The Journalist and the Murderer

by Janet Malcolm

  I said that it seemed to me his experiment was hardly up to the best—or any—scientific standards, since it had no controls.

  “Yes,” Stone said, “I could have gone about it in that scrambled way, using several normal people—somebody with a different personality disorder, some other convicted person—along with Jeff MacDonald. But none of that could have been admitted into evidence unless the other side had overseen the experiment, and they would never have agreed to do that because they know bloody well that inside he’s exactly the way the book says he is.”

  “This is your belief, but you haven’t established it.”

  “No. But I suspect strongly that Bostwick knew he wasn’t dealing with Lord Fauntleroy.”

  “You don’t feel that there is any possibility that MacDonald is innocent?”

  “No. In fact—and this, too, was something I wasn’t able to say in court, since Bostwick cleverly ate up all the time with a bunch of silly questions and I had to catch a plane—the four intruders who MacDonald claimed were responsible for the murders represented the only truth, psychologically speaking, that he told. There really were four people who intruded on the hedonistic life style and whoring around of Jeff MacDonald: the four people who intruded on his disinclination to be a responsible husband and father; namely, Colette, Kristen, Kimberly, and the unborn son. Three white and one black—the hidden one.”

  Stone went on to speak of having seen MacDonald in the courtroom. “I was highly nervous about being in the presence of this man,” he said. “I had the feeling his eyes could bore holes through a tank. The steely stare of this hostile man! I made a point of finding out when he would be paroled, and when I learned that it was after the time I would be no longer be on earth I felt bolder.”

  “You talk about him as if you really knew him, as if he were a real person,” I said. “But actually he’s a character in a book. Everything we know about him we know from McGinniss’s text.”

  Stone said nothing for a moment, and I wondered whether my remark had been imprudent. In asking a character in one text to comment on the ontological status of a character in another text, was I alerting Stone too soon—as I had alerted McGinniss too soon—to the dangers of subjecthood? Stone wavered, but—obviously made of hardier metal than McGinniss—resolutely went on with his mission of self-disclosure. “He’s not a Dickens character,” he finally said, correctly, if irrelevantly.

  “You really don’t like him,” I said.

  “No. It’s hard to like a man who stabs his pregnant wife to death. It takes more—what shall I say?—love of mankind than I possess. I’m more of the school of ‘You get what you earn, and you have to earn what you get.’ ”

  Stone had spoken earlier of the chain of abuse and brutalization that links generations of violent people. I asked him, “Isn’t it possible that bad things were done to MacDonald in his early years? That his childhood wasn’t all that idyllic, and that he repressed what happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you knew that to be so, would you feel more benign toward him?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s a liar. Because he’s not man enough to say, ‘I committed those murders because I was under the influence of amphetamines. I didn’t know what I was doing. Colette was taking a course in psychology, she was going to wear the pants in the family. This was threatening to me; I felt left out. I was beginning to fondle the older girl too much, and she caught me’—this is Colette’s stepfather’s theory; he told me about it during the trial—‘so in a moment of frenzied feeling that ruined my whole life I just killed the whole lot of them.’ If he could say all that, I’d still want him put away for the rest of his life, but at least I’d have some respect for the fact that he could be honest about what happened. No way. He can’t do that. He’s not built to do that.”

  “You take a very harsh view, which is unusual for a psychotherapist in our culture.”

  “Unfortunately, it is unusual. I am at odds with many of my colleagues as a result of that. I feel that the profession has too much of this ‘Tout comprendre, tout pardonner’ attitude. And there is also the ‘We can fix it’ attitude—the notion that if we can send a man to the moon surely we can make a psychopath go straight. But a person who has a propensity to murder is beyond the pale of psychotherapy. It is folly to think that a person like that could be corrected through the process of one-to-one therapy. He is a lost soul.”

  AS MICHAEL STONE’S office had astonished and mystified me, so did Ray Shedlick’s windowless office in a security firm on the outskirts of Durham, North Carolina, seem immediately familiar, with its dark-wood panelling, framed certificates, athletic trophies, and a poignant sort of bareness and neatness—the emblems of rural American officialdom. Shedlick, a retired New York City police detective, was hired by MacDonald in 1982 as an investigator. A tall, slender man of fifty-five, with a very agreeable manner, wearing a red jersey shirt and tinted glasses, he had met me at the Durham airport on a Saturday in the winter of 1988 and driven me to the empty office building, a few miles away, where we now sat waiting for a third member of the party, a writer and professor named Jeffrey Elliot, who taught at nearby North Carolina Central University. Elliot was preparing a book on the MacDonald case and had appeared in the McGinniss trial as a rebuttal witness to Buckley and Wambaugh. Bostwick was at first reluctant to call him—a man who was writing a book on MacDonald did not seem to be the wisest choice as an expert on the author-subject relationship. But MacDonald was very insistent that he do so, and after speaking with Elliot on the telephone Bostwick changed his mind, realizing that he had stumbled upon a treasure. He would not have been able to invent a witness who would better embody the high-mindedness he sought to hold up as an alternative to the ruthless expediency that Buckley and Wambaugh declared to be the standard in the writing profession.

  “Dr. Elliot,” Bostwick said in his examination (Elliot has a doctorate in political science), “do you have an opinion as to whether an author who is attempting to obtain information from a living subject he is going to write about may tell that living subject something that in fact the author does not believe to be true, in order to obtain more information from the subject?” (The clumsiness of Bostwick’s syntax derived from a series of objections by Kornstein to earlier versions of the question, in which the word “lie” was used; they were sustained, forcing Bostwick into these contortions.)

  Elliot replied, “My opinion is that, while I’m sure there are those who do this, it is extremely irregular and unprofessional and, in my view, lacking in integrity and principle. I have not done it. I would not do it. And most authors whom I have interviewed, whom I know, whom I work with, would not deceive or lie or tell falsehoods, either in terms of getting assignments or, once they receive the assignments, of manipulating their subjects in order to write a story that they thought would fetch them either greater money or greater notoriety. Such conduct would likely result, particularly if discovered, in a ruination of reputations, publishers, and publishing houses, and would destroy credibility in terms of getting future assignments and projects.” He continued, “Obviously, if one expects to interview well-known international and national figures, an attitude of hostility or belligerency is certainly going to kill the interview before it begins. But that’s very, very different from expressing directly—either verbally or in writing—untruths which lead the subject to believe that in fact you have one position when you have another. That, I think, is just unacceptable.”

  In his cross-examination, Kornstein, attempting to show that Elliot, when it came to the point, was no better than Wambaugh or Buckley, brought up an interview with Fidel Castro that Elliot had done for Playboy in 1985, and asked, “Now, when you were interviewing Fidel Castro, you didn’t tell him that you were against his Cuban revolution, did you?”

  “No, I did not,” Elliot replied.

  “And you didn’t tell him that you thought he was a mass murderer,
did you?”

  “I did not.”

  “In fact, didn’t you try to appear sensitive and understanding of his particular point of view?”

  “Sensitive and understanding and willing to listen.”

  “Right. You were not confrontational?” Kornstein said, forgetting the first rule of cross-examination: Ask only questions you know the answers to.

  “Yes, I was,” Elliot replied. “There were many places where I was, and if you read the interview in Playboy you will see that.”

  Kornstein said, “That was part of your process of being sensitive and understanding?”

  Elliot, recognizing his opportunity, replied with unction, “There are times when a particular question must be asked, and whether it’s comfortable or not truth requires that you ask it.”

  A few weeks before my trip to Durham, I had spoken with Elliot on the telephone. At the trial, under Bostwick’s questioning, he had identified himself as a “distinguished adviser on international relations” to Mervyn Dymally, a black California congressman. He had listed black politics, civil rights, and civil liberties among the courses he taught at North Carolina Central, and the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History among the professional organizations he belonged to, and he had cited several black men and women—Alex Haley, Shirley Chisholm, and Julian Bond—among the subjects he had interviewed, so I had assumed that he himself was black. But on the telephone I learned that Elliot was white and Jewish. He had got into the field of black studies by accident. An early teaching job had been at the University of Alaska, where he had been hired to teach history; when he arrived, he was told that he would be teaching a course in black studies. “I had no formal preparation in black studies, and it came to me very quickly that the faculty and administration’s aim was to kill the black-studies program,” he told me. “When their intent became clear to me, I determined that I would teach the course anyway, and learn as I went along. And the more I taught it and studied it, the more interested I got in it. It became clear to me that there was a lack of books in the field, and since blacks weren’t writing them, I would. And when I talked to the publishers they would say, ‘Well, this is a good idea, but you should know that, one, blacks don’t buy books and don’t read them, and, two, there is no market for black-related subject matter.’ I viewed that as racist.”

  Elliot, when he arrived at Shedlick’s office, proved to be a short, rotund man with thinning curly gray hair, a dark complexion, and thick glasses; he looked older than his age, which was forty. Although our telephone conversation had prepared me for his seriousness and earnestness, it had not prepared me for his austerity. It is rare to be in the presence of someone as grudging of himself as Elliot is; the ordinary small gestures of affability that we automatically extend to one another and automatically expect others to extend to us were not extended by Elliot. He stayed within himself, he would give no quarter, he refused every gambit of friendliness and playfulness. Shedlick and Elliot were well acquainted; Elliot’s research for his book on MacDonald had brought him to Shedlick, and Shedlick had said of him, “Dr. Elliot is not one you can buffalo. He’s very adroit, very probing, very factual. You can’t pull the wool over his eyes. We hit it right off.” After Elliot’s arrival Shedlick spoke very little and listened to Elliot with the nonchalantly pleased air of a music teacher hearing a favorite pupil give a flawless performance of a difficult composition.

  I asked Elliot how he had come to be writing a book about MacDonald. He said, “After watching a film version of Fatal Vision on television, I had an intuitive hunch that something was wrong, and as soon as the movie was over I went to my study and wrote to Dr. MacDonald, requesting an interview. Two weeks later, I received a letter from him saying that he’d been deluged with requests for interviews and that he wanted to do only one major one, and after reviewing my résumé and the clippings and books I had sent him he had decided to grant that interview to me. I then contacted Playboy and they ultimately approved the project. [Elliot’s interview with MacDonald appeared in the April 1986 issue.] I spent months preparing for the interview, and then spent about twenty-five hours with MacDonald in prison.”

  “Do you believe he’s innocent?” I asked.

  “My position is that, at the very least, he deserves a new trial,” Elliot said. “I would never say that I believe him to be innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt. But I would say that much of the evidence that has come out post-trial and much of the evidence that was suppressed at the time of the trial would cast a very different light on Dr. MacDonald’s case if presented in court, and that in all likelihood an impartial jury would reach a very different conclusion. There is no question in my mind but that his story is believable—far in excess of reasonable doubt. If I had to believe either the government’s position, which I consider very flawed, or his position, where there are still some unanswered questions, I would believe his position. I would certainly not commit him to prison on the basis of the government’s case.”

  “One would much prefer to believe that a person one is having regular dealings with—as you are having with MacDonald—is innocent. Otherwise you are in a very uncomfortable position.”

  “That’s right. And when the idea was raised of my writing a book telling MacDonald’s story, it was not a project I rushed into with great abandon. Before I would do so, I had to be persuaded that there was another side, and that the other side could be made credible. I was not going to make myself look foolish proclaiming MacDonald’s innocence when it could not be demonstrated. You know the stories about Norman Mailer and these Eastern journalists who have interceded on behalf of various individuals in prison. I didn’t want to be that kind of writer. I had to be persuaded. And I’ll tell you that one of the things that most persuaded me was the package of Xeroxes of Joe McGinniss’s letters that MacDonald sent me. Those letters, more than anything else, convinced me that there was another side to the story. They were so calculated, so manipulative and deceitful—and just so wrong, in terms of what McGinniss actually felt, as against what he wrote—that I had to wonder whether McGinniss had perhaps failed to tell the truth in his book. Those letters were very disturbing. I had always admired Joe McGinniss. I had used his book The Selling of the President in class, and to read those letters assuring MacDonald—right up to publication—that the book would exonerate him was outrageous. At the very least, they showed a stunning lack of ethics on the part of Joe McGinniss. I don’t believe in situational ethics, and I certainly don’t believe that journalists have to lie and misrepresent in order to get someone to work with them. Also, I think that such duplicity casts grave doubts on what is written. To me, if freedom of the press depends on the right to lie, then it’s a freedom that ought not to be protected. To tell Mrs. MacDonald on the telephone, ‘I won’t rest until your son is acquitted,’ and then to turn around and write that book—there’s something about that that’s very unsavory.”

  I asked Elliot whether he found his relationship with MacDonald different from his relationship with other subjects.

  He replied, “Not really. I view this as an important project, but I don’t have a deep interpersonal relationship with him. I view this as a story that deserves to be told and that may have considerable consequences. But I am not enchanted by Dr. MacDonald the man. I’m not motivated by my personal liking for him. He certainly has not seduced me. We clearly don’t have the kind of relationship that he and McGinniss had. Of course, I didn’t know him until he was in prison, but under no circumstances would we have run on the beach together. I’m very different in temperament and personality from Joe McGinniss. I suspect there was a closer fit between the two of them than there is between the two of us.”

  “How would you characterize this difference? How are you different from McGinniss?”

  “I view McGinniss as part of the Eastern literati, as someone who relishes fame, someone who is adept at name-dropping, who enjoys the accoutrements of money and influence, who likes partyin
g and lighthearted leisure activities. I view myself as a sober academic, a serious writer who writes serious things. MacDonald and McGinniss are more traditional males than I am. They are passionately interested in sports. I am more interested in serious issues, questions of public significance.”

  Elliot told me about his upbringing: “I grew up in Los Angeles in a typical white Jewish family, originally from Eastern Europe. My father was not one to take expensive vacations, nor did he believe in ostentatious display. He believed in the work ethic. He taught us the work ethic and the importance of saving your money, and not spending it in a flighty manner. We had the kind of family that if at dinner I said that I had seen this bug outside, my mother or my father—usually my father—would say ‘Are you interested in insects? Do you want to see more?’ and if I said yes, that Saturday we would be at the Museum of Natural History.