Fatal Vision (100 page)

Now, in November, heading toward Long Beach on another warm and sunny afternoon, I turned on the radio. The first song I heard was from the new Eagles album, which had just been released. The song was called "Heartache Tonight," and it began:

Somebody's gonna hurt someone Before the night is through. Somebody's gonna come undone, There's nothin' we can do . . .

I drove to St. Mary's Hospital and parked the car. I went inside and saw Jeffrey MacDonald's secretary. She gave me the keys to his condominium. She said he was holding up well. I would be living in the condominium during my stay. It was conveniently situated—less than half an hour's drive from Terminal Island—and it would provide me with easy access to the thousands of pages of material related to the case which Jeffrey MacDonald had accumulated over the years, and which he had agreed to make available to me in order that I might be better able to write my book.

Among those personality disorders upon which considerable psychiatric attention has been focused in the past decade is a condition known as pathological narcissism.

In his 1978 book,
The Culture of Narcissism,
Christopher Lasch has identified some of the character traits associated with this disorder as being "pseudo self-insight, calculating seductiveness, nervous, self-deprecatory humor, a dependence on the vicarious warmth provided by others combined with a fear of dependence, a sense of inner emptiness, and boundless repressed rage." Indeed, Lasch writes, the personality of the pathological narcissist consists "largely of defenses against this rage."

Unable to "acknowledge his own aggression, to experience guilty, or
...
to mourn for lost love objects, because of the intensity of his rage," the pathological naricssist, "while sexually promiscuous rather than repressed, and often pan-sexual as well," seeks to "avoid close involvements, which might release intense feelings of rage."

Instead, he "attempts to compensate himself for his experience of rage and envy with fantasies of wealth, beauty, and impotence."

Jeffrey MacDonald's condominium was quite comfortable, once I got used to all the mirrors.

In the mornings, I would sit on the deck for a while, enjoying the sun. The
Recovery Room
bobbed gently at anchor, only a few feet away. MacDonald's friends were continuing the payments on the boat and on the Citroen-Maserati and on the condominium itself, so everything would be waiting for him when he returned. They all felt—because he told them repeatedly that it was certain—that this would be only a matter of months. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, despite its denial of bail, was sure either to dismiss the charges entirely on the same speedy-trial grounds it had invoked in 1975, or, at the very least, to order a new trial—so contaminated had the first one been by the malice and bias of Judge Dupree.

I would spend hours each day with MacDonald's files. Going box by box, drawer by drawer, folder by folder, through every piece of paper I could find. He had, of course, the complete transcript of the Article 32 hearing, and, in addition, he had copies of the grand jury testimony of each of his family members, as well as of all those witnesses who were later called by the government to testify at trial. I would read slowly through these volumes, taking notes, bec
oming aware
for the first time of an enormous amount of detail that had not been presented at trial.

I found, for example, in the notes prepared at the request of his military attorney shortly after his interview with the CID on April 6, 1970, that MacDonald had written that on Monday, February 16—in addition to everything else he had done—he had "called a Maj. Sampson—he is a pediatrician at Womack. We. discussed moonlighting at Lumberton Hosp. and I asked to be put on the staff. He said I could begin working there shortly."

Thus, in addition to having worked every night of January a Cape Fear Valley Hospital in Fayetteville, and having begu
n to
work weekend shifts at Hamlet Hospital sixty miles away, Mac Donald had—on the last afternoon before the murders—sough yet a third moonlighting job. Th
is seemed hardly consistent with
his assertion that the months at
Fort Bragg had been "a reattach
ment of our entire family because we were having the time and wasn't tired and I didn't have to rush off to work
..."

In the same notes, he also had written: "One more thing— think I got a call from the coach of the Fort Bragg boxing team He had mentioned to me they needed a doctor to accompany the team for 30 days on a trip to Rus
sia. I jumped at the chance, and
offered myself. He called me on
Monday, I think, to tell me the
Dept. of the Army was trying to get me on orders for the trip and I would probably hear from him in the next several days Both Colette and I were very happy about this." This was consistent, perhaps, with his 1970 "diary" entry regarding the boxing trip, but hardly wit
h what he had said under oath to
Victor Woerheide: that "the first time that it ever clicked" tha there might have been a discussion regarding a boxing team trip to Russia had been in midsummer, during the Article 32 hearing.

I also found it curious that later in these notes, while describing the attack by the four assailants, MacDonald had written—as he had told Dr. Sandoff in Philadelphia in April of 1970—"! suppose it's possible 'she' [the female intruder] was a male with long hair. CID never asked me if it was possible she was male."

In late afternoon, I would drive to Terminal Island. I would sit with MacDonald for two or three hours each evening, in the visitors' lounge. Most nights, his mother was present. Occasionally, when her American Airlines schedule permitted, Sheree Sizelove would be there also. Often, friends and colleagues from St. Mary's came to call.

MacDonald would talk about the horrors of his cross-country bus trip, of the evil personified by such figures as Dupree, Murtagh, and the Kassabs, of the failure of the jury selection process and of Bernie Segal's closing argument, of how—despite it all—he could not understand how the jury could not have at least found reasonable doubt. When the visit was over, I would stop and get a bite to eat. Then I would return to the condominium.

He never came right out and asked me what I thought. And I never came right out and said. For him it must have seemed easier to assume that with me his innocence had never been in question. To ask directly would have been to risk getting an answer he did not want. For me, of course, it was easier to let him go right on believing whatever he cared to believe. At least it seemed so at the time. The more I learned the less easy any of it turned out to be.

There was no dearth of enlightening material in the files. One folder marked "Book" contained a copy of a letter that Joseph Wambaugh had written to MacDonald on March 28, 1975, in response to an inquiry about whether Wambaugh might be interested in writing a book about the case. This was only two months after MacDonald had been indicted.

You should understand that I would not think of writing
your
story. It would be
my
story. Just as
The Onion Field
was
my
story and
In Cold Blood
was Capote's story. We both had the living persons sign legal releases which authorized us to interpret, portray and characterize them as we saw fit, trusting us implicitly to be honest and faithful to the truth as
we
saw it, not as
they
saw it.

With this release you can readily see that you would have no recourse at law if you didn't like my portrayal of you. Let's face another ugly possibility: what if I, after spending months of research and interviewing dozens of people and listening to hours of court trials, did not believe you innocent?

I suspect that you may want a writer who would tell
your
story and indeed your version may very well be the truth as I would see it. But you'd have
no
guarantee, not with me. You'd have absolutely
no
editorial prerogative. You would not even see the book until publication.
...

The next day, MacDonald had sent a brief note to Bernie Segal, along with a copy of Wambaugh's letter.

Enclosed is very interesting. What do you think? He sounds awfully arrogant to me but it will be an obvious best seller if he writes the book. Please get back to me ASAP.

Wambaugh, of course, had not written the book, though his discussions with MacDonald and Bernie Segal had continued into the summer of 1979. Now, I was writing it. As would have been the case with Wambaugh, MacDonald had absolutely no editorial prerogative. And the "ugly possibility" to which Wambaugh had referred had now become a reality.

I found in the files a program from an athletic event: the Long Beach Heart Association's Second Annual Benefit Basketball

Classic, April 11, 1975, played at the Long Beach City College Gymnasium.

The "classic" consisted of a game between a team composed of Los Angeles Rams football players and one which consisted of emergency room physicians and technicians from various Long Beach hospitals.

At guard, number 7, age thirty-one, height five feet, ten and a half inches, weight 185 pounds, was Jeffrey R. MacDonald, M.D. Beneath his name and picture in the program was a caption which he had written himself: "The Second Coming of 'Dr. J'—watch his hands!"

This had appeared just three and a half months after MacDonald had been indicted on charges of having murdered his pregnant wife and two daughters with his hands.

An extensive study of the narcissistic personality disorder has been madefy psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg, who published many of his findings in a 1975 volume entitled
Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism.

"On the surface," Kernberg writes, pathologically narcissistic individuals "may not present seriously disturbed behavior; some of them may function socially very well." Many possess "the capacity for active, consistent work in some area which permits them partially to fulfill their ambition of greatness and of obtaining admiration and approval from other people."

Kernberg has observed "a curious apparent contradiction between a very inflated concept of themselves and an inordinate need for tribute from others. When narcissistic personalities are in a position of objective importance they love to surround themselves with admirers in whom they are interested as long as the admiration is new. They obtain very little enjoyment from life other than from the tributes they receive from others or from their own grandoise fantasies, and they feel restless and bored when external glitter wears off and no new sources feed their self-regard."

Kernberg considers the main characteristics of narcissistic personalities to be "grandiosity, extreme self-centeredness, and a remarkable absence of interest and empathy for others in spite of the fact that they are so very eager to obtain admiration and approval.
...
It is as if they feel they have the right to control and possess others and to exploit them without guilt feelings, and, behind a surface which very often is charming and engaging, one senses coldness and ruthlessness. These patients not only lack emotional depth, but fail to understand complex emotion in other people."

Kernberg has noted that "the pathological narcissist experiences other people as basically dishonest and unreliable. The greatest fear of these patients is to be dependent on anybody else, because to depend means to hate, envy, and expose themselves to the danger of being exploited, mistreated, and frustrated."

Conversely, however, such individuals experience
"a
remarkably intense envy of other people who seem to have things they do not have, or who simply seem to enjoy their lives."

Such a "devalued concept of self," Kernberg has observed, "can be seen especially in narcissistic patients who divide the world into famous, rich and great people on the one hand, and the despicable, worthless 'mediocrity,' on the other. Such patients are afraid of not belonging to the company of the great, rich and powerful, and of belonging instead to the 'mediocre,' by which they mean worthless and despicable, rather than 'average' in the ordinary sense of the term.

"Narcissistic patients," Kernberg continues, possess an "overriding necessity to feel great and important in order to cancel feelings of worthlessness and devaluation. At the very bottom of this dichotomy lies a still deeper image of the relationship with external objects, precisely the one against which the patient has erected all these other pathological structures. It is the image of an enraged, empty self—the hungry wolf out to kill, eat and survive—full of impotent anger at being frustrated, and fearful of a world—devoid of food and love—which seems as hateful and revengeful as the patient himself."

Kernberg cites the case of one patient who "fell in love with a woman whom he considered very beautiful, gifted, warm; in short, completely satisfying. He had a brief period of awareness of how much he hated her for being so perfect, just before she responded to him and decided to marry him. After their marriage, he felt bored with her and became completely indifferent toward her. . . . After that, the patient gradually developed strong hatred toward her for having all that he felt he did not have."