Innocent Victims

by Whisnant, Scott;

  Fingerprint examiner John Trogden found prints on door frames almost seven feet from the floor. A palm print next to a bloody smear was found above the living room door. That night, the State Bureau of Investigation sent its lab experts to spray the house with Luminol. Brenda Dew and Pam Tully pulled a blanket over them and created a walking tent, spraying Luminol and waiting for a reaction from the chemical, which causes blood and some metallic objects, such as straight pins, to glow.

  The Luminol explained why the house hadn’t been covered in blood. The killer had spent considerable time covering his tracks. Luminol reactions suggested he had wiped a bathroom sink, doorknobs, and light switches. A towel and washcloth, soaked in blood, had been dropped near the master bathroom door.

  The Luminol further revealed a path of bloody left footprints leading into the master bedroom. Perhaps the killer had carelessly stepped one foot in blood as he cleaned up. There were more Luminol footprints on the front porch and others leading from the carport down the driveway. How had they survived rain on Saturday and Sunday?

  Some of those hairs and prints should match the killer, Watts thought. The department later released a statement saying, “If the killer left so much as a hair, we’re going to find it. It’s hard to do that much damage without leaving a part of yourself.”

  But the killer had left behind one piece of evidence that had already confounded Watts. Rensch had found a rubber glove tip in a doorway between the living room and hallway, a tip that obviously hadn’t come from a dishwashing glove or a technician’s glove. It matched nothing in the house and had no reason to be there, unless someone left it there on purpose to mock investigators.

  Anyone familiar with Fatal Vision knew Army investigators had found the finger of a surgeon’s glove in the MacDonalds’ bedroom, still fresh with Colette MacDonald’s blood. The glove had been used to write the word “PIG” on the headboard of the bed, just above where she had been stabbed and clubbed to death.

  Watts needed a witness to explain this away. He turned the investigation outside the house to anyone who could tell him about Kathryn Eastburn’s final days. He started with Julie Czerniak, the 15-year-old baby-sitter still sobbing on the Seefeldts’ porch.

  “Julie, did anything unusual happen while you baby-sat?” Watts asked.

  “I got these weird calls just about every time,” she said.

  Ever since Gary Eastburn left for officer’s school, the calls kept coming, she said. Mrs. Eastburn had even warned her about how to handle them. Julie told Watts that the last time she baby-sat was Tuesday. Somebody called and asked “How is the most gorgeous girl on Summer Hill Road?”

  “Did you know who it was?” Watts asked.

  “Well, I can’t remember, but he left a message. I took another message, too. Somebody named Angela wanted to buy their dog.”

  Julie explained that the family had planned to move to England and feared their dog, Dixie, wouldn’t survive the trip.

  “What did you do with those messages?” Watts asked.

  “She kept all her messages on the bulletin board over the phone. I guess that’s where I put them.”

  Watts sent his men back inside the house to find the notes, but they came back empty-handed.

  “You sure you don’t remember what they said,” he asked Julie again.

  “No, sir, I wish I could, but I just can’t.”

  Watts turned to leave. Better try again when she’s not so distraught, he thought.

  “It freaks me out,” Julie said. “It’s just like Dr. MacDonald.”

  Watts stopped and listened as the Eastburns’ babysitter explained her friendship with Jeffrey MacDonald, a martyred hero in her eyes. Julie was a charter member of Jeffrey MacDonald’s international fan club.

  This isn’t good, Watts thought. First a strange glove tip, then a baby-sitter who idolizes MacDonald.

  The friendship started in eighth grade after she chose Fatal Vision for a book report. She had absorbed all 663 pages, reading some parts over and over. Jeffrey MacDonald—the Princeton graduate, Green Beret doctor, and All-American boy—couldn’t have killed his wife and kids. She didn’t understand how they could have so easily dismissed Helena Stoeckley, a drug-addled informant who confessed several times to witnessing the murders.

  “I don’t think she’d confess to something like that for nothing,” Julie said.

  Julie’s fascination with MacDonald didn’t end with her book report. She wanted to know more about him, the book, and the case. She wanted to hear from him, find out for herself what he was like. Julie wrote to MacDonald at his Bastrop, Texas, prison.

  “I’ll understand if you don’t write me back,” she wrote.

  A few days later, the first of more than a dozen letters from MacDonald arrived, punctuated throughout with smiley faces. It was good to hear from her, he wrote. He was working out with weights, trying to stay in shape, and reading medical journals. He said his chances for a new trial were good.

  “Hope you’re doing well in school,” MacDonald wrote in another letter. “When I get out, I’ll have to come see you.” Julie said she wanted to be MacDonald’s third daughter. MacDonald agreed if he ever had another daughter, he’d want her to be like Julie.

  She espoused his innocence to anyone who asked, saying “Doctor MacDonald” was not that type of person. She’d read Fatal Vision seven times and decided it was filled with lies.

  “I don’t think you can really understand what I mean because you haven’t talked to him and you haven’t written him, you know,” she said. “And it’s just the way he is … Joe McGinniss lied extensively through that book as far as I know, what Dr. MacDonald has told me. And Dr. MacDonald is a very caring, sensitive person, and unless he was just totally freaked out somehow, he couldn’t have done that in a normal state of mind.”

  Ten weeks before the murders, Dr. MacDonald called collect to wish Julie a happy fifteenth birthday. Julie told him she’d been kicked out of junior high school for getting caught with marijuana in her purse.

  “Yeah, they handcuffed me like a murderer,” she said. “Oh my God, I mean, uh …”

  Watts moved on to other witnesses, ones who cared less about Jeffrey MacDonald. But none could shed any light on why someone butchered the Eastburn family. He left for home around midnight, resigned that he would spend time investigating a MacDonald copycat murder. He wished he had a better lead.

  Not long after Watts left the neighborhood, twenty-year-old Patrick Cone walked to the top of Summer Hill Road and waited. Cone knew when he saw those ambulances he was going to have to tell what he saw. Three nights earlier he thought it was kind of funny. He told his dad. He told co-workers. He played it for laughs, never telling it the same way twice.

  That was before the bodies were found. Patrick Cone now had to think this through. He wasn’t sure he wanted to expose his private life to policemen. He always stayed out too late and drank too much. He was afraid his friends would think he’d “turned fed.”

  But he knew right from wrong. And he knew somebody might remember seeing him on the street that night. So Patrick Cone did something he never thought he’d do. He started waving his arms as a sheriff’s deputy turned into Summer Hill.

  Deputy Eddie Hollingsworth pulled over.

  “Man, I saw somebody leaving the house that night,” Cone told him.

  Hollingsworth summoned the detectives before the young black man lost his nerve.

  Watts had just gotten home when he and Detective Robert Bittle were called back out to Summer Hill. “Mr. Cone,” Watts began, “could you tell us what you saw Thursday night?”

  “I was walking home from my girlfriend’s house, about 3:30,” Cone said, describing a walk home that took him past the Eastburns’ home and around the corner where he lived with his parents and sisters.

  “As I was walking, I saw a white Chevette parked on the road. Then I saw this white dude walking down the lady’s driveway. I passed right by him. He said, ‘I’m getting an ea
rly start this morning,’ or something like that. Then I watched him get in his white Chevette and drive off.”

  Cone said he could remember the man’s face, his hair and mustache. He described a black jacket, a black hat, a white shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. He remembered how the guy carried a garbage bag over his shoulder all the way to his car, 200 yards down from the Eastburns’.

  Watts couldn’t believe his good fortune. He didn’t know much about Patrick Cone, but he liked his story. He told Cone he’d be in touch.

  Chapter Three

  Air Force Captain Gary Eastburn stared at the phone. It should be ringing by now, he thought. He paced up and down the dormitory hallway. Then he sat down and stared some more.

  Eight o’clock in the morning. He and Katie had an arrangement—while he was gone eight and a half weeks at squadron officers’ school in Montgomery, Alabama, they would try to limit the phone calls to one a week. It was cheaper for Katie to call than for him to call collect. If she called early on Saturday, he could guard the hall phone next to his room and answer before it rang twice.

  Gary didn’t like being separated any more than she did, but he had to do it. The Air Force had offered him the chance to go to squadron officers’ school for three months and learn about great leaders in military history. If an officer wanted to get promoted, he attended these schools.

  Gary had considered taking his wife and daughters with him, pulling Kara out of school and jamming them all into a trailer just off Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, but he just couldn’t do that to them. Besides, when he got back they’d be just a few weeks from moving to England, a longtime fantasy of his. The Air Force was sending an officer to act as liaison with the British Air Force, a job Gary Eastburn had lobbied long and hard to get. So he could bear the eight and a half weeks of separation, by far the longest he and Katie had been apart in ten years of marriage.

  From what Gary could tell, they had held up well. Katie called at 8 A.M. every Saturday and wrote during the week. The kids took turns on the phone when she called. When Katie put Jana on the phone, she thought her father was inside the telephone, sometimes pointing at it and saying “Da-da.”

  He’d even stopped worrying about the phone call she’d gotten about a week after he left.

  About 4 A.M., someone had awoken Katie.

  “What are ya doin’ tonight?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Mrs. Eastburn, I live around the corner. I’m coming to see you,” the caller said.

  Katie slammed down the phone and stared at her bedroom walls until it was time to get Kara up for school.

  Gary hadn’t thought about that call for a while. His mind was on the hall phone in his dormitory. As soon as it rang, Gary would tell Katie he’d be home by this time next week. “I’ll miss you tomorrow on Mother’s Day,” he’d say.

  Katie must be getting Kara ready for one of the gymnastic shows her class staged. Gary’s oldest daughter could do somersaults and handstands and, her dad was proud to find, knock the heck out of a baseball.

  Gary grew impatient. One collect call wouldn’t hurt, so at a quarter past 8 he dialed.

  No answer. Soon, his unit took off on a “warrior run,” where soldiers would go as far as they could, just to see if they could do it. At least the run occupied Gary’s mind. He finished, then he talked with some friends. Even laughed a little.

  Back to the phone around 11. No answer. That gymnastic show must be running late, he thought.

  At 2:30, Gary Eastburn began to worry in earnest. Jana was supposed to be taking a nap this time of day. Whenever Gary was late getting Jana home for her afternoon nap, Katie lectured him. She was religious about the afternoon nap.

  By 6 o’clock, Gary thought of calling the next-door neighbors, but could not for the life of him remember the Seefeldts’ name. He considered calling the police, but said no, nothing bad had happened. He called Dale Johnson, a sergeant who worked for him at Pope Air Force Base, and asked Dale to take a look around the house. He called back to say no one was home.

  “Well, call the sheriff’s department and get them to leave a message,” Gary said.

  Deputy Brenda Price woke up Robert Seefeldt. “Have you seen anything unusual next door?”

  Seefeldt groused, trying to shake off sleep. He squinted into the deputy’s headlights as he looked into his driveway.

  “No, I haven’t noticed,” he said.

  Gary’s roommate at the air base came over to console him. “Hey, look, there’s some telephone problems or something,” he said. “Don’t worry about it and go to sleep.”

  Gary took that advice. Maybe Katie and the kids spent the night at a friend’s. The next day, he’d find his family, and he and Katie would laugh about this.

  Gary spent most of the morning chasing cadets off the phone. The call came that afternoon. He couldn’t wait to hear Katie’s explanation.

  “Gary, it’s for you,” someone said.

  “There she is,” Gary said as he moved toward the phone.

  “It’s some detective.”

  Gary knew then. If it’d been just a car wreck, a detective wouldn’t be the one to call. He grabbed the receiver, his life as he knew it crashing to an end.

  “Are any of them alive?” he asked.

  The greeting startled Detective Jack Watts. Suddenly the man on the other end was a suspect. “There’s been a death in the family,” Watts said. “You need to come home.”

  “Can you tell me who?”

  “I just can’t tell you. There’s been a death in the family and you need to get home right away.”

  Gary put the phone on the hook and staggered down the hall.

  “What’s wrong?” a voice said.

  Gary collapsed into a ball. “My wife and kids are dead.”

  His friends threw some of his things into a suitcase. The school’s vice commander, who’d spent seven years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, came by and wept harder than Gary. The chaplain, just off the phone with Detective Watts, offered the only comfort he could.

  “The baby’s still alive,” he told Gary.

  Gary and his roommate packed up and drove to the Montgomery airport. They bought the last two seats on the last flight out. Gary sank into his seat, surrounded by a plane full of sons and daughters flying home after Mother’s Day visits. The flight landed in Atlanta, where Gary waited two hours to change planes. Passersby tried not to stare, but Captain Gary Eastburn was making quite a scene, sipping beer between long, loud sobs.

  He remembered how she was that day on a softball field 11 years ago.

  Kathryn Furnish, twenty years old and engaged to her college boyfriend, had to be talked into going to the singles club softball game in Westwood, Kansas—a tiny town among the suburbs of Kansas City. Katie hadn’t tried softball Little League, but a high school friend told her it’d be something to do on another slow night.

  Gary Eastburn, twenty-five years old and tired of selling shoes at Montgomery Ward, never passed up a softball game. He’d never been to a singles club either, but a friend talked him into it. If they played softball, he figured, it couldn’t be all bad.

  He sought out the girl in a ponytail and cutoff jeans during post-game beers. She let him take her home. A week later, they arranged to meet at another soft-ball game. This time Katie sat and watched him hit two homers and a triple and drive in seven runs. Gary Eastburn never played better. He was in love.

  On one trip around the bases, he glanced into the stands. He was sure he had impressed her now. But she looked bored.

  Later, Gary leaned over to kiss her good night.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” Katie said.

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “I’m kinda engaged to this guy.”

  She and her boyfriend had been shopping for rings while at Kansas State University. He had gone home for the summer and promised to call every week.

  A deflated Gary Eastburn drove home, at first resigned that he
met her too late. But then he pounded the steering wheel. I’m not going to give up on this, he thought.

  He dropped by Katie’s parents’ house after work on Fridays and took her on drives through the countryside on Sundays, his only day off. Her parents wondered at first what she saw in this shoe salesman, but he made them like him. He made sure to scoop seconds of Jane Furnish’s cooking every time he sat at her dinner table. He took tomatoes from the icebox and ate them like apples, praising Gene’s backyard garden every time.

  The Furnishes made a nice family life, one he wanted to be a part of. Gene made a good living as a livestock broker, Jane stayed home and had dinner ready when her husband got off work. The family ate together and went to St. Agnes Parish, where the children were baptized and learned the catechism.

  Katie was the oldest of four, a bashful child who suffered through Girl Scouts at her parents’ urging. Her best friend was her sister Susie, a year younger. She helped her parents take care of Patty, a deaf sister three years younger, and Tim, 16 years younger.

  Katie rode the horses at her father’s stockyards whenever she got a chance. She often asked for a pony for Christmas, but the Furnishes’ backyard on their suburban street was hardly the place to keep one. “When I grow up, the first thing I’m going to buy is a horse,” she told her mother.

  She did have three chickens she got as an Easter present, and the family always had bird dogs and cats. Her parents wouldn’t let her have a dog of her own until she was old enough to buy it. She saved babysitting money for Pepper, a black poodle she trimmed and loved for years.

  Katie’s classmates and teachers remember a shy, bright girl who got along with everybody and was a straight arrow, even by Catholic high school girl standards. She didn’t drink or even swear, as far as anyone could remember. Her first date was the prom, where she went with a boy who worked with her at the dime store. She was vice president of the school’s knitting and crocheting club.