Fatal Vision (15 page)

When I went back early the next morning to see Colette she looked terrible. She looked white as a sheet and she was soaked with perspiration and I walked over to her and I said, "Honey, are you okay?" She said she felt fluttery in her chest and she felt like she was going to die.

I reached down to feel her pulse and I remember very specifically thinking that I can't feel her pulse but that's okay, I'm gonna not let her know that I can't really feel her pulse very well. Then I looked for her intravenous and her intravenous was
out.
There wasn't any intravenous going and she was clearly in early shock.

So I went out and yelled for the nurse and when the nurse came I said, "Where the hell is her IV?" and the nurse said, "The doctor is on his way," and I said, "I don't care about the doctor. I want to know where her IV is and what's her blood pressure," and I grabbed her chart from the rack and her blood pressure had been going down for several hours and her pulse had been going up and I said, "What the hell is going on here? You don't even have a handle on your patient! That's my wife in there!"

And she said, "Now, relax. You're not allowed to go back in," and I said, "Not allowed to go back in?!" I said, "I'm the one who's treating her now." So I went back inside and the nurse came in with an IV cart and she started to stick Colette but she couldn't get one going so I grabbed it from her and told her to find me another nurse who knew what the hell she was doing.

And she left the room—very upset, by the way—and I started the IV and shortly thereafter a very excited nurse and the doctor arrived and I took him out in the hallway—or,
he
took
me
out in the hallway—and I told him that she was in shock, that she had a belly pain, that she had a very fast pulse and a low blood pressure and she looked terrible.

And he said, "Well, she's probably having some bleeding in her tummy from the surgery," and that, in fact, is what it was. They ended up doing a second operation right away and she got several blood transfusions and they opened her up and found an arterial bleeder—a little artery that had had a ligature around it but the ligature had slipped off and she was pumping blood into her tummy and had bled several quarts. She only has eleven pints, you know. Five and a half quarts in a 170-pound male, so she probably only has nine and a half to begin with and she had bled a good half of that into her stomach. So she was in real trouble when I found her. It · was very close. She, I think for a while there, was in a very risky situation.

Anyway, that episode sort of, urn, intensified our feelings for each other. I almost lost her, and it, um, it meant something. It just, ah—Colette became a more intense, a more real need for me then because I had almost lost her. And when she came home from the hospital she in turn felt a new dependence on me.

She was always dependent on me, she was never really an independent person, but when she came home from the hospital—she was tireder now, much tireder than she would have been, and her recovery took a little longer—there was a new ability to lean on me, and to hug me once in a while when she wanted to, not when I wanted to. I had to keep up my school duties, of course, but we were able to have more interplay than before.

Our senior year, we had the nice house, we had Kim and Kris and both of them were doing fine, Colette had recovered nicely by now, and I made Alpha Omega Alpha, which was the honorary society in medical school for the top 10 percent of the students, and that was a real honor, I felt very good about that.

It was also the time that we were applying for internships and, I believe it was in the early fall, several of us went together to make a circuit of areas that we wanted to visit for potential internships.

I was being wooed by Northwestern Hospital to be an intern there because my record was so good in medical school, but Colette and I felt that we wanted to get out of Chicago, so I took off on an internship tour with two of my classmates and good friends.

We went out to the West Coast and we did the Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco tour, and I was kind of impressed, but not as impressed as I thought I would be, but the tour was kind of fun, it was kind of a bachelor night out.

One of the guys was married, and one was not, and I was married to Colette, but to be honest, we had a blast on this trip. We went out every night and had plenty of beer and drinks, and I remember being a little stunned by the openness of the girlie shows in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We went to a place called the Body Shop in Los Angeles, and I remember thinking, gee, I hadn't seen anything quite like this, where the audience participation took place.

And we went to Carol Doda's Condor Club up in San Francisco, and there was some famous competitor of hers then, had a club two doors away and we went to that one and we did this whole tour and had an absolute blast.

I ended up liking San Francisco General best, as far as the hospitals went. It was the most dynamic, most exciting, most trauma-filled, clearly a knife-and-gun-club atmosphere, the surgeons were clearly in charge, but its ranking wasn't quite yet up to that of some of the others.

So I ended up, to make a long story short, ranking Columbia Presbyterian first on my application, simply because
I
felt it was the best hospital that I had seen or heard of except for Mass General, and
I
had decided that I didn't want to go to Boston. I don't know what I decided that on, I just decided that I really didn't want to go the Boston route, and Columbia Presbyterian always seemed to be number two in the country, behind Mass General, so I applied, had a good interview, liked it—it was a little awesome, the structure is so gigantic and overwhelming that I, um, it was, it's a magnificent place, but I didn't have any warm, dynamic feelings for it like I did for San Francisco General, but when we got ranked that spring I got Columbia Presbyterian, my first choice. I'm not sure Colette was really that happy about it, but it was such a hard-to-get internship, it was so impressive that that overwhelmed us, and I remember my friends, even Bob McGann who got into Mass General, number one in our class, was impressed.

We worked hard, even in senior year. Colette was taking in papers for typing, and doing lots of babysitting for pay, in addition to taking care of Kimmy and Kristy, and I was having all my odd jobs—working at the Chicago
Tribune
employees' clinic as well as doing autopsies over at the VA Hospital, and Colette was now taking English classes at Northwestern.

But we still seemed to find time for each other and for the kids and still to go out socially. We liked Rush Street and

the nightclubs, and we went to Mr. Kelly's several times, and we even tried some of the jazz clubs in the South Side. And we ate at a lot of ethnic places—there was a little Greek place over near Cook County Hospital, and we tried Mexican food for the first time and we found the Italian places that we liked, and we went to movies and we stayed out late, and we went to the Playboy Club—I had a key to the Playboy Club—and we also had a lot of people over for dinner. Our house was kind of more of a social center than some of our other friends' houses.

The kids were doing fine this senior year, and the sports teams that we were involved in [laugh] did very well, too. We had a blast, I remember, in the winter tournament in basketball.

Even after her return from Myrtle Beach, Jeffrey MacDonald's mother did not go home. She took an indefinite leave of absence from her school nursing job and remained with her son at Fort Bragg. They ate breakfast together every morning and dinner together every night. Accompanied frequently by Ron Harrison, they would go on shopping trips in Fayetteville and to the movies in the evening.

Often, MacDonald and his mother would also go to Franz Joseph Grebner's office to inquire about what progress was being made in the investigation. On these occasions, the young Green Beret captain would wait in an outer office while his mother went in to speak to Grebner. The dominant role she was assuming began to strike the CID chief as peculiar. "She leads him around," Grebner would remark to associates, "like a little kid who's just wet his pants."

Grebner, however, did not have a great deal of time to devote to speculation about the nature of the relationship between Jeffrey MacDonald and his mother. Even before the MacDonald murders he had been a man under considerable stress. Though the CID detachment at Fort Bragg was supposed to consist of forty-four accredited investigators, it was, through attrition and general understaffing, down to seventeen men during the early months of 1970. This despite the fact that at any given time there were approximately 250 unsolved felonies under investigation at the base.

There were an average of four murders per month in the Fort Bragg-Fayetteville area for the investigation of which the CID eventually assumed responsibility. And, in addition to numerous

other deaths due to suicide, training accident, motor vehicle accident, and narcotics overdose, there were rapes, robberies, and—as the Cumberland County sheriff had noted—a narcotics problem which had reached epidemic levels.

Since February 17, Grebner had felt greatly burdened by the fact that the MacDonald investigation had not gone as smoothly as it should have. Though he personally, like Ivory and Shaw, the agents actively involved in the case, and like the Fort Bragg provost marshal, had little doubt that Jeffrey MacDonald was, indeed, the murderer of his family and that the story of the drug-crazed hippies was fabrication, the number of investigatory loose ends was threatening to unravel the whole case.

For example, contrary to what the provost marshal had told the press, roadblocks had never been established. As an open post from which there were more than a dozen exits on well-traveled routes, Fort Bragg could not have been sealed in time to prevent the killers—had there been killers—from escaping. All that had been done in the first moments after the discovery of the bodies was to call the morning shift of military police in early and to have them check cars at random, looking for one containing two white men, one black man, and a girl with a floppy hat and long blond hair. By 6
a.m
., even this ineffectual attempt at search had been discontinued because of the heavy build
-
up of traffic on post.

Still, the first impression Grebner had formed upon arriving at 544 Castle Drive remained with him: there were no hippies; there was only Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret doctor who for reasons as yet unknown had exploded into a murderous rage and
..
had then just as quickly regained enough presence of mind to stage the scene, develop his story, and stick to it.

The case against MacDonald would have to be based entirely upon circumstantial evidence. Under the most favorable of conditions (i.e., a well-preserved crime scene and an impeccably conducted investigation), such cases were difficult to win, and, as Grebner was learning to his increasing dismay, the MacDonald case did not even come close to meeting those criteria.

MacDonald's pajama bottoms, for example—potentially crucial evidence—had been discarded by a hospital orderly in the emergency room and had been burned with the rest of the hospital trash.

In addition, the MPs assigned to guard the exterior of 544 Castle Drive on the morning of February 17 had allowed the Fort Bragg trash collectors to empty the MacDonald garbage cans before any CID agent had thought to examine the rubbish for possible evidence—such as a bloodstained pair of disposable rubber surgeon's gloves.

Such gloves, of course, could as easily have been flushed down the toilet. But before this thought had occurred to agents at the scene (four days after the murders), the laboratory technicians from Fort Gordon had been making such regular use of the toilet facilities as to assure that evidence disposed of by such means would have been long since carried into the main sewer lines and lost forever.

Blunders by lab technicians had not stopped there. When one, using a saw, had attempted to remove the bloody footprint from the floor of Kristen's room, the boards on which the print had been made had separated and the print itself had been destroyed.

Even back at the laboratory, inexcusable mistakes continued to be made. The piece of skin found beneath Colette's fingernail, for instance, had inexplicably been lost. And lost, too, was the vial which contained the blue fiber that had been scraped from beneath the fingernail of Kristen.

Nonetheless, by mid-March, the laboratory at Fort Gordon was forwarding to the Fort Bragg CID findings which, in Grebner's view, strengthened considerably the case against Jeffrey MacDonald.

It was proved by microscopic analysis, for instance, that the loose fibers found in the three bedrooms of 544 Castle Drive were, in fact, identical in composition to those used in the manufacture of Jeffrey MacDonald's torn blue pajama top. It was also determined that the rubber glove fragments found in the master bedroom were identical in chemical composition to the surgical rubber gloves that had been kept beneath the MacDonald kitchen sink.

In addition, based upon comparison with the "known hair samples" taken from the MacDonald apartment, the laboratory reported that the blond hair found in the palm of Colette MacDonald's hand was her own and not that of a blond-haired intruder.