Fatal Vision (29 page)

"My wife and I have a right to show to the whole country that the charges against Captain MacDonald are false.

"My wife and I have three graves to visit, and when we do we want to feel that we are doing everything we can to protect from any wrong the one that was most dear to them."

Despite a Jack Anderson column harshly critical of the Army for having barred the public from the proceedings, the hearing continued behind closed doors.

The only spectator permitted to attend was Jeffrey MacDonald's mother, who was allowed in after a wire-service photograph showed her seated on the steps outside the locked hearing room, and an accompanying story quoted her as saying that as a sign of her belief in her son's innocence she would remain there each day that the hearing was in session, or until the military police dragged her away.

Behind the closed doors, Bernie Segal was discovering—to his amazement and to his client's delight—just how confused, disorganized, and riddled with procedural error the Army's case against MacDonald really was. Segal's vigorous and exhaustive cross-examination of prosecution witnesses unearthed a series of. investigative blunders far more extensive and significant than he would have ever dared hope.

From the earliest moments at the crime scene, when the military police sergeant had picked up the dangling telephone, to the later laboratory ineptitude which had resulted in the loss of the blue fiber from beneath Kristen's fingernail and the piece of skin from beneath the fingernail of Colette, the Army had been, as Franz Joseph Grebner had known since February, grossly incompetent.

It turned out, for example, that the flowerpot whose upright position had so aroused Grebner's suspicions had actually been set aright by an ambulance driver who had ignored all instructions to leave the crime scene untouched. The same driver, according to the testimony of a military policeman who had observed him,

had managed to steal Jeffrey MacDonald's wallet from a desk— all while the crime scene supposedly was being preserved.

The doctor who had been called to 544 Castle Drive to pronounce death testified that he had rolled Colette MacDonald onto her side in order to check for wounds in her back, and that in so doing he had removed the blue pajama top from her chest. He said he did not remember where he had placed it, but would not rule out the possibility that fibers from it might have fallen within the body outline on the floor.

The pathologists who had performed the autopsies had neglected to take either fingerprints or hair samples from the bodies, and, when a laboratory technician was later dispatched to the funeral home for the purpose of obtaining fingerprints, he found Kimberly and Kristen, already embalmed, "looking like two little angels lying there," and he could not bring himself to disturb them further. Thus, the children's fingerprints were never obtained, leaving many more "unidentified" fingerprints on the premises than might otherwise have been the case.

The CID had not realized that hair samples were lacking until after the bodies were buried. For "known hair samples" to match against the blond hair found in the palm of Colette's hand, the CID chemist was forced to rely upon hairs taken from her coat collar, not from her head. The efficacy of this procedure was severely undermined when it was determined—much to the prosecution's chagrin—that a "known hair sample" obtained from a sweatshirt of Jeffrey MacDonald turned out to be not his hair at all, but a strand of hair from his pony.

Each day's testimony—even during the prosecution's portion of the case—seemed to produce less evidence linking MacDonald to the crimes than it did new examples of CID bungling. The discarded pajama bottoms, the emptied garbage, the flushed toilets, the destroyed footprint which, superficially at least, had appeared to match a test print taken of the left foot of Jeffrey MacDonald—the string of errors would have been highly comical had their consequences not been so serious.

Segal learned, for example, that following Ron Harrison's February 19 press conference, investigators and technicians alike had rushed to read the
Esquire
magazine found in the MacDonald living room. By the time the blood smear across the top of the pages was finally noticed and the magazine dusted for fingerprints, the only ones found were those of CID personnel and military policemen.

Back at Fort Gordon, when the fingerprint technician developed the film on which he had photographed prints found inside the apartment, he discovered that more than fifty of the pictures were so blurred as to be useless. Perhaps, he theorized, trucks passing by or firing from a nearby artillery range had caused his camera to vibrate. Whatever the cause, when he returned to 544 Castle Drive to rephotograph the prints in question, he found that moisture had penetrated the protective tape he had placed over them and that more than forty had been obliterated and, would thus remain forever unidentified—markedly decreasing the certainty with which the prosecution could claim that there was no evidence of intruders inside 544 Castle Drive.

As the toll of blunders mounted, Bernie Segal suggested ever more pointedly to the hearing officer, Colonel Rock, that irreparable damage had obviously been done to the crime scene and that this damage had rendered useless—indeed, had thrust into the realm of wild conjecture—any inferences which might otherwise have been drawn from the so-called physical evidence.

Each day, as the hearing recessed, Segal would emerge from the room to regale eager reporters with tales of the latest fiasco. With Army prosecutors under strict orders not to comment in any way, Segal's accounts—which did not tend to minimize the significance of the mistakes—provided the sole basis for news reports on the progress of the hearing.

Thus, as the days passed and the Army was made to appear ever more foolish and incompetent, the original cynicism with which most reporters had viewed MacDonald's account—an attitude that, in the wake of the formal accusation, had hardened into open disbelief—began to give way to a sense that, in light of such gross investigative malfeasance, the handsome Ivy League, Green Beret doctor just might, after all, be telling the truth.

Public belief in the possibility of MacDonald's innocence increased dramatically when, in August, Segal actually began to put on his defense. He called to the stand a military policeman named Kenneth Mica, one of the first to have arrived at the scene. Mica testified that, en route, at an intersection approximately half a mile from Castle Drive, he had observed a young woman standing in shadow. It had seemed to him most unusual for anyone to be standing alone at such an intersection at 3:50 on a cold and rainy February morning, and, had he not been responding to a radio call he would have stopped to question her.

A few minutes later, Mica testified, it had come to seem more than unusual: it had seemed to be of crucial importance. For the woman standing on the corner had been wearing, in addition to a raincoat, a floppy hat.

As soon as Mica had heard MacDonald's description of the female intruder, he had informed the MP lieutenant of what he had just seen. He had urged the lieutenant to dispatch a patrol immediately, to bring the woman into custody for questioning. The lieutenant, however, had failed to respond to the suggestion (at the hearing he testified that he had not heard what Mica said), and the woman on the corner was never found.

Moreover, when Mica eventually had told military prosecutors about the woman in the floppy hat, he was instructed not to mention it in his direct testimony at the hearing. Only after the prosecution phase had been completed, with his conscience continuing to nag at him, had Mica chosen to approach the defense and inform them of what the prosecutors had urged him to suppress.

Having thus introduced not only a further extraordinary example of military police incompetence (and a glaring display of prosecutorial misconduct) but the first independent corroboration— however indirect—of Jeffrey MacDonald's story, Segal next concentrated on constructing a portrait of his client as the sort of man utterly incapable of having committed the crimes with which he had been charged.

Segal called to the stand a series of witnesses who had known Jeffrey and Colette MacDonald at various stages of their lives, and who, without exception, were convinced that MacDonald was a noble and honorable man who had deeply loved his wife and children and had been deeply loved in return.

A doctor from Columbia Presbyterian who had supervised MacDonald's internship spoke of his "stamina and equilibrium," and his extraordinary ability to "stand up under stress."

A classmate from Northwestern described the MacDonald marriage as "ideal" and added that he'd spoken to Colette by phone in early February and she had told him that their months at Fort Bragg had been "the happiest time in their marriage."

A Green Beret colleague described MacDonald as having had a "rare" level of communication with Colette and an "extraordinary" interest in his children.

MacDonald's next-door neighbor on Castie Drive said that as far as he could tell the relationship between Jeff and Colette had been "just great."

MacDonald's former commanding officer at Fort Bragg, Robert Kingston, was contacted in Hawaii where he was enjoying a short respite from his tour of duty in Vietnam. By telephone, - Kingston, who, as a general, would be named in 1981 to head the newly created Rapid Deployment Force of the U.S. armed services, described MacDonald as "one of the finest, most upright, most outstanding young soldiers" he'd ever seen, and said MacDonald had also been, "very close, very devoted, to both his wife and children."

Robert Kingston's wife also spoke. She said she had come to know the MacDonalds unusually well because her own daughter was about their age and would occasionally double-date with Jeff and Colette. She said that MacDonald had been a "very loving father," and that both he and Colette had been looking forward joyously to the expected third child. Once, in fact, she had even said to her own daughter, "I hope you have a marriage like that." She was not asked about the Valentine she had sent, nor did she volunteer information about it.

Perhaps most telling—and certainly most emotional—was the testimony of Freddy Kassab, who said he had known Jeffrey MacDonald from the age of twelve, had watched him grow to manhood, and believed him to be as fine a human being as he'd ever known.

From the first day of their marriage, Kassab said, Jeff and Colette had been as happy as "pigs on ice." MacDonald also had been deeply attached to his daughters. "Every time you turned around," Kassab said, "he had one of the girls, playing with her."

At Fort Bragg, Kassab said, "They were the happiest I'd ever seen them. They had less financial problems, Jeff came home most nights, which he'd never been able to do before. He had more time to be with the children, more time to devote to Colette. She was ecstatic about it." She was also "ecstatic," Kassab said, about the prospect of having a third child.

He then described, in overwhelmingly powerful and evocative detail, the scene Christmas morning when Jeff had taken Colette and the girls to see the pony.

Kassab was weeping openly as he prepared to step down from the witness stand. As an afterthought, he turned to Colonel Rock and asked, "Sir, may I add one thing?"

"Of course."

"If I ever had another daughter," Freddy Kassab said, "I'd still want the same son-in-law."

Leaving the hearing room, Kassab told the press that, "We know full well that Jeffrey MacDonald is innocent beyond any shadow of a doubt, as does everyone who ever knew him. I charge: that the Army has never made an effort to look for the real murderers and that they know Captain MacDonald is innocent of
any
crime except trying to serve his country."

He then announced that he and his wife were offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the real killers.

Segal completed the character-witness phase of his defense by calling Robert Sadoff, the Philadelphia psychiatrist who had examined MacDonald in April. "Based on my examination and all the data that I have," Dr. Sadoff said, "I feel that Captain MacDonald does not possess the type of personality or emotional configuration that would be capable of this type of killing with the resultant behavior that we now see.

"In other words," Dr. Sadoff said, "I don't think he could have done this." He then added: "I rarely think about a person personally when they are patients. But if I allow myself that indulgence today—I found working with Captain MacDonald a great deal more pleasurable than working with many of the people I have to. He is a very warm person, and very gracious, and one whom—I must admit—I like."

At this point in the proceedings there occurred one of those dramatic strokes of good fortune which a defense attorney could go through an entire career without experiencing.

Bernie Segal was staying at the Heart of Fayetteville motel. There, one morning in August, he was approached by a delivery-man for the linen service which supplied sheets and towels to the motel. The deliveryman's name was William Posey, he was twenty-two years old, and he lived in the Haymount section of Fayetteville, which had become notorious as the city's hippie district.