(Kindle/Chapter One): It is the longest-running criminal case in US history, United States of America v Jeffrey Robert MacDonald and one of the most horrifying murder cases of its time, with chilling echoes of the Manson Family's "Helter Skelter" killings. It has lasted forty-two years and remains at least three of four years from closure.
If you know about the case, at least some of what you know is probably wrong. If you don't know about it, you should, because it's a story that reveals as much about America - the best and the worst of it - as any other you'll hear.
Jeffrey MacDonald, a handsome, Ivy League-educated Green Beret Army doctor, was accused of brutally stabbing and clubbing to death his five-month-pregnant wife and two young daughters (aged five and two) in the middle of the night on 17 February 1970. Military police who arrived at the bloody scene found MacDonald lying motionless next to his wife on the floor of the master bedroom, wearing only a pair of pajama bottoms.
He was alive. He moaned and then cried out, "Check my kids."
He said he'd been sleeping on the living room couch when two white men and one black men attacked him. With them was a white woman who had long blond hair and was wearing high boots and a floppy hat. She was holding a lit candle and chanting, "Acid is groovy...Kill the pigs." He'd tried to fight off the three men, but they'd knocked him unconscious. He said he was a doctor and that he thought he was going into shock. If that happened, he said, the military police should elevate his legs, keep him warm, and make sure he didn't swallow his tongue.
Despite the massacre of his wife and children, MacDonald was almost unharmed. Other than a small, neat chest incision that caused the partial collapse of one lung, he had two superficial stab wounds, neither of which required stitches, and a bruise on his forehead that hadn't even broken the skin. From the start, investigators found this discrepancy suspicious.
And so it began: the saga of the Princeton-educated Green Beret doctor who never served in Vietnam, never saw combat, and killed no one other than his own wife and children.
MacDonald was formally questioned for the first time on 6 April 1970, in front of a grand jury in 1974 and 1975, and at trial in 1979. The physical evidence from the crime scene was undeniable and he was found guilty on three counts of murder and sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment, to be served consecutively. His projected release date is 5 April 2071, by which time MacDonald would be 128 years old.
Since his sentencing, MacDonald had filed many appeals of the guilty verdicts and motions for a new trial based on "newly discovered evidence." All were denied until 2011, when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decreed that MacDonald's new claims should be considered in light of "the evidence as a whole."
An evidentiary hearing was convened in Wilmington, North Carolina, in September 2012. Because of certain things the author had written in Fatal Vision - which contains a comprehensive description of the physical evidence and how it proved the guilt of Jeffrey MacDonald - the Justice Department subpoenaed the author, Joe McGinniss, to testify. McGinniss would be the prosecution's final witness, probably the last person who would ever testify against Jeffrey MacDonald in a court of law.
MacDonald, now a gray-haired sixty-nine-year-old, continues to attract supporters, most recently acclaimed filmmaker Errol Morris, whose recent book (The Wilderness of Error: The Trial of Jeffrey MacDonald, 2012) casts doubt on the conviction, but as McGinniss makes clear in his fascinating, authoritative book, MacDonald's guilt is undeniably beyond a reasonable doubt.
About the author: Joe McGinniss is the author of twelve books, including the political classic The Selling of the President (1969), about the marketing of Richard Nixon during the 1968 campaign, and a bestselling trilogy of true crime books: Fatal Vision (1983), Blind Faith (1989) and Cruel Doubt (1991). He is also the author of the Byliner Serial 15 Gothic Street, which follows events in a county courthouse in small-town New England.
Final Vision (2012) is priced at £1.49 on Amazon.co.uk and at $2.33 on Amazon.com.
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