The Mammoth Book of New Csi (62 page)

Gunderson believed that there were thirteen members of Stoeckley’s coven, too, and named eight of them: the cult leader Francis Winterbourne, nicknamed “Wizzard”, who was white and by then was deceased; Greg Mitchell, who was also deceased; Shelby Don Harris, who was then alive; Allen Mazerolle, also alive; Dwight Smith, nicknamed “Zig Zag”, who was the black man MacDonald and others had seen, and was then living; Bruce Fowler; Helena Stoeckley, deceased; and Cathy Perry, who was then still alive.

According to Beasley, Stoeckley had told him that a new man named Candy had taken over leadership of the group and was teaching them about black witchcraft. Stoeckley informed on him, but when Beasley went to arrest him he found no drugs. However, he found Candy in a room painted black. In the stairwell there was a painting of Christ being fellated by a hippie.

When Beasley confronted Stoeckley about the arrest, she said: “I changed my mind. Candy’s our man.”

In the yard outside Candy’s apartment, Beasley found a mutilated cat. Stoeckley explained the significance: “They’d hang a cat up in the room, slit its throat, and have sex on the floor in the warm blood, men on women, men on men, women on women, it didn’t matter.”

The deaths of Mitchell and Stoeckley were a setback for MacDonald, who now put his hopes on the book that Joe McGinniss was about to publish. The two men had become close during the four years McGinniss was preparing the manuscript. McGinniss stayed in MacDonald’s condo; they ate, drank and played together. When they were apart, McGinniss wrote often, assuring MacDonald of his belief in his innocence.

“There could not be a worse nightmare than the one you are living through now,” McGinniss wrote in one letter. “But it is only a phase. Total strangers can recognize within five minutes that you did not receive a fair trial . . . What the fuck were those people thinking of? How could twelve people not only agree to believe such a horrendous proposition, but agree, with a man’s life at stake, that they believed it beyond a reasonable doubt?”

He told others, including MacDonald’s mother, the same thing. He had been present at all of the meetings with the defence team, seen the exculpatory evidence new lawyers had unearthed and knew the case inside out. MacDonald was sure that Joe would give him the “ultimate vindication”. He learnt different during an interview with Mike Wallace on
60 Minutes
, just weeks before the book hit the shelves.

Wallace asked MacDonald: “How would you feel if I told you that Joe McGinniss says you’re a homicidal maniac?”

“Joe McGinniss?” said MacDonald. “I don’t believe you.”

“Well,” said Wallace, “I have the manuscript right here.”

The book, which would be entitled
Fatal Vision
, was damning. It detailed all MacDonald’s infidelities and lies. And it related another chilling tale. In California, MacDonald took a girlfriend and her son on a trip on his yacht. But then, enraged by some incident so minor no one else could recall it, MacDonald grabbed the boy and threatened to crush his skull between the side of the boat and the dockside. In the end, MacDonald relented and threw the child in the water. The girlfriend rescued her child and fled.

“I will never forget that look in his eyes,” said the boy, who was grown up when McGinniss interviewed him. “Kind of a fire.”

“Something seems to happen to people when [they] meet a journalist, and what happens is exactly the opposite of what one would expect,” said Janet Malcolm, author of
The Journalist and the Murderer
. “One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but in fact childish trust and impetuosity are far more common . . . There are very few people in the country who do not regard with rapture the prospect of being written about or being interviewed on a radio or television program.”

McGinniss still had to explain how a man that everyone agreed loved and cared for his wife and children could suddenly become a raging maniac and kill them. He discovered that, a year before the murders, MacDonald had taken some prescription diet pills to lose weight. According to the book, he was overdosing on two or three pills a day, inducing an amphetamine psychosis that turned him into a criminal psychopath. Kristen wetting the bed precipitated an uncontrollable drug-induced rage – even though no drugs were found in his bloodstream in hospital.

McGinniss said that he changed his mind about MacDonald’s guilt after the trial. But some had cynically suggested that the story of an evil monster masquerading as an upstanding doctor who had tricked people into thinking he was innocent for nine years would sell more books than a crusade to get an innocent man a new trial.

Fatal Vision
was hailed by the critics as a true-crime masterpiece. It shot to the top of the best-sellers list. A made-for-TV movie followed. When it aired on NBC over two nights in the autumn of 1984, it was watched by an estimated sixty million Americans and was the network’s highest-rated non-sports show of the year. It won a Primetime Emmy and other awards. MacDonald was disappointed. He had wanted Robert Redford to play him and was not happy with the casting of Gary Cole in the lead role.

“I thought he was wooden,” he said. “I thought I was more expressive than him.”

However, there was a glimmer of hope. Cathy Perry, the woman Stoeckley had named as a cohort, confessed. But her story was shaky at best. She said that, when the intruders were subduing MacDonald, they injected him with a narcotic. None was found in his system. Then they went upstairs to the bedrooms. The apartment had no second floor. There they had beat one of the two boys. The children were both girls. Perry herself admitted killing Colette. This contradicted Stoeckley’s testimony. She stabbed her stomach and legs. Colette’s wounds were to the chest and neck. The rest of her body was undamaged.

Worse, Perry had been a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. In and out of mental hospitals, she heard voices and hallucinated. Then, when under the doctor’s care and dosed with Thorazine, she became sufficiently coherent to tell the FBI that she had no knowledge of the crime. True, there were some holes in her story, but that only made it more believable, MacDonald’s lawyers said when they filed a habeas-corpus petition for his release in 1984. The fact that her story was contradicted by MacDonald’s own testimony was countered with an affidavit from a psychologist, saying that he might be suffering from retrograde amnesia.

The petition would not be unopposed. Brian Murtagh produced a sheaf of FBI reports giving alibis to Stoeckley’s alleged accomplices. The most ironclad belonged to Allen Mazerolle, who MacDonald’s observant neighbour had said she had seen sitting in the blue Mustang only moments before the killings and Stoeckley said had wielded the ice pick. Unfortunately, at the time, Mazerolle was in jail, charged with the possession of a thousand tabs of LSD. What’s more, the records further showed that he had been arrested three weeks before by Prince Beasley, acting on a tip from his top informant, Helena Stoeckley.

“It’s a devastating blow,” MacDonald said after the Fourth Circuit denied his petition. “But I cannot and will not roll over and play dead.” Meanwhile, to add insult to injury, Murtagh, whom MacDonald had called a “viper”, was driving around with the customized licence plate VIPR.

Under their agreement, MacDonald could not sue McGinniss for libel, but he could sue for fraud and breach of contract. In August 1984, he lodged a $15 million lawsuit.

Gary L. Bostwick, MacDonald’s lawyer in the civil action, compared the tapes McGinniss had made of his conversations with MacDonald with the passages in
Fatal Vision
that purported to be “The Voice of Jeffrey MacDonald” and satisfied himself that McGinniss had skilfully edited the material to make it seem that MacDonald had delivered “glib, non-stop soliloquies of self-adoration”. The passages where MacDonald had expressed concern about the tragic deaths of his wife and children did not make the page.

Worse, MacDonald’s edited thoughts were interspersed with the prosecution’s case, which was recorded unchallenged by the evidence the defence had unearthed. “The results, Bostwick charged, were fictional and the book could not be legitimized as non-fiction,” said Jerry Allen Potter and Fred Bost, whose book
Fatal Justice
is a repost to
Fatal Vision
.

A few days before the trial, McGinniss offered MacDonald $200,000 to settle out of court. MacDonald refused. The trial did not go well at all for McGinniss. Eleven jurors found against him. But one was opposed to awarding money to a convicted murderer. She would not be persuaded.

“The trouble had started early in the trial,” wrote Janet Malcolm, “when [the juror who held out], an animal-rights activist, brought animal-rights literature to the jury room and wasn’t able to interest the other jurors in her cause. She became the weird ‘Other’ to the majority, and they became the ‘Oppressors’ to her . . . they had scorned this woman at their peril and were now powerless against her.”

With the jury hung, the judge declared a mistrial, but left the door open for a new trial. McGinniss then offered to settle for $325,000. MacDonald’s team negotiated him up a little, but the huge legal bills he was incurring forced him to settle. And even a victory in the civil courts could not undo the impression, produced by the book and the TV film, that MacDonald was a dangerous psychopath.

However, MacDonald found he had a new champion. Veteran
New Yorker
writer Janet Malcolm published her book-length attack on McGinniss,
The Journalist and the Murderer
. That prompted the thought: if the attacks on MacDonald were so mercenary and self-serving, might he be telling the truth after all? The result was a series of articles and TV documentaries that sought to exonerate him. Fortunately, Helena Stoeckley’s statements had been videotaped and now she confessed to the nation from beyond the grave.

Jeffrey Elliot, who had interviewed MacDonald for
Playboy
and testified for him at the McGinniss trial, said of MacDonald: “There’s a sweetness about him . . . After meeting him, you would say, ‘This is a travesty. This is a good, decent, kind, thoughtful man, and the system has failed.’You might be willing to do things to help him.”

MacDonald, as ever, was charming and engaging.

‘I am that overachiever personality,” MacDonald told a visitor. “I set up a goal and say, ‘That’s the next goal’ . . . I don’t sit and bemoan fates and say, ‘Woulda, coulda, shoulda’ . . . I don’t have deep insights into life . . . My skill is medicine . . . By me helping a person, I help myself. I hope that doesn’t sound selfish . . . I think that’s all good. It’s how I am . . . an overachiever, a very good physician. I am not patting myself on the back. Please. I am telling what is a fact. People like me, and I work very hard.”

The visitor noted that he nodded at his self-diagnosis and smiled in a cool and confident fashion.

“Generally speaking, I say to myself, ‘You are a good guy. You didn’t save your family, but that doesn’t make you bad. And, generally speaking, you tell the truth. So stop beating yourself up,’” he continued.

While going over 10,000 pages of government documents, the new defence team found a pre-trial memo that implied that MacDonald’s attorneys had not been given unfettered access to the crime scene evidence. Among the dozen cardboard boxes of evidence, there was one labelled “Black/Black & Gray Root/Synthetic Hairs”. Inside it was an envelope marked “Synthetic Hairs, Blonde”. Inside that was a 22 in. (56 cm) long, blonde strand of artificial hair recovered from Colette’s hairbrush mounted on an evidence slide. It was much too long to have come from one of the children’s dolls as had been suggested. MacDonald maintained that this came from the wig worn by the woman who had chanted: “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.” His attorney, Harvey Silverglate, and Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz agreed that access to this evidence had been unfairly denied to MacDonald and filed another habeas-corpus petition in 1990. However, an FBI lab report presented to the Fourth Circuit showed that this hair was made from saran, which was used to make doll hair, not human wigs.

“Unless the defendant wants to maintain that Ken and Barbie did it,” said a government attorney, “I don’t see how this hair helps them very much.”

The judges agreed.

“At some point,” they ruled, “we must accept this case as final.”

Like other celebrity prisoners, MacDonald was besieged by women. One came from Ohio and claimed that she had seen her lover killing Colette and the children in a fight over her. Another went to work on his behalf and tracked down a textile executive who said that saran was used in human wigs. Silverglate found documents showing that the FBI knew this and contended that the bureau had committed “fraud on the courts”.

The Freedom of Information Act uncovered other evidence that had been withheld from the defence. More artificial hair had been found in Colette’s hand. Segal had been led to believe that this was natural hair from MacDonald’s head.

Short brown hair was found under the fingernails of Colette and the girls. This was not MacDonald’s hair, which was blond, nor the hair of any of the house’s inhabitants. It was most likely the hair of the killer. Not only was this evidence suppressed, a lab technician wrote in a note that the hairs “are not going to be reported by me”. The army lab, it seems, was under pressure to keep quiet about anything that might help MacDonald.

A piece of skin was also found under Colette’s fingernails. This was also thought to been from her killer. No fingernail scratches were found on MacDonald when he was taken to the hospital after the murders. Conveniently, the skin was lost by the army investigators during their mishandling of the evidence.

Two dark fibres were found on the piece of wood used to beat Colette. The prosecution maintained that these came from MacDonald’s pyjamas. Years later, the defence team learnt that no fibres from MacDonald’s cotton pyjamas were found on the club. There were two black wool fibres that matched wool fibres found on Colette’s mouth. It seems they had adhered when she was struck with the club. But these black wool fibres did not match any garments in the MacDonalds’ apartment. The FBI lab notes said they were “foreign”. But the defence were denied access to the notes and the jury was led to believe that fibres from MacDonald’s pyjamas were found on the club.