A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald | By Errol Morris | Penguin Press | 544 pages | $29.95
Final Vision: The Last Word on Jeffrey MacDonald | By Joe McGinniss | Byliner, Inc. | $2.99
In 1970, 26-year-old Colette MacDonald and her two daughters were found stabbed to death in their Fort Bragg, NC apartment. Colette’s husband, 26-year-old Army doctor Jeffrey MacDonald, claimed that a band of hippies, including a girl with long blonde hair and a floppy hat, burst into his apartment and murdered his family. He was acquitted by an Army tribunal, retried by a civilian court, and convicted of murder in 1979. He has spent the last 33 years proclaiming his innocence from a prison cell.
In his new book, A Wilderness of Error, filmmaker Errol Morris sets out to prove that Jeffrey MacDonald is, if not an innocent man, at least a victim of the criminal justice system. Morris is best known for The Thin Blue Line, a documentary that got an innocent man off death row. This September, a New York Times book critic raved that A Wilderness of Error would leave the reader 85 percent convinced of MacDonald’s innocence.
In Morris’s telling, MacDonald is also a victim of unscrupulous journalism. In 1983 journalist and author Joe McGinniss published Fatal Vision, which would become the definitive popular account of the MacDonald murders. Morris argues that Fatal Vision distorted the facts of the case and poisoned public opinion against the doctor.
MacDonald has every reason to loathe McGinniss. In 1979, MacDonald made McGinniss a full-fledged member of his defense team in exchange for a cut of the book’s future profits. McGinnis even lived with MacDonald and his lawyers at a frat house in North Carolina. Over the course of the trial, and during his jailhouse correspondence with MacDonald, McGinniss became convinced that MacDonald was guilty, but he kept telling MacDonald that he thought he was innocent. MacDonald only learned otherwise when Fatal Vision was published.
(Update, 01/08/13: This afternoon, Joe McGinniss left a message on my Facebook page clarifying his original arrangement with Jeffrey MacDonald’s defense team. McGinniss writes: “MacDonald’s lawyer realized that prosecution could subpoena me during trial and force me to testify about inner workings of defense. Being a journalist did not provide immunity. To eliminate the risk he paid me one dollar and named me ‘investigator.’ It was a ruse, and not necessary because prosecutors had no interest in me. Obviously, I did no investigating for the defense. My role was clear. But for many years after The Selling of the President, some people thought I’d worked for Nixon. Since I left the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1968, except for a couple of teaching gigs, I’ve never worked for anyone but myself.”)
Last month, McGinniss released an ebook called Final Vision: The Last Word on Jeffrey MacDonald. In it, he summarizes the post-conviction history of what has become the longest-running criminal case in US history and explains why Morris’s claims of startling new evidence are really old news. McGinniss scoffs at Morris’s claim that Fatal Vision sealed MacDonald’s fate, noting that the book came out after the doctor was convicted and that the courts began rejecting MacDonald’s appeals before Final Vision saw the light of day.
Read side-by-side, A Wilderness of Error and Final Vision amount to a journalistic sumo match in which two heavyweights grapple for control of the MacDonald narrative. In order to assess Morris’s book, we must lay out the case made by the prosecution at trial and reported in Fatal Vision.
Jeffrey MacDonald looked suspicious from the outset. He was in the apartment that night, and he was a Green Beret, trained to kill hand-to-hand. He was barely injured, and injured in ways that could have been self-inflicted, or inflicted by his wife, Colette, in self-defense. His cover story was preposterous. “Drug-crazed hippies killed my family” is “The dog ate my homework” of murder.
Upon closer examination, MacDonald’s cover story didn’t match the physical evidence at all. For example: He claimed he was attacked in the living room, where he held up his pajama top to ward off the blows of an ice pick-wielding hippie. According to MacDonald, after being clubbed unconscious, he awoke to find the attackers gone and his wife dead on the floor of the master bedroom. MacDonald said he covered his wife with his ripped pajama top before going to check on the girls. Yet investigators found no pajama fibers in the living room—meaning it couldn’t have been ripped there, as MacDonald claimed—and lots of pajama fibers and threads in the master bedroom, including several under Colette’s body.
Even more damning, a lightly soiled pajama pocket flap found near Colette’s body shows that she bled directly on it before it was ripped off. The area covered by the flap was soaked in blood, so we know the flap came off first. One sleeve was bloodied before it was ripped down the seam. The defense didn’t even try to dispute this evidence at trial.
Morris breezes past the inconvenient pajama threads and blood spatter. As far as he’s concerned, the whole crime scene was hopelessly corrupted. Everyone agrees that the military police lost control of the scene but that doesn’t explain how Colette bled on the top before it was torn, or how those threads ended up under her body.
Morris spends a lot of time trying to discredit a model the prosecution used to show that MacDonald stabbed his wife’s corpse 21 times through his own pajama top, creating 48 holes in the garment. Morris discounts the simulation because it relies on unsupported assumptions about how the top was draped over Colette’s body. If Morris is right, the prosecution’s model should be downgraded from incontrovertible proof of MacDonald’s guilt to highly plausible conjecture. But even if we throw out the prosecution’s pajama model, the rest of the fiber and blood evidence still points squarely at MacDonald.
MacDonald claimed that he attempted CPR on his daughters, even though they were both obviously dead when he found them. Yet his daughters, 5-year-old Kim and 2-year-old Kristy, were found on their sides with their mouths closed, posed as if they were sleeping. If he’d actually performed CPR on the dead children, they’d have been on their backs with their mouths open. We know Kim’s body was moved after she was mortally wounded because her blood and cerebral spinal fluid were found in the master bedroom. The fact that blue pajama fibers were found under her bedclothes suggests she was moved by someone wearing her father’s pajama top.
There are many, many more instances where MacDonald’s story conflicts with the physical evidence. And yet the jury might still have been inclined to believe the doctor—if they hadn’t also heard about the outlandish lies he told about the case. (He told his father-in-law and a family friend that he located, tortured, and murdered one of the intruders, for example.)
So why is Morris willing to believe that MacDonald might be innocent? Basically, because MacDonald seemed like such a good guy. Morris simply can’t believe that a Princeton-educated Green Beret doctor who was widely regarded as a loving husband and father would do such a thing. He thinks it’s perfectly plausible that a bunch of hippies would decide to attack a Green Beret for no particular reason, but he can’t imagine that MacDonald might have a dark side.
Morris also believes MacDonald might be innocent because of the confessions of local drug addict named Helena Stoeckley. Stoeckley was one of scores of Fayetteville-area hippies who were questioned in connection with the MacDonald case. At the time, she was a 17-year-old runaway who supported her omnivorous drug habit by working as a police informant. When her handler asked her if she knew anything about the murders, Stoeckley, still tripping, said she “felt in her mind” like she was there.
Stoeckley’s handler asked her about the murders because she sometimes wore a blonde wig and a floppy hat, like the one MacDonald described.
A military policeman saw a young woman with long hair and a wide-brimmed hat standing on a corner near the MacDonalds’ home as he rushed to the scene. Neither the officer nor MacDonald could identify Stoeckley from a photograph, however.
For years, Stoeckley alternated between confessing to anyone who would listen and swearing she didn’t remember anything. When she was finally called to testify at MacDonald’s trial, she said she was so high on mescaline that she had no idea where she’d been.
Morris suggests that Stoeckley knew things she couldn’t have known unless she was in the house that night, but these claims are unconvincing. Stoeckley was interrogated so many times over the years, and the case received so much publicity, that it’s impossible to know which details she picked up from her interrogators. Like many who trust Stoeckley, Morris tends to seize on what she got right—when she got it right—and forget about all the errors and wildly implausible claims she made over the years. Morris omits Stoeckley’s most outlandish “confessions,” such as her claims that she applied to babysit for the MacDonald children, burglarized their house three weeks before the murders, and got high and had sex with Jeffrey MacDonald.
Morris makes a big deal out of the fact that Stoeckley passed various polygraph tests, which suggests she was sincere. As a champion of the wrongfully convicted, Morris should know that false confessions are surprisingly common. An estimated 15 to 25 percent of cases reversed by DNA evidence involve some kind of false confession or guilty plea. False confessions where the subject comes to believe the false narrative are unusual but hardly unheard of. Stoeckley had many risk factors for one of these so-called internalized false confessions. She was young, drug addicted, hallucinating on the night in question, suffering from a personality disorder that made it difficult for her to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and eager to please her police handlers.
Of all the claims of judicial misconduct in A Wilderness of Error, only one stands out as being both serious and credible. Morris suggests that Stoeckley clammed up because one of the prosecutors threatened to charge her with murder if she testified to being in the house that night. If Stoeckley had confessed and the prosecutor hadn’t told the defense, he would have been withholding exculpatory evidence, a serious form of misconduct. Morris takes it one step further and suggests the prosecutor’s behavior was akin to witness tampering.
Morris’s case centers on a 2005 affidavit from a now-deceased US Marshal named Jimmy Britt who claimed to have transported Stoeckley from South Carolina to North Carolina to testify. Britt swore that Stoeckley confessed to him en route and later to the prosecutor in a closed-door meeting. He claimed the prosecutor threatened to charge her if she told the truth.
At the evidentiary hearing in September 2012, after A Wilderness of Error had gone to press, the government demolished Britt’s affidavit. McGinniss enumerates the many defects of the document. The paper trail proves that Britt didn’t transport Stoeckley from South Carolina and that he was never alone with her for any extended period of time. It’s doubtful that Britt was in the meeting between Stoeckley and the prosecutor; US Marshals don’t usually do that. The prosecutor denied both that Stoeckley confessed to him and that Britt was in the meeting. Stoeckley told the judge that she gave the same story to both sides. We know she didn’t confess to the defense, because Joe McGinniss was there and reported the meeting in Fatal Vision. With that, Morris’s only substantial case for miscarriage of justice crumbles.
The most dramatic moment in Final Vision comes when McGinniss recalls his realization during the 2012 evidentiary hearing that MacDonald’s lawyer lied to the trial judge during a tête-a-tête at the bench in 1979. The lawyer claimed that Stoeckley said all kinds of incriminating things in their pretrial meeting to which she later refused to testify. McGinniss reported in Fatal Vision, and reiterated in Final Vision, that Stoeckley said nothing of the sort.
As McGinniss explains in Final Vision, most of the putative miscarriages of justice that Morris cites in his book have been exhaustively reviewed by appeal courts and rejected. A pattern emerges. The defense got the original crime scene investigation file through a FOIA request, and they’ve since insisted that every scrap of debris that can’t be traced to something in the house is proof of invaders, proof that should have been turned over to them earlier.
Morris doesn’t give us enough information to assess the procedural merits of their claims. Just because MacDonald’s lawyers say evidence should have been turned over to them doesn’t mean that they were entitled to it, let alone that the prosecution committed malfeasance by not turning it over. One might infer from MacDonald’s more than 30-year losing streak that his case lacks merit; but Morris considers it further proof of the system’s bias against MacDonald.
As far as the probative value of the “withheld” evidence, it’s pretty much a bust. Any occupied home will contain hairs and fibers that can’t readily be sourced, especially transient housing like the MacDonalds’ apartment.
In 2012, the defense shamelessly trumpeted the results of DNA testing released in 2006 as “new evidence” of MacDonald’s innocence, even though none of the three untraced hairs matched Helena Stoeckley or her boyfriend Greg Mitchell, whom she named as an accomplice.
Morris tries to blame McGinniss for poisoning the well against MacDonald, but Fatal Vision mostly reported the facts as they were presented at trial. The disappointing truth is that MacDonald was proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in 1979 and his lawyers have been grasping at straws ever since. Joe McGinniss’s Final Vision should indeed be the last word on the subject.
LINDSAY: Excellent job. Next to the Gene Weingarten article in the Washington Post, this is the best article written on the MacDonald case in the past 30 years. Unlike a majority of the recent articles written about this case, you clearly researched the documented record and didn't take any of the claims leveled by the MacDonald camp at at face value.
This is an open and shut case. The prosecution presented over 1,100 evidentiary items at the 1979 trial and ALL of the sourced evidence points to MacDonald's guilt. This incudes DNA, blood, fibers, hairs, bloody footprints, fabric damage, bloody fabric and non-fabric impression evidence. People ask why this case continues to garner evidentiary hearings and Joe McGinniss provided the best answer. In a recent interview, he stated, "Never underestimate the staying power of a psychopath." The documented record demonstrates that Jeffrey MacDonald is a serial liar, a coward, and a cold blooded killer.
#1 Posted by PhilC, CJR on Tue 8 Jan 2013 at 06:55 PM
Seriously?
Fact check much?
You said:
snip-
We know Kim’s body was moved after she was mortally wounded because her blood and cerebral spinal fluid were found in the master bedroom
-end snip-
Who knows that? On What lab report do you reference this child has CLEAR body fluid missing anywhere in that home? Did not happen and her head wound involvement resulting in the radiating basal fracture at no time breached her skull - that is a junk science theory.
#2 Posted by Voltaire, CJR on Tue 8 Jan 2013 at 11:51 PM
That article contains factual errors.
Even if you think Dr. MacDonald is guilty, which he isn't, his story is plausible and consistent with the evidence, and he should have been acquitted.
That Joe McGinniss book, and the TV Fatal Vision movie are fiction and are no more the pure unadulterated historical truth, or scientific certainty, than The Young Victoria movie or the Three Musketeers movie.
McGinniss is lying about the contract he had with Dr. MacDonald. McGinniss entered an employment agreement with Segal, chief defense counsel for Dr. MacDonald, in order for McGinniss to assist in the defense of Dr. MacDonald in connection with the murder charges brought against him.
The Brady material law on exculpatory evidence was deliberately and illegally withheld at trial by the prosecution, which is grounds for a mistrial ,and retrial.
Judge Dupree at a later MacDonald appeal made the silly remark that this withheld exculpatory evidence would not have swayed the jury. How on earth did Dupree know for sure? Prosecution must disclose evidence that would help in proving the innocence of a defendant.
There were more irregularities at the MacDonald trial. The foreman of the jury was biased, which negates the principle of an impartial judge and jury. Stombaugh of the FBI was never qualified to render an opinion on fabric impressions, which helped convict Dr. MacDonald, and the fiber evidence is extremely weak evidence. it was all "could have" stuff.
Stombaugh of the FBI was never qualified to testify that there was blood on the pajama top and pocket before it had been torn Janice. Glisson,, at the Army CID lab was in disagreement with Stombaugh about that matter, Dr. MacDonald never did say that the pajama top was torn in the living room so why is it such a big deal that no pajama fibers were found there?
Detective Beasley was convinced from the start that the Helena Stoeckley killer gang were involved, but he was never believed. Leads and suspects were disregarded by the FBI and by the Army CID. Shaw thought Colette murdered the two little girls and Kearns thought he did it because he was a womanizer Ivory made up a theory about bodies possibly being carried in a sheet..
All that mouth-to-mouth accusations is a spurious argument. Dr. MacDonald did mouth-to-mouth to the best of his ability under the circumstances. It was not ideal hospital conditions there, and bodies were moved around later by other people.
It's ludicrously unsatisfactory evidence and a gross miscarriage of justice.
#3 Posted by Henri McPhee, CJR on Wed 9 Jan 2013 at 07:07 AM
“Drug-crazed hippies killed my family” is “The dog ate my homework” of murder. Good one.
Also: most people who are convicted are actually guilty, whatever procedural errors may have been made. Not all, but most. After a little while you need to come up with a counterfactual--a proof of innocence. It's not enough to say "here's a hair you can't explain." You have to be able to say, "THIS OTHER GUY is the actual murderer, and here is how he did it, and why," and your explanation has to fit the evidence.
This is always difficult when your starting point is “Drug-crazed hippies killed my family."
#4 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Wed 9 Jan 2013 at 03:54 PM
Thanks for the well-written article and the shrewd insights.
I bought Final Vision after reading Weingarten's article. I did not expect Final Vision to be much more than a rehash, but I was wrong. Some things I have never understood about the judicial circus acts from 1982 to 2012 were made clear in plain words.
I found a transcript of Errol Morris admitting to Brooke Gladstone that yes, he hopes to free Jeffrey Macdonald the way he freed Randall Adams. According to his own account, Morris took more than twenty years to get around to trying much. Odd way to go about saving the day.
You are a great writer - thanks again. Don't worry about missing the ramifications of that non-breach basal fracture thingy because your critic made that up.
#5 Posted by François-Marie Arouet, CJR on Wed 9 Jan 2013 at 08:59 PM
I haven't read McGinnis' book, but this article, at least with respect to Errol Morris' book, is not at all accurate.
To say that Morris is willing to believe that MacDonald might be innocent because MacDonald seemed like such a good guy is a gross mischaracterization of the book and would almost lead me to believe that Lindsay Beyerstein did not read the book. He cites a tainted crime scene, botched investigation, prosecution that did not disclose all information to the defense (such as unknown fibers in the mouth of one of the victims, wax that didn't match any candles found in the home (and Stoeckley claimed to have carried a lit candle while she was in the house), fibers that seem to have come from a blonde wig (which Stoeckley claimed to have worn while in the house), and a judge that, even according to admirers of said judge, did not allow for a fair trial, all as evidence that could lead a jury to have reasonable doubt about whether Jeffrey MacDonald murdered his family. To reduce it to "Morris simply can’t believe that a Princeton-educated Green Beret doctor who was widely regarded as a loving husband and father would do such a thing." is perfectly false.
Beyerstein states that Morris "thinks it’s perfectly plausible that a bunch of hippies would decide to attack a Green Beret for no particular reason," which is also not accurate. Stoeckley purportedly claimed that they wanted to threaten the doctor since he wasn't giving drugs to addicted soldiers that were requesting them.
Also, at the end of the article, Beyerstein states that "[MacDonald's] lawyer claimed that Stoeckley said all kinds of incriminating things in their pretrial meeting to which she later refused to testify. McGinniss reported in Fatal Vision, and reiterated in Final Vision, that Stoeckley said nothing of the sort." But fails to note that another witness to the pretrial meeting also indicated that Stoeckley said incriminating things.
#6 Posted by Sebastian, CJR on Sat 19 Jan 2013 at 11:47 PM
"Beyerstein states that Morris "thinks it’s perfectly plausible that a bunch of hippies would decide to attack a Green Beret for no particular reason," which is also not accurate. Stoeckley purportedly claimed that they wanted to threaten the doctor since he wasn't giving drugs to addicted soldiers that were requesting them."
As Weingarten points out in his article, these hippies wanted drugs enough to murder - but not to steal them, since the drugs, readily available in Macdonald's house, were left untouched. Well, who would ever thinking of looking in a medicine cabinet, anyway?
I can't believe the piffle Macdonald's defenders come up with. But it is piffle. And the thin thread upon which Macdonald is basing his claim to a new trial, the supposed suppression of evidence, has been, as Beyerstein points out, decisively overthrown.
One thing that does amaze me in the chatter about this case is the fact that, most likelly, Macdonald would, at least, have known about Stoeckly from hearsay. She was the daughter of a lieutenant colonel at the base where Macdonald worked. And she apparently appeared frequently at the base. It isn't hard to see how he would have manufactured a culprit out of her. It is funny, however, that Morris doesn't investigate other of her stories - like being involved in 13 murders with her cult, or having sex with Macdonald two weeks before the murder, etc. I guess those are the ravings of a lunatic - only exculpatory information from her is acceptable.
#7 Posted by roger gathman, CJR on Tue 29 Jan 2013 at 08:00 AM
I think it's most unlikely that Dr. MacDonald knew Helena Stoeckley prior to the MacDonald murders.
The local Fayetteville front-line Detective Beasley did know Helena Stoeckley and he testified at the MacDonald trial that she was his most reliable informant. When she told the police, or the Army CID or FBI, that drugs would be found somewhere they were found there. Whether she was a lunatic or not, that's a fact.
The problem with police informants, or snitches, is that none of them are capable of telling the truth. The police use them because they have inside information, and information is the lifeblood of any police investigation. Helena lied through thick and thin if it was a question of saving her own skin. She was never granted immunity.
The thing is Helena was a reliable informant and she named names. Those leads and named suspects should never have been disregarded by the Army CID and by the FBI and neither should Judge Dupree have ignored her numerous confessions.
The Nashville cop Gaddis testified at the 1979 trial that he would have had Helena indicted for what she had said about the MacDonald case to him.. It was not just Beasley and Jimmy Britt who said Dr. MacDonald didn't do it.
There definitely was suppression of evidence by Murtagh at the 1979 trial including the unsourced black wool fibers in Cotette's mouth and arm and on the wooden club, and the blonde synthetic hair-like fibers.
Part of the trouble is I think the Mafia and CIA were involved. The Mafia murder families and the CIA is above the law, and international law, and it was involved in drug smuggling and torture.
#8 Posted by Henri McPhee, CJR on Mon 4 Feb 2013 at 05:46 AM