, and, most important, talking together. At the end of the trial came a shocking verdict: MacDonald was found guilty and given three consecutive life terms, the severest sentence the judge could pass. McGinniss was visibly shaken; along with the defense team, he cried when the news came in (Malcolm 23). While McGinniss had absorbed everything about MacDonald and his defense team’s behavior, he had not spoken with MacDonald directly about the murders during the trial. As MacDonald began life as a prisoner on Terminal Island (not far from his home in Long Beach, California) in late 1979, McGinniss prepared to proceed with this aspect of the book. Visiting MacDonald in prison and corresponding with him regularly, McGinniss got the doctor to delve into his past and record on audiotapes detailed reminiscences about his childhood, his family and his burgeoning romance with Colette, charting his life story through the first years of their relationship up to and beyond the murders of his family. Meanwhile, McGinniss holed up in California to immerse himself in research; MacDonald had given the author the keys to his Long Beach apartment, along with full access to his files and correspondence regarding the case.
The two men stayed close by letter. Not long after MacDonald arrived at Terminal Island, McGinniss wrote to him: “Goddamn, Jeff, one of the worst things about all this is how suddenly and totally of all your friends—self included—have been deprived of the pleasure of your company…” He went on: “What the fuck were those people [the jury] thinking of?” adding, “I am still as sorry as hell this whole thing ever happened, and am impatient to see you again and plunge into the book, and, hopefully, once again to share with you many laughs and good stories and new experiences…” (Malcolm 36–37). The exchange of heartfelt letters continued until July 1980, when the fourth circuit court accepted MacDonald’s appeal argument that he had been denied a speedy trial after the murders. The doctor was promptly freed on bail. He returned to his job at St. Mary’s Medical Center, and he and McGinniss were able to resume their friendship and collaboration. While the prosecution worked to have the appeal decision overturned, MacDonald once again returned to a life that was far from unpleasant. Apart from being unable to leave California and having to report to a parole office once a week, he picked up where he left off, dating again and soon getting serious with an attractive medical student. It wasn’t to last; in March 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that MacDonald’s right to a speedy trial had not been violated and he was sent back to jail.
The letters between MacDonald and McGinniss resumed as the latter began his fourth year working on the book. Back behind bars, MacDonald could only place his faith in the case for exoneration that he believed the book would provide, and he was becoming impatient. As McGinniss began to reach the end of the project in early 1983, MacDonald demanded to see the final draft, leading McGinniss to respond firmly: “At no time was there ever any understanding that you would be given an advance look at the book six months prior to publication” (Malcolm 31). MacDonald instead focused his efforts on helping to publicize the upcoming book, accepting a proposal from Mike Wallace of CBS’ 60 Minutes to talk about it. It was during this interview that MacDonald learned the truth of what McGinniss had been writing about him. Although McGinniss had rebuked MacDonald for demanding to see the galleys, Wallace was armed with a pre-publication copy of the book when he went to see the prisoner. During the interview, the broadcaster asked MacDonald, “How would you feel if I told you Joe McGinniss says you’re a homicidal maniac?” MacDonald was incredulous, dismissing the question. Then Wallace produced McGinniss’ manuscript—titled “Fatal Vision”—and began to detail the evidence (Anson). McGinniss, it was clear, was not just convinced MacDonald had in fact murdered his wife and family. He suggested the doctor was a pathological narcissist reveling in the attention that the murder case had brought him; a serial womanizer who had been constantly unfaithful to his wife during their marriage; a sometime drug addict (overloading on diet pills in the days before the attack on his family); and a spoiled, self-centered egotist capable of violent rages when things didn’t go his way (McGinniss 480–97). McGinniss explained that in the weeks leading up to the murder of his family, MacDonald “had lost fifteen pounds … while taking a [diet] drug that can cause insanity. He was suffering from short-term physical exhaustion and longer-term emotional stress. His life, in fact, had been one extended period of stress—financial, intellectual, psychological—ever since Colette had become pregnant and he had to marry her and to leave Princeton early and to get through medical school while being husband to her and father to two daughters” (496). With “the amphetamines swelling [MacDonald’s] rage to flood tide,” McGinniss wondered, “would it be too much to surmise that in one instant … a critical mass had been achieved, a fission had taken place, and that by 3:40 a.m. on February 17, 1970, the ensuring explosion of rage had destroyed not only Jeffrey MacDonald’s wife and daughters but all that he had sought to make his life?” (496).
Even McGinniss’ description of MacDonald’s Long Beach apartment, in which the author had stayed to research the book, promoted the view that the doctor was disturbingly obsessed with his own image. “Jeffrey MacDonald’s condominium was quite comfortable, when you got used to all the mirrors,” he wrote (481). The author skimmed over the friendship that had existed between the two men, instead giving sympathetic exposure to anti–MacDonald crusaders such as Freddy Kassab. Events as seen purely from MacDonald’s perspective were confined to a handful of albeit lengthy (but interminably boring) passages called “The Voice of Jeffrey MacDonald,” which served as prosaic transcripts of the reminiscences of childhood and courting that MacDonald had taped in prison and which paled miserably in comparison to the juicy details of the murder case itself. The author also dismissed as totally unreliable the claims that pointed to Helena Stoeckley as a potential suspect, many of them made by Stoeckley herself. From the aftermath of the murders until her untimely death in 1982, at age 30, from liver disease, Helena Stoeckley had said at various times that she had been in the MacDonald’s apartment on the night in question; that she hadn’t been in the apartment; that she couldn’t remember if she had been in the apartment or not; that there had been six intruders in the apartment; that earlier in the evening MacDonald had spoken with her and the other assailants and tried to procure drugs for them; and that one of the killers was a former CID agent.
MacDonald, not surprisingly, was devastated by McGinniss’ manuscript; he was further outraged when Fatal Vision went on to become a bestseller in late 1983. (The following year, a faithful, two-part TV adaptation of the book was broadcast by NBC—to an audience of sixty million.) After digesting the extent of the “betrayal,” MacDonald made an unprecedented move for a subject of a true-crime work: In August 1984, he filed a civil suit against McGinniss for contract fraud, seeking $15 million in damages. The subsequent trial may not have served in any way to clear MacDonald’s name, but it succeeded in humiliating Joe McGinniss. Prosecuting counsel Gary Bostwick was relentless in juxtaposing the author’s Fatal Vision conclusions with the sentiments he had expressed in his private letters to MacDonald, which the latter had happily made available for use in court. While McGinniss tried to maintain that his only responsibility was to the ultimate truth of the case—by whatever means possible—his emotive letters to MacDonald proved powerful in bringing his methods, and his character, into question. The case concluded in August 1987 with a hung jury, but five of the six jurors were in MacDonald’s favor, regardless of his status as a convicted murderer. The case was settled out of court, the doctor being awarded $325,000 (although it could not go to him personally). While it was not a huge amount in relation to the money Fatal Vision had made, the price McGinniss paid in terms of his reputation was higher. His less than ethical behavior had been exposed, and the case shone an ugly light on the murky area of cynical journalists’ relationships with—and responsibilities to—their “unwitting” subjects. As Janet Malcolm famously began her book on the MacDonald–McGinniss fraud case: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or books appears—his hard lesson” (3).
Within a couple of years, McGinniss had stopped talking about Fatal Vision and the case altogether. For his part, following the fraud trial, MacDonald, never without his (sometimes adoring) followers, saw something of an upswing in support, with books and television programs lending a more sympathetic ear to his version of events, although he would remain in jail. But McGinniss’ Fatal Vision remains a strong indictment of Jeffrey MacDonald’s apparent guilt. The book had its biases, flaws, and strategic omissions, but it presented its arguments powerfully. Subsequent pro–MacDonald offerings, most notably Jerry Allen Potter and Fred Bost’s Fatal Justice, whose whole raison d’être is to be a clear rebuke to McGinniss’ book, failed to defend MacDonald quite as convincingly as McGinniss condemned him. Potter and Bost’s book, for example, was heavily biased against the prosecution’s case from the outset. But Fatal Vision, for all its manipulation, did not avoid the theories and events and pieces of evidence that could throw doubts on the prosecution’s case, nor did it shy away from the some of the more serious glitches in the 1979 trial that finally sent MacDonald down for three consecutive life terms (not least, the prosecution’s treatment of Helena Stoeckley).
The MacDonald case continues to be divisive, with as many of its followers passionately proclaiming the doctor the victim of a miscarriage of justice as those who steadfastly stand by the guilty verdict. In the 2000s, the case was investigated by the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. Morris wanted to get a new documentary about MacDonald off the ground. His most famous film, The Thin Blue Line (1988), had uncovered a miscarriage of justice in the case of convicted killer Randall Adams; it led to the quashing of Adams’ conviction and won plaudits across the industry. But financing for a MacDonald film wasn’t forthcoming, so Morris published his interviews and investigations in 2012 in a book, A Wilderness of Error. The book reasonably pointed to the mistakes and neglectfulness of the prosecution’s case against MacDonald, and it spent a long time painting a sympathetic picture of Helena Stoeckley as a tortured soul who could have been in MacDonald’s house on the night of the murders. But when Morris finally spoke to Kenneth Mica, the MP who said he saw a girl matching Stoeckley’s description on a street corner in Fayetteville as he was rushing to the MacDonald residence, Mica was adamant that the girl wasn’t Stoeckley. Mica said that he’d been misquoted in many of the interviews he had done for TV documentaries about the case and that he had “told them right out” that the woman he saw was not Stoeckley. Morris was then obliged to spend the next few pages dismantling Mica’s credibility with the same energy he spent trying to establish Stoeckley’s. He wrote: “The question became, if Mica knew that Stoeckley wasn’t the woman, why didn’t he communicate that fact to the various authorities involved in investigating the crime? When was he certain? Or had he reinvented the story in recent years? Needless to say, there were pressures to believe that it wasn’t Stoeckley…. If MacDonald was guilty, then it didn’t matter whether Stoeckley was on the roadway that night. And so, maybe it was easier to mentally remove her from the story” (434, author’s emphasis). Although his face-to-face interview with Mica proved a new obstacle to his investigation, Morris concluded that Mica’s “memory of the events may change, but the testimony under oath, the official statements, remain the same…. [T]he written record reminds us that Mica did see someone…” (443, author’s emphasis).
Despite Morris’ best efforts, the MacDonald camp was still reeling from McGinniss’ book thirty-five years later. It was McGinniss, after all, who had struck the first literary blow. For those who believe MacDonald’s side of the story, Fatal Vision reaped lasting, catastrophic damage by securing massive public support for the ongoing incarceration of an “innocent” man. It is worth remembering, however, that if McGinniss was guilty of deception and betrayal, he was not accused of brutal murder. In the furor that followed Fatal Vision, the three people almost forgotten were those most innocent in the whole sordid affair: Colette, Kimberly, and Kristen MacDonald. When five-year-old Kimberly was found at the murder scene, her face was battered so badly that her cheekbone was left exposed. Two-year-old Kristen had thirty-three stab wounds in her neck, chest, and back. Both Colette’s arms had been broken as she fended off a frenzied attack that saw an ice pick driven deep into her chest twenty-one times. These emotive details have, perhaps understandably, been absent from the tireless and ever-efficient assertions of innocence that have emanated from Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald over the last thirty-five years. Cases for appeal and retrial have been heard and re-heard at various times. Every few years, MacDonald supporters claim to produce fresh evidence warranting an overturning of the original verdict. Each time, so far, their arguments have been dismissed. In 2005, MacDonald applied for parole, something he said he would never do, as securing parole usually requires an admission of guilt. Still maintaining his innocence, he was denied parole. MacDonald went back once again to his long-established routine, serving his time and speaking out about the case whenever the opportunity arose, reserving his most impassioned and vociferous cries for how its injustices, and how Fatal Vision, had destroyed his life.