Fatal Vision (11 page)

Our wedding day was a little bit-overcast. We were afraid that it wasn't gonna be a nice day but it ended up being nice. It was a little windy, but it was September in New York and it was beautiful. It was a little cool, too, as I remember. I don't think it ever really got hot that day, but I remember being in a nice breeze and it was a beautiful day and the wedding went off very, very smoothly, very beautifully. Everything was just super. It was a really nice wedding.

We stayed that night at the Hotel Pierre up on Central Park South, had a nice room, and despite the fact that we had just left the reception we decided to really show off and order from room service, so we ordered, I believe, like at ten o'clock at night, steak sandwiches and champagne and it was something like $60 or some incredible cost like that and she and I both almost fell over.

It was a very exciting time. We had a very lovely night. It was a funny night because we were tentative, despite the fact that we'd been sleeping together for at least a year and she was already pregnant. It seems a little silly but in fact we really were—it really was like a honeymoon night. We were very tentative and I'd say gentle with each other. It was sort of the beginning of our real life together.

The honeymoon was kind of a funny time. It was, um—I don't have one word to describe the honeymoon by any means. There was a certain amount of hesitancy. There was a little chagrin because Colette was pregnant. We had this sort of feeling of adventure that we were embarking on this great life adventure together, and that somehow we always knew we would do that ever since we met in the eighth grade, and now we were fulfilling that.

And yet you have to remember it was 19, um, 63, and it wasn't common for college kids, especially at Princeton, to have to get married all of a sudden and have a child. As a matter of fact, we had to ask permission to be married at Princeton at that time. So it was, you know—there was a whole host of confusing emotions.

We drove up to Cape Cod and—the week is a little blurry, to be honest. I have some great remembrances of us walking together through, I guess it's Provincetown at the end of Cape Cod, and eating the salt water taffy and going in all the shops. It was a quiet time, of course. It was after Labor Day. And it was so beautiful. We had one or two rainy days—no, two or three rainy days out of the week and only two or three sunny days, but we enjoyed both. We were kind of oblivious to the weather. And we had a super time. We were arm in arm, and we would eat a late breakfast and a great big dinner and walk around and shop.

I had been passed a lot of envelopes all through the reception. People kept, you know, coming up, wishing us congratulations and giving me envelopes like they do at Polish or Italian weddings.

And when we got to this motel in Provincetown, we sat on the bed and we took out the suitcase—we had thrown all these envelopes and cards and everything, without really looking at them the first night, into the suitcase—and the next night we're up in Cape Cod and we undid all these envelopes and we had almost $3,000 sitting in front of us, which at that time—in 1963—was an extraordinary sum of cash.

I still remember this very clearly. We were sitting at the edge of the bed—I was, as a matter of fact, on the left side, sitting on the bed looking down toward the foot, and Colette was on the right side and her back was a little to me as she was opening some of the letters, and my back was a little to her.

We both turned and looked at each other after the first couple of letters and she was squealing sort of with delight as she opened each letter, and I ended up letting her open the majority of them because it was so much fun to watch her, and they kept making this mound of money and cash and checks and, like I say, it ended up to right around $3,000, and we were just stunned.

We just—it was sort of hilarious—we didn't sort of know what to do with that much money. So we put it all in a big wad and put some rubber bands around it and put it back in the suitcase. But I remember we had a super week.

One dinner we had was the best of the whole honeymoon. It was, I think, like about the second or third night. We found this Portuguese restaurant which we went back to later in the week, which is always a mistake. You can't really re-create.

We had a—the second dinner was nice also but the first dinner was like magic. It was the first time we had—we ordered a strange wine, I believe it was a Portuguese wine, and we had a Portuguese dish, and I don't remember what it was, but I remember everything was spicy, and we tried everything, with entrees and soup and the salad and then the main course, which was seafood. We both picked seafood but they were done Portuguese-style and they were very zesty, spicy hot.

We had the absolute, most delightful evening. It's one of the best evenings I think we ever had. We laughed and giggled the whole time and had the bottle of champagne at least, and then we went back to the motel and had a super night.

I think we realized then, it was about the third day of the

honeymoon—although we really had no bad feelings, bad premonitions, we had hesitancy—and at that point, about the second or third day of the honeymoon, we felt that, sort of, we could conquer the world. That the union was so fine and so much fun and held so much promise and fulfillment for both of us.

The bodies of Colette MacDonald and her two daughters were buried in a Long Island cemetery on Monday, February 23. Immediately afterward, Freddy and Mildred Kassab retreated to the seclusion of their home. They pulled down the blinds to shut out the light and had their phone number changed to prevent any incoming calls. In their grief they wanted total isolation.

Jeffrey MacDonald's mother did not have the time to plunge deeply into mourning. She left the gravesite and drove immediately to New Hope, Pennsylvania, to meet with a psychiatrist concerning difficulties being experienced by her older son, Jay.

The previous November, in apparent reaction to a drug overdose, Jay, who was a year and a half older than Jeffrey, and who, like Jeffrey, had been named Most Popular male during his senior year of high school, had suffered a schizophrenic break with reality. This had resulted in his arrest and confinement to a state mental hospital after he had assaulted his mother on a street corner.

A police report prepared at the time said that Jay "struck his mother several times about the body," and that it had been necessary for officers to "physically subdue" him. The incident had occurred on November 7, at the corner of Windsor Avenue and Montauk Highway in the town of Brightwaters, New York. Jay had been brought to a local precinct house and examined by a police psychiatrist who recommended transfer to Central Islip State Hospital.

Jeff had been called home on emergency leave from Puerto Rico, where he had been on a training exercise with his Green Beret unit. Jay had been released
from the hospital within a week
and had returned to his part-time job as a bartender at a Greenwich Village tavern called the Shortstop.

On the morning of February 17, having been informed by Freddy Kassab that she was to accompany them on the urgent and ominous trip to Fort Bragg, Dorothy MacDonald had tried, unsuccessfully, to reach Jay by telephone.

The next day, while at Fort Bragg, she learned,
that Jay— having heard the news of the murders on the radio—had suffered a relapse and had once again required hospitalization.

A close family friend named Bob Stern, who was in the computer business and who had access to a private plane, had obtained Jay's release from the hospital in order that the two of them might fly to Fort Bragg to attend the funeral on February 21. Afterward, Stern had flown back to New York with Jay and had helped him transfer his belongings from the Greenwich Village apartment he was sharing with a merchant seaman to the Stern home in New Hope, Pennsylvania, about thirty miles north of Philadelphia. Arrangements had been made for Jay to recuperate at the Stern residence while undergoing psychotherapy as an outpatient.

Dorothy MacDonald was a sturdy, energetic woman of fifty who was employed as a school nurse. Since her husband's unexpected death of lung disease at the age of forty-eight, four years earlier, she had noted a steady deterioration in her older son's emotional well-being. Since his November breakdown, she had devoted an enormous amount of time and energy to efforts to aid his recovery. Now she was faced with him in a state of relapse and with her younger son, Jeffrey, recovering from injuries sustained during the assault which had resulted in the murder of his wife and children.

After visiting Jay and the Stern family, and meeting with a psychiatrist in nearby Doylestown, Jeffrey MacDonald's mother drove back to Fort Bragg on Tuesday, February 28, to return to his hospital bedside.

Jeffrey MacDonald remained in Womack hospital for nine days. He looked pale and said he felt exhausted. He complained of frequent, severe headaches and of an inability to sleep. An armed guard was stationed outside his door to protect him from any attempts at further violence by the four intruders who he said had massacred his family. The chest tube used to re
-
expand his lung did not function properly, and it became necessary to insert a second tube. He was seen twice by a Green Beret psychiatrist, a major with a shaved head and a handlebar mustache. "Normal grief process continues," the major noted at the conclusion of his second visit.

On Thursday, February 26, his lung having healed without further complication, MacDonald was discharged from Womack Hospital and was assigned to a room in Bachelor Officers' Quarters. The armed guard that had been stationed outside his hospital room was withdrawn.

Upon hearing of this development, MacDonald's mother confronted his commanding officer. She demanded to know why the guard had been removed, particularly since, in an unsupervised BOQ room, her son would be in more danger of an attack by murderous intruders than he had been while hospitalized. She was told that law enforcement officials at Fort Bragg did not feel that her son was in danger.

'That makes it sound," Dorothy MacDonald said, "like you suspect Jeff may be involved."

The commanding officer assured her, without attempting to explain the contradiction, that her son was not considered a suspect. He said, in fact, that having just gone through such an ordeal, Captain MacDonald was now free to take some time off, and added that Mrs. MacDonald could retain her visitor's suite, in order to remain close to her son, as long as she wished.

That evening, Jeffrey MacDonald said he found his new room unbearably depressing. He said he could not yet cope with solitude. He spent the night on his mother's couch.

MacDonald, however, was indeed a suspect at that time. Even before his release from the hospital, military authorities—while continuing to refuse public comment (newspapers reported that a "shroud of secrecy" had enveloped the investigation)—had concluded that the young captain was the
primary
suspect in the murders.

In a report never publicly released, the Fort Bragg provost marshal expressed the opinion that "the accuracy, similarity, and location of the wounds strongly indicates actions of one individual with expertise on vulnerability—killing as rapidly and mercifully as possible without creating any noise."

He added the observation that all the knife wounds were "deep, and in a relatively small area of the bodies," and that there had been "no disfiguring and no sexual molestation," indices which, to him, pointed away from drug-crazed hippies, and toward the one man—husband, father, and physician with an interest in surgery—known to have been in the apartment at the time that the murders occurred.

The provost marshal's opinion was shared by Franz Joseph Grebner and the two CID investigators—William Ivory and Robert Shaw—who were working most exhaustively at the crime scene. The three of them, within days, had come to believe it highly likely that Jeffrey MacDonald had—for reasons unknown— killed his wife and children and had then—in an attempt to escape detection—staged a scene designed to make the murders look like the work of drug-crazed intruders, even going so far as to puncture his own lung in the process.

As early as Monday, February 23, the provost marshal had informed the FBI that they could cease their nationwide search for the four killer hippies. He said a preliminary consideration of the physical evidence did not indicate that any civilians had been involved in the commission of the crimes.

Nonetheless, pending laboratory analysis, the "evidence" against MacDonald was non
-
existent. Thus, at the beginning of March, when Dorothy MacDonald asked if she could take her son to the seashore for a few days of rest and recuperation, no one at Fort Bragg felt there was any basis for not granting her request.

So, during the first week of March, Jeffrey MacDonald and his mother drove to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for what she hoped would be a restorative time near the salt water to which he had always been attracted as a child.