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Jeffrey R. MacDonald

Encyclopedia : J : JE : JEF : Jeffrey R. MacDonald

Dr. Jeffrey Robert MacDonald (Born: October 12, 1943), also known as the Green Beret Killer, was a former member of the elite military unit, who was tried and convicted in 1979 for the Feburary 1970 murders of his pregnant wife and two daughters

Contents

The murders

In the early morning hours of February 17, 1970, a brutal multiple homicide took place in the house of Jeffrey MacDonald, a doctor with the Green Berets (United States Army Captain) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. MacDonald's entire family--his pregnant wife and two young daughters--was brutally slaughtered while he was in the house, while MacDonald survived with some injuries.

Conviction

MacDonald claimed that on the night of the murders, he was attacked on his living room couch by four intruders who also murdered his family. Despite the massive trauma to the rest of his family, MacDonald himself suffered relatively light injuries, save for one serious stab wound which punctured (and collapsed) his right lung. He said that when he washed his hands and checked himself in the bathroom mirror (before making sure that help was on the way) "he did not even have a cut or anything". However, when he arrived at the emergency room doctors actually did find less serious wounds, including knife lacerations on the abdomen, several shallow stab wounds on his left chest and abdomen, and several bruises at his hairline indicating mild blunt-force trauma.

MacDonald had said that one of the intruders was a woman who was carrying a burning candle and chanting "Acid is groovy, kill the pigs", a style of killings that investigators found suspiciously reminiscent of the recently publicized Manson murders. Three candle wax drippings, which were different from one another in chemical composition, were found in the apartment. Colette was known to be fond of burning candles, though none of the wax could be matched to any candles in the house. Some of the wax was found to be consistent with birthday-candle wax; other wax drippings were studied and found to be old and filled with household debris. Helena Stoeckley (1952-1983), a heavy user of drugs whom the defense fastened upon as possibly one of the alleged intruders, confessed and recanted many times, and at one point said that MacDonald himself committed the murders. Most interesting with regard to the wax drippings were that Stoeckley claimed that her candle dripped blood, not wax. A polygraph administered by CID in 1971 indicated that Stoeckley at least believed she had been in the house that night, though Stoeckley was well known to have emotional problems.

One of the most damaging pieces of evidence against MacDonald was the fact that, despite his story of using his pajama top to fend off frenzied, ice pick- and knife-wielding "intruders," the punctures in MacDonald's pajama top were found to be perfectly round, with no tearing, indicating that they were placed in the top while the top was stationary. Moreover, MacDonald claimed that he was wearing his pajama top when he went to sleep and woke to find it still on his body, wrapped around his wrists, yet holes in the pajama top matched holes in Colette's chest. (The defense disputes this, saying that documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)show that while the lab was apparently able to fold the top in such a way that the holes lined up, they could not come up with a configuration that matches both the location and the direction of the punctures, and that only when the technicians decided to ignore the FBI lab's own finding of the direction of the broken fibers on each hole were they able claim success.) MacDonald also claimed that he had wakened to the sounds of his wife and one daughter screaming, and that at that exact time, he was attacked by three of the intruders each respectively armed with a club, ice pick and knife. Yet it was shown at trial that the weapons with which he claimed to have been attacked were, at the same point in time, being used against his family in other rooms. Additionally, a bloody hair of Colette's was found entwined with a fiber from MacDonald's pajama top, and another fiber from his pajama top was found under his youngest daughter's fingernail.

An initial army Article 32 hearing into Jeffrey MacDonald's possible guilt, overseen by Colonel Warren Rock, convened in July 1970 and ran through September. In November 1970, Colonel Rock issued a report recommending that charges be dismissed against MacDonald because they were "not true", and recommended that civilian authorities investigate Helena Stoeckley. However, the Army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID) believed that MacDonald was guilty, and the charges were instead dropped because of "insufficient evidence".

After studying the Article 32 transcripts, his father-in-law, Alfred Kassab (who was originally supportive of his son-in-law, believing him to be innocent), became convinced of his guilt and began a successful campaign to have him brought to trial. A grand jury in North Carolina indicted him on 24 January 1975 and within the hour MacDonald was arrested in California. On 31 January 1975 he was freed on $100,000 bail pending disposition of the charges. On 29 July 1975 District Judge Franklin T. Dupree Jr. denied MacDonald's double jeopardy and speedy trial arguments and allowed the trial date of August 18, 1975 to stand. On August 15 1975 the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the trial and on 23 January 1976, in a 2-1 split, the indictment was dismissed on speedy trial grounds. An appeal on behalf of the Government led to an 8-0 reinstatement of the indictment by the U.S. Supreme Court on 1 May 1978. On 22 October 1978 the Fourth Circuit rejected MacDonald's double jeopardy arguments, which was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court on 19 March 1979. The trial lasted July 16-August 29, 1979 where he was convicted of one count of first-degree and two counts of second-degree murder. He was given three life sentences, to be served consecutively. Immediately after the verdict MacDonald applied for bail pending the outcome of his appeal. On 7 September 1979 this was rejected and an appeal on bail was further rejected by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on 20 November 1979.

On July 29, 1980 the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed MacDonald's conviction in a 2-1 split on the grounds that the delay in bringing him to trial violated his Sixth Amendment rights to a speedy trial. On August 22, 1980, MacDonald was freed on $100,000 bail. He returned to work at St. Mary's Medical Center in Long Beach, California. On December 18, 1980, the Fourth Circuit Court split 5-5 to hear the case en banc and thus the 2-1 decision stood. On May 26, 1981, the United Stated Supreme Court accepted the case for consideration and on December 7, 1981, heard oral arguments. On March 31, 1982, they ruled 6-3 that MacDonald's rights to a speedy trial were not violated. Technically, only the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals could revoke MacDonald's bail but Judge Franklin T. Dupree did so anyway. MacDonald shouted to news reporters "they had no right to revoke my bail!" before being driven to the FCI Terminal Island. After attempting to be freed on a new bail in April 1982, the Fourth Circuit refused. MacDonald's remaining points of appeal were heard in June 1982 and his convictions were unanimously affirmed. A further appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was refused on January 10, 1983.

MacDonald lost all of his appeals, and the courts ruled that the judge at the original trial, Judge Franklin Dupree, had acted correctly when he refused to let the jury see a transcript of the Article 32 military hearing, and, because this was not an insanity trial, had also acted properly in not allowing the jurors to hear any of the psychiatric testimony. Had he done so, the jurors would have learned that all of the doctors at Walter Reed Hospital, with the sole exception of Sadoff who was hired by the defense, concluded that MacDonald most certainly could have committed these crimes.

MacDonald supporters have claimed that the prosecution suppressed evidence in this case, but the courts ruled that no suppression had taken place. Unidentified fingerprints and fibers found in the apartment amounted to nothing, since prints and hair samples of the children were never taken, and since every home has many fibers, hairs and fingerprints that belong to no one and no item in the house. Moreover, Stoeckley's fingerprints and hair samples were obtained, compared to the prints and hairs found in the house, and were found not to match.

He is currently imprisoned in Maryland at a Federal prison. He has steadfastly maintained through the years that he would not ask for parole because it would mean he must admit remorse to the parole board. But he finally did apply and had a hearing on May 10, 2005. Parole was denied, with the recommendation that 15 more years be served before another parole hearing.

Publications

Fatal Vision

A best selling book was written about the case called Fatal Vision by Joe McGinnis. The book is made up almost entirely of direct quotations from trial and grand jury transcripts, the signed statements of witnesses, and Jeffrey MacDonald's own words (though his defense charges that McGinniss radically altered the quotes by stringing together sentences from hundreds of pages apart, and misquoting medical texts, in order to make MacDonald sound like the psychotic killer McGinniss was painting him to be). In Fatal Vision, the author suggested that MacDonald killed his family in a fit of psychotic rage due to taking amphetamines. Although this was only a theory, there are items of evidence to support it, including but not limited to MacDonald's own admission that he was using amphetamines, and his telling Dr. Sadoff that it was a "weird coincidence" that his brother Jay had also suffered a psychotic break with reality after abusing amphetamines. The defense claims that MacDonald was tested for drug use, however he was not tested for the presence of amphetamines, as the equipment available to CID was not capable of performing this test.

Fatal Justice

In 1993, another book about the MacDonald case entitled Fatal Justice appeared. Its basic claims are that:

1. The army botched the crime scene, allowing too many people to tramp through it and contaminate evidence. The book does not tell the reader that none of the many evidentiary items found against MacDonald were "contaminated," nor does it explain how any MP, medic or investigator managed to carry away all evidence of intruders while leaving only evidence that pointed to MacDonald as the murderer.

2. The neighbors saw people who might have been the intruders, contrary to the government assertion. The book does not tell the reader that timelines do not match, nor do they emphasize that countless people matched the descriptions of the alleged assailants but none were found to have any involvement in the crimes.

3. There was evidence of other people at the crime scene, including a bloody palm print on the master bedroom headboard that did not match MacDonald (and was listed on reports, and testified about, by the government in such a way as to conceal this fact); brown hairs under the fingernails of the little girls (MacDonald is very blond); a brown hair in the hand of Colette, MacDonald's wife; a blond wig hair (which the government claimed belonged to a doll, but which the authors say was too long--20 inches--to have matched any of the small, short hairs of the girls' dolls); and black wool fibers on the club which could not be matched to anything in the house. The actual case records show that there was no "bloody palm print" found; Potter and Bost had simply taken an unidentified partial print and put it together with other blood found, to make a "bloody palm print." MacDonald was also shown on official reports as having brown hair, not blond. No person ever testified that any hair was found under Kristen's fingernail, and the hair from Kimberly's fingernail scrapings is not talked about in the defense's recent filings. As for "wig hair," nowhere in Janice Glisson's lab notes does she refer to "wig hairs," and in fact the synthetic fibers were of different compositions and were never matched to any wig at all, much less any wig ever worn by Helena Stoeckley.

4. That the government systematically manipulated or surpressed this information--denying the defense the handwritten lab notes that indicated evidence was exculpatory, but refusing to let them test the evidence themselves. They document one case where a lab technician specifically notes that she is not going to turn over potentially exculpatory material, and describe the government repeatedly making evidence physically inaccessable, or accessible in such a way that it was not reasonable to expect the defense to find anything. This also was misinformation for the reader, since study of Janice Glisson's R-11 note shows that the words "will not be reported by me" were actually deliberately taken out of context, and her note actually says she "...did not label all the vials containing fibers and hairs (#1, #7, #8), but gave #'s and slide comparisons to these #'s, since they will not be reported by me." This is because she was not assigned to do those comparisons; Dillard Browning was.

After meticulous examination, the courts determined that the prosecution had not wrongly withheld any evidence: "In short, what MacDonald ascribes to Murtagh's bad faith manipulation of testimony at trial appears to the court to be the result of factors unrelated to prosecutorial misconduct. The court has had the opportunity to observe the conduct of counsel for the government and for MacDonald over the last sixteen years and has found all counsel, without exception, to have performed in a diligent and professional manner. While there have been sharp conflicts over a multiplicity of procedural and substantive issues, the court has not perceived any instance where attorneys for either side crossed the boundary between zealous advocacy and impropriety. Any suggestion that the government engaged in conduct intended to deny MacDonald his right to a fair trial is unsupported by the extensive record in this action."

5. The judge in the case, Judge Dupree, may have been prejudiced against MacDonald because his son-in-law was involved in the initial army case, and at any rate was excessively deferential to the prosecution. The court declared that "Appellant's claims that Proctor interviewed Stoeckley, concluded that MacDonald killed his wife in a heat of passion, went to Washington to persuade the Justice Department to prosecute MacDonald and volunteered to furnish Justice Department files to the Army, are based upon an unsubstantiated newspaper article (see J.A. 1856-58). Such evidence is plainly incompetent to establish the truth of these facts. See, e.g., Fed. R. Evid. 802. In any event, such allegations, even if correct (which they are not), do not alter in the least the fact that Proctor never assumed a protective role in the MacDonald case before or during Judge Dupree's involvement in it." The court twice characterized Judge Dupree's conduct in handling the trial of this case as "admirable."

6. That the government ignored potential perpetrators such as Helena Stoeckley, who had confessed to being in the house to multiple people. This is bolstered by the recent [confession] of Jimmy Britt, a former US marshal, who said that he was present in 1979 when Helena Stoeckley confessed that she had been in the house on the evening of the murders to prosecutor James Blackburn and others. According to Britt, Blackburn replied "If you testify before the jury as to what you have told me, I will indict you for murder." The following day, Ms Stoeckley testified that she had amnesia about the night of the murders. However, Britt's claim that he withheld this information out of a sense of loyalty to the government and Judge Dupree is tainted by the fact that if true, he allowed his friend to conduct a trial without telling him of this information, and by the fact that Britt retired in 1990, some fifteen years before coming forth with this information. The defense admits that Stoeckley told the same story to them as she told to the prosecutor and jury, thereby undermining and contradicting another of their claims that she told a different story to the court than she told to the defense. Missing in Britt's affidavit are any recollections on Britt’s part that Helena told the prosecutor that she, or anyone else, murdered the pregnant wife and two small daughters of the MacDonald family or any details that might support that Helena was ever in the MacDonald apartment.

7. That given the evidence of possible innocence, and prosecutorial misconduct, MacDonald deserves a new trial. Current copies of the book do not bring the reader up to date by informing him that the courts found no evidence of possible innocence, nor did the court find any prosecutorial misconduct whatsoever.

8. That MacDonald may have been the victim of a coverup by higher-ups at Fort Bragg, whose children were associates of Stoeckley and her friends, and could have been implicated. The scenario would be that they were covering up for their children, rather than trying to "get" MacDonald--but when he was caught up in the net, they did not come forward. This is, however, highly speculative.

The authors do not go into MacDonald's behavior subsequent to the murders, such as his appearance on the Dick Cavett show, which at the very least betrayed a staggering lack of normal affect, and his even stranger decision to tell his father-in-law that he had actually tracked down and killed one of his wife's murderers. Nor do they really address the possibility that Stoeckley was simply a hysterical young girl--akin to the batty college roommate who thinks she's a witch. They offer "evidence" that Stoeckley knew about the broken rocking chair in the house, which they say had not appeared in any news reports, but in fact, a picture of the horse had been published in the newspaper the morning after the murders, and a picture of the horse was shown to Stoeckley by MacDonald's lawyer, Bernard Segal, during the trial in 1979.

The authors claim that psychiatrists, both military and civilian, had examined MacDonald before the Army's Article 32 hearing in 1970 and said he was sane and normal. However, examination of the facts shows that all of the doctors at Walter Reed Hospital concluded that MacDonald indeed was completely capable of committing these horrific crimes, and only one doctor -- who was hired by the defense -- disagreed.

It was implied that no bloodstains were put on MacDonald's pajama top before it was torn. Stombaugh (FBI) testified at trial that despite MacDonald's story of waking in the hallway after the attack, with his pajama top still wrapped around his wrists, the pajama top was stained with Colette's blood before it was torn. The authors argue, however, that by the time of the trial, Stombaugh himself was unable to discern any spot on which the bloodstain continued across the tear onto the other side; Stombaugh's explanation was that the stains must have faded in the 9 years between the murder and the trial.(Fatal Justice, p. 146) The book also argues that Judge Dupree should have allowed the defense wider latitude to impeach Stombaugh's credibility, since other technicians in the lab disagreed with his findings, and because his credentials were in question:

"During preliminary quesitoning at the trial . . . Stombaugh said he received his bachelor of science degree in 1949 from Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, with a major in biology and a minor in chemistry . . . a defense reseracher contacted Furman University seeking facts. Thus, when Segal began his cross-examination, he was armed with new information and attempted to show through questioning that Stombaugh had received only one year of instructin in chemistry, that his chemistry grade had been minimal, and his grade in physics had been even worse. But Judge Dupree, visibly angry at such attempts to discredit the former head of the FBI lab's chemistry section, quickly cut the effort short."

MacDonald's lawyers accepted Stombaugh as an expert, and the jury found Stombaugh to be credible.

Potter and Bost also make some mention of gloves found in the apartment, implying that these were worn by "intruders." These gloves were, in fact, oven mitts. They also make much of the fact that Stoeckely and friends match his description, even though MacDonald may have seen them elsewhere, and thus could have based his description on real people. Potter and Bost do not inform the reader that the summer before the murders, MacDonald was seen with people (the so-called "New York Four") who matched the descriptions he later gave, nor do they inform the reader that in December 1970, ten months after the murders, MacDonald viewed the arrest records of the New York Four and, despite the fact that they matched his descriptions, he said nothing about it to anyone.

DNA test results released March 10, 2006, showed that neither Stoeckley's nor Mitchell's nor any other "intruder's" DNA matched that in any of the "crucial" exhibits chosen by the defense. The results also showed that the hair which MacDonald has repeatedly described as being "clutched" in Colette's hand and which he has claimed for 36 years could only have come from her murderer, was found to be his very own.

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