Fatal Vision (8 page)

After two days had passed with no arrests, the local papers reported that "waves of terror" had engulfed Fort Bragg, especially in the vicinity of Corregidor Courts. Husbands refused to report for night duty. Doors were double- and triple-locked. Military police, attempting to query neighborhood residents, found women afraid to open their doors, even in daylight, even to uniformed personnel. More than ninety new gun permits were issued on the base within forty-eight hours of the murders, and pawnshops throughout Fayetteville reported an unprecedented demand for firearms.

The obvious similarities to the Manson killings—intruders in the night chanting "Acid is groovy," the word
pig
written in blood, the fact that Colette MacDonald, like Sharon Tate, had been pregnant—brought dozens of out-of-town newspaper reporters to Fayetteville. With little hard news to report (on February 18, the Army's only announcement was that a "specially trained team of criminologists" had arrived from the Fort Gordon laboratory), such papers as the New York
Daily News
resorted to running stories on the city's ambience.

"Young girls from all over the country follow the Green Beret glamor and the highly polished jump boots into this town," one feature began. They lived in "rickety old wooden houses on the outskirts," the rent for which was paid "by young men from Fort Bragg who want to get away from military life.

"Speed, hash, whammies, pot, pills—they're all here. Carried into the communes by vets of Vietnam who have seen plenty of action and already at 18 or 19 are looking for a way out of it all."

The desire for information about the background of Jeffrey MacDonald—the Green Beret doctor from the Ivy League who had somehow survived the bizarre, maniacal assault—became almost insatiable.

An interview with his immediate superior yielded the information that MacDonald was "an unusually good soldier, willing to work eighteen to twenty hours a day."

MacDonald's younger sister, arriving from her home in Schenectady, New York, described him as an "athletic intellectual" who had "breezed through Princeton in three years" and who loved to read—"especially adventures, philosophy, and poetry.'' She said he had become a doctor because of his compassion for humanity. "He just didn't like to see things die."

On February 19, under considerable media pressure and with no suspects yet apprehended, the Army made Lt. Ron Harrison available for a press conference, at which it was expected that—as the Green Beret who had known the family best—he would provide a more intimate glimpse of the family's life at Fort Bragg.

Harrison began by saying that Jeffrey MacDonald was
^‘
‘
an outstanding person in any walk of life. A very intelligent, very perceptive person, very kind, and, I'm certain, a great father."

He liked to help people, Harrison said.
^‘‘
He was always available for counseling." He was also a man interested in many things. Harrison mentioned several: 'Special Forces, parachuting, baseball, football, boxing, the kids' horse, what Kimmy did yesterday afternoon, Colette's class at school."

Colette had been, quite simply,
^‘
'Number one," Harrison said.
^‘‘
A very innocent person, very, very sweet." She and her husband, Harrison added, had been extremely happy about her new pregnancy.

Then he described for the press his final visit to 544 Castle Drive on the night of Valentine's Day. Nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, just a couple of Green Berets sitting around eating Jell-0 and cookies—but there had been one incident which, in retrospect, struck him as
^’
odd" and
^‘‘
ironic."

Speaking very softly and slowly, Harrison explained that Jeffrey MacDonald had just received the new issue of
Esquire
magazine in the mail. It was the March 1970 issue. There was a picture of Lee Marvin on the cover, and next to it the caption:
^‘‘
Evil Lurks in California—Lee Marvin Is Afraid."

Almost the entire issue was devoted to articles about witchcraft cults and drug orgies and violence in California. Among the stories to which MacDonald had specifically called Harrison's attention—saying,
^‘‘
Hey, Ron, you've got to take a look at this, it's really wild"—had been one which described how an "acid queen" with long blond hair, attended by a
^‘
'retinue of four," had consummated a candlelit LSD orgy by copulating with a black swan.

Another story dealt with the murder of Sharon Tate by members of the Charles Manson cult.

Mention was made of the fact that Tate had been pregnant when she was killed, and that the word
pig
had been written in her blood on the headboard of her bed.

A funeral service was held on Saturday, February 21.
^‘
'Hunched over in pain from the stab wound in his chest," according to newspaper accounts, Jeffrey MacDonald walked "dry-eyed, with head bowed," into the John F. Kennedy Memorial Chapel in the Special Forces area of Fort Bragg. A squadron of Green Berets in dress uniform carried the three silver caskets—one full-sized, two smaller—into the church.

MacDonald sat in the front row, next to Colette's mother and stepfather. His own mother sat directly behind him. The chaplain read from the Book of Job. "Job, too," the chaplain said, "lost a couple of his children."

MacDonald seemed able to control his emotions until the final moments of the service. Then, the newspapers reported, "sobs shook his shoulders," and he emerged from the chapel "with tears running down his handsome face," and returned directly to his hospital bed.

Very early on the morning of Sunday, February 22—the morning after the funeral—Freddy Kassab borrowed Jeffrey Mac-Donald's white 1965 Chevrolet Impala convertible and drove to 544 Castle Drive.

He parked across the street from the apartment. It was empty and sealed and, as a crime scene under continuing investigation, guarded by military police. For more than two hours, Kassab sat alone, staring at it.

He was a portly, balding man, fifty years old. He had been born in Montreal to wealthy Syrian parents and had been educated in European private schools. As a child he had learned to speak French fluently and had worn his first tuxedo at the age of six.

At the age of eighteen, he had enlisted in the Canadian Army and had been assigned to intelligence work. He had served as a liaison with the French resistance, making half a dozen parachute drops behind enemy lines. He had been wounded four times during the war and while he was on a mission in Italy his young Scottish wife and infant daughter had been killed by a German bomb dropped on London.

Kassab had returned to North America after the war and his life had become somewhat more prosaic. He moved to an apartment in New York City, remarried, and found work at a Sears, Roebuck store in Brooklyn, where he sold washing machines.

In 1957, while on Long Island, overseeing a housing development in which his mother held a financial interest, he met an interior decorator named Mildred Stevenson. She was the mother of two children and her husband had committed suicide a year before. Kassab's second marriage, which had produced no children, was in the process of divorce. Within a year he married Mildred Stevenson, becoming stepfather to her seventeen-year-old son, Bobby, and to her thirteen-year-old daughter, Colette.

The Kassabs enjoyed an extensive European honeymoon, sailing first class on the
Liberte.
Their drink of choice was Dom Perignon. Later, while touring the Monte Carlo casinos to which Freddy, as a child, had accompanied his wealthy father, they spent time in the company of King Farouk.

In the decade that followed however, the Kassabs had fared less well than expected financially. Mildred's decorating career did not prove profitable and a dress shop which they opened in her hometown of Patchogue proved too posh for community standards and had to be sold at a loss.

They sold their home in Patchogue and moved to the apartment on Washington Square. Within a few years, however, that, too, was surrendered and they returned to Long Island where Freddy found work as a salesman for a firm which distributed liquid egg yolk in large quantity to manufacturers of macaroni, baked goods, and mayonnaise.

Throughout this period of financial disequilibrium, there were two constants in the life of Freddy Kassab. One was his wife, Mildred, for whom his love was deep and strong, and the other was his stepdaughter, Colette. Stepdaughter, he felt, was an awkward, formal term, and one which did not even begin to reflect the depth of feeling that had grown between Freddy and Colette. He thought of her and spoke of her as if she had always been his daughter—as if she were a reincarnation of the infant daughter in London he'd scarcely seen—and his feeling was reciprocated in full. He was, to Colette, not a stepfather, but a father, replacing the father who had killed himself.

Freddy Kassab had quickly become acquainted with Jeffrey MacDonaid. Colette, it seemed, was virtually obsessed with this bright, energetic, and extraordinarily charming classmate. She doodled his name—
jeff
—in double block letters everywhere: in her schoolbooks, in her mother's cookbooks, and on the desk blotter in the Kassab living room.

While they were dating, in junior high school, Freddy Kassab would often drive them to the movies. Even after they stopped seeing one another—following Colette's summer flirtation with the student from Purdue—Jeff continued to show up at the Kassab house. Unbidden, he would mow the lawn in summer, and shovel the driveway in winter. More than once, he would leave a surprise gift for Colette on the back steps of the house, ringing the doorbell and then disappearing before anyone could come to answer it.

With Colette at Skidmore and Jeff at Princeton—and with Jeff having announced his intention to pursue a career in medicine— both Freddy and Mildred were delighted at the resumption of the relationship. Jeff was so obviously a special young man: so full of drive, of ambition, of intelligence. To both Freddy and Mildred it was gratifying to think that Colette would someday be this doctor's wife.

Neither, however, was prepared for the call they received on the afternoon of August 30, 1963—a call from Mildred's sister in Patchogue, with whom Colette had been living for the summer (the summer which had begun with her letter to Jeff from Washington Square).

"Don't be upset," Colette's Aunt Helen said "but Jeff and Colette have just been to see me, and she's pregnant. They're on their way in to tell you right now."

The Kassabs stood at their living room window, looking out at the street below. They saw Jeff and Colette arrive and park the car. They watched as three times Jeff and Colette, hand in hand, circled the building on foot, trying to build up the courage to ascend.

Mildred, in particular, was horrified at the news. Not that Colette had been intimate with Jeff: as mother and daughter, they'd had frank talks about that subject long before, and it was Mildred's view (which Freddy, with his old-world values, did not fully share) that Colette, at age twenty—three years older than Mildred had been at the time of her own first marriage— was competent to make her own decisions in that regard.

What appalled Mildred were the stupidity, the carelessness, and now the consequences involved in getting pregnant while only halfway through college. Particularly when the father was facing four years of medical school after that.

Mildred suggested an abortion, but neither Jeff nor Colette would hear of it. Their minds were already made up: they would be married. When the Kassabs persisted in expressing an opposing point of view, Jeff went to the telephone and called his mother. She drove in immediately from Long Island to lend her voice to Jeff and Colette's side of the argument.

Neither Freddy nor Mildred had ever before met Dorothy MacDonald, but both were impressed by her forceful personality—a characteristic also so apparent in her son. She rode over all objections the Kassabs raised. Others might have their futures ruined by such a happenstance, but not Jeff. Nothing would stop him. His drive was too strong. Once he set a goal he would achieve it. He would continue at Princeton and then go on to medical school and become a doctor as planned. Colette could now be with him every step of the way, sharing the joy he would feel in his accomplishments, as well as sharing with him the joys of parenthood.

A wedding date was set for two weeks hence. One hundred people were invited. The wedding was held in a Catholic church because Jeffrey MacDonald was a Catholic, and the reception was at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It all cost a lot more than Freddy Kassab could afford, but he acted as maitre d' for the entire affair and everyone agreed that they had never seen him more charming or radiant.

The years that followed had gone much as Jeffrey MacDonald's mother had predicted, with the exception that the joys of parenthood were soon amplified by the presence of a second child.