The Mammoth Book of New Csi (56 page)

“The next thing I remember was lying on the hallway floor,” said MacDonald. “I was freezing cold and it was very quiet. My teeth were chattering. I went down to the bedroom. I was dizzy, you know. I wasn’t real alert. My wife was lying on the floor next to the bed. There was a knife in her upper chest. I took that out and tried to give her artificial respiration, but the air was coming out of her chest. So, I went and checked the kids . . . there was a lot of blood around.”

When asked about his family, MacDonald wept profusely and struggled to compose himself.

“So, I went back into the bedroom. This time I was finding it real hard to breathe and I was dizzy. So I picked up the phone and I told this asshole operator that my name was Captain MacDonald and I was at 544 Castle Drive and I needed the MPs and a doctor and an ambulance. And she said, ‘Is this on post or off post?’ Something like that. And I started yelling at her. Finally, I told her it was on post, and she said: ‘Well, you’ll have to call the MPs.’

“So, I dropped the phone and went back and checked my wife again. Now I was – I don’t know – I assume I was hoping I hadn’t seen what I had seen, or I was starting to think more like a doctor. So, I went back and I checked for pulses. You know, carotid pulses and stuff. There was no pulse on my wife. I felt I was getting sick to my stomach and I was short of breath, and I was dizzy and my teeth were chattering cos I was cold. And so I didn’t know if I was going – I assumed I was going into shock because I was cold. That’s one of the symptoms of shock: you start getting chills.”

He recognized that he was suffering another symptom – shortness of breath. “That’s what happens when you get a pneumothorax” – air in the chest cavity, causing the collapse of the lung – “you think you can’t breathe. I had to get down on my hands and knees and breathe for a while, and then I went in and checked the kids and checked their pulses and stuff. I don’t know if it was the first time I checked them or the second time I checked them, to tell you the truth; but I had blood on my hands and I had little cuts in here.”

He pointed to his mid-section. His head hurt, but he seemed to be thinking better, he said, and he went into the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror. It then struck him that he had not got anywhere with his phone call. He went back out into the hallway. By this time he was on his hands and knees.

“I went into the kitchen, picked up that phone and the operator was on the line. My other phone had never been hung up. She said, ‘Is this Captain MacDonald?’ I said, ‘Yes it is.’ And she said, ‘Just a minute.’ And there was some dial tones and stuff and then the sergeant came on. And he said, ‘Can I help you?’ So I told him that I needed a doctor and an ambulance and that some people had been stabbed, and that I thought I was going to die. He said, ‘They’ll be right there.’ So, I left the phone; and I remember going back to look again. And the next thing I knew, an MP was giving me mouth-to-mouth respiration next to my wife.”

MacDonald had told an intriguing tale, but the CID did not believe him. They had sent a young investigator, thirty-yearold William Ivory, to the crime scene. He arrived there at 3.50 a.m. – even before MacDonald had been carted off to hospital – and he found things that contradicted MacDonald’s story.

In the small living room, a plant had been tipped over and a top-heavy coffee table was lying on its side – a position it would never assume in subsequent tests. But otherwise the living room was undisturbed, though MacDonald said he had struggled against three full-grown men in there. According to his testimony and his examination in hospital, he had been stabbed numerous times with a blade or ice pick, shredding his pyjama top. However, just a single fibre from his pyjamas was found in the living room. But, in the bedrooms, there were dozens. Several were found under Colette’s body. Others were found under Kimberley’s sheets. Two more were found in Kristen’s room – one lodged under her fingernail. Under further questioning, MacDonald said that he had not been wearing the tattered pyjama top when he went to his daughters’ rooms – he had already laid it over Colette.

The distribution of the blood around the house also raised Ivory’s suspicions. A lot of it was found in the bedrooms. There was even a bloody footprint matching MacDonald’s exiting Kristen’s room. But only a drop too small to be typed was found on the hallway steps and none on the living-room floor where MacDonald said he had been attacked. A tiny fleck appeared on the front of one of the lenses of MacDonald’s glasses, which were found near the living-room curtains. It was Kristen’s. But MacDonald said he had taken his glasses off before he went to her bedroom.

Ivory found the tips of surgical gloves beneath the headboard where “PIG” had been written in blood. Would drug-crazed hippies such as those MacDonald described have had the foresight to purchase surgical gloves to conceal their fingerprints? Forensic tests would show that they were identical in composition to those MacDonald kept in a cabinet beneath the kitchen sink. Beside the cabinet, on the floor, Ivory discovered drops of blood that were the same type as that of Jeffrey MacDonald.

“My gut told me that what he told the investigators and what he told the military police could not possibly have happened in that house,” said Ivory. The master bedroom, where Colette’s body lay, was all too neat. “I looked at that and saw how everything was laid out. I saw a weapon over to the side. And the position of her body. On the headboard of the bed, the word ‘PIG’ was written in blood.”

At 6.42 on the morning of the murder, outside the back door Ivory found an ice pick, an Old Hickory paring knife with a wooden handle and a piece of wood the size of a baseball bat with bloodstains on it. Forensic tests found that they had all been used in the murders. It was also discovered that all of them came from the MacDonalds’ apartment.

Another damning piece of evidence was found in the living room – a March 1970 edition of
Esquire
magazine with smudges of blood on it. It carried an article about Charles Manson and his hippie “Family” who had killed Roman Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate and several other people in a murderous rampage in Los Angeles six months earlier. Was this the origin of the murderous hippies that MacDonald said had killed his wife and daughters? There were eighteen points of similarity between the MacDonald and Manson murders, including the word “PIG” written in blood on the wall and a blonde hippy-style woman carrying a candle. Ivory believed that MacDonald had to look up the article after the murders to get his story straight.

MacDonald’s own testimony over the next six weeks did not help him. Three times shortly after the murders he had said: “Be sure to tell the CID I took the knife out of my wife’s chest.”

But why was he so fixated on the knife? Investigators were all the more puzzled when tests showed that the knife had never been in Colette’s chest in the first place. However, the bent Geneva Forge knife discovered in the bedroom was found to have made two slits in MacDonald’s pyjama top. Colette had been killed by twenty-one wounds in the chest where an ice pick had been driven in to the hilt, though there were another sixteen wounds thought to have been inflicted by the Old Hickory paring knife found outside. She had also been hit around the head at least six times and both her arms were broken. Apparently, she had held them up in an attempt to defend herself.

Kimberley had also been hit on the head with a club at least six times. One blow had shattered her skull. Another, which had hit the left side of her face, was delivered with such force that it had splintered her nose and cheek. When she was near to death, she had been stabbed in the neck with a knife repeatedly. The blows were grouped so closely together that the pathologist Dr William Hancock could only estimate the number of wounds to be eight or ten.

Kristen had fifteen wounds from the ice pick in the chest, along with four knife wounds. She had been stabbed with a knife another twelve times in the back and once in the neck. One of her fingers was also cut to the bone, suggesting she had been holding up her hand to protect herself.

These were frenzied attacks. By comparison, MacDonald’s injuries were minor. According to a staff surgeon, MacDonald’s most serious wound was a “clean, small, sharp” incision in the right chest, which caused a partial deflation of a lung. This was easily remedied.

There was more damning crime scene evidence. Unusually, MacDonald and the members of his family all had different blood types. This allowed CID agents to put together a scenario that tracked the action around the apartment. According to the CID, a fight began between MacDonald and his wife in the master bedroom. Colette, they believed, struck the first blow, whacking her husband in the forehead with a hairbrush. MacDonald retaliated by clubbing her with a piece of timber thought to have been a slat from Kimberley’s bed. Colette defended herself using the knife with the bent blade. Woken by the commotion, Kimberley appeared at the door of the master bedroom. Her brain serum was found in the doorway. It appeared she was struck, possibly inadvertently, during the furious altercation.

“We believe that the older girl was in the bedroom with them and got in the middle of the fight between them,” said Ivory. “He swatted back and hit her on the side of the head and dropped her to the floor.”

Believing Colette to be dead, MacDonald carried his wounded daughter back to her bedroom, where MacDonald placed her back in her own bed. Then he finished the job, stabbing and bludgeoning her. At the time, he was still wearing his pyjama top, which was splattered with Kimberley’s blood.

“While he’s doing that, his wife regains consciousness and goes to the baby’s room and lays across her on the bed, obviously in an attempt to protect her,” said investigator Peter Kearns.

Ivory said that MacDonald followed her into that room. “And he began beating her more there with the club. That’s evidenced by blood sprays that were on the wall and on the ceiling.”

After he killed his wife Colette and his daughter Kimberley, MacDonald came back into Kristen’s bedroom where the child was still in her bed.

“And then he killed her,” said Ivory. “And the only reason in the world that he killed her was because she was a witness. And she was old enough, she could say, ‘I saw daddy hitting mommy.’”

After he had killed them both, MacDonald wrapped his wife’s body in a sheet and carried it back to the master bedroom. On the way out, he left a footprint in Colette’s blood.

“There are no ridge marks . . . so we can’t say it’s his. But all the configuration fits his foot,” said Ivory.

He then had to inflict some wounds on himself that would appear life-threatening. So he took a disposable scalpel blade from his supply in the hallway closet. In the bathroom next to it, he cut himself between his seventh and eighth ribs, an area with few nerve-endings. The incision let air into his chest cavity and collapsed a lung. Now a victim himself, investigators said MacDonald then went about setting a stage to fit his story of an attack by drug-crazed hippies that he borrowed from the Manson murders. He went to the kitchen to get some surgical gloves. Donning them, he returned to the master bedroom, dipped his finger in Colette’s blood and wrote “PIG” on the headboard – just as Manson’s followers had at Sharon Tate’s house. MacDonald then laid his pyjama top over his wife’s chest and repeatedly stabbed through it with an ice pick. Finally, with the gloves still on, he threw the club, the ice pick and the Old Hickory knife out of the back door. He used the phones in the kitchen and master bedroom to summon help, messed up the living room and flushed the gloves and scalpel blade down the lavatory. Or he might have thrown them in the garbage as the CID allowed it to be taken away before they had inspected it.

In fact, the CID investigation was a disaster all around. The crime scene was not sealed off. Lieutenant Paulk admitted that he did not know how many military policemen had been inside the apartment. It is thought that twenty-six people tramped through the crime scene while evidence was being collected. Paulk had never attempted to compile a list of names and he left no one in charge to ensure that evidence was not disturbed when he left the apartment to call an ambulance and notify the provost marshal of the crime.

When the ambulance turned up, an ambulance driver moved other things around, encouraging the theory that MacDonald had staged the assault. He even stole MacDonald’s wallet from under the noses of the MPs.

One of the first men on the crime scene picked up the receiver dangling from the bedroom phone to inform headquarters that the MPs had arrived. The phone was then wiped. Fingerprints were wiped clean off Kristen’s baby bottle and other items after MacDonald had been taken to the hospital. In all, forty sets of fingerprints were lost, along with the bloody footprint, which was destroyed when they tried to remove it. A blue fibre found beneath Kristen’s fingernail and a piece of skin taken from beneath one of Colette’s nails were also lost. An army doctor attending the crime scene was allowed to remove the blue pyjama top and turn over Colette’s body, disrupting fibre evidence. As mentioned, the garbage was taken away before it could be examined, allowing potentially critical pieces of physical evidence to be discarded.

“The crime scene handling by the Army CID in 1970 is now taught in military police and investigation schools as a primary example of a crime scene investigation gone mad. This is the worst example they could find,” said MacDonald’s lawyer.

While MacDonald claimed that his family had been attacked by four assailants, no attempt was made to close off the surrounding streets while a search was made. Soon after his arrival at 544 Castle Drive, Lieutenant Paulk himself noticed wet grass tracked in from outside at various places around the apartment, but did not know if this had been brought in by the attackers or by his own men. Some of them were not thinking straight because they were distraught as a result of the slaughter they had seen.

Despite the destruction of crime scene evidence, the CID formally read MacDonald his rights seven weeks after the murders. It was noted that he showed little emotion when questioned about his family. However, he did agree to take a polygraph, but ten minutes after leaving CID headquarters, he phoned to say he had changed his mind. The army responded by putting him under armed guard.