Innocent Victims

by Whisnant, Scott;

  Beaver was willing to gamble that the truth wouldn’t hurt. Two mornings later, Stombaugh drove four and a half hours to Fayetteville. He couldn’t help but think about the crime there long ago that led to the experiment that became his calling card. As long as people remember Jeffrey MacDonald, they would remember Paul Stombaugh matching 48 holes to 21 stab wounds.

  For most Americans, the facts of the MacDonald case flood back like words of a familiar song.

  Early on February 17, 1970, MacDonald said he awoke on the living room couch and discovered four intruders standing above him, including a blond woman in a floppy hat, lit from below as if holding a candle. Two white men and a black man wearing an Army jacket with sergeant stripes stood with her.

  “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs,” MacDonald said the woman had chanted as if in a trance. “Hit him again.”

  He said they clubbed and stabbed him. He warded them off with his pajama top bound between his wrists until, weakened by the blows, he passed out in the hallway. MacDonald said he awoke some time later and tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on his wife and children before calling for help. His last act, he said, was pulling an ice pick out of Colette’s chest and placing his pajama top on her as a protective gesture.

  Colette lay beside her bed, stabbed 37 times with a knife and ice pick, her skull and both arms fractured by a club. Five-year-old Kimberly, stabbed and beaten to death with a club, was in her bed. So was Kristen, a bottle propped against the two-and-a-half-year-old’s head. She’d been stabbed in the front and back 33 times.

  The crime resembled a series of killings months before in California. Like the Manson murders, intruders had chanted “acid is groovy” and written “Pig” in blood on the wall. And like Sharon Tate, Colette MacDonald had been pregnant. The nation’s media came to Fayetteville to report the latest hippie cult murder.

  But the Army quickly dismissed the hippie theory and turned instead to the Green Beret doctor who survived the massacre with only a few bruises and a punctured lung. The Army wanted court-martial charges, but Colonel Warren V. Rock decided there was not enough evidence, a decision that nearly ended the case.

  Freddy Kassab, Colette’s stepfather who had supported MacDonald, read a transcript of the hearing and decided his son-in-law was lying. He helped Army investigators rebuild their case against MacDonald, an effort that took them to Paul Stombaugh’s lab.

  Stombaugh studied the pajama top carefully. The cuts, he determined, were not ragged or torn, but clean, as if the top was stationary when they were made, and not being used to ward off a knife. When he realigned the top, he noticed that several of Colette’s bloodstains fit perfectly together, suggesting her blood was on her husband’s pajama top before it was torn.

  Three years later, Kassab’s efforts paid off. The U.S. Justice Department decided to prosecute the case, which sent investigators back into Stombaugh’s lab so he could study the evidence some more. Stombaugh fiddled with MacDonald’s pajama top again, finally folding it so the 48 holes in the top matched the 21 stab wounds in Colette’s chest. After he folded it, the top roughly matched the shape it was in when MPs found it on Colette.

  Stombaugh examined the other evidence from the house—splatters of the victim’s blood, MacDonald’s bloody footprint and fibers from his pajamas found all over the house—and developed a theory that is still the prevailing voice on what happened that night inside 544 Castle Drive.

  Stombaugh deduced that Jeffrey and Colette had a fight in their bedroom that escalated into a death struggle. MacDonald, he said, struck five-year-old Kimberly in the bedroom doorway with a club, perhaps accidentally, then knocked out his wife with the same weapon.

  He took Kimberly to her room, Stombaugh said, and finished her with the club. Colette awoke and ran to Kristen’s room to protect her, but MacDonald beat his wife to death before she could stop him, leaving behind a footprint made in her blood.

  Stombaugh said MacDonald then laid Kristen across his lap and stabbed her repeatedly in the back. Then he stabbed an already dead Kimberly and returned to Colette, placing his pajama top on her chest and stabbing her 21 times, burying the ice pick to the hilt. His final act, Stombaugh argued, was staging a scene to make his living room look like the site of a struggle with hippies.

  Stombaugh sold his theory to a grand jury in 1975 and again to a trial jury in 1979, enduring two and a half days of cross-examination from Bernie Segal, who stopped just short of calling him a charlatan. McGinniss’s book and the movie convinced millions of others of MacDonald’s guilt. Stombaugh used the case to prove the importance of physical evidence, showing slides in lecture halls around the nation, including the Houston Astrodome. As he returned to Fayetteville to study the Eastburn house, he had yet to put his most famous case behind him.

  Billy Richardson met Stombaugh and drove him to 367 Summer Hill Road. The house was sweltering in July heat. As Richardson opened the front door, he wrinkled his nose at the smell. “Man, that’s awful,” he said.

  “I’ve seen worse,” Stombaugh said.

  Stombaugh started in the utility room, dusting for fingerprints and looking for hairs. Then he made his way through the dining room and hallway and to the back bedroom. He bent over the bloody spot where Kathryn Eastburn had died. Richardson looked around the room. Despite the midsummer heat, the young lawyer shivered.

  “You’re gonna have to help me with this,” Stombaugh told his recoiling partner.

  Richardson couldn’t believe it’d come to this. Within seconds he was on his hands and knees, picking hairs out of Kathryn Eastburn’s blood.

  Stombaugh moved over to a dresser next to the stain. Underneath was an empty condom packet. “Wonder how this got here?” he asked, carefully lifting the packet so he could test it for fingerprints. “Rapists don’t usually bring these.”

  Four hours later, Stombaugh packed up the evidence he’d found and headed back to Greenville. “Let me know what the SBI comes up with,” he said. “All this looks awfully familiar.”

  Stombaugh next heard from the lawyers in October. Beaver called to say that, except for a piece of corduroy, the lab results had helped Hennis. Stombaugh had already suspected as much because nothing he’d found had matched Hennis either. He wrote Beaver that day:

  Dear Jerry,

  Your call this morning was most interesting and enlightening. The information concerning Julie Czerniak points this crime more and more in her direction as well as mastermind MacDonald. His appeal for a new trial was rejected by Judge Dupree about a month before these murders. He knew this decision would be appealed before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals this fall and needed an unsolved similar case in Fayetteville to support his story that the killers are still running loose. This would put some substance in his story, although the physical evidence was so overwhelming against him. When Hennis was arrested, I would imagine it was quite a shock to him.

  Sex, said Stombaugh, was no motive to wipe out a family. The key to solving the case was Julie. He noted that the summer before the murders, Julie had been to Los Angeles, the headquarters for MacDonald’s defense team. A few days after the murders, MacDonald had written Julie a three-page letter advising her to stop talking about his case or writing to him. His investigator called Julie’s parents to ask that Julie not talk about the case for fear she would “affect his parole.” Julie never heard from MacDonald again.

  Stombaugh wrote:

  To get the truth out of her, we must first convince her completely that MacDonald did in fact murder his family. I feel I can do that with the photographs of the crime scene and the physical evidence. Once that is accomplished, we may get the correspondence she has received from MacDonald and get her talking about it … Her knowledge of the family, connection with MacDonald, use of drugs, knowledge of the interior of the house, undoubtedly the location of the strong box, etc. point right at her.

  I believe we have Fatal Vision II well on the way.

  Stombaugh saw it as the final chapter of his
most famous case. He figured that, for some reason, the killer either duplicated the MacDonald murders, or, at the very least, post-edited the murders to match the MacDonald scene. “What else could it be?” he asked.

  Colette MacDonald, five years younger than Kathryn Eastburn, was pregnant with her third child. Both mothers were military captains’ wives living in three-bedroom homes, Colette on Fort Bragg, Katie within a mile of post. Like Katie, Colette was found lying on her back beside her bed with something placed over her. Both were killed first then stabbed in the chest.

  Five-year-old Kimberly MacDonald was first attacked in her mother’s bedroom with a club then stabbed in the neck ten times in her own room. Five-year-old Kara Eastburn had her throat cut and was stabbed ten times.

  Kristen MacDonald, two and a half years old, was stabbed in the front and back. So was three-year-old Erin Eastburn.

  The glove tip was the strongest link. The MacDonald tip was similar to surgical gloves found in the house. The Eastburn tip matched nothing. Detectives at first tried to prove Katie used it to protect her fingers while doing crewel embroidery, a hobby she had taken up that spring. But the tip would hardly have thwarted a needle prick, and tests on it produced no small holes. The state eventually gave up explaining the tip.

  The MacDonalds were killed with knives, an ice pick, and a club. Stombaugh noted that two puncture holes along the left side of Kara’s rib cage could’ve been made by an ice pick. Compared with the others, the wounds weren’t serious or even noteworthy—unless they were symbolic.

  Under the “motive” heading of a chart he made, Stombaugh wrote under the Eastburn column:

  None apparent. Has all the earmarks of “hit killings” to duplicate the MacDonald murders.

  “See if you can bring me what the state found in the house,” Stombaugh told Beaver.

  A judge ruled that the defense was entitled to see the evidence. The lawyers got a court order for custody of the physical evidence and Richardson took 92 pieces of the Eastburn house to Greenville for Stombaugh’s analysis.

  He first compared the evidence to Hennis. “Not one blooming thing” tied Hennis to the house, he said.

  “He’d have left evidence all over the place,” Stombaugh said. “He wouldn’t have taken the time to clean the place, he wouldn’t have killed the kids.… It takes a really deranged mind to kill children at that age.

  “The cleanup—he’d have risked leaving more evidence.”

  Stombaugh addressed the fabric impressions found in the bedroom. The fitted sheet, comforter, and pillow case had bloody impressions made by material with narrow ribs and wide gaps. The corduroy from the barrel, he discovered, had thick ribs with narrow gaps.

  He turned to an alternate source for the bloody impressions. Beaver had suggested a bloodstain on Kathryn Eastburn’s left sock, the only sock she was wearing when she was found. Stombaugh measured the sock’s rib pattern and found it had the narrow ribs and wide gaps he was looking for.

  The autopsy reports further intrigued Stombaugh. Three doctors had looked at the victims. The ones who studied Kara and Erin had described each wound in detail, giving the dimensions of each wound and the angle into the body. Dr. Michael Shkrum had noted that some of Kara’s wounds were made with a double-edged knife and others were made with a knife with only one sharp edge. Two knives, Stombaugh wrote. He further concluded that a third knife, possibly a butcher knife, had made the throat wounds. That same knife, Stombaugh noted, might have made one of the chest wounds that was more than twice as wide as the others. That thrust of the knife fractured the child’s rib.

  If the puncture wounds were made by ice picks, Stombaugh said, four weapons were likely used in the house, the same as the MacDonald home.

  Dr. Robert Thompson noted that some stab wounds in Erin angled left to right and others angled right to left. From this, Stombaugh concluded that more than one person committed the Eastburn murders. The killers, he said, might have taken turns stabbing the child to make sure one was as guilty as the other.

  The Luminol footprints fueled his theory. Besides the left shoeprints leading into the master bedroom, the SBI found a jumble of partial right and left shoe-prints at the foot of the master bed, and another jumble of left and right prints on the front porch, as if someone had stood there to make sure the door was locked. Stombaugh concluded that there must have been two pairs of shoes in the house with different amounts of blood on them.

  A few weeks later, Stombaugh drafted a theory on what had happened on May 9:

  After returning home from the Seefeldts’, Katie Eastburn put Erin and Jana to bed and began sorting the laundry, sometime around 9 P.M. The assailants arrived, and Mrs. Eastburn let them inside because she knew at least one of them.

  The group went to the living room, where Katie resumed sorting the wash. She was grabbed, and during a brief struggle the basket of clothes was knocked to the floor. One of them tied Mrs. Eastburn’s hands behind her back with a narrow binding, possibly a lamp cord or heavy twine.

  A man stayed with Mrs. Eastburn in the living room and began the rape, holding her at bay with a knife to the left side of her throat. Stombaugh had found a small cut in her blouse in that area. The man forced Mrs. Eastburn either to the couch or floor, where he pulled off her shoes and jeans and cut her panties.

  Another assailant went down the hall for the children, probably expecting to find them in the same bedroom. Upon seeing an empty bed in the first bedroom on the left, he went to the master bedroom, where he found Erin and stabbed her. Then he went back and found Kara, stabbing her first in the chest.

  Mrs. Eastburn somehow broke loose, perhaps while the man prepared for the rape, and ran to the back of the house, only to discover the fate of her children. An assailant pursued her and stabbed her at least once. In a final attempt to get away, Mrs. Eastburn ran across her bed, possibly losing a sock as she tried to ward off her attacker. She left ribbed impressions in her own blood on the bed before making it to the other side, where she was trapped against the wall. The chase was over.

  Erin was then pulled onto the floor and stabbed some more. The killers removed the binding from Mrs. Eastburn’s wrists, cleaned up the house, and left.

  Stombaugh ruled out the state’s two motives. Rape couldn’t have been the reason, he wrote, because at least two assailants were in the house. Rapists usually act alone. As for robbery, he said that no one would kill children to get $300 from a bank machine. The motive, he wrote, went much deeper:

  The assailants arrived at this residence knowing exactly what they were going to do. This crime is remarkably similar to the murders of the MacDonald family on February 17, 1970 … The similarities appear well beyond coincidence. When the facts surrounding both cases are analyzed and compared, it would appear the Eastburn slayings were purposely made to duplicate the MacDonald slayings. If so, for what reason?

  Both cases do have a common denominator, however. It is the person of Julie Czerniak, the Eastburns’ babysitter.

  Jeffrey MacDonald’s motion for a new trial was rejected in its entirety by the trial judge in Raleigh, N.C., in March 1985. At that time, his attorneys indicated the decision would be appealed.… Since his motion for a new trial contained no new evidence, it is logical to assume something new was needed to add credence to his story of being attacked by hippies. An uncleared look-alike murder case in the Fayetteville area would certainly suggest the same group of hippies was still around.

  The plan failed when Hennis was arrested, he wrote. Stombaugh questioned why MacDonald would suddenly cut off correspondence with Julie after having been pen pals for more than a year. He wrote that Brian Murtaugh, one of MacDonald’s prosecutors, had told him that MacDonald receives hundreds of letters from all over the country. Did he answer all those letters?

  Since MacDonald apparently has turned her off after Hennis’ arrest, control of her mind must be turned in our favor. To do so, we must first convince her of MacDonald’s guilt. This I can do by showing he
r the case we had against him and the physical evidence.… It would appear we are now down to our trump card—Czerniak.

  Beaver read Stombaugh’s letter and rolled his eyes. He’d gotten a credible explanation of what could have made the ribbed fabric impressions, but he didn’t need another indictment of Jeffrey MacDonald. He could only imagine how much fun VanStory would have in court with Stombaugh’s theory.

  The “trump card” was busy with her sophomore year in high school, a turbulent summer over at last. Julie was oblivious to the suspicion Stombaugh had raised, but not to those of her schoolmates, who repeated rumors about her alleged involvement and even wrote “baby murderer” on her posters when she ran for sophomore class president. The defense lawyers kept coming around, and she was paranoid someone was out to get her. She called Christy Dunning once from her kitchen, afraid to move to another room. Julie no longer felt safe at home.

  “I just know somebody’s in the house,” she told her.

  “Better get you a knife,” said Christy, weary of Julie’s paranoia.

  Julie refused to touch a knife. The memory of Mother’s Day never left her. She could still hear Deputy Toman saying the girls were “almost decapitated.” “What does decapitated mean?” she’d asked her mother.

  Rumors about Julie’s state of mind reached Beaver’s office that fall, though not from the halls of Westover High School. Keith Smith called Beaver and said he could introduce him to a girl who had heard a stoned Julie confessing to being present during the murders.

  Beaver and Richardson had wanted to believe something like this would happen from the moment they got the case, though their optimism was tempered with Smith as the source. Smith visited Beaver and Richardson three days after his call and said one of his high school informants, Susan, had overheard Julie telling someone that she had tripped on acid and gone to Mrs. Eastburn’s house on May 9 with her boyfriend. Susan remembered Julie saying the boyfriend was blond and six-foot tall, and he drove a white van.