The Journalist and the Murderer Read online

  MacDonald continued to talk about McGinniss’s letter: “He kept saying ‘It’s background’ when I asked him why he wanted to discuss intimate scenes between me and a woman. I talked to him on the phone and said, ‘Joe, this is crazy. This doesn’t make any sense. What does this have to do with the story about the case?,’ and he’d say, ‘Nothing. What it does is it teaches me. I’m the artist. I have to know everything. I have to know what your sweat smells like. I want to know how you and Colette made love. Then I can choose from that. I, as the artist, have to have all this background so that I can write the true story of Jeff MacDonald, decent man in prison.’ And that made sense to me, quite honestly. I think I understood what he was saying. I had made a decision—catastrophic, it turned out—to trust Joe. It turned out I was unbelievably off base. He dragged the stuff out of me, and then turned it around in the book and said, ‘Here’s this callous, superficial, chauvinistic, nasty human being talking about the woman he says he loves.’ But that’s not me. That’s not my life style.”

  “But did you have to tell him those things?” I asked.

  “I know, I know,” MacDonald said. “And the answer—and it’s not even an excuse anymore, because I’m so ashamed that I did it—is that he said he was writing a book that would get the truth out about this horrible mis-prosecution, and I was willing to pay the price.”

  As we talked, MacDonald, who had forgone his lunch to be with me, ate some small powdered-sugar doughnuts from a package I had bought at a machine in the prison-staff lunchroom, and once again I was struck by the physical grace of the man. He handled the doughnuts—breaking off pieces and unaccountably keeping the powdered sugar under control—with the delicate dexterity of a veterinarian fixing a broken wing. When the package was empty, he neatly folded it, and spoke of the abusive letters he had received by the hundred from readers of Fatal Vision. “There’s one I’ll never forget,” he said. “I wake up occasionally and think of it. A guy wrote me and said, ‘I’m sitting on the beach in front of the Sheraton Waikiki Hotel, and my wife and I have just read Fatal Vision.’ Then he speaks of me as though I’m a psychotic monster. It’s an unbelievably tormenting thing. Here is this guy, sitting on a beach with his wife, supposedly having a vacation, writing a vicious, hateful letter to someone in prison.” I had read this letter in Bostwick’s office, and I, too, had found it unbelievable. This is the letter:

  August 19, 1984

  Dear Inmate MacDonald,

  My wife and I are here in beautiful and sunny Hawaii having a great time, and we both have read the novel Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss while laying on the beach here at Waikiki.

  We are both, I must tell you, convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are guilty as all hell of the murders of your wife and daughters.

  We have two lovely and bright daughters of our own and thank God they were not subjected to a “madman” for a father.

  I have no compassion for an individual as sick, demented and sordid as surely you must be. From the text of McGinniss’s well versed story about you, it is plain to see that you are a liar of outrageous stature.

  Anyone who could do what he did to a pregnant woman is really a slime, but what you did to two helpless children is even sicker and more difficult to comprehend and believe. It states in the book (I believe) that you are eligible for parole in 1991. We only pray to God that the authorities in charge of such proceedings will have better sense than your Army peers did years ago and never let you loose. You are obviously a latent homosexual (or perhaps no longer latent now that you are where you are! Perhaps, by now, you may well be the “Queen of the Hop” there in the joint, hm?) who hates women because you are an impotent faggot, true?

  At any rate, we just wanted you to know we enjoyed the novel but feel sure you are guilty and a pervert maniac like you should never be cut loose. You should, probably, concentrate on getting yourself a “daddy” there in the joint and becoming the true fag you really must be.

  With best wishes.

  J—— H——

  I said, “There is something baffling and confusing to me about this. These people lying on the beach in Hawaii are writing a letter to a person they have read about in a book—to a character in a book whom you reject as a representation of yourself—and yet the letter arrives in your hands, you read it, and are afflicted by it.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s part of the shattering impact of McGinniss’s book. People who have read it feel that they know me, that they have got inside my head. That’s the evilness—I don’t know any other word—of his concocted scenario. He’s crafted it well enough, and it appears to be very deep. But he was crafting facts to fit an opinion. He wasn’t crafting his opinion to fit the facts.”

  I asked MacDonald about his life in prison, and he spoke for twenty minutes on the subject. You ask this man a question and he answers it. After my return to New York, and for the next eight months, I experienced—as McGinniss had experienced—MacDonald’s exhaustive and relentless responsiveness. The briefest and slightest of inquiries on my part would bring twenty-page replies from MacDonald, and huge packages of corroborating documents. MacDonald does nothing by halves, and, just as McGinniss had felt oppressed by the quantity of extraneous details in MacDonald’s tapes, so was I oppressed by the mountain of documents that formed in my office. I have read little of the material he has sent—trial transcripts, motions, declarations, affidavits, reports. A document arrives, I glance at it, see words like “bloody syringe,” “blue threads,” “left chest puncture,” “unidentified fingerprints,” “Kimberly’s urine,” and add it to the pile. I know I cannot learn anything about MacDonald’s guilt or innocence from this material. It is like looking for proof or disproof of the existence of God in a flower—it all depends on how you read the evidence. If you start out with a presumption of his guilt, you read the documents one way, and another way if you presume his innocence. The material does not “speak for itself.”

  Similarly, how one “reads” MacDonald himself depends on one’s prior assumption of what he did or didn’t do on the night of February 17, 1970. Dr. Stone, assuming MacDonald to be the murderer, sees him as a remorseless psychopath whose eyes can bore holes through tanks. MacDonald’s friends and defenders, imagining drug-crazed intruders as the killers, see him as a sort of Hallmark Job. Interestingly, anyone who has adopted neither position—who finds both scenarios unimaginable—tends to give MacDonald the benefit of the doubt. To disbelieve what a person says goes against all our instincts. We tend to believe each other.

  By his own testimony, McGinniss, when he first met MacDonald, was in this state of benignant skepticism, but in the course of the criminal trial he came to disbelieve MacDonald and to accept—as did the jury and the judge and the other journalists present—the prosecution’s theory: that MacDonald killed his wife and his older child during an argument, and then cold-bloodedly killed his younger child to make it seem that there had been a Manson-like massacre. The circumstantial evidence the government produced was ineffectively responded to by the defense; MacDonald was simply unable to explain the discrepancies between his story and the testimony of the physical evidence. In Fatal Vision, McGinniss reports that several of the jurors were crying when they returned the verdict. They had not wanted to convict MacDonald but felt they had no choice. One of the jurors told McGinniss of a crucial turning point in his thinking: the playing of a tape recording of an interview of MacDonald by Army investigators, made in April 1970. McGinniss writes in his book: “ ‘Until I heard that,’ a juror would comment later, ‘there was no doubt in my mind about his innocence. All the evidence had just seemed confusing. But hearing him turned the whole thing around. I began to look at everything in a whole new way. There was something about the sound of his voice. A kind of hesitation. He just didn’t sound like a man telling the truth. Besides, I don’t think someone who just lost his wife the way he said he did would have sat there and complained that her kitchen drawers had been a mess.’ ” (Th
e italics are mine.)

  On such things verdicts hinge. The evidence—as the prosecution put it, the “things that don’t lie”—had “just seemed confusing.” When I spoke to the McGinniss-trial jurors, they had been similarly susceptible to their impressions of the defendant. Except for Lucille Dillon, all of them “felt” that McGinniss was not telling the truth. “Throughout the whole thing, I kept thinking, You’re lying,” an alternate juror, Jackie Beria, told me. The jury foreman, Elizabeth Lane, a retired social worker, said, “It was always ‘I can’t recall,’ ‘I don’t remember,’ ‘I don’t know.’ ” She added, “I feel bad about the whole thing, because I thought Fatal Vision was a very good book. I know how hard it is to get a book together, and how much research he did. I eventually found myself in a position I didn’t want to be in, and that was agreeing that MacDonald had a cause for complaint. I had always felt that convicted murderers shouldn’t make money out of books and talk shows, and if they do make money it should be sent to the victims. That’s where I was coming from. So it wasn’t easy for me to see that there was some merit in MacDonald’s suit. Then we saw all those letters. But what bothered me most was that after Buckley and Wambaugh had testified and said that it’s perfectly all right to behave this way—that authors do it all the time—McGinniss couldn’t stand up and say, ‘Yes, I led him on, yes, I lied to him, yes, I deceived him, because we’re all agreed in the publishing world that it’s O.K. to do this, and it has to be done sometimes, and I did it because I had this book to write, and the book was the most important thing to me, and therefore the means to this end were justified.’ He could not stand up in court and say that. He had to pretend he wasn’t sure, though the evidence showed he was writing one thing to MacDonald and in fact thinking and believing and saying another thing to other people. Now, that may not be illegal, but it sure is unethical, and it didn’t sit well with us, especially when he tried to lie about it.” The jurors also told me that they left the trial convinced that MacDonald was guilty. When I asked them why they thought so, they said that after reading Fatal Vision (which they had been assigned to do by the judge) they couldn’t think anything else: Bostwick’s attempts to cast doubt on the book’s veracity had evidently not succeeded. (If it says so in a book, it must be true.) Nevertheless (perhaps because of the flatness of McGinniss’s portrayal of the murdered wife and children; one never cares about them the way one cares about the victims in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood), the jury declined to put MacDonald beyond the pale of sympathy, where Kornstein sought to place him. Rather, they heeded Bostwick’s rhetorical question: “Do you think that a person who’s been convicted, and believes he’s been wrongly convicted, cannot be hurt? Is that conceivable? That’s what Mr. Kornstein would have you believe when he calls him a convicted murderer.”

  IN THE course of preparing his book about a murderer who stubbornly refused to exhibit any of the traits one associates with people who kill, and whose past seemed to yield up nothing more ominous than a banal history of promiscuity, McGinniss finally struck gold. One of MacDonald’s friends—she was one of many people MacDonald had urged McGinniss to see—betrayed him. She was a married older woman, with whom MacDonald had had a love affair, and after going to see her McGinniss was able to write this compelling passage:

  I learned also that later that summer, not long after MacDonald had taken up residence in Huntington Beach [it was the summer after the Army hearing exonerated him], he received a visit from a close friend of his mother’s—a woman he had known since childhood. She brought with her her ten-year-old son.

  During the course of the visit, which extended over a period of weeks, Jeffrey MacDonald became sexually intimate with his mother’s friend. He himself had told me about this during one of my visits to Terminal Island. Later, in another part of the country, I located the woman and she confirmed that the story was true, though she was a bit chagrined that he had chosen to make me aware of it.

  I asked her what caused her to terminate the relationship, expecting her to say either that finally the impropriety of the situation had started to bother her, or simply that summer was ending and it was time to go home.

  Instead, she said she had left abruptly—before she had planned to—because of two incidents involving her ten-year-old son. The first, she said, occurred when MacDonald—angered by the boy’s misbehavior inside his apartment—had carried him outside and dangled him by the feet over the edge of the dock, threatening to drop him head first into the water.

  The second incident, the woman said, had occurred later in the summer when she, Jeff, and her son were out for a cruise on his boat. Again, the boy had done something to anger MacDonald. This time, the woman said, MacDonald had grabbed the boy and had told him, in an even more furious and more threatening tone, that upon returning to shore he was going to take the boy’s head and hold it over the front of the boat and crush his skull against the dock.

  Eventually I spoke to the boy—now a young adult attending an Ivy League college—about his recollection of these incidents.…

  [He] said the first incident had not been unduly alarming. Perhaps just a form of roughhousing that had gone a little too far. But the second episode—the scene on the boat—he said, “I remember with real terror to this day.” He could not recall what in particular he had done to so anger MacDonald, “but he came at me, yelling, and I remember kind of a fire in his eyes. It really, really was scary. I didn’t know what he was going to do. In fact, what he did was to throw me in the water—he threw me off the side of the boat while it was moving and I can remember actually feeling relieved that he hadn’t done anything more.

  “But I will never forget it. I will never forget that look in his eyes. You know, maybe as a kid you perceive things more directly, in a way, than you do as an adult. But ever since that moment on the boat I believed that he must have been guilty. Just from seeing that kind of fire in his eyes. And I did not want to stay around him anymore. I was very frightened and I told my mother I wanted to go home right away. And we did.”

  The passage stands out in the book. It is the single, indelible instance of murderous rage on MacDonald’s part. When Mike Wallace, in his interview for “60 Minutes,” confronted MacDonald with McGinniss’s book, this was one of the passages he read to him. MacDonald sputtered out a denial (“That never happened. It’s a lie”) and then dispatched Ray Shedlick to get a retraction from the mother, her husband, and the boy. But the retraction was not forthcoming. Something evidently had happened on the boat to upset the boy and to cause his mother, ten years later, to talk about it to a journalist. In a letter she wrote to MacDonald a few months after she saw McGinniss, she said of the interview, “He turned out to be very easy to talk to, charming and disarming. He, of course, is your devoted fan and supporter, but I think he is having a struggle with the book. I guess all good writers have labor pains.” Interestingly, the mother and MacDonald have continued in friendly correspondence. All his anger is directed at McGinniss. When I questioned MacDonald about the incident in a letter, he replied, “What McGinniss is saying is ‘Yes, I’m aware no one has ever seen or heard of Jeff MacDonald being violent—except, of course, for a few seconds on Feb. 17, 1970—but I, Joe McGinniss, super-important author, have discovered the one other time Jeff MacDonald’s latent violence was uncovered.’ … McGinniss had to depict me that way to justify his Judas-style of friendship, and so he simply takes normal events and concocts evil in them.” In the same letter, MacDonald described his idyllic relationship with the boy, writing of the amiable horseplay that went on between them (“I would be fishing at the end of my dock, and he would sneak up behind me & push me in & run away with glee. In return, I’d push him in whenever possible”), and speculating on the possible psychological motives for the boy’s “misconception or misperception of horseplay, or an attempt at discipline.” I was already familiar with MacDonald’s version of the incident, having read Bob Keeler’s interview with him in the blue loose-leaf book. The intervie
w took place two months after the Mike Wallace taping, and, again, MacDonald vehemently repudiated the passage. “O.K., she and I developed this relationship,” he told Keeler. “There’s no question the husband was cuckolded, and I feel terrible about what I did. But that does not make what Joe wrote accurate. That’s an absolute fabrication. That never occurred.”