The Mammoth Book of New Csi (58 page)

MacDonald’s friends, neighbours and professional associates – many leading figures in the military and medical fields – said much the same. His former commanding officer, Robert Kingston, called him “one of the finest, most upright, most outstanding young soldiers and very devoted to both his wife and children”. However, it did come out that MacDonald had been unfaithful when away on training missions, but Colette, it was said, knew nothing of these indiscretions.

In his report, Colonel Rock found that the charges against Captain MacDonald were not true, recommended that they be dismissed and that the appropriate civilian authorities take up the investigation of Helena Stoeckley.

Ivory said he was shocked: “Because I knew that there was enough evidence to put reasonable suspicion in anybody’s mind that perhaps this guy had done that.”

Many other people at Fort Bragg were not happy with Rock’s report and, instead of dismissing the charges completely, General Flanagan merely dropped the charges due to insufficient evidence. This meant that they could be revived again at any time.

MacDonald and Kassab’s campaign against the army investigations had raised the possibility of perjury charges. These had to be refuted and a second CID investigation was now underway. This time it was in the hands of a seasoned investigator, rather than the rookie Ivory.

Knowing that feelings at Fort Bragg were running against him, MacDonald applied for an honourable discharge, sold off his family’s possessions in a yard sale and moved to New York, where he rubbed shoulders with model, heiress and socialite Countess Christina Paolozzi Bellin and searched for a journalist who would pay for his story. Then he appeared on a television with broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite to complain about his treatment by the army, and on
The Dick Cavett Show
he made wisecracks about the army investigators.

“He knew how to do it, as we say in the talk show trade. He knew how to handle himself,” Cavett said. But this was not how a man who had just lost his wife and children should appear, Cavett felt. “His affect is wrong, totally wrong. My affect was, ‘Gee, to find your wife and kids murdered.’ And even his answer to that was something like, ‘Hey, yeah, isn’t that something?’ Almost sounded like Bob Hope. Very like Bob Hope.”

Colette’s family were watching the show that night and were disturbed by MacDonald’s performance.

“All he spoke about was how his rights had been violated,” said Colette’s older brother, Robert Stevenson. “I don’t think he once mentioned about, ‘Let’s get the murderers. My family’s been killed.’ But I remember him grinning like a Cheshire cat.”

Kassab, until then MacDonald’s most dogged defender, was put off by the sight on his son-in-law joking about so grave a subject as the murder of his stepdaughter and grandchildren. MacDonald humoured Kassab by telling him that he and some Green Beret buddies had tracked down one of the killers and put him “six feet under”. Kassab later found out this was not true.

Then MacDonald made another mistake. He gave Kassab the transcript of the Article 32 hearings that his father-in-law had been requesting for months. Going through the testimony with a fine-tooth comb, Kassab found that MacDonald had said things that could not be true. For example, he said he had seen blood bubble from Kimberley’s chest. But the room was dark and Kimberley had no chest wounds. MacDonald also claimed in testimony that he had sustained near life-threatening injuries. Kassab had visited MacDonald in the hospital less than eighteen hours after the attack and found him sitting up in bed, enjoying a meal and with very little in the way of bandages and dressing. He also discovered that some of MacDonald’s Green Beret buddies had come to the hospital and they had drunk a bottle of cold duck – a mixture of red wine and champagne.

With the investigators, Kassab spent hours at 544 Castle Drive, going over the crime scene inch by inch, testing MacDonald’s testimony against the crime scene evidence. MacDonald’s staunchest supporter had now become his most resolute enemy.

“He sat around a table that I still have at home, where you can see the elbow marks as he smoked pack after pack of cigarettes, trying to decide how this happened, drawing the diagrams, plotting it with the X’s where the bodies were, the differing blood types,” said Colette’s brother Robert.

“When I was faced with the evidence, put together with what I knew he had told me, nothing fit. Absolutely nothing,” said Kassab.

MacDonald was astounded.

“It never occurred to me that Alfred Kassab would turn on me, to be quite honest,” he said.

MacDonald’s mother had sold her house to pay for his defence. Now he had to earn some money to pay her back. He began working as an emergency-room physician at the St Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, California, alongside his old friend Jerry Hughes, who had transformed the department into one of the best in the state. There he soon acquired the accessories of a swinging bachelor, including a marina-front condominium and a yacht.

An enthusiastic sportsman, MacDonald helped organize an inter-departmental softball competition at the medical centre. He also taught emergency medicine at UCLA Harbor General Medical Center and became a public speaker in the campaign against child abuse. An expert in CPR, he saved the lives of a number of policemen and was made an honorary lifetime member of the Long Beach Police Department. Once again, he was known, liked and extremely successful professionally. Meanwhile, CID officers were on his trail and they began to discover that the MacDonalds’ marriage had not been as picture-perfect as had been made out.

Born in the Jamaica district of Queens, in New York, MacDonald had been both “most popular” and “most likely to succeed” at Patchogue High School. A quarterback in the high-school football team, he was handsome, intelligent and hard-working. He won a scholarship to Princeton University, moving on to Northwestern University Medical School. After graduating, he did his internship in the prestigious Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. But it was a struggle. MacDonald was only nineteen when his high-school sweetheart, the intelligent and attractive Colette Stevenson, fell pregnant. They married a month before his twentieth birthday. Kimberley was born the following April. While MacDonald was at Princeton, Colette was at Skidmore College. Then, together, they moved to Chicago. Kristen was born while MacDonald was still at medical school.

After he had completed his internship in 1969, he joined the army and the family moved to Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, where he was assigned to the Green Berets as a Group Surgeon to the 3rd Special Forces Group that September. That Christmas, Colette wrote in a card sent to friends: “We are having a great, all-expenses-paid vacation in the army. It looks as if Jeff will be here in North Carolina for the entire two years, which is an immense load off my mind at least. Life has never been so normal nor so happy. Jeff is home every day at five and most days even comes home for lunch. By the way, been having such a good time lately that we are expecting a son in July.”

But there was a cloud hanging over this idyllic marriage – MacDonald’s persistent infidelity. The CID discovered that he had at least fifteen girlfriends, most while he was away from home, training with the army. Colette’s sister-in-law, Vivian “Pep” Stevenson, said that Colette knew of the affairs and complained bitterly about them. The marriage was on the rocks.

“I give up,” Colette told Stevenson. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Two days before the murder, MacDonald informed her of another upcoming trip. He would be away for three months, during the last stages of what was expected to be a dangerous pregnancy, travelling as a physician for the Fort Bragg boxing team. Colette was so upset she phoned her mother, saying she wanted to come home with the kids.

Even her death did not dull MacDonald’s libido. A secretary at Fort Bragg told the CID that MacDonald had sex with her “as often as possible”, while he stood accused of murdering his wife and kids.

MacDonald admitted that he was unfaithful throughout the latter part of their marriage.

“I did step out on Colette,” he said. “None of which I am proud of.”

But he had his excuses.

“I don’t think they were real girlfriends,” he said. “They were one-night stands. I never had a love affair with anyone where we planned weekends away or divorce. I wore my wedding ring. It was the temper of the times. I like women and I wasn’t thinking of the consequences. I had high testosterone. Among guys around me and people in medical school and the service, I wasn’t doing anything unusual. It was ’68, ’70, and a lot of things were exploding.”

His wife knew, he said, but was not concerned.

“I essentially wasn’t screwing around. It’s not true. Colette had no fears or worries. There weren’t any.”

Not to be wrong-footed again, the CID tracked down Helena Stoeckley, who had already told Nashville police officers that she believed that she was a witness to the MacDonald murders. But she would only say more if given immunity from prosecution. This was refused. Nevertheless, she took a polygraph test. The man who administered it told the CID: “Miss Stoeckley is convinced that she was physically present when the three members of the MacDonald family were killed.”

But those who knew her said that she was disturbed. At school, she had been a sad little girl who made up stories to get attention. One of those stories, it turned out, was the one she told Posey – that she had to leave town to get away from the cops. The police were not even looking for her. Stoeckley did leave Fayetteville two months later to go to a hospital for her drug addiction. By then she was taking heroin eight or nine times a day, as well as taking barbiturates, stimulants and psychedelic drugs. Her rehab did not last long.

The diagnosis was that she had a “schizoid personality”. “The prognosis for this patient seems poor,” the psychiatrist wrote on her discharge form.

The CID discovered that Posey also had a penchant for making up stories, including the one about seeing Stoeckley in a Mustang on the night of the murders. After failing a lie-detector test, Posey admitted that he was not sure about seeing Stoeckley that night, and the sighting of the Mustang, it appeared, came from a dream he’d had two months later.

Stoeckley’s credibility as a witness was further undermined by Fayetteville narcotics agent Prince Beasley, who had been running her as an informant.

“Helena would do anything to get me to pat her on the back and act proud of her,” Beasley said. “That’s why she turned in some of her best friends.”

Beasley volunteered to accompany a CID agent to Nashville, Tennessee, where Stoeckley had resumed her career as an informant for the police department. She seemed happy to see Beasley, but over the next two months told the CID a jumble of contradictory stories. She later told the CID that she was only doing what Beasley had advised her: “Tell them anything, just get them off your back.”

The CID went back to their crime scene evidence, but Stoeckley’s hair and fingerprints did not match any of those remaining from the crime scene, and she was cleared as a suspect. The CID then prepared a 3,000-page report, again naming MacDonald as the prime suspect. But lead investigator Peter Kearns still wanted to interview one more witness – another of MacDonald’s girlfriends that they had recently discovered. He needed the approval of a lawyer in the Washington headquarters of the army’s judge advocate general. He picked twenty-seven-year-old Brian Murtagh, a native of Queens who reminded people of Woody Allen, and tried to bounce him into giving his approval.

Dumping a stack of papers on Murtagh’s desk, Kearns said: “Don’t bother to read, just sign here.”

“I was green, but not that green,” recalls Murtagh. “I told him to leave it.”

As Murtagh plunged into the paperwork, Kearns kept bringing more material, including the crime scene photographs of Kimberley and Kristen.

“I was feeling sick looking at them,” says Murtagh. “I must have made then some kind of emotional commitment that however long it took – whatever it took – I was going to do nothing that, either through act or omission to act, was going to see this guy get away with this.”

By this time, MacDonald had admitted to his father-in-law that he and his buddies had not caught one of the intruders and killed him.

“I was keeping Freddy happy,” he explained. “The man is a fanatic.”

It made no difference. Kassab was now convinced that MacDonald had killed his daughter-in-law. But while the new investigation had turned up fresh evidence, Kassab and Murtagh were told repeatedly that they did not have enough to convict MacDonald. So Kassab took the case to the Justice Department and the CID’s crime scene evidence was handed over to the laboratories of the FBI, who made an exception to their usual policy of refusing to examine evidence that had been tested by other government labs.

“It wasn’t until Freddy and I went from New York down to Clinton, North Carolina, to swear out a citizen’s arrest. That’s when the federal government got off their duffs and got an indictment and a grand jury,” said Kearns.

With the aid of Kearns, Freddy and Mildred Kassab presented a citizen’s criminal complaint against Jeffrey MacDonald in April 1974. The Justice Department had grown tired of the pressure that Kassab was putting on them and handed the case over to Victor Woerheide, whose handling of last-resort causes had made him the Justice Department’s “junkyard dog”. Murtagh offered his services and, in August, a grand jury was convened in Raleigh, North Carolina. After seven months of testimony and evidence, in January 1975, it indicted Jeffrey Robert MacDonald on three counts of murder. Within the hour, MacDonald was arrested in California.

After a week, he was freed on $100,000 bail pending disposition of the charges. That May, MacDonald was arraigned and pleaded not guilty to the murders. District Judge Franklin T. Dupree Jr rejected the defence arguments that MacDonald had been denied a speedy trial, as guaranteed by the US Constitution, and that he stood in double jeopardy as he had already effectively been tried in the Article 32 hearing. He set a trial date. Bernie Segal went to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, who stayed the trial, then dismissed the indictment on the grounds that MacDonald had not been given a speedy trial.