Fatal Vision (4 page)

His blood pressure was 120 over 70, his pulse 78, respiration rate 26, and temperature 99—all considered normal vital signs. The emergency physician gave him no treatment at all. In listening to MacDonald's chest, however, the doctor noted decreased breath sounds on the right side, indicating the possibility of a partially collapsed lung, a diagnosis which was confirmed by chest X ray.

Of far more concern than his physical condition was MacDonald's emotional status. He was both tearful and angry during his first moments at the hospital and seemed agitated to the point of hysteria.

Screaming and cursing, he berated a nurse who approached to ask his Social Security number, and there was concern that he might jump up from the litter upon which he'd been placed—just as, pushing and swearing, he had tried to struggle free of the military police and medics who had wheeled him out of 544 Castle Drive.

^‘
Am I gonna be all right, Doc? Am I gonna be all right?" MacDonald asked the emergency physician.
^“
Yes," said the doctor,
^“
I think you are."
^‘
'What about my wife and kids?"

The doctor—who already had been informed that this patient's family had just been murdered—did not want to upset him any further.

"They'll be okay," the doctor said.

^‘
'What do you mean, they'll be okay?" MacDonald said. "They're dead, aren't they?"

The second doctor to examine MacDonald was the surgical resident on duty, Benjamin Klein. He observed the same injuries that the first doctor had, and in addition noted, on the left side of the chest, "four puncture type wounds along a linear track, spaced rather evenly, about two to three millimeters apart."

The military policeman who had given MacDonald mouth-to-mouth resuscitation had observed the same marks. To him, they had appeared to be scratches,
^“
like where someone had dug their nails into him."

Repeatedly, MacDonald asked why his wife and children had not yet been brought to the hospital.

^‘
'Why aren't they here yet? How come they're so slow? The ambulance ought to be here by now." On several occasions, he said of Colette, "She never hurt anyone," and added that, "the kids were great."

"He said he was awakened from sleep," Dr. Klein said. "I believe he was in the living room, sleeping on the sofa. He said he was awakened by somebody beating on him, and his wife was screaming, and there was a blond female holding a candle, saying something like, 'Kill the pigs,' and there were three men, one of them a Negro.

"There was a man with a bat and a man with a knife—some sort of sharp instrument—and the man with the bat hit him and somebody was jabbing at him with the sharp instrument and he was dancing around trying to avoid them, and he said he could still hear his wife screaming.

"He mentioned something about his own wounds, that he'd seen a little bubble from his right chest, and—I did not get the exact timing interval but he said he examined his children. He said they didn't have any pulses and that he went on to his wife. She had a lot of blood on her. He said she looked very bad. That was his statement: 'She looked very bad.'

"He also said, 'Be sure to tell the MPs and the CID [the Army's Criminal Investigation Division] that I pulled the knife that was in her chest out. Tell the MPs and the CID I pulled the knife from my wife's chest and threw it on the floor.' "

The third doctor to see MacDonald was Merrill Bronstein, the staff surgeon on call, who had been awakened at home by a 4:45
a.m
. call from the resident. Bronstein knew MacDonald from moonlighting work each had done in the emergency room of a civilian hospital in Fayetteville and Bronstein had been extremely impressed by MacDonald, both as a person and as a physician.

The relationship had not yet blossomed into close personal friendship, but once MacDonald had shown Bronstein a picture of one of his daughters on a pony he had bought them for Christmas, and more recently—in fact, within ten days of February 17—he had asked Bronstein, whose own wife was pregnant, to recommend an obstetrician for Colette.

Stunned by the news of the murders, Bronstein arrived at the hospital shortly after 5
a.m
. to assume responsibility for the care of Jeffrey MacDonald.

"When I first came in," Bronstein said, "he was in a glass cubicle in the intensive care unit. He was tearful and very upset. Continually asking where his family was. At one moment talking about one thing and at the next moment talking about something

else, but always very agitated. How could they do this to him? How could this have happened? What was this country coming to?

^‘
'I was concerned about his emotional status. That was the thing that affected me the most, the thing that impressed me the most, the thing that I had the greatest difficulty, as a physician, in dealing with.

"He was very upset and I was very concerned for him and because he was kind of hysterical, I thought—I wanted him to be sedated. I wanted to give him a narcotic to relax him and
I
wanted to give him a barbiturate to help him sleep.

"So I went over him thoroughly. I went over his scalp and hair, and I especially went over his reflexes. I did a neurological examination because, generally, when a person has had a head injury—which I felt he had, because he had a bruise and he said there had been times when he had lost consciousness—you withhold those drugs.

"So I did go over him very thoroughly, and then I gave him those drugs. I gave him a fair amount of them. I may have done it mainly for my own comfort. I mean, you know, it's no joke: I hate to see a grown man cry."

Two hundred milligrams of the sedative Nembutal—a not insignificant amount—was administered intravenously at 5:30
a.m
., at which time, according to the hospital nursing notes, Jeffrey MacDonald was "hysterical and crying." Fifteen minutes later, 100 milligrams of the tranquilizer Vistaril were added. By 6
a.m
, according to his chart, MacDonald was "resting quietly."

"But I never really accomplished what I intended," Bronstein said. "I mean, I never really knocked him out or made him incoherent in any way."

As he had to the surgical resident, MacDonald described to Merrill Bronstein what had transpired at 544 Castle Drive. There was one detail which Bronstein recalled with particular clarity.

"He told me at one point he had looked down at a man's hand and saw—he thought it was an icepick. He told me to remind him to tell the FBI it was an icepick. He said this several times: he remembered looking down and seeing a blade that looked like an icepick, and he said to remind him to tell them about it."

MacDonald also asked Bronstein to call his mother and his in-laws on Long Island and—without informing them of what had happened-^to tell them to come to Fort Bragg right away.

"He made me promise to stay with him, to be with him when he told them what had happened. On the other hand, he wanted to know what had happened. He was—one minute he would say that he wanted me to be with him when he told them what had happened, and yet he would ask
me
what had happened.

"He would continually ask where was his wife, where were the kids, were they dead? Why weren't they here? Why wasn't
I
with* them? He wanted me to be with him, yet he wanted me to go out and see what was going on. In other words, there was a question in my mind if he knew that his wife and children were dead."

It was shortly after 5:30
a.m
. when the phone rang at the home of Colette MacDonald's mother and stepfather, Mildred and Freddy Kassab. Mildred Kassab answered it. The caller identified himself as a doctor from Womack Hospital and asked to speak to her husband.

"He's in the shower," Mildred Kassab said, "but you can tell me whatever it is. I'm not a hysterical person."

"In that case," Merrill Bronstein said, "you'd better locate Captain MacDonald's mother and get down here as fast as you can."

The first agent of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division to reach 544 Castle Drive on the morning of February 17 was William Ivory, who arrived just as Jeffrey MacDonald was being wheeled out the front door.

Ivory was the CID agent on duty that night. He was thirty years old and had grown up in Somerville, Massachusetts, on the outskirts of Boston. Before becoming an Army detective, Ivory had worked for a while as a truck driver, and then as a security guard at a Sylvania electronics plant. He was married and had two children of his own.

Ivory had been dozing on a cot at CID headquarters when, shortly before 4
a.m
., he had heard voices coming over the military police radio at what seemed a higher than normal pitch. There was a sense of urgency in the voices which brought Ivory fully awake.

When he heard the word
stabbing
he went to the radio in his office and inquired of the MPs at the scene whether there had been any fatalities. Told that there had been, he gathered some evidence-processing equipment, alerted the CID photographer, and drove to 544 Castle Drive.

The streets were deserted. A light rain was falling. The ground was already wet from the heavy rain that had fallen earlier in the night. The temperature was not much above 40 degrees.

Ivory reached the apartment at 4:10
a.m
. There was, he noted, "quite a stir in the neighborhood. People were coming to their doors, coming to the house, to see what had happened."

There were more than a dozen military policemen still clustered inside the apartment. Ivory stepped into the living room and was told what had happened by the lieutenant in charge.

Looking down the hallway, Ivory could see the body of Colette MacDonald lying on the master bedroom floor. He walked to it. He got down on one knee. He studied the wounds to see if there was any active bleeding. There was not. He looked at the chest for signs of respiration. There were none. Whatever she had been for twenty-six years, she was now simply a battered, bloody corpse.

Ivory noted the torn and bloody blue pajama top that had been laid across her chest and the white Hilton Hotel bathmat on her abdomen.

He saw the word
pig
written in blood on the headboard.

He saw the paring knife—a small, wooden-handled knife with a bent blade and the brand name "Geneva Forge" stamped in the handle—lying not far from the body.

By the feet of Colette MacDonald, he saw the pocket from the blue pajama top. This was only lightly flecked with blood.

He saw a large stain—it looked like urine—on the exposed bottom sheet of the double bed. And he saw, rumpled together in a corner, the blood-soaked bedspread and top sheet from the bed.

"Now I'll show you the children," the lieutenant said.

Kimberly MacDonald's bedroom was dark. The lieutenant shined his flashlight on the bed. Ivory, using the tip of his pen so as not to blur any possible fingerprints, flipped on the light switch.

He
could see a bookcase filled with books and games. A child's record player sharing a tabletop with a collection of dolls. A Pink Panther piggy bank on a windowsill. And the body of five-year-old Kimberly MacDonald in her bed, her skull fractured, a piece of cheekbone protruding from her face, and the numerous gaping stab wounds in her neck.

The process was repeated in the bedroom of Kristen MacDonald, where, amid the gore, Ivory noted the bare, bloody footprint leading away from the girl's bed.

Ivory went next door to use a neighbor's telephone. He called half a dozen CID agents and told each of them to call more. He also called the chief of the Fort Bragg CID, Franz Joseph Grebner. Then he asked the neighbors—a warrant officer, his wife, and three teenaged children—if they had heard any noise. "Any sounds of a break-in, a fight, any disturbance at all?"

They said they had not.

Ivory asked the warrant officer to accompany him next door to identify the bodies. "It's a pretty rough scene," he said, "but I'd appreciate it."

In bathrobe and slippers, Jeffrey MacDonald's next-door neighbor accompanied Ivory to 544 Castle Drive. The first time the neighbor had met MacDonald had been in September, when MacDonald had asked to borrow his lawn mower. The last time he'd been inside the apartment had been on Christmas afternoon when MacDonald had invited him and his wife over for a drink. His sixteen-year-old daughter had been employed frequently by the MacDonalds as a babysitter.

He followed Ivory from room to room.

"Yes," he said, "that's Krissy."

"Yes," he said, "that's Kim."