Fatal Vision (96 page)

"I think that you can infer from the evidence that—you know, you remember the
Esquire
magazine and the words in it: the Manson-type murders and a multiplicity of weapons equaling a multiplicity of people. An icepick was obtained. And Kristen was stabbed with the icepick after she had already been stabbed with the knife.

"You remember the testimony of the CID agent who interviewed the defendant in the hospital on the morning of the murders, and who said that he became incoherent and confused when he talked about Kristen. Kristen was so hard to talk about. Perhaps that was because it was the most cold to do—a defenseless little girl. Kimberly and Colette had perhaps been struck while he was angered, but not Kristen." Blackburn paused again, allowing the jury to think about that for a moment. Then he resumed.

"Well, you know, there is no such thing as perfect murder. The pajama top was probably already on Colette's chest. And I think you can find from the evidence that the defendant forgot it was there and made that terrible mistake of stabbing Colette with the icepick through that blue pajama top and that is how those holes got there.

"He didn't know at that time that four years later, the FBI would figure out that forty-eight can match twenty-one.

"I believe that the weapons—the Old Hickory knife and the icepick—were wiped off on the bathmat. Do irrational and irresponsible drug-crazed people wipe off weapons and then throw them outside to be found by investigators?

"Why did he say that the Geneva Forge knife was pulled out of the chest of Colette even though Paul Stombaugh testified that in his opinion that knife was dull and did not make any of the cuts in her clothing? Remember, he said, 'Don't forget that I pulled the knife out of her chest.' I suggest that you could find from the evidence that he did that because he didn't know what was on that knife and he had to have an explanation for why it was there—he forgot to throw that one out.

"I suggest that the Geneva Forge knife didn't kill anybody. If he pulled it out of her chest, why does the evidence suggest that there was no significant amount of blood on that knife? Perhaps, because it didn't go in that chest—it nicked the defendant's arm.

"I believe that the surgical gloves were then taken—I think you can find from the evidence—and used to write the word
pig
on the headboard. The self-infliction of one injury was made, the story was concocted, the MPs were called, and he lay down next to his wife to wait for help."

Once more Jim Blackburn paused, and when he resumed his voice was even softer—his cadence slower—than before. "You know," he said, approaching the jurors now and looking directly at them, "the defendant had a lot of nice character testimony, and I am sure that each of you, if you were accused of a crime, would have the same."

Leaning forward, his voice almost a whisper, his regional accent thicker than it had been for seven weeks, he said, "But don't ever forget that perhaps the greatest crime of all was committed 2,000 years ago. And the night before Christ was betrayed, Judas Iscariot would have had twelve of the best character witnesses this world has ever known to have said he couldn't have done it. But you know that he did."

Every eye in the courtroom was on him now, every ear awaiting his next words. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "if in the future, after this case is over, you should think of it again, I ask you to think and to remember Colette, Kimberly, and Kristen.

"They have been dead for almost ten years. That is right now around 3,400 or 3,500 days and nights that you have had and I have had and the defendant has had that they haven't. They would have liked to have had those.

"And so if in the future you should say a prayer, say one for them. If in the future you should light a candle, light one for them. If in the future you should cry a tear, cry one for them."

The sadness in his tone, the sadness in the room, had a weight to it that was the culmination of nine and a half years of the grief and agony of all who had cared—and of all who had come to care—about Jeffrey MacDonald's pregnant wife and little girls.

"We ask for nothing in the name of persecution," Blackburn said. "We ask for nothing in the name of harassment. We ask for nothing in the name of what is wrong. Nothing. But, God, we ask for everything in the name of what is right and in the name of what is just. That is why we are here. We ask for everything in the name of truth.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is horribly tragic and horribly sad, as you know, because you have seen Mrs. Kassab and you have seen Mrs. MacDonald and it is sad for both of them—both of them were grandmothers, not just one—and it is sad for the defendant.

"But it is sad most of all for those who paid the highest price of all—with their lives.

"And so we ask you, ladies and gentlemen, to return a verdict of guilty as to clubbing and stabbing Colette, guilty of clubbing and stabbing Kimberly, and guilty—perhaps most of all—of stabbing little Kristen.

"You remember—I am sure you have heard it many times— part of the third chapter of Ecclesiastes—There is a time for everything under the heavens—a time to be born and a time to die.'

"Surely, God did not intend on the 17th of February, 1970, for Colette, Kimberly, and Kristen MacDonald to die.

"It is time, ladies and gentlemen. It is so late in the day. It is time that someone speak for justice and truth and return a verdict of guilty against this man."

The night before, Bernie Segal had spent hours preparing his closing argument. He continued to insist, even privately, that the jury would acquit MacDonald even if he, Segal, were to offer no closing remarks whatsoever, but he had waited more than nine years to purge himself of all the rage and frustration and anguish he felt on behalf of his most favored, most publicized client, and he had no intention of letting the moment pass.

In its closing days the MacDonald trial had come to attract the attention not only of the North Carolina press and of
Newsday
on Long Island, but of
The Washington Post, The New York Times,
the
Los Angeles Times,
the television networks, and the news magazines.
People,
to Segal's horror and to the astonishment and dismay of Jeffrey MacDonald, had just printed a feature story on Freddy Kassab and his long quest for justice, in which Kassab was pictured surrounded by law books, looking somber and determined, as if he were perhaps a new appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in which he was quoted as saying, quite unjudicially, "If the courts of this country will not administer justice, then I most certainly will."

Of the three hours and fifteen minutes allotted to the defense for its presentation, Segal had decided that he would speak for the first two, focusing, in detail, on the inconsistencies in the government's circumstantial case. Then Wade Smith would speak for an hour, i
n the finest down-home, country-
boy style he could muster, about what a wonderful human being Jeffrey MacDonald was, and about how much love he and his family had shared,

and about how unthinkable it was that a man such as this could have performed deeds such as those with which he was charged.

Smith, it must be said, given free rein for an hour, had the ability not only to make each and every member of a Raleigh jury feel that he had known and loved them all since kindergarten, and that the opportunity to speak to them again, even under such unfortunate circumstances as these, was one of the greatest and rarest pleasures of his life, but that even so decent-appearing and kindly a man as Mr. Blackburn—while by no means duplicitous, or even manipulative—might be just the teeniest bit less worthy of their absolute faith and trust than he had hitherto seemed.

Then Segal was to return to the lectern once again for fifteen minutes of fire and brimstone—venting every bit of his and Jeffrey MacDonald's spleen at the way they had been treated throughout the whole sordid affair. He would attack the CID, the FBI, Victor Worheide, Brian Murtagh, and each and every principle for which they stood, and by the time he was finished, the jury (he was convinced) would be worked up into such a frenzy of anger at this high-handed government mistreatment of a truly decent and noble human being that they would hardly be able to sit through Jim Blackburn's rebuttal, so eager would they be to bring to an end Jeffrey MacDonald's long personal nightmare.

It did not work out that way. Bernie Segal carried a wrist-watch with him to the lectern, but he was so caught up in the moment that not once—until he was interrupted by the tapping of Franklin Dupree's pencil and a quiet reminder from the bench that "You have three hours and fifteen minutes and you have already used three hours and ten minutes of it"—did he look at it, nor did he, apparently, give any thought whatsoever to the passage of time.

After two hours of Segal's rambling, sometimes incoherent, often vituperative, and consistently repetitive harangue, Wade Smith had found himself faced with what he considered to be perhaps the most difficult decision of his legal career.

Should he leave the defense table, walk to the lectern and whisper to Segal that he was running well over the previously arranged time limit, and what's more,
he had not yet even begun to cover most of the specific points he had intended to include in his argument
—or should he, because, as he had been made clear to him from the day Segal and his entourage had arrived in Raleigh, he was not, in fact co-counsel, but only another one of Segal's many assistants, just sit tight and let nature take its course?

Jeffrey MacDonald, the client, was sitting beside him. If MacDonald had so instructed him, Smith indeed would have made that long and embarrassing walk across the courtroom to tell the chief counsel that he was letting his last chance for even a hung jury, much less an acquittal, drown beneath the endless torrent of his words.

But MacDonald, though squirming uncomfortably in his seat from time to time, like each of the jurors and everyone else in the courtroom except Segal, did not issue any such instruction. So Wade Smith sat still and watched silently—and in professional horror—as Bernie Segal, like a runaway truck on a steep, icy hill, careened wildly out of control.

From the start, at 1
p.m
., when Segal had said bitterly and sarcastically to the jury, "Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there has been a tragedy, but we haven't talked about the real tragedy in this case yet"—the real tragedy being, in Segal's mind, not the murders of Colette and Kimberly and Kristen, but the subsequent "destruction" of Jeffrey MacDonald's life by the American legal system, Segal's tone and style and content—particularly coming after Blackburn's quiet country elegance—had been not at all what the jury had been expecting, or wanting to hear.

By 4:10, when Judge Dupree finally and mercifully tapped his pencil, Segal was swinging wild roundhouse punches at the government, as if he were the prosecuting attorney and it was the Justice Department that was on trial.

". . . Again, the government makes fun," Segal was shouting. 'Why did you come forward, Mr. Posey?' If you come forward at all, you get mocked! If you don't come forward because you think they don't need you, you get mocked! You can't win!"

Even after three hours and ten minutes, Segal had not yet gotten around to Helena Stoeckley. He was forced to squeeze her into the four minutes which followed the tapping of the pencil, leaving Wade Smith with exactly sixty seconds, rather than the prearranged sixty minutes, to convince the jury that Jeffrey MacDonald was such a decent man that he couldn't possibly have killed his wife and children, no matter what the physical evidence appeared to show.

A recess was declared by Judge Dupree, during which Smith went over to bargain with Jim Blackburn—to bargain the way two good old boys can, knowing that they will both be living and practicing in the same city long after Bernie Segal and Jeffrey
MacDonald and all the out-of-town newspaper reporters have departed.

As a professional attorney—and in order to minimize the possibility that Judge Dupree might grant Smith his entire hour— Blackburn, who had forty minutes remaining to him for rebuttal, agreed to give Wade Smith ten minutes of that time.

There wasn't much Smith could do to repair the damage, but he tried. He picked up his tempo, the way he might have on his banjo, and played it hard and fast and as strong as he could.

"Let your insides talk to you for a minute about the case," Smith suggested. "What do you
feell
Don't you wonder
why
when you think about this?
Why
did it happen? Don't you wonder, when you are thinking about whether Jeff did it,
why
would he have done it? Can you think of a reason why?

"Now, the prosecution is not under any obligation to furnish a motive. The law does not place that burden on them. Nevertheless, there is natural law. That is law that we feel inside of us—every one of us. And we feel that we can say to the prosecution, 'Tell us why. Tell us
why
this man would have destroyed his family.'