The Mammoth Book of New Csi (63 page)

Three wax drippings were found at the crime scene. These did not match the wax of any of the fourteen candles in the MacDonalds’ home. This substantiated MacDonald’s story that the woman with his attackers was carrying a candle, and Stoeckley’s story of using candles in her incantations and rituals. A burnt match was found in Kristen’s room. MacDonald and his wife did not smoke and the match could have been used to light the candle MacDonald said he saw. A bloody syringe was also found at the crime scene, but it was lost by the CID lab before it could be examined. There was also a number of gloves with blood on them, but not enough to determine whose it was. It came to light that seventeen unmatched finger- and palm-prints had been found at the crime scene. However, the crime scene investigation had been so sloppy that exemplar fingerprints had never been taken from the children and those from Colette were poor because they were only taken after she had been embalmed.

Other things began to go MacDonald’s way. Jim Blackburn had been to prison for embezzling from clients and was now working as a waiter. Joe McGinniss was being pilloried by the critics for plagiarism in his new biography of Teddy Kennedy. And Potter and Bost’s book,
Fatal Justice
, had just come out. In 496 pages, it makes a point-by-point rebuttal of the prosecution’s case and posits a conspiracy theory involving the army, the Justice Department and the FBI. The press was now sympathetic. An inspector general’s report trashed the FBI’s saran expert’s testimony in an unrelated case.

Then in October 1997, the Fourth Circuit allowed the defence to introduce DNA evidence. Testing began in December 2000 but this was another blind alley. Test results released by the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in 2006 showed that neither Mitchell’s nor Stoeckley’s DNA matched that found at the crime scene. The DNA in hair found stuck to Colette’s left palm matched that of Jeffrey MacDonald. A hair found in Colette’s right palm was her own. MacDonald’s DNA profile also matched body hairs found on the top sheet of Kristen’s bed and the bedspread from the master bed. However, three hairs – one found under the fingernail of Kristen, one from the bedsheet and one, a long pubic hair, found between Colette’s legs – did not match the DNA profile of any MacDonald family member or known suspect. Someone else had been in the room. This provided the basis for another habeas-corpus petition, which was supported by an affidavit of retired US Marshal Jimmy Britt. He said that, in 1979, he was present when Helena Stoeckley told James Blackburn that she had been inside the MacDonald apartment where she and the others had gone to get drugs. Britt then remembered Blackburn saying to her: “If you testify to the things that you’ve just told me, I will indict you for first-degree murder.” The following day, Stoeckley testified in court that she had no memory of where she was that night. Blackburn denied this. Despite pleading guilty to a number of felonies, including embezzlement, forgery and stealing several hundred thousand dollars from his law firm, and being disbarred and imprisoned, Blackburn went on to become a speaker who gives lectures on ethics to lawyers.

In March 2006, Donald Buffkin of Alabama filed an affidavit in which he claimed that on several occasions between 1980 and 1982, he drank at a bar with a man who claimed to have been involved in the MacDonald family murders. Buffkin identified the man as Greg Mitchell. The last occasion that Mitchell told him about the murders was just two weeks before his death. Two other men, Everett Morse and Bryant Lane, also claimed in affidavits that Mitchell confessed that he had committed the murder to them on separate occasions. A law clerk claimed that she spoke to the cashier of a 7-Eleven store near the MacDonalds’ home, who said that she saw a group of hippies come into the store on the morning of the murders – though she did not report it for fear of her life.

After over thirty years in jail, MacDonald’s fight for freedom continues in the hope that something in the crime scene evidence will clear his name. His case has already been appealed to the US Supreme Court more than any other in history. MacDonald married again in 2002. At the behest of his second wife, he attended a parole hearing in 2005, but refused to admit his guilt. A tape made by Fred Kassab before he died in 1989 was played. In it he said: “I want to be sure he serves out his sentence the way it should be served out. I don’t want him walking around the streets.”

Colette’s brother Robert said: “My joy in you, Mr MacDonald, is that you are the complete sociopath that you are. And that you’re never going to admit what you did. And that I’m going to have the pleasure of knowing that you’re going to stay here and rot in jail for the rest of your life.”

Parole was denied. MacDonald’s next scheduled parole hearing is in 2020. Otherwise, his release date is set for 5 April 2071, when he will be 127.

I
N
A
UGUST
1991, newly married thirty-two-year-old Robert Curley was renovating an old home for his new wife Joann when he became violently ill. He suffered intense burning pains in his hand and feet. After four days in the Wilkes-Barre General Hospital, Pennsylvania, he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurological disorder, and released.

But the symptoms did not go away. Despite his wife’s objections, Robert Curley was readmitted to Wilkes-Barre General in early September 1991, where the doctors now confessed they were baffled by his symptoms. These included burning skin, repeated vomiting, weakness, numbness and rapid hair loss. After ten days, he became agitated and aggressive. Eventually, he had to be tethered to his bed by leather straps as he writhed in agony. Heavy-metal poisoning was suspected, so he was transferred to the Hershey Medical Center where doctors could perform the appropriate tests. Elevated levels of thallium were in his system – up to 900 times the lethal dose.

His brain swelled up. He eventually fell comatose and had to be hooked up to a respirator. But nothing could be done. His wife, who was at her husband’s side throughout his suffering, permitted the doctors to turn off his life support and, on 27 September 1991, he died. The couple were very close, friends recalled.

Thallium was not a common substance. It had been discovered by Sir William Crookes in Britain in 1861 and, in limited doses, it was used to treat gout, ringworm and sexually transmitted disease, until it was found to be carcinogenic. It was also used in rat poison but was eventually banned in 1984. However, Curley worked on a construction project at Wilkes University earlier that year. A search turned up five bottles of thallium salts in the chemistry laboratory’s stockroom, but none of Curley’s thirteen co-workers exhibited any symptoms of accidental thallium exposure.

At Curley’s post-mortem, it was discovered that the thallium levels in his body were so high that he must have been poisoned deliberately. His death was ruled a homicide. The cause of death was given as severe hypoxic encephalopathy, where the brain is deprived of oxygen – a secondary effect of thallium poisoning. Forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht, best known for his criticism of the findings of the Warren Commission on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, said that Curley’s brain had swelled up so much it pushed down into the spinal cord.

Initially, a disgruntled work colleague, who had access to the poison, was suspected. However, investigators from the Federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration did an inventory of the chemicals at the lab and determined that none was missing. Then investigators turned their attention to the Curley home, where Joann, his wife of thirteen months, lived with her daughter from a previous marriage. They were also found to have elevated levels of thallium in their systems, but not at toxic levels. Investigators also found several thermos flasks that Joann Curley said her husband used to take iced tea to work. These too tested positive for thallium. But with no suspects, the case went cold for three years.

Curley’s life insurance paid out $297,000 to his widow. Two days before Curley died, she had also received over $1 million in a payout over the car accident that killed her first husband. Now she grew greedy and sued the university over her second husband’s death. Naturally, the university and its insurers sought to defend themselves. Her mercenary attitude also looked suspicious to the police and it was up to them to prove that she had killed her husband.

This was a job for forensics. The authorities approached Dr Fredric Rieders of National Medical Services, a private toxicology lab in Willow Grove with extensive testing abilities, who would later appear as an expert witness at the O. J. Simpson trial. He was asked to do a more thorough analysis of the tissues. The evidence was sparse. Rieders needed more samples, but Joann Curley agreed to allow her husband to be exhumed. Hair shafts were removed from various parts of Curley’s body, along with fingernails, toenails and skin samples. What could they show? It was already known that Curley died due to the raised level of thallium in his body.

But Dr Rieders had a clever plan. He divided each hair up into small segments. The level of thallium in each segment was then determined by the use of atomic absorption spectrophotometry. This was a sophisticated technique where chemicals were used to break down each segment of hair into individual atoms. These were then excited by electro-magnetic waves and the spectrum of their absorption plotted. Each element has a characteristic absorption spectrum.

Working out how much thallium there was in each segment of hair, it was possible to draw up a timeline of Curley’s exposure.

“Hair is, for many things, a timeline,” said Rieders, a former Philadelphia assistant medical examiner. “It is a repository of what circulated in the body. If you take an aspirin, what will grow out of your head will be a strand of hair on which a tiny portion will have a little aspirin.”

Since hair grows at an approximate rate of
¹
/
₃
to ½ in. (0.8 to 1.3 cm) per month, scientists can start at the hair’s root, and work backwards in time. Some of the strands of hair from Curley’s head were long enough to track the toxin back up to 329 days before he died, but Dr Rieders confined himself to the previous nine months.

Investigators had thought that Curley had been fed thallium in August 1991, fallen ill and then died. Instead, the timeline showed a series of spikes, indicating that Curley had been fed thallium over a long period. And they began before Curley had started work at the university. This proved that someone was poisoning him long before he took the job there. There was also a massive spike just a few days before his death, while Curley was confined to the Hershey Medical Center. This was confirmed by readings from hairs from other parts of his body, and measurements from his fingernails and toenails supported this data. This again suggested that the poisoning was intentional – and the poison was being administered by someone who had access to him in hospital.

There were other oddities about the timelines. There were at least seven separate spikes when Curley had ingested thallium. When Rieders compared it to the events in Curley’s life, he found that, except for the few days before his death, the thallium levels dropped when he was away from home or in the hospital. However, in the last few days of this time, his family had brought some food into the hospital for him and he had been left alone with his wife.

As the prosecution prepared for trial, they called in some other leading expert witnesses. The former chief medical examiner for New York City, Michael Baden, confirmed Rieders’s findings. Baden had been chairman of the Forensic Pathology Panel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations that reinvestigated the John F. Kennedy assassination. He had also given evidence at the O. J. Simpson trial and helped in the investigation of the remains of the Romanovs. Then there was Cyril Wecht, author of several books about high-profile crime scene investigations.

“I was an expert, with Michael Baden and Fred Rieders, for the DA,” said Wecht. “I was the only one to testify at the preliminary hearing and I went through the entire forensic pathology and toxicology stuff that the three of us had prepared. It was a beautiful case because it had to do with the sequential chronological testing of a hair from its follicle to its tip. It showed the peaks and valleys of his poisoning. When he was away, he had a valley and when he was home or with his wife, he had a peak.”

Wecht’s role was to interpret the toxicological findings relating to the cause of death.

“The forensic toxicologist can come up with the technical methodology and findings,” he said, “but the pathologist is needed to talk about cause of death and relate it to the science and symptoms and critical episodes. It’s a joint effort.”

Acknowledging that the case against Joann Curley was largely circumstantial, District Attorney Peter Paul Olszewski Jr said he believed a conviction would be “difficult, difficult, difficult”. Police said Joann was the only person with “constant and frequent access to the victim and to the food and drink consumed by the victim”. But the case, it seemed, literally hung by a hair. The prosecution did not give details of the psychological profile that they had built up on Joann Curley, nor did they say how she had obtained the thallium. However, they believed that Robert Curley had discovered he was being poisoned in the days before he died. A registered nurse at the Hershey Medical Center told police that Robert Curley grabbed her by the arm the day before he went into the coma and said: “Please help me. My wife is trying to kill me. She is not as she seems.”

In the end, the big guns of forensic toxicology were not needed. Confronted with this panel of experts and the forensic evidence that had amassed, the pressure was on thirty-threeyear-old Joann Curley. In 1997, she made a plea bargain with the prosecution. She confessed to having murdered her husband with rat poison for the life insurance. In exchange for her confession – and saving the state the cost of a prosecution – she was given a sentence of ten to twenty years in prison. She has, so far, been denied parole.