Fatal Vision (35 page)

"Well, I must say I would have expected that, but surprisingly enough I think my mail—I would read my mail as saying that the fact that I am a Green Beret gave me more support, I would guess. A lot of people wrote to me because I
was
a Green Beret, I think. And they said very nice things, like, 'I once knew a Green Beret and he couldn't possibly have done it.' "

"Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, we have very little time left. What do you want to come of all this? What's going to happen next?"

"Well, I think Congress is looking into things. We hope that they get into it in a big way and reopen the old investigation."

"Congressman Lowenstein is helping you in some way?"

"Allard Lowenstein from Long Island, right. He's doing a magnificent job and he's just a great person."
v

"Ah, this must have cost you a fortune," Cavett was saying, "aside from all the other—"

"Right, well, aside from my family and what not, and the nine months, somewhere in excess of thirty thousand dollars."

"Not to mention," Cavet said—since MacDonald, to that point, had not—"that the ah, perpetrators of the crime are still free."

"Absolutely. There are at least four people running around who have, ah, murdered three people."

"It's just unbelievable," Cavett said. "Does it seem like your life was, in a sense, ended at one point and started again in a Kafka short story?"

"That's exactly the feeling that you get. And you still get the feeling when you—when I wake up in the morning, you know— that it really didn't happen and my wife's still here, and what not. It's been a hard year."

"Boy, it's a fantastic story. I don't know what to say about it. It'll be fascinating to see what happens. Good luck to you. After this message, we'll be right back."

And Jeffrey MacDonald exited to music and applause.

PART THREE

THE CONTEMPT OF FAMILIES

If I covered my transgressions as Adam,

by hiding mine iniquity in my bosom:

Did I fear a great multitude,

or did the contempt of families terrify me
...
?

—Job 31:33-34

For Freddy and Mildred Kassab, the summer of 1970, like the spring, and like the last month of winter, had been a time of unrelieved torment.

In spring, her compulsion to bake having waned, Mildred had begun to plant roses, more roses, hundreds of roses, digging feverishly into the soil around her house, as if somehow, by sheer dint of spade work, she could force it to yield up to her that which she wanted so desperately—those whom it had forever claimed.

In summer, she had started to swim. Each evening, having completed her labor in the garden, she would place stereo speakers in her living room windows, facing outward, and fill the night air with the music of Chopin, Debussy, Schumann, Mozart, Beethoven and then immerse herself in the pool that had been built for Colette and the children.

'The passion and pain of the old masters," she wrote in a journal, "unleashing my own inner turmoil. Swimming in the night, up and down, up and down, for hours, the pool filled with music, until finally exhausted enough to go to
N
sleep."

Her husband, as if sleepwalking, had eventually returned to work. Each day was a void, however, which would end only in a new night of sorrow. The only activity which energized him was his battle to clear his son-in-law's name. The only emotion which fueled him was rage—rage now not only against the nameless, faceless, vanished killers, but against the obdurate and merciless military bureaucracy which, with its false and sadistic accusation, seemed determined to compound the original tragedy.

Occasionally, Freddy Kassab would have a minor, tactical

disagreement with Jeffrey MacDonald. If they offered him a lie detector test, Freddy wondered, why not take it? If they wanted hair samples, why not give them?

MacDonald, however, or occasionally his lawyer, Bernie Segal, would at such times remind Kassab that matters had passed beyond the point where cooperation with the investigators could be of value. The Army no longer had any interest in solving the crime: its only goal was to make the charge against MacDonald stick. It was on that—not on the arrest of the four intruders—that promotions were riding. The Army had committed itself: its goal was to destroy Jeffrey MacDonald. Under such circumstances, both Segal and MacDonald insisted, you gave them nothing. You fought them, with tenacity and savagery, on every point. This was war.

Kassab understood about war. He had lost a wife and child to one, long ago. Now, having lost also the last family that he would ever have, he was not about to interfere in Segal's attempt to win dismissal of the charges against MacDonald.

What did frustrate him, however, was his lack of knowledge. Given MacDonald's refusal ever to describe the events of February 17, and given the Army
^?
s decision to bar the public from the Article 32 hearing, Kassab's only sources of information were the occasional newspaper stories based on briefings given to the press by Bernie Segal, or the phone calls from MacDonald in which he would gleefully describe the defense's uncovering of the latest example of the CID's negligence and ineptitude.

It was not until the
Newsday
interview appeared in late July that the Kassabs received their first account of what had actually happened to Colette, Kimberly, and Kristen. And it was vaguely disturbing to them that MacDonald had been so ready to share with a newspaper reporter those intimate and anguishing details which he had withheld from all others for so long, but the primary effect of the information contained in the
Newsday
story was to whet the Kassabs' appetite for more. The details of the slaughter provided only the coldest, most numbing sort of comfort, yet information—any information—relating to the deaths seemed all that could fill even a minuscule portion of the void.

As a first step toward the acquisition of knowledge, Kassab, during a telephone call in early October, asked MacDonald to provide him with the transcript of the Article 32 hearing. (As he would continue to do for several years, Kassab was—without the knowledge of the party to whom he was speaking—tape-recording all telephone conversations which were in any way related to the case.)

"How heavy are those volumes you've got down there?" Kassab asked.

"It's, ah, thirteen volumes, each about an inch and a half thick."

" 'Cause I was gonna say, you know, if your mother can bring them back I can run them off on my big machine in the office."

"Aaah, geez . . . I—she just asked me for an extra suitcase 'cause she's overflowing because she's bought some clothes down here. I don't know. I'll see if we can—if I can arrange it."

"Yeah, because if she brings them up I can run them off on my big machine in the office. I'll run down on a Sunday.".

"Well, Freddy, you've got—you have no idea what this entails. This is not, you know, like running off a letter."

"No, I know, Jeff. I realize it will take me a few rolls of paper, but—"

"This is well over two thousand pages."

"I know. I know it is. But what the hell, I'll buy the paper and I'll go down to the office on a Sunday and run them off."

"Yeah, well, I'll tell you what. Let me see what I can work out with a smaller suitcase and then see how much we can get in. I might have to do it in sections, and then mail the rest."

MacDonald, however, sent none of the transcript, telling Kassab a few days later that Bernie Segal had instructed him that it would be inappropriate to release the material before Colonel Rock had filed his report.

Having lost all else, the Kassabs now asked very little of life: only that Jeff, who had so deeply loved Colette, be cleared of the charges against him; that, however painful the knowledge would be, they eventually learn what had happened at 544 Castle Drive, and that those responsible for such a monstrous, evil act be brought to justice.

By the end of October, with the charges against MacDonald finally dismissed, it was this last desire which began to obsess the Kassabs. They had assumed that within twenty-four hours of the dropping of the charges, the FBI would be back in the case, assuming control of the investigation.

But then a week passed. And then another. Nine months had now elapsed since the murders, and as far as the Kassabs could tell, no effort to find the killers was being made by anyone. The Army was apparently so embarrassed by the entire affair that it seemed unwilling to investigate any further, while the FBI—in response to a phone call from Kassab—declared that it had no plans to reenter a case in which, months before, it had been deprived of primary jurisdiction.

Fred Kassab's anger was immense. The killers were out there— scot free—and
no one was even trying to find them!
He did not stay idle for long. While MacDonald remained at Fort Bragg, awaiting his honorable discharge, Kassab contacted dozens of public officials demanding a renewed investigation.

Most receptive seemed Allard Lowenstein, the Long Island congressman and antiwar activist who did not need to be convinced that the Army was capable of both stupidity and injustice. Lowenstein, however, was only one man. Moreover, he had just lost a bid for reelection. By the end of January, he would not even be a member of Congress. Kassab, therefore, drafted a letter to all 500 U.S. senators and congressmen, requesting not only a hearing into the Army's mishandling of the case, but a congressionally mandated reinvestigation of the crimes.

After specifying twenty-nine counts of misfeasance and malfeasance by the Army—allegations which were based upon information supplied him by Jeffrey MacDonald and Bernie Segal—Kassab wrote, "An effort must be made by some body other than the Army's Criminal Investigation Division to find the murderers who are still running loose, maybe to kill again."

In his conversations with members of Congress—or, more often, with their administrative assistants—Kassab had begun to learn that when trying to prompt a public figure to take action— publicity (either the threat of it or promise of it) could be an extremely useful tool.

By mid-November then—though their motives did not entirely coincide—both MacDonald and Kassab were devoting considerable time and energy to the task of building the MacDonald case into a national issue.

Unaware of Bernie Segal's prior effort—during which the payment of a fee to Jeffrey MacDonald had been requested— Kassab arranged a meeting with a senior editor at
Look
magazine. The editor, himself unaware of Segal's original approach, expressed considerable interest.

Excited by what he considered a potential breakthrough, Kassab called MacDonald at Fort Bragg.

"I just had a two-hour meeting with the editor of
Look
magazine," he said.

"Oh, really?"

"And they are extremely interested in splitting this thing wide open. I told him I had three purposes: one, a complete investigation so that we can see if we can catch the people that did this—" "Right."

"—two, I want you cleared
one
hundred
percent"—something which, in Kassab's eyes, an announcement that the charges had been dropped for "insufficient evidence" had not accomplished— "and, three, to try and prevent this from ever happening to anyone else again."

"Uh huh."

"And they are definitely very interested. He says they have two investigating reporters who would make FBI agents look like school kids."

"Really?"

"He says the problem is you'll be sick of these people. They'll just about live with you. They'll look into every sneeze and what-have-you and wherefore, and it will take three months."

"Three months?"

"That's what he says."

"All right. Did you tell him how much material I have?" "I sure did. By the way, have you still got that transcript?" "Yeah."

"I'll tell you why, Jeff. We got to talking about that and he said, Tor God's sake, get that material out of there. And not only that—when you get it where you're taking it, make a copy and one copy must be in a safe in a
bank.''

"Yeah."

"So I think I'm gonna come down." "Oh, don't come down."