Fatal Vision (37 page)

"What did you learn?" she asked. "Did he tell you anything?"

"By the time we got through with him," MacDonald said, "he would have told on his own mother. He said he remembers being in the house, he remembers the shouting, but he doesn't know why he was there. He was so far gone on drugs he didn't know what happened."

"How about the girl? Did he know who she was?"

MacDonald was shifting ever more uneasily in his chair. He had finished his coffee and pie, and it was obvious that he was eager to leave.

"Yeah," he said, "her name was Willie the Witch, and she went away with the fellow with the mustache. They're both away."

Then Mildred mentioned her fear that Jeffs action might be discovered.

"Don't worry," he told her. "He's six feet under now." He added that they had arranged it to look like a robbery. Then he said he really had to leave.

"He was terribly uncomfortable talking to me about it," Mildred would later recall. "He wouldn't look at me. He just kept gazing all around the room, and eventually I started to feel that maybe he wasn't telling the truth."

Freddy Kassab did not appear on network television in December, but he did travel to Washington with two bulging suitcases that contained 500 copies of his eleven-page letter to members of Congress. He had decided it would be more effective to deliver them in person instead of mailing them.

For four days he trudged through the halls of the House and Senate office buildings, hand-delivering a copy to every office: a Willy Loman peddling his plea for justice.

Often, he would get only as far as the front desk. Occasionally, an administrative assistant would spend a few minutes with him. Everybody was very sympathetic. Nobody promised a thing.

He returned home, worn and weary, on the night of December 15. He turned on the television. He saw Jeffrey MacDonald on the Dick Cavett show. He was infuriated by MacDonald's performance.

Given an opportunity, on network television, to reach within minutes millions of the constituents of the political figures Kassab had spent four days vainly attempting to see, and to demand, through that medium, that the killers of his wife and daughters be pursued, MacDonald instead had focused almost solely on the injustices that had been done to him.

Equally galling was his playing off the audience for laughs. Amusement had passed from the lives of Freddy and Mildred Kassab ten months before, and it seemed to them profoundly inappropriate that the aftermath of February 17 should be presented, by Jeffrey MacDonald, as entertainment.

Perhaps most troubling, however—although it did not at the time seem to have the significance that it would later acquire— had been MacDonald's assertion that he had sustained twenty-three wounds in the attack and the implication that he himself had almost died.

Both Freddy and Mildred Kassab had seen Jeffrey MacDonald at Womack Hospital on the afternoon of February 17. "There wasn't so much as a Band-Aid on him," Mildred recalled. "Not even Mercurochrome." Freddy Kassab had returned to the hospital that evening and had found MacDonald "sitting up in bed and eating dinner with apparent enjoyment."

Perhaps, the Kassabs told one another, it was simply a lingering sense of defensiveness—the result of the false accusation— that had made their former son-in-law so grossly exaggerate the extent of his own injuries.

Kassab called MacDonald the day after the Cavett appearance. He informed him of his displeasure. At the same time, he renewed his insistence upon access to a copy of the transcript.

Now that he was out of the Army there was no plausible reason for MacDonald to object. Though he himself, in the wake of the story he had told them, seemed increasingly reluctant to be in the presence of the Kassabs, MacDonald had his mother deliver a copy of the transcript. She arrived—bearing thirteen manila-bound volumes-—on Christmas Eve. She said, however, that they could only keep the transcript for a week. Then Jeff would need it back in order to prepare the lawsuit he was planning to file against the Army.

The Kassabs read in silence throughout Christmas Day. It was their first Christmas together without Colette. The transcript was the only gift they had received.

They read quickly. There was much to absorb, a great deal of it obscured by legal wrangling. Eventually, through the verbiage, the picture began to come into focus. The transcript provided the Kassabs with their first glimpse of the murder scene: their first close-up view of Colette's torn and battered body awash in blood on the bedroom floor; their first look, through the eyes of military policemen, doctors, and investigators, at the damage that had been inflicted upon Kimberly and Kristen. It was also their first exposure to Jeffrey MacDonald's detailed account of what had occurred.

Pausing only to try to sleep—or when tears so blurred their vision that they could no longer distinguish the words on the page—the Kassabs read until New Year's Day. So overwhelmed were they by the horror, so numbed by the excruciating detail, that they gave no thought whatsoever to analysis.

There was, however, one point that Freddy Kassab did find puzzling. It was MacDonald's statement that for more than six weeks he had slept with a pistol under his pillow because he so feared for his life.

Kassab recalled the detailed account in
Newsday
of MacDonald's contemplation of suicide. The exposed pipes, the chipped paint, the logistics of trying to hang oneself with one's own belt, the conclusion that the attempt would be likely to end in failure. Why, wondered Freddy Kassab, if a man was lying in bed with a pistol under his pillow, would he be so concerned about whether or not he would be able to take his own life with his belt?

Kassab returned the transcript to MacDonald. He wrote to the Army, asking for a copy for himself. Familiar, by now, with Kassab's outspokenness and tenaciousness, the Army agreed to supply him with one if MacDonald would sign an authorization. MacDonald signed. Again, there was no plausible reason to refuse. Kassab received a copy in February. The same week, he also received a visit from two CID investigators.

In December, in response to congressional inquiries prompted by Kassab's hand-delivered letter—and by MacDonald's nationally televised accusations—the CID command in Washington had begun an internal investiga
tion to determine the extent to
which the Fort Bragg CID and laboratory technicians at Fort Gordon had been guilty of dereliction of duty.

The conclusion reached, as expressed in a letter sent to members of Congress by the Army's chief of legislative liaison, was that while the investigation had not been "a model of its kind," neither had it been "the amalgamation of incompetence, perjury, and malicious prosecution which Mr. Kassab envisioned."

On January 19, 1971, Col. Jack Pruett—the CID's director of internal affairs—was instructed to shift his attention to the murders themselves. He was given office space in the Federal Building in downtown Fayetteville. A task force of eight agents was assigned to him, under the supervision of warrant officer Peter Kearns. He was told to take as much time as he needed. He was told all necessary resources would be available. He was told he was expected to be thorough. He was told also that it was expected that this investigation would produce evidence sufficient to bring about the indictment of the killer or killers of Colette, Kimberly, and Kristen MacDonald.

Pruett and Kearns came to Long Island on February 11 to inform Freddy Kassab that the new investigation had begun. At the same time, they informed him that his son-in-law was still considered a suspect.

Jeffrey MacDonald had moved from Long Island to the Upper East Side of Manhattan in January of 1971. He took an apartment at 321 East 69th Street and found employment as an emergency physician at the World Trade Center construction site.

He also found part-time work as the assistant to a West Side physician known colloquially as "Dr. Broadway"—a man whose specialty it was to cater to the particular needs of persons affiliated with show business. In this role, MacDonald told friends, it was not uncommon for him to make 4
a.m
. house calls bearing tranquilizers for agitated actresses.

In his free time, MacDonald was entertained by such friends as Dr. Howard Bellin and his wife, the Countess Christina Paolozzi. At one party, he said, he met the actor Hugh O'Brian. At another—he was almost certain—he had actually been introduced to Walter Cronkite. In addition, he began to date a woman who worked as a secretary for Joe Namath's lawyer.

MacDonald failed to keep a Washington appointment with Allard Lowenstein. Talk of finding the real killers receded. He was speaking, instead, by early 1971, of the need to build a new life. Rather a rude shock it was, then, to receive a phone call from Freddy Kassab, informing him that at that very moment two CID agents were in the Kassab home describing him as a suspect still under active investigation.

MacDonald drove immediately to Patchogue, arriving at the Kassab house just as Pruett and Kearns were preparing to leave.

"He wanted to know what we were doing there," Kearns said. "He was somewhat put out. Angry at us. Not to the point

of fisticuffs or anything. He was just angry. We advised him he was a suspect and therefore we couldn't discuss anything with him—we couldn't even talk to him—unless he had his lawyer present."

Arrangements were made promptly, however, and on February 19, in the library of the Philadelphia Bar Association, in the presence of Bernie Segal, Jeffrey MacDonald was interviewed by Pruett and Kearns.

After three hours of questioning, the agents showed MacDonald a picture of Helena Stoeckley and asked him if he could identify her as having been one of the assailants.

"I probably sound like I am avoiding the issue," MacDonald said, "but not from the photograph. I can't do that. I just can't do that. There are a number of reasons. Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that she was there, the conditions and the shortness of my being there, she was least likely for me to be able to identify. I would say that out of the four I saw—the four people—she is the least likely. I said this at the hearing. You know, it was really very quick. It is hard to—it is really hard to get across how quick this occurs and how little I saw of her. This is not a case of looking at someone's face like I am looking at you and thinking of her. It was just like that. That's all it was. I know I was seeing blond hair. For instance, it really does, when you look at the face—I would say probably not from this—the nose looks really prominent here. It looks like you would remember the nose right away. I just have the impression that I was looking at a much smaller, narrower nose. This is very bulbous. It looks very prominent. But I get a weird feeling. I get an uncomfortable feeling looking at her face. I just don't know."

Pruett and Kearns had a second interview with MacDonald in March. At the conclusion of this session they asked whether he might now be willing to take a polygraph test. He declined. He also refused to undergo a sodium amytal interview, a technique whereby an individual is questioned while under the influence of a memory-enhancing drug. It was explained to the two CID agents that his psychiatrist, Dr. Sadoff, felt that such a procedure might be injurious to MacDonald's overall mental health, in that it would cause him to reexperience, rather than simply to recall, the events of February 17.

"We felt sure we were going to have another interview," Kearns said. "We hadn't covered nearly all the area we wanted. But after that they turned down all our requests. In fact, after that second meeting in Philadelphia, Mr. Segal told us, 'Until I see your investigation taking a different course—that you're not channeling it towards Dr. MacDonald—you can expect no further cooperation."

Pruett and Kearns, however, were delving into other aspects of the case. In particular, they were looking into the matter of Helena Stoeckley.

One of the first people to whom they spoke was P. E. Beasley, a detective assigned to the narcotics squad of the Fayetteville police department. Prince Edward Beasley had known Stoeckley since 1968, when she was sixteen years old. By February of 1970 he had come to consider her the most reliable drug informant he'd ever used.

She was a graduate of Terry Sanford High School in Fayetteville, where she had been a member of the dramatics club, the chorus, the Future Teachers of America, the Girls' Athletic Association, the French club, and the Latin club. Known for her fine singing voice, she had played intramural volleyball and basketball and had been a contestant, one year, in the high school beauty pageant. She had also worked as a Candy Stripe volunteer at Fayetteville hospitals and had expressed interest in a nursing career.

Despite this wide range of activities, she was remembered by classmates as "much quieter than average," and as a person who shared very few of her feelings. A tenth-grade teacher recalled her as "a rather sad little girl who was not much in touch with reality."