The Journalist and the Murderer (9 page)

The solution McGinniss arrived at for dealing with MacDonald’s characterlessness was not a satisfactory one, but it had to do. At the criminal trial, the prosecution had argued that it did not have to show that MacDonald was the kind of person who could have committed the crimes—it had only to show that he had indeed committed them—but this was precisely what McGinniss, the nonfiction novelist,
did
have to show. The means he adopted was to quote long descriptions by Kernberg and Lasch of their vivid characters, the pathological narcissists, his idea evidently being that some of the aura of those characters would come off on MacDonald—that, by extension, their interesting horribleness would become his. When Kernberg (in a passage quoted by McGinniss) speaks of pathological narcissists’ “grandiosity, extreme self-centeredness, and remarkable absence of interest and empathy for others, in spite of the fact that they are so very eager to obtain admiration and approval,” and adds,

he could be talking about the sinister Grandcourt in
Daniel Deronda
and Osmond in
Portrait of a Lady
. Unfortunately for McGinniss’s project, however, there is nothing in the preceding six hundred pages of
Fatal Vision
to suggest that Kernberg was talking about Jeffrey MacDonald; nor does McGinniss’s quotation from Lasch on the narcissist’s
“boundless rage against the female sex,” based on his “fear of the devouring mother of the pre-Oedipal fantasy,” connect with anything McGinniss could show MacDonald to have done.

Hervey Cleckley’s psychopath worked a little better for McGinniss.
The Mask of Sanity
, first published in 1941, is an extremely odd book, which begins (to give an idea of its period flavor) with an attack on
Finnegans Wake
and includes among its vignettes of anti-social behavior the case of an “intelligent and in some respects distinguished young man” who was discovered having sex with four black “unwashed laborers” in a tourist cabin in the South. For some reason, this quaint and rather mad book continues to exert its hold on the imaginations of American psychiatrists; it appeared in a fifth edition as recently as 1976, and is still used as a textbook in medical schools throughout the country. The book’s thesis, which is buried among masses of the sort of thing cited above, is that there is a kind of evildoer called a psychopath, who does not seem in any way abnormal or different from other people but in fact suffers from “a grave psychiatric disorder,” whose chief symptom is the very appearance of normality by which the horror of his condition is obscured. For behind “the mask of sanity” there is not a real human being but a mere simulacrum of one. Cleckley writes:

Cleckley’s “grave psychiatric disorder” is, of course, the same disorder that afflicted Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and a host of other wonderful literary creations. The attempt to solve the problem of evil and perpetuate the Romantic myth of the innate goodness of man through the fanciful notion that the people who commit evil acts are lacking in the usual human equipment—are not “real” human beings at all but soulless monsters—is a familiar topos of Victorian Romantic literature. That Cleckley’s book remains to this day a serious psychiatric text is a testament to the strength of this fantasy among psychiatrists. To McGinniss, the concept of the psychopath did not so much offer a solution to his literary problem of making MacDonald a believable murderer as give him permission to evade the problem—just as the concept itself evades the problem it purports to solve. To say that people who do bad things don’t seem bad is to say something we all already know: no one flaunts bad behavior, everyone tries to hide it, every villain wears a mask of goodness. The concept of the psychopath is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil—it is merely a restatement of the mystery—and only offers an escape valve for the frustration felt by psychiatrists, social workers, and police officers, who daily encounter its force. For McGinniss, the Cleckley tautology must also have offered a way out of his moral dilemma in regard to MacDonald. If MacDonald
only seemed to be a fellow human being, and was actually a “subtly constructed reflex machine” (wearing a mask? Cleckley never quite got the bugs out of his figural machinery), then McGinniss owed him nothing, and could betray him with impunity, since he was betraying not “him” but only some sort of unholy “it.”

When I returned to New York from California, I telephoned Dr. Stone. At the trial, he had attempted to fuse Cleckley’s Dracula with Kernberg’s Grandcourt in his diagnostic portrait of MacDonald, achieving rather odd results. Now, on the phone, he said he welcomed the opportunity to enlarge on his testimony—he had a
great deal
to tell me, he said—and a few days later I opened the door to his office, on the ground floor of an apartment building on Central Park West. The office was like a Victorian parlor—or perhaps like a stage set for one—furnished with a grand piano, velvet draperies, Persian rugs, brocaded sofas and chairs, ornate inlaid tables, books in old leather bindings, and dimly glowing lamps. Stone, a tall, loosely built man in his middle fifties, with a kindly, soft, rosy face and white hair, motioned for me to sit on one of the brocaded sofas in front of a low marble-topped table, and seated himself nearby in a bentwood rocker.

Stone’s eagerness to talk to me had been preceded by his eagerness to testify for the defense. At the trial, under Bostwick’s cross-examination, he had had to concede that in his first telephone conversation with Kornstein—before he had seen any of the transcripts on which he based his testimony—he had all but agreed to testify. In reply to a question about his fee as an expert witness, he told Bostwick he had not yet determined the fee, because “I have spent upwards of nineteen hundred hours, and I feel that some of that has been out of a special interest on my
part,” and that “no one asked me to make a concordance of six hundred pages of material. I did that myself to help orient things in my own mind, and I feel that I will charge a lower amount as a result.” Now, in his office, Stone said, “I had read
Fatal Vision
years before, and it was pretty clear that Jeff MacDonald was a very pathological person.”

“You thought that from reading the book?” I asked.

“Oh, sure. The man was at the very least a pathological liar, and since he was also a killer, that made him a very ugly and obnoxious person—a threat to the body social, and clearly a very sick personality. However, I had not paid too much attention to this when I read the book—it was just another interesting book. By the time they asked me to look into the matter as a personality-disorder expert, I had become a—if you will—murderologist, as a hobby. I had amassed a large collection of psychobiographies of murderers, and I was much more familiar with the famous killers of the past twenty or thirty years than I had been when I read the book. The whole subject had become very intriguing to me, so I was very enthusiastic about participating in the trial. They sent me a transcription of the thirty tapes of Jeff MacDonald talking while in jail—his pseudo-autobiography. It was all fake.”

“Fake?”

“Well, the whole thing was a tissue of hyperbole and outright lies and deceit. I made an index of the examples of lying, self-aggrandizement, boasting, et cetera, page by page, so I would be better prepared at the trial to cite chapter and verse for anything they might ask me. It is a remarkable exercise in lying. Now, knowing full well that I couldn’t admit this into evidence—the law is adversarial in structure, and thus antithetical to scientific method—I
nevertheless conducted a little experiment, just to see if I was on the right track. After reading the hundreds and hundreds of pages of the transcript, I took four pages at random and had my secretary Xerox a dozen copies, which I gave to the class at Cornell that I teach on personality disorders. The students are Ph.D. psychologists and young psychiatrists. I didn’t tell them anything except ‘Here are four pages from a tape recording that somebody made about his life. Here is a list of the
DSM-III
standard diagnostic personality disorders. Please scribble down whether you think the person’s words convey any evidence pertaining to the presence of one or several of these disorders.’ And everyone picked up that he was narcissistic, and most that he was anti-social—just from the four pages! And my wife picked it up from
one
page, because I had the stuff lying on the bed one evening, and she glanced at it and said, ‘My God, who is this narcissistic son of a bitch?’ Ha, ha! Just like that! Of course, at the trial they asked me, ‘How can you diagnose a person you haven’t examined?’ Often, you can’t, but with personality disorders you can sometimes do a better job when you haven’t examined the person than when you have, because the subject is going to lie through his teeth. Kernberg’s concept of pathological narcissism is nothing more than the confluence of narcissistic traits—poor empathy, self-aggrandizement, manipulative and exploitive use of others—with anti-social qualities like ruthlessness, conning people, hurting others, taking liberties with the rules by which society regulates itself. So it was not surprising that my wife and my dozen students could make the diagnosis at the snap of a finger. However, I couldn’t introduce my experiment into evidence, because it was hearsay. It bothered the hell out of me. Here was a man who by the
best scientific standards was exactly what Joe McGinniss said he was, and yet I couldn’t introduce that evidence into court.”

I said that it seemed to me his experiment was hardly up to the best—or any—scientific standards, since it had no controls.

“Yes,” Stone said, “I could have gone about it in that scrambled way, using several normal people—somebody with a different personality disorder, some other convicted person—along with Jeff MacDonald. But none of that could have been admitted into evidence unless the other side had overseen the experiment, and they would never have agreed to do that because they know bloody well that inside he’s exactly the way the book says he is.”

“This is your belief, but you haven’t established it.”

“No. But I suspect strongly that Bostwick knew he wasn’t dealing with Lord Fauntleroy.”

“You don’t feel that there is any possibility that MacDonald is innocent?”

“No. In fact—and this, too, was something I wasn’t able to say in court, since Bostwick cleverly ate up all the time with a bunch of silly questions and I had to catch a plane—the four intruders who MacDonald claimed were responsible for the murders represented the only truth, psychologically speaking, that he told. There really
were
four people who intruded on the hedonistic life style and whoring around of Jeff MacDonald: the four people who intruded on his disinclination to be a responsible husband and father; namely, Colette, Kristen, Kimberly, and the unborn son. Three white and one black—the hidden one.”

Stone went on to speak of having seen MacDonald in the courtroom. “I was highly nervous about being in the presence of this man,” he said. “I had the feeling his eyes
could bore holes through a tank. The steely stare of this hostile man! I made a point of finding out when he would be paroled, and when I learned that it was after the time I would be no longer be on earth I felt bolder.”

“You talk about him as if you really knew him, as if he were a real person,” I said. “But actually he’s a character in a book. Everything we know about him we know from McGinniss’s text.”

Stone said nothing for a moment, and I wondered whether my remark had been imprudent. In asking a character in one text to comment on the ontological status of a character in another text, was I alerting Stone too soon—as I had alerted McGinniss too soon—to the dangers of subjecthood? Stone wavered, but—obviously made of hardier metal than McGinniss—resolutely went on with his mission of self-disclosure. “He’s not a Dickens character,” he finally said, correctly, if irrelevantly.

“You really don’t like him,” I said.

“No. It’s hard to like a man who stabs his pregnant wife to death. It takes more—what shall I say?—love of mankind than I possess. I’m more of the school of ‘You get what you earn, and you have to earn what you get.’ ”

Stone had spoken earlier of the chain of abuse and brutalization that links generations of violent people. I asked him, “Isn’t it possible that bad things were done to MacDonald in his early years? That his childhood wasn’t all that idyllic, and that he repressed what happened?”

“Yes.”

“If you knew that to be so, would you feel more benign toward him?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s a liar. Because he’s not man enough to
say, ‘I committed those murders because I was under the influence of amphetamines. I didn’t know what I was doing. Colette was taking a course in psychology, she was going to wear the pants in the family. This was threatening to me; I felt left out. I was beginning to fondle the older girl too much, and she caught me’—this is Colette’s stepfather’s theory; he told me about it during the trial—‘so in a moment of frenzied feeling that ruined my whole life I just killed the whole lot of them.’ If he could say all that, I’d still want him put away for the rest of his life, but at least I’d have some respect for the fact that he could be honest about what happened. No way. He can’t do that. He’s not built to do that.”