Fatal Vision (42 page)

She was asked why she had sent the card to his office and not his home.

"Oh, the whole thing was just a joke," she said.

Mrs. Kingston was then shown a copy of the Joan Didion column, "A Problem in Making Connections," found in the same envelope that contained the Valentine. The column read, in part:

I am a 34 year old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves, sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific watching for a tidal wave that will not come. . . .

My husband switches off the TV and stares out the window. I avoid his eyes and brush the baby's hair. In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices. . . .

We are each the model of consideration, tact, restraint at the very edge of the precipice. He refrains from noticing when I am staring at nothing and frightened of the void. . . .

At the end of the week I tell him that I am going to try harder to make things matter. He says he has heard that before, but . . . there is no rancor in his voice. Maybe it can be all right, I say. Maybe, he says.

Mrs. Kingston was asked if she'd ever seen the article before. "I don't know," she said. "I may have. It might be something my daughter would send to Jeff. I don't recall sending it. My daughter was writing on my behalf and she does things like that—sends clippings from magazines whenever she runs out of things to write about."

Colonel Kingston's daughter, who was twenty-two years old, said, when asked about the card. "That is an embarrassing thing. At the time I never thought anything about it. I was in Hawaii getting cards for several friends in the States when I ran across that card. It reminded me of the time at the airport when mother gave each of the MacDonald family a kiss on the cheek, even the children.

"Jeff laughed about it and teased her. I suggested to mother that we send him the card as a kind of joke about the kiss at the airport. If I had known that anything like this was going to happen, I would certainly never have sent it."

In regard to the clipping, she said, "I never sent that. Definitely not. I've never even seen it before. I wouldn't send Jeff something like this. It is kind of coincidental, isn't it?"

In addition to socializing with the wife of his former commanding officer and "becoming really acquainted" with his own wife, and making the acquaintance of nurse Tina Carlucci at Fort Sam Houston in early December, Jeffrey MacDonald, in the fall of 1969, was acquainting himself also with a number of other young women.

He was, Ron Harrison said, doing some "counseling" for the red-haired wife of a Special Forces sergeant who was having marital problems. He was also, apparently, teaching the nineteen-year-old daughter of another colleague how to drive. Harrison recalled stopping by the MacDonald apartment one evening just as MacDonald and the young woman—whose name was Carla and who lived only a few houses away on Castle Drive—were on their way out for a lesson. MacDonald told Harrison to make himself at home and have a beer, saying he would be back in about forty-five minutes.

So frequent did these driving lessons become that Carta's mother eventually came to suspect a deeper—possibly intimate— level of involvement. She told investigators that she considered MacDonald's attentions to her daughter to be "excessive" and said, "He took her out many places and seemed to be a little friendlier than an ordinary neighbor would have been."

Even the sixteen-year-old babysitter who lived upstairs came in for her share of attention. She told investigators that "He made one comment about if he had known girls like me when he was sixteen, he'd like to still be in school." Given the manner in which the remark had been made, the young woman said, she had considered it offensive.

By January of 1970, however, changes in MacDonald's manner were being noted. "I remember seeing Jeff looking very white and very tired and very serious," one neighbor said. "He wasn't his usual jolly self—you know, friendly and outgoing. ' He was moonlighting—holding down two jobs besides his Army job—and he just looked so tired."

The sixteen-year-old babysitter also noticed a change in both

Jeffrey MacDonald and his wife. "After January,'' she said, "Colette hardly ever even said 'Hi' when I went over to babysit. She never smiled and Jeff wasn't too friendly either. When I saw them together, I just sensed they weren't happy. They didn't yell at each other, but now I look back and they never really smiled."

Colette, of course, was certain by now that she was pregnant. And though, to some friends, she had expressed enthusiasm at the prospect of having a third child, there were others who developed a different perception. One Fort Bragg acquaintance said, "I don't know how the subject came up, but she told me she had sort of gotten pregnant by mistake because she had forgotten to take one birth control pill. You know, at the time, I laughed. I sort of said, The joke's on you,' type of thing. She laughed, too, but I didn't get the feeling that she was overjoyed about it."

Also, by January, of course—according to what MacDonald himself had told Pruett and Kearns in one of the Philadelphia interviews—he was moonlighting at Cape Fear Valley Hospital "every night." In addition, he had made arrangements to begin a second moonlighting position at Hamlet Hospital on weekends. And he had also begun to work out with the Fort Bragg boxing team.

"He came into the arena on January 4," the boxing coach said, "saying that he wanted to work out and lose some weight. I saw him thereafter on January 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, and 20. There might have been a couple of days during that period when he came in which are not reflected in my logbook but those dates reflect the majority of his visits. As far as I can determine, January 20 was the last workout he participated in.

"When he came in the first time, the team members were going through a five-minute heavy bag drill. This is exceedingly strength-sapping and it generally takes months to build up the endurance to punch for the full five minutes. Captain MacDonald, however, during his first workout, participated in this drill and lasted the five minutes. Although he was winded at the end he did not seem to show the effects. I thought this was an outstanding performance for someone who had not been participating in any type of boxing program on a regular basis.

"Captain MacDonald was much stronger than the average individual and in much better physical condition when he started the program than the average soldier would be. He also had a considerable amount of drive and determination. After only a very few workouts he sparred with our middleweight champion and held his own during the minutes he was in the ring.

"He was very well accepted by the members of the team and very well liked. In fact, after his first few workouts, I asked him if he would like to become the team physician. As I remember, he accepted without much persuasion.

"I
don't recall exactly when I told him, but
I
did inform him of our upcoming road trips, starting on or about February 20 through to the last of April or the first of May. For the boxing staff this would be continuous traveling. We would go to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for the U.S. Army trials, then to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for the Inter-Service matches, and then on to Trenton, New Jersey, for the National AAU matches.

"On the 12th or 13th of February,
I
called Washington and requested that Captain MacDonald be considered for acceptance as team physician. The colonel I spoke to said he would look into it and if Captain MacDonald's unit did not object, he would be so assigned. As I recall, that same evening, I called Captain MacDonald at his quarters and told him of my conversation with the colonel. I cannot recall his exact comment but as I remember he seemed pleased."

Colette, however—contrary to MacDonald's assertion in his "diary"—apparently had not been pleased. Not only had she mentioned her apprehensiveness to her mother and to the Long Island friend to whom she wrote in January, but she spoke of it to the friend who had begun to accompany her to the child psychology class in early February. "She told me that when her husband first was in the Army she'd had to stay home while he had gone down for his training and she didn't like being away from him. She sort of dreaded the thought of being separated again, but he was going somewhere with the boxing team."

The "somewhere"—Jeff had told Colette—was Russia. Not Fort Dix; not Trenton, New Jersey. The team coach, however, informed the CID reinvestigators that no trip to Russia had ever been planned or even discussed. "There was nothing scheduled for the Bragg or Army teams regarding Russia," the coach said. "The National AAU team had gone to Russia, departing on or about the first of February, but I had no conversation with Captain MacDonald regarding his desires to go with them and there was no travel scheduled for the Army team after the national championships in New Jersey."

Gradually, Pruett and Kearns drew closer to the time of the murders. MacDonald had said repeatedly that despite having worked a twenty-four-hour shift at Hamlet Hospital and having put in a full day at his office and having then played basketball for an hour, he had not been overtired on the night of Monday, February 16.

The woman whom Colette had driven to class, however, recalled Colette's commenting that Jeff had seemed totally exhausted. "She said—I forget if he was sleeping, or laying on the couch when she left. But she said he was really tired because he had worked all night the night before and then he had to go to work at Fort Bragg all day."

Having had, at the most, a half-hour nap on the living room floor before Kimberly had awakened him to watch
Laugh-In,
MacDonald had become so revivified during his wife's absence that upon her return he not only stayed up watching television with her until 11 but even after she went to bed he stayed up—to watch more television, to finish
Kiss Me Deadly,
and even to wash the dinner dishes at 2
a.m.

Like the unexplained sojourn to Texas and the non
-
existent trip to Russia, this sudden infusion of energy puzzled Pruett and Kearns. With MacDonald no longer willing to talk to them, however, these did not seem matters which they could pursue. Instead, they focused on Colette's child psychology class.

Normally, she was not an active participant in class discussions, but on the evening of Monday, February 16, she posed a question.

"She raised the question," her friend said, "about her youngest child coming into bed with her and her husband in the night. She wondered whether they should allow the little girl to stay the night or if they should put her back to bed or what kind of solution they should try. It seems to me she said her husband felt that the little girl should stay in bed with him and, you know, that she should go and sleep on the couch."

Another member of the class recalled that "Mrs. MacDonald outlined the
situation as one in which a littl
e girl crawls in bed with her parents and pushes her mother out of bed. This was done by the child crowding the mother so far to the edge of the bed that she was no longer comfortable.

"The instructor asked Mrs. MacDonald if it was her child. She replied that it was. The instructor then asked if the child knew that Mrs. MacDonald was pregnant. She said yes. The instructor than asked the child's age. I think she told him two or three. The instructor then asked what she did about the child. Mrs. MacDonald told him mat she had to go to sleep on the couch.

"The instructor asked Mrs. MacDonald what her husband thought of her sleeping on the couch. She replied that it was her husband's decision that the child stay in their bed and that she sleep on the couch. The instructor asked how often this happened. Mrs. MacDonald said a few times in the last two months.

"There was a general discussion about the problem, and the consensus was that after a short time the child should be taken to its own bed and made to understand that that's where it belonged. I remember Mrs. MacDonald sitting there smiling and nodding, apparently happy with the decision of the class. It was about this time that class ended. About five minutes later, I saw her at the Shopette. The next day I learned that she and her two children had been killed."

Colette had begun the course at the North Carolina State University extension at Fort Bragg on February
A
—a course not in "something literature," as Jeffrey MacDonald had told the CID when first asked, and had repeated to the psychiatrist, Dr. Sadoff, but a course in child psychology, designed to give a basic overview of the relationship between childhood event and adult behavior.

Pruett and Kearns looked closely at Colette's class notebook. On her first night she had made notes concerning two basic personality types: "Sadistic authoritative—the personality that wants to make other person his dependent" and "passive dependent—relinquishes self-esteem to the other person."

The class met again four days later to consider the oral, anal, and phallic stages of pregenital development, "in which the libido," Colette noted, was "all directed toward self (narcissistic)," creating a "megalomaniacal attitude" in the child, who believed himself to be "omnipotent." Eventually, the normal child would pass beyond this stage to the point where "ego develops as some libido energy is directed toward other people."