CHAPTER 33
THE MACDONALD MASSACRE
When military police arrived at the Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of Captain Jeffrey MacDonald at 3:50 a.m. on February 17, 1970, they found a bloody massacre. Captain MacDonald, a twenty-seven-year old military doctor, had multiple wounds, including stab wounds in his stomach and chest, and a collapsed lung. His pregnant wife, Colette, twenty-seven, was lying dead in a pool of blood. Their two daughters, Kimberley, six, and Kristen, three, had been beaten and stabbed to death. The word “pig” was scrawled in blood on a wall. There were apparent signs of a struggle, including a table standing on end, magazines strewn around the room, and torn clothing. They also found three possible weapons—a paring knife, an ice pick, and a club. When Macdonald was revived by the military police through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, he gave a descriptions of three men and a blond woman who he said broke in and attacked him. He said that the woman wore boots and a floppy wide-brimmed hat, and held a candle.
The gory murder scene itself lent itself to two theories. The first one, based on MacDonald’s story, was that home invaders had broken in and attacked him while he slept on the couch. Such home invasions happened in that era. Just about six months earlier in Los Angeles, the Charles Manson “family” had broken into two homes and murdered seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate. They had also written the word “pig” in blood. Since Fort Bragg was an open base, anyone, including drug-crazed murderers, could have broken into the MacDonald home that night.
The second theory is that MacDonald, the lone surviving member of the family, murdered his pregnant wife and daughters. He then staged the appearance of a hippie home invasion by upsetting furniture, throwing objects around, writing “pig” in blood, and inflicting multiple deep wounds on himself. According to police statistics of spousal murders, the husband is usually the perpetrator, especially if he was at home at the time of the murder.
Husbands become prime suspects in such cases because they have the opportunity and the means (in the form of household knives, ice picks, and blunt instruments) and a possible motive to kill their wives, even if it is only a domestic spat. Often, as seen in the Dr. Sam Sheppard case, husbands claim that the deed was done by strangers. But if none are immediately found, the husband almost automatically becomes the focus of the investigation. (On this logic, Roman Polanski, the husband of Sharon Tate, would have been a suspect if he had not been in London shooting a movie at the time of the crime.)
In the MacDonald case, even when Captain MacDonald was still in the hospital, military investigators proceeded on this latter theory. In May 1970, MacDonald was brought before an Article 32 hearing, the military equivalent of a grand jury, presided over by Colonel Warren V. Rock. Since military investigators could find no apparent motive, the only evidence they presented was of staging. Their expert witness testified that multiple experiments persuaded him that the coffee table at the crime scene could not have landed on its edge as a result of a fight, and that therefore MacDonald had arranged it in that position to simulate the appearance of a home invasion. At that point, Colonel Rock went to the crime scene and, to settle the matter, kicked the coffee table once. It landed on its edge, and he dismissed the case against MacDonald for lack of evidence. After MacDonald reentered civilian life, he was indicted by a Federal grand jury for the murders in 1975. It then took four years to adjudicate his claims of double jeopardy and other procedural issues, so the trial did not commence until nine years after the crime itself. At the trial, experts from the FBI crime lab presented more sophisticated evidence of staging, including the alignment of puncture wounds in his clothing, which convinced a jury that he was guilty. On August 29, 1979, he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The prosecution’s successful narrative of the crime was then so thoroughly established in the public mind by massive media attention, including Joe McGinniss’ best-selling book Fatal Vision, a TV miniseries, a 60 Minutes investigation, and Janet Malcolm’s book The Journalist and the Murderer, that most people, including myself, assumed there was no reasonable doubt of his guilt. It appeared to be a closed case.
But in 2012, Errol Morris, an Academy Award–winning filmmaker and former private investigator, published his book A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald. It is based on an extraordinary investigation, documented with a wealth of affidavits, diagrams, and interview transcripts, and pursues the other theory—that a home invasion had been neglected by police for over forty years. He found several witnesses who saw a girl matching MacDonald’s description of the girl with a candle, including Kenneth Mica, the MP officer who first answered the call to go to the MacDonald house. As he raced home at 3:30 a.m., he recalled seeing a young woman in a wide-brimmed floppy hat. Then six other witnesses identified Helena Stoeckley, a twenty-eight-year-old drug user, self-styled witch, and narcotics informer, as a person wearing such a hat that night. One police officer, for whom she worked as an informer, saw her in such a hat, a blond wig, and white boots arriving home that morning in the company of a group of men. So did a neighbor. She eventually admitted to no fewer than six people that she was in the MacDonald home on the night of the murder, high on drugs, accompanied by three male Vietnam veterans. She also recalled such details of the home invasion as holding a candle, riding a broken toy rocking horse in the home, and answering the MacDonalds’ phone. (A soldier named Jimmy Friar told the FBI that he had called the MacDonald number and heard the woman who answered break into hysterical laughter when he asked for Dr. MacDonald and then hang up.) Not only did Stoeckley pass a lie detector test; one of the veterans she named, Greg Mitchell, had written, according to three witnesses, in bright red paint on a white wall in the farmhouse where he was staying, “I killed the MacDonald’s wife [sic] and children.”
Stoeckley gave her account in an 1982 interview taped for CBS’s 60 Minutes. She told of how she taken a large amount of mescaline that night, wore a blond wig, hat, and boots, and went from room to room with a candle. “I entered the [MacDonald] house with another member of the cult. There were three members there already, talking with Dr. MacDonald.” Then she said “someone knocked him unconscious” and other cult members were beating his wife. After the phone call, she recalls that the group left in two cars. Morris cites a half-dozen other witnesses who spotted Stoeckley and her confederates earlier and later that night.
Yet the jury never heard Stoeckley’s account. Instead, as Morris discovered, Stoeckley was reportedly discouraged from testifying, when she arrived at the courthouse, by the assistant U.S. attorney, James Blackburn. This alleged warning emerged only in 2005, when Jimmy B. Britt, the U.S. marshal charged with bringing Stoeckley to the courthouse for the trial, came forth. In his affidavit, Britt said that on arriving at the courthouse with Stoeckley, he first brought her to see Blackburn. He then witnessed her giving Blackburn a detailed confession, essentially the same story that she had told Britt on their trip to the courthouse. Then, according to Britt, Blackburn told her that if she repeated that story under oath in court, he would indict her for first degree murder. (Blackburn, who was disbarred in 1993 for ethical transgression, denies Britt’s account.) When she appeared in court, she totally changed her story, saying now that she could not recall ever being in the MacDonald house. Without her testimony, the defense could not call the corroborating witnesses.
Nor was her confession ever broadcast on CBS’s 60 Minutes. CBS producers decided against airing it. Instead, the 60 Minutes report focused on McGinness’s sensational story of a drug-crazed doctor who slaughtered his family. Stoeckley’s confession would undercut the program’s narrative line, and, by 1982, the accepted conventional wisdom was that MacDonald would not have been convicted if he were innocent.
We are left with the same two theories that existed four decades ago, but thanks to Morris, more evidence as to what happened. However abhorrent the idea may be of an innocent man spending his life in prison, I believe th
at the evidence now supports the intruder theory. To be sure, the prosecutors made a powerful case for the husband-did-it theory and for the claim that the crime scene had been staged. That assertion was seemingly substantiated after from the testimony of expert witnesses interpreting the results of complex experiments conducted at the FBI crime lab. One FBI fiber expert testified, for example, that the neat pattern of puncture wounds in MacDonald’s clothes indicated that, in his opinion, the shirt was stabbed when he was not wearing it. Morris, however, found that many of the experiment results were distorted by cherry-picking the parts that supported the staging narrative and omitting those consistent with the break-in narrative. Such distortions are not unheard of at the FBI crime lab: In 1997, a Justice Department historic review of the FBI lab’s work discovered some 3,000 such suspect incidents of misconduct. In any case, even if taken at their face value, the experiments proved not that MacDonald killed his family but that his account was inconsistent with clues found at the scene. But as MacDonald was woozy when resuscitated, trauma alone—and not murder—could account for his lack of clarity.
My assessment of the evidence is that home invaders, including Helena Stoeckley and her boyfriend Greg Mitchell, murdered the wife and children of Jeffrey MacDonald. We have an eyewitness evidence of a break-in in the statements of Helena Stoeckley. Mitchell corroborated part of her account by writing that he murdered MacDonald’s family on the wall of the house in which he was staying.
There was also a motive for the break-in, according to Stoeckley. She said that her friends were seeking drugs at the MacDonald house. Since he was a doctor, this is a plausible motive. Her claim that the violence began when MacDonald attempted to call the police is also plausible, since MacDonald, a trained Green Beret, would no doubt respond to the break-in. It also seems likely that once the violent rampage began, the “cult,” as she describes her friends, imitated elements of the then-notorious Manson murders by painting the word “pig” on the wall. As there were unidentified fingerprints found in the house—which were accidently destroyed by a military technician before they could be compared with prints of people outside the household—it is not possible to preclude such a home invasion. I am also persuaded by elements of Stoeckley’s story that were later confirmed, such as candle drippings on the floor that did not chemically match any candles found in the MacDonald home, twenty-four-inch Dacron strands found on a hairbrush that did not match anything owned by the MacDonald family but were consistent with strands in the type of blond wig Stoeckley wore, and the finding of a witness who confirmed details of the phone conversation described by Stoeckley. The police chose the path of least resistance in focusing on MacDonald, as is often the case in a domestic crime, but in doing so they woefully neglected the counter-narrative of a home invasion. Francis Bacon summed up the problem bedeviling this case four centuries ago when he wrote in Novum Organum that “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion … draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises, or else by some distinction sets aside or rejects.” It took a truly extraordinary book by the documentarian Errol Morris to break the journalistic paradigm that had congealed around this case. Even though MacDonald remains in prison, it is, in my view, a miscarriage of justice.
CHAPTER 34
THE KNOX ORDEAL
On the night of November 1, 2007, Meredith Kercher, a twenty-one-year-old exchange student from South London, was murdered in a cottage on the Via della Pergola in the ancient university city of Perugia in Umbria, Italy. Her body was found by police the next day, locked in her ground-floor bedroom and covered in a blood-soaked quilt. She had deep stab wounds in her neck. The only clothing on her body was a cotton shirt pulled up to the neck. Bruises indicated that she had been held down, and there was male DNA in her body, indicating possible rape. The exact time of death could not be determined because the coroner had not been allowed to immediately take the body’s temperature. The autopsy could only establish a time frame for the death, between 8:55 p.m. and 12:50 a.m. There was also evidence of a burglary, since house keys, money, cell phones, and credit cards were missing and a ten-pound rock had been thrown through the window of the adjoining room. When the crime scene was further processed, fingerprints, palm prints, and semen were found that did not match any of the residents of the cottage. There was also a footprint of a Nike sneaker in blood. Two witnesses had seen a young black man running down Via della Pergola from the direction of the cottage at 10:30 p.m. They said that he nearly collided with them.
The black man seen running away might have been sought as a suspect if the investigators from the police’s “flying squad” believed that an outsider had killed Meredith, but, within hours of finding the body, they concluded that all the evidence of burglary, including the broken window, strewn clothing, and missing belongings, had been staged to mislead them. For one thing, some of the glass fragments of the window had landed on top of the clothing on the floor, indicating that the rock had been thrown through the window after and not before the crime, and probably from inside the room. For another thing, it seemed unlikely that an intruder had climbed the 11.5-foot wall to enter through the window when he could have broken a lower window for entry. The investigators therefore assumed that it was an inside job done by someone who lived in the cottage.
The insider theory narrowed the police investigation down to just seven suspects: four young Italian students who rented rooms in the basement of the house, where they grew Cannabis plants; and, upstairs, Filomena Romanelli, Laura Mezzetti, and Amanda Knox, who, along with the victim, shared the ground-floor flat. Each of the women had a separate bedroom that could be locked from the outside only with a key. As it then turned out, it was a holiday week in Italy, and all four of the Italian men had gone away that weekend to visit their families (and they had asked Meredith to water their Cannabis plants). Romanelli and Mezzetti, both legal trainees in their late twenties, were also away and had solid alibis. That left only one other suspect, Amanda Knox, a twenty-year-old American student from Seattle, who was at the house when the police arrived, kissing her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. She was stunningly beautiful. Knox’s alibi was provided by Sollecito, whom she had met the previous week at a classical musical recital. The two told police that they were together at Sollecito’s nearby flat all night. According to Knox, they had smoked marijuana, watched a DVD of the French movie Amélie, and slept together. She claimed she only returned to her apartment at 11:00 a.m the next morning to change her clothing, and that she then noticed blood in the shower. Even though Sollecito initially fully supported her alibi, during the three days of interrogation, he changed his story, now saying that Knox had left his apartment at 9:00 p.m. to go to a bar, Le Chic, where she worked, and that she did not return until after midnight. So neither of them had an alibi for the time when Kercher was murdered. Under intensive interrogation, in which Knox was threatened with imprisonment, and without being given a lawyer, she also altered her story, suddenly implicating Patrick Lumumba, the Congo-born owner of the Le Chic bar. She told police that Lumumba had murdered her flatmate. On November 6, police arrested Knox, Sollecito and Lumumba for the murder of Meredith Kercher. Even though Knox subsequently retracted her accusation, claiming that she had been traumatized by police threats, the theory of the prosecutors now was that the murder proceeded from an orgy that got out of control. But a problem developed when a Swiss professor, who had been at the Le Chic bar on November 1, swore that he had had an extended conversation with Lumumba during the time the murder was committed. In light of this alibi, and Knox’s admission that she had falsely accused him, Lumumba had to be released.
Meanwhile, on November 15, the prints in Kercher’s room were identified. They belonged to Rudy Guede, a twenty-year-old unemployed gardener from Ivory Coast. His palm print was clearly visible on the bloodstained pillow under Kercher’s hips. Hi
s DNA was found on her clothes and inside her vagina. He also wore Nike Outbreak 2 sneakers that were consistent with the bloody footprint on the floor. In addition, he also fit the description of the man seen running down the street at 10:30 p.m. He also had knowledge of the cottage. He had met the Italian men living downstairs in the cottage in mid-October while playing basketball, and in the week of the murder he went to the apartment to watch an auto race and smoke hash with them. On that occasion, he met both Kercher and Knox.
This hard evidence unambiguously established that Guede was in Kercher’s room, had sexual contact with her, and left the room after her blood was spilled. According to witnesses, he also had been involved in other recent break-ins in Perugia and Milan. In September 2007, a witness said that Guede had broken into his home in Perugia (through a window) at 6:00 a.m. on the morning after the murder, brandished a knife, and stole his credit cards. On October 13, he apparently broke into a lawyer’s office in Perugia through a second-story window and took a laptop and cell phone (which were later found in his backpack). Less than one week before the murder, he had been briefly detained by police in Milan for breaking into a nursery and stealing an eleven-inch kitchen knife.
The Annals of Unsolved Crime Page 25
