Fatal Vision (107 page)

(3) Each partner agrees, fully, that if one partner asks a
question, a truthful and full answer will be given by the other partner. Each partner agrees that the love shared is so great and so intense that it can overcome any problems that may arise by a full and truthful answer.

The children, they had decided, were both going to be boys.

Following the decision of the appeals court, Jeffrey MacDonald was transferred from Terminal Island to the higher-security federal prison at Lompoc, California. One day, not long afterward, Randi Dee Markwith, having become a stewardess for Pacific Southwest Airlines, paid him a visit to inform him that the engagement was off. She moved out of 16052 Mariner Drive. MacDonald's mother began to clear his personal belongings from the apartment in order that it might be sold. The condominium at Mammoth Mountain was also put up for sale, as were the
Recovery Room
and the Jaguar.

After six weeks at Lompoc, MacDonald was transferred to the Federal Correctional Institution at Bastrop, Texas, to serve the remainder of his term.

Vowing to fight on, he dismissed Bernie Segal as chief counsel and hired a new lawyer from Santa Monica. He also hired a new private investigator from New York City.

Helena Stoeckley, having recanted her recantation, reconfessed in front of television cameras provided by a program called
Jack Anderson Confidential.
From prison, MacDonald urged his new lawyer to explore the possibility of gaining for him a presidential pardon.

"President Reagan,
^’’
he wrote, "2 pronged attack, orchestrated
carefully."
He suggested that Reagan could be approached either through Jack Anderson, who seemed obviously sympathetic to the cause (if not terribly well informed about the facts) or through the new governor of California, George Deukmejian, who was said to be a friend of Whitey Littlefield's, the beer distributor from Long Beach, and fellow honorary member of the Long Beach Police Officers Association.

From Bastrop, in central Texas, about thirty miles east of Austin, he wrote his new attorney a letter, just as the attorney prepared to visit North Carolina in an attempt to familiarize himself with the case.

. . . Some thoughts on public relations. . . . The Supreme Court
should
grant a new trial but probably won't, so my only hope is
...
a new trial based on "new" evidence. We'll have to get the evidence, package it, and force a new trial. We'll have to marshall public opinion to do that, I think—and we have to expend good energy that way. . . .

I'm writing this letter to tell you what you already know, and it doesn't require an answer but I wanted to say it. I was innocent in 1970 and I'm innocent now. I spent 7 months in a room in 1970 and a year in prison in 1979-80 and now 7 months more in prison. I'm looking at the rest of my life here, among functional illiterates and vicious people who spend 85% of their time bragging about their crimes. The grotesque monster of the "case" has been on my back for so long I'm not sure what I'd be like without this incredible pressure 24 hours a day. But I would like to find out. The insanity of being here, of being saddled with a "guilty" verdict on these horrendous crimes against my family and myself, of facing the rest of my life behind razor wire, being told to make my bed by thugs with an IQ approaching 60, of watching my Mom aging now incredibly quickly and becoming uncertain in her thought and actions—it is all almost too much to take.

I go over the "ifs" of my case & I can't sleep for 2 nights each time. I can afford no more "if only's"—I need some hope, some new evidence, and a vindication. I have to leave this system, this case, these
twelve and a half
years, and return to a real life. I'd like to see my Mom smile again—I'd like to treat patients again—I'd even like a family (that was Randi's gift to me—she got me over
that
hurdle).

I'm hoping you come back from N.C. with key new evidence. If not, at least a determination, if not a religious fervor, to plunge headlong & 100% into the case, to work day & night, to find the means to overturn this monster I've been saddled with.
...

The weeks and months keep slipping by—I'm now 39 and have lots of anger to dissipate as I try to resume a life. Remember—this all started when I was 26. I'm sitting here in Texas, in a strange & alien land, in an environment that is 500 fools locked up by 300 borderline retards, on a jr. college campus, but treated like jr. high schoolers, with our campus surrounded by double fences topped with razor wire and barbed wire—all on closed circuit
T
.V. It is really bizarre.

I need to walk out of here—vindicated, able to hold my head up, able to care for myself & my family. I need that fairly soon.

Lastly, let me say that for 12 years I let the lawyers do it.
I
paid my way, dearly at times, but I concentrated on my professional career, myself, forgetting Feb. 17, 1970, and tried to live a normal life. That is all gone, and they are saying "forever." My fight now is truly for my life, as it was that night in 1970, only this death will take 30 to 40 years. I don't want, or deserve this.
...
I need to be vindicated—I need to walk out of here, back to life. I would like to smell the flowers again, and I should.

On Monday, January 10, 1983, the Supreme Court, without comment, denied MacDonald's request that it review the Fourth Circuit's rejection of MacDonald's claim that he had not received a fair trial. This brought to an end—after twelve years, ten months, and twenty-four days—the legal phase of the Jeffrey MacDonald case.

Three days later—on the afternoon of Thursday, January 13—the body of Helena Stoeckley was found on a couch in an apartment she had been renting in Seneca, South Carolina. The body, found by a maintenance man who had come to the apartment to install weather stripping, was in a state of decomposition which indicated that she had been dead for several days. Her seven-month-old son—the product of her marriage to Ernie Davis, who was serving a fifteen-year jail sentence for first-degree sexual assault at the time of her death—was found, badly dehydrated but alive, beneath a crib not far from the couch.

From his Bastrop prison cell, MacDonald said he found the death "highly suspicious," but autopsy disclosed that Stoeckley had died of natural causes: pneumonia, brought on by cirrhosis of the liver which, for years, had been diseased with hepatitis.

The manager of the apartment complex in which she had been living said, "She told us a couple of weeks ago that she and the baby had pneumonia." The manager added: "They were going without food. She told me one time she had only peanut butter sandwiches for five days."

From
his
jail cell near Greenville, South Carolina, Ernie Davis charged that his wife's death was the result—at least indirectly—of "harassment" by investigators employed by Jeffrey MacDonald.

"Helena was like a puppet," he said. "These people would pull her strings and make her do whatever they wanted. They'd tell her they talked to people who could place her at the murder and that she'd end up in jail if she didn't confess. Other times, they promised to get her a part in a movie once it was all over. She was just trying to please them. They put things in her head they knew weren't true and had her repeat it in the confessions. She knew it was all lies, but she finally sold out. She said time and time again that if she didn't tell them what they wanted to hear, they'd bother her even more."

Both Ted Gunderson (who was approaching literary agents with the story of how he had "solved" the MacDonald murders) and Prince Edward Beasley (who had reached an agreement with a former Fayetteville newspaper reporter that the two of them and Stoeckley would share in the proceeds of a book and possible movie to be based on the proposition that the Stoeckley cult had been responsible for the killings) denied the charges leveled by Ernie Davis.

"Every time Helena gave us statements, it was voluntary," Gunderson said. "The only time she was reluctant was when Ernie was harassing her. And still, she gave us fourteen or fifteen signed statements."

And, ignoring the autopsy findings, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson had written a January 15 column which
The Washington Post
headlined "Evidence Backs the Innocence of MacDonald," in which he said, "My staff has uncovered stacks of evidence that supports the doctor's claim of innocence" (without at any point specifying what the stacks consisted of). Anderson's follow-up piece was headlined, "Death of Trial Witness Looks Suspicious." In this he wrote: "Not long ago, a tragic young woman named Helena Stoeckley stepped out of the shadows to save a man from life in prison. She told my office a story that brought her nothing but grief and threats. Last month she was found dead in her hideout apartment in South Carolina." The column strongly implied that members of Stoeckley's witchcraft cult had been responsible for her death but did not ever suggest how such a cult might use pneumonia and eirrhosis to silence a renegade member.

Encouraged by such evidence of continued support and—as he told a Long Beach newspaper reporter—by "more than 6,500 letters, all but about a dozen of them supportive," Jeffrey MacDonald vowed to fight on.

Dismissing Bernie Segal as "an asshole," he hired a new attorney. And, as ex-FBI agent Gunderson began to give press interviews claiming that the Stoeckley cult was threatening
his
life, MacDonald also employed a new team of private investigators. (Gunderson told a Dallas newspaper that he had received the following deadly message presumed to be from members of the cult: thirteen red roses, thirteen chrysanthemums, and a typed note that read, "Poacher in the grass, Once a cub, the lion sees Shades of death and life," and that as a result he had found it necessary to flee Los Angeles and begin a "life on the run.")

He said that by April 1983 his new attorney would be in court with, "an ironclad case" that would prove his innocence. "We're going to have both barrels loaded," MacDonald said. "We're going to have this thing in a cast-iron mold with perfect evidence." (In the meantime, he said, he was keeping trim in prison by abstaining from dinner. "Too many carbohydrates," he said.)

Not long afterward, however, MacDonald estimated that it would be midsummer at the earliest before his lawyers would be ready to proceed, despite the fact that "We know the people who were in the house that night, and we are on the road to locating them." Later he said no motion would be filed before fall.

The people named by Stoeckley in 1981 were located—not by MacDonald's investigators, however, but by FBI agents and, in February 1983, by a Fayetteville newspaper reporter named Steve Huettel. With the exception of Greg Mitchell, who had died in June of 1982 from liver disease (and who had been investigated and cleared by the CID in 1971 and by the FBI ten years later), all denied any knowledge of the murders.

One called Stoeckley's story "totally insane" and "the craziest thing I've ever heard." Another termed it "the ravings of a madwoman." These two were individuals who, like Mitchell, had been investigated and cleared of involvement, both by the CID in 1971 and by the FBI in 1981 and 1982, following the delivery of Stoeckley's statement to the Justice Department by representatives of Jeffrey MacDonald.

A key figure in the Stoeckley "confession"—one she had not named in prior statements—was Allen Mazzerolle, who was traced to a small town in Maine. His denial of involvement was supported by Cumberland County court records, which showed he had been arrested on January 28, 1970, for possession and transportation of LSD and had remained in jail until March

10—thus making his presence in or near 544 Castle Drive during the early morning hours of February 17 a physical impossibility.

"It's ridiculous," Mazzerolle said of Stoeckley's allegation. "She was the informer who fingered me to the narcotics agents."

MacDonald, however, still would not admit that it was over. "The Rock won't crumble," he wrote to one admirer, and, after telling me in a collect phone call from Bastrop that he was "80 percent certain" that the Mazzerolle court records had been falsified by government agents in an attempt to discredit Stoeckley, he said, "I just believe there will be a major break in the next few months. The things we sensed were there are there. The facts will bear me out. This time, we're going to win."