The Mammoth Book of New Csi (61 page)

“If you were a physician, an army physician, you were under orders to turn in drug-abusing patients,” said MacDonald. Asked if he thought someone he turned in might have been involved, he said: “Sure, that’s one of the thought processes we immediately went through, of course.”

Many physicians on the base were concerned that, under the new policy, drug-addicted soldiers would avoid medical treatment and make the drug problem worse. Four months after the murders, the policy had to be changed. The commander of Fort Bragg, Lieutenant General John Tolson, offered an amnesty to any drug user on the post who would step forward to seek help. They were to be tended in a hippie-decorated “halfway house”, a clapboard building in the post’s old hospital area.

MacDonald was group surgeon for his unit and was also assigned to provide medical counsel for Green Beret heroin addicts. But he did little to endear himself to drug addicts on the post. One of his duties was to restrict the supply of drugs to improve his unit’s performance. He also encountered addicts in the emergency room of Cape Fear Valley Hospital where he worked to pay off his medical school bills. After MacDonald treated a soldier who had overdosed just a month before the murders, the police were called and a heroin dealer – a black man – was arrested. The word circulated that MacDonald was a “fink”. But MacDonald was used to threats from junkies.

The soldier’s name was Robert Wallack. He had been brought into the hospital by two hippie types, Larry Cook and Thomas Brown, who were convinced that MacDonald had called the cops. Cook was a friend of Greg Mitchell and was either part of, or tight with, Stoeckley’s crowd. He told the FBI that, on the night of the murders, he stayed in Murchison Road near the Hickory Trailer Court and across the road from the grocery store. Brown said he stayed the night in a house on Haymount Street. There is no Haymount Street in Fayetteville, but there is a Hay Street, which runs through the centre of the then drug-plagued Haymount district. A black-painted pad where Stoeckley and her crew performed satanic rituals was at 908 Hay Street.

MacDonald’s defence team could not find any documents giving the name of the drug dealer who had been arrested. However, he was described as a black man “five feet nine inches [1.75 m] tall, weighing 160 pounds [73 kg], and age twenty-nine to thirty”, while MacDonald described the man he said had attacked him as 5 ft 8 inches (1.73 m) and about 165 lbs (75 kg).

The day before the murders, a young corporal visited MacDonald and demanded that the doctor discharge him from the army because of his heroin habit. When MacDonald informed him that he had no power to do that, the man became abusive. Captain Jim Williams had to come to MacDonald’s rescue. It took three men to eject the corporal. Williams warned MacDonald of the deteriorating reputation he had among drug users who had just come back from Vietnam. These men were armed and dangerous. MacDonald replied that he was not concerned. After the murders, Williams told the MPs about the corporal and MacDonald’s reputation as a fink. The corporal was picked up, but he had an alibi.

Helena Stoeckley told author Fred Bost: “MacDonald was just one of several people giving the drug users a hard time . . . It’s kind of like if you tell somebody that they’re going to be cut off [from drugs] . . . they said, ‘Look, you know it’s happening to us now. It could be you next’.”

A raid on MacDonald’s home was planned. At first, “there was simply going to be a little pushing around,” she said, “you know, and trying to get a point across . . .”

But then, according to Stoeckley, the group decided to “annihilate the MacDonald family” because of his refusal to treat opium and heroin addicts. The main target would be Colette, then her two children.

“Human sacrifice involving a pregnant woman is the most prestigious for the cult members,” said Stoeckley, “followed by children, women, and lastly men.”

MacDonald was to be spared, so that he could provide them with drugs.

Early on the night of the killings, Stoeckley said she phoned the MacDonalds’ home. Colette answered. She said she was going out to a class, but her husband would be home later. The group then decided to stage a Manson-style murder, accompanied by a satanic ritual. At around 2 a.m., they drove to the MacDonald apartment in a blue Mustang, unaccountably forgetting to take any weapons with them.

Two male cult members went into the master bedroom to see to Colette. Three others woke MacDonald and tried to get him to sign a prescription for Dexedrine. But MacDonald was “belligerent”, Stoeckley said. They roughed him up a bit and he agreed to call a friend who would get the drugs. It was a trick. Instead, he dialled the operator in an attempt to get them to call the MPs. When they realized what was going on, the men administered a second, heavier beating, while Stoeckley chanted: “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs, hit him again.”

Afterwards, she went to the master bedroom where she said she only remembered seeing one person actually attacking Colette. It was her boyfriend, Greg Mitchell.

Just nineteen at the time, Mitchell was already a heroin addict when he came back to Fort Bragg from his first tour of Vietnam. After the murders, he did what few other soldiers did. He asked to be sent back to south-east Asia. While waiting to be shipped back, he had an argument with his mother and yelled that he had to go kill all the ten-year-olds he could find. Soon after, he took an overdose of heroin, but survived. He then went back to Vietnam, until he was cashiered for drug addiction in 1971.

Back in Fayetteville, he broke down and confessed that he had murdered people, begging God to forgive him. Later, he was seen near a farmhouse where the words “I KILLED MACDONALD’S WIFE AND CHILDREN” were freshly painted on an interior wall. He told friends that the FBI was interrogating him about the MacDonald murders and confessed to one of them that he had done it.

Crime scene evidence also implicated Mitchell. Mitchell had type O blood, the blood type found on Colette’s hands. MacDonald’s blood was type B. The hair found under the victims’ fingernails was brown, like Mitchell’s, while MacDonald’s hair was blond. Forensic experts also concluded that Colette had been killed by a left-handed person. Mitchell was left-handed, while MacDonald favoured his right.

Stoeckley also remembered that, while Mitchell was bludgeoning Colette, one of the children was lying motionless next to her. Stoeckley believed Colette was fighting to protect the child. At the sight of blood she became hysterical and started “ranting and raving”. The two men returned to the living room. Stoeckley followed. MacDonald was then lying unconscious, half on and half off the couch. She went to Kristen’s bedroom where she saw the younger daughter apparently dozing peacefully. After looking in on Colette again, she returned to the living room and said to the others: “Let’s get out of here. She isn’t breathing anymore.” She then ran out of the house. When she left, she said, she thought MacDonald was dead.

Unfortunately, Stoeckley’s story did not coincide with MacDonald’s account and Gunderson wanted more. While threatening her with forty years in jail if she did not cooperate, he promised that any statement she made was strictly for use in a movie. In December 1980, he wrung a second statement from her. In this one, a sixth member of the cult was implicated in the crime. His name was “Wizard”. Her filmed confession also revealed much about the official investigators and their motivations for framing MacDonald. The idea was to limit the scope of the investigation to MacDonald alone and maintain the cover-up of a lucrative CIA drug pipeline running from Vietnam into military bases in the United States, using the body cavities of dead American soldiers being returned home. MacDonald, it appears, was the perfect patsy.

Asked why he believed Stoeckley’s story, Gunderson said: “Because she said that she tried to ride the rocking horse in the small bedroom . . . and she tried to get on it and she couldn’t because the spring was broken.”

Why would that be significant? “Because the only people that knew that spring was broken on the rocking horse was the family, the MacDonald family.”

However, crime scene photographs seem to show that none of the springs on the toy horse were broken.

So far Beasley had not been paid a nickel by Gunderson. And if a movie deal was going ahead, he feared he would be left out of it. So he began making his own plans. He got in touch a reporter on the
Fayetteville Times
named Fred Bost, who was himself a former sergeant major in the Green Berets. Stoeckley joined the project for 20 per cent of the proceeds and signed a contract for a $5 advance. Gunderson also wanted a piece of the pie. He told Beasley to take Stoeckley to the
Washington Post
. But she did not like the tone of the resulting article and recanted her confession. Now in a fragile mental state, she accused Gunderson of being “a member of the Mafia”. In a letter to him, she wrote: “Never have I seen a bigger mockery made of justice, or such a shambles made of an investigation.”

Gunderson was busy rounding up witnesses to corroborate Stoeckley’s story. He tracked down one of MacDonald’s neighbours, who had testified at the Article 32 hearing that, sometime on the night of the murders, she had glanced out her window and seen the tail lights of a passing car. Under Gunderson’s prompting, she remembered that it was between 2 and 3 a.m. The car was a blue Mustang, just like the one Stoeckley said she had been riding in and William Posey had said he had seen. Two other vehicles were parked by the Mustang. One of them was a military jeep driven by a black man. It was a rainy night and the neighbour was observing the scene at a distance of 70 to 80 ft (21 to 24 m). Nevertheless, she described the man sitting in the Mustang’s passenger seat.

“I remember him specifically because of his piercing, deep-set eyes and the sneer on his face,” she said. “I could pick him out of a crowd today.”

She was then shown drawings produced during a hypnotic session with MacDonald. Stoeckley identified the man in the picture she selected as Allen Mazerolle, a former friend and fellow cult killer. According to Stoeckley, he had stabbed MacDonald with an ice pick.

Meanwhile, in July 1980, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned MacDonald’s conviction – just has it had thrown out the indictment – on the grounds that he had been denied a speedy trial. He went back to work as a doctor in California and returned to his playboy lifestyle, buying a ski condominium and dating an actress, who also happened to be the daughter of the chairman of the US Parole Commission. Then, at age thirty-seven, he got engaged to a twenty-two-year-old airline stewardess. But after twenty months, the US Supreme Court reversed the Fourth Circuit ruling. Appeals for a reduction of his sentence also fell on deaf ears. Courts were not impressed by his lawyers’ argument that “the 1970 murders constitute the only blot on his record”. Nor did Stoeckley’s statements help.

“She was like a light bulb which hadn’t been completely wound in,” said one judge. “She blinks back and forth.”

By this time, Bernie Segal was worn out and resorted to teaching at a San Francisco law school while new lawyers prepared further appeals. Gunderson still hoped to talk round Helena Stoeckley, who by then was destitute, pregnant, and an alcoholic. The offer of an interview on CBS’s
60 Minutes
did the trick. She also had something new to add – fellow drug addict Cathy Perry had participated in the murders as well.

“Cathy freaked out,” Stoeckley said. “Even the guys had trouble controlling her.”

Stoeckley went on to claim that one of the killers was an undercover CID – apparently an idea suggested by Gunderson – and that three and a half weeks prior to the murders she had stolen a bracelet from Colette’s jewellery box. This came as news to MacDonald and the interview was never aired.

Along with Stoeckley, six other people confessed to the MacDonald murders.

“If you put everybody in that room who confessed,” said Murtagh, “there would hardly be room in there for Jeff.”

Nevertheless, the FBI checked them all out. Meanwhile, Gunderson withdrew from the case when a hole was found in the steering-fluid drum of his car. Stoeckley’s cult was suspected. A former New York homicide detective was hired to replace him, but he quit after concluding that MacDonald had done it. Undeterred, MacDonald’s friends took on another ex-cop to work the case. But his investigation was hampered by the alcohol-related death of the heroin-addict and murder suspect Greg Mitchell, Stoeckley’s former boyfriend who she had fingered for the murder of Colette. Six months later, Stoeckley’s half-naked body was found in a low-rent apartment complex in Seneca, South Carolina. She was thirty, and she and her baby had been subsisting on peanut-butter sandwiches. Her body was decomposing, but the baby, though dehydrated, survived.

Gunderson suspected she had been murdered.

“Helena was like a puppet on a string,” said her husband, Ernie Davis, who was then doing a fifteen-year stretch for first-degree sexual assault. “She knew it was all lies, but she . . . said if she didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear they’d bother her even more.”

Two weeks before she died, both Gunderson and Beasley had received frantic phone calls from Stoeckley. She had been recently interviewed by the FBI and now she said she could see two men in black suits parked across from her apartment in Seneca, South Carolina. They were watching her every move, twenty-four hours a day. She told Gunderson and Beasley that she was scared and needed protection. And she told Beasley that she was now prepared to tell the whole story about the MacDonald murders, without demanding immunity. This would “blow the lid” off Fort Bragg. Gunderson told Beasley to go down to Helena’s place as fast as he could, but before Beasley could arrange to take the trip, Stoeckley was dead.

However, the post-mortem said the cause of death was acute pneumonia complicated by cirrhosis of the liver. Nevertheless, Gunderson was convinced that she was silenced using one of the many covert, untraceable assassination techniques known to government intelligence agencies. Stoeckley’s body was found on 14 January. She had died the day before. A satanist and CIA insider interviewed by Gunderson identified 13 January as an important date for satanists. It is considered the Satanic New Year as it is the thirteenth day of the thirteenth month. The number thirteen is all-important. Covens, for example, always have thirteen fully fledged members.