Fatal Vision (43 page)

A note on "ways of coping with anxiety" such as "regression" wherein the "individual reverts to more infantile behavior" was followed by a description of the phallic stage in the three- to four-year-old male:

a. identification with father up to this point

b. at this point father becomes a rival

c. little boy wants Mommy all to himself

d. Oedipus complex—kill father, marry mother

e. castration fear that father will take away his penis

f. this stage seems to set the s
tage for determination of homo
sexual or not—can he i
dentify with father or not—most
critical period of life for child.

Whether Colette might have come home from these classes eager to share with her husband some of the new knowledge she was acquiring could only be grounds for speculation, but the possibility that at least some portion of the final few hours of her life had been devoted to conversation with the man suspected of having killed her about either a specific problem concerning one of her children or the more general subject of the psychosexual development of the human being caused her notes from Monday, February 16, to be read with particular care.

The class had begun with a continuation of the earlier discussion of human defense mechanisms, such as:

fixation on earlier stage of development . . .

insulation: withdrawal into a shell of passivity and isolation . . .

compensation: covering
up of weakness by overcompensat
ing in another area

and
acting out—reducing anxiety concerning forbidden desires by allowing their expression.

Colette had written that such defense mechanisms were "denials, distortions or falsifications of reality," and "functions which occur in the ego's attempt to deal with infantile anxieties," and that they "always operate unconsciously."

There were later notes under the heading "Psychosexual Development and Psychopathology," including a paraphrase of Theodor Reik's description of the father in Western society as one (Colette wrote) "who feels unconscious guilt for impregnating his wife and also unconsciously wants her to go through the pains of childbearing. He . . . goes through the tortures of hell when she is in labor to punish himself for these feelings."

The last words she would ever write dealt with psychological disorders which manifested themselves in the genital stage of development.

Her final notes included references to such categories as:

Obsessive Compulsive—obsessive collecting or neatness . . . Melancholic—feel guilty about aggressive impulses . . . Paranoid Schizo—have high I.Q. . . .

Manic—megalomaniacal psychotic. Everyone likes them, they think. The world is great. Very busy, hyperactive.

Then she bought some milk for the morning and went home.

As they pressed forward, Pruett and Kearns turned up a hitherto undisclosed fact regarding Jeffrey MacDonald's conduct
after
the crimes. During the Article 32 hearing—as he'd stood accused of the murder of his wife and children—MacDonald, while confined to Bachelor Officers' Quarters, had entered into a sexual relationship with Bonnie Wood, a young civilian woman employed at Fort Bragg.

Aware of who he was—as was virtually everyone else at Fort Bragg—she had frequently seen him sunning himself on his front porch during lunch breaks. One day she offered him a tuna fish sandwich and sat with him in the sun. Soon, he was able to persuade the MPs assigned to guard his quarters to permit her access to his room.

When questioned, Miss Wood said she had been "frankly attracted" to MacDonald. "He's handsome, he has a great body, and he was the most exciting thing around."

She said she had visited him in his room throughout the summer and fall, and that the relationship "certainly wasn't a secret." After the charges against him were dropped, she said, he even took her out to dinner once, double-dating with one of his former escort officers.

"Probably," she said, "if you had asked me at the time, I would have said I was in love with him." She said she could not recall specifically how many times they'd had sex, but that it was more than once and less than "dozens of times."

Other than being a violation of the terms of his restriction, this conduct could not be construed as criminal on MacDonald's part, but, to Pruett and Kearns, given the circumstances, it did indicate a certain lack of sensitivity.

The reinvestigation, of course, involved more than just character evaluation. The physical evidence which had from the start been at the core of the case against MacDonald, but which, in Colonel Rock's opinion, had been insufficient to bring him to court-martial, was thoroughly re
-
evaluated, and the quest for new evidence was renewed.

William Ivory lay on the floor beneath Kimberly MacDonald's bed, within the still-sealed premises of 544 Castle Drive. As he looked up at the underside of the mattress, he noticed that it was supported by slats. He removed the slats and sent them to the CID laboratory at Fort Gordon, where a microscopic examination of the wood proved conclusively that the club used in the murder of Colette and Kimberly had been sawed from one end of a piece of wood that had been used to make one of the mattress slats.

Pruett and Kearns sent other portions of the physical evidence to the FBI laboratory in Washington. Paul Stombaugh, chief of the chemistry division, put Jeffrey MacDonald's blue pajama top under a microscope. He examined the icepick holes in the garment. Altogether, there were forty-eight. Each was cylindrical and smooth-edged.

To Stombaugh this indicated that the holes had been made while the pajama top was stationary. There were no ragged edges, and none of the tearing that would have resulted had the icepick been thrust through the garment while it was in motion, as it would have been if it had been wrapped around the wrists of a man who was using it as a shield to ward off thrusts from an icepick during a struggle.

Stombaugh also discovered that the two paring knives—the Geneva Forge knife with the bent blade that had been found on the master bedroom floor (and that MacDonald had said he'd removed from his wife's chest) and the Old Hickory knife with the straight blade that had been found next to the icepick under the bush twenty feet from the back door—made distinctly different types of cuts in fabric.

The blade of the Geneva Forge knife was dull and made ragged cuts.

The blade of the Old Hickory knife was sharp and made smooth, clean cuts.

Microscopic examination of the cuts in the clothing worn by Colette, Kimberly, and Kristen MacDonald—as well as a study of the autopsy photographs which showed the knife wounds in the bodies—proved, to Stombaugh's satisfaction, that all three victims had been stabbed with the Old Hickory knife and none with the Geneva Forge knife.

In other words, the knife Jeffrey MacDonald claimed to have removed from the chest of his wife had never been in her chest. The only cuts consistent with the blade of the Geneva Forge knife were those in MacDonald's own pajama top, leading Pruett and Kearns to deduce that MacDonald might have used that knife to inflict at least the sup
erficial wounds on himself, and
that he had then fabricated the story of removing it from his wife's chest in case his fingerprints were found on the handle.

As for the wound which had caused the partial collapse of MacDonald's right lung—this was consistent with the type of cut that could have been made by one of the many disposable scalpel blades which MacDonald had kept in his medical supply closet just outside the hall bathroom—the bathroom in which drops of his blood were found on the right side of the sink.

But it was Paul Stombaugh's third finding which was the most significant of all: the single piece of circumstantial evidence which, in 1971, most clearly seemed to contradict the story—or stories—that Jeffrey MacDonald had told.

When Stombaugh realigned the sections of the torn blue pajama top to restore it to its original shape, certain of the bloodstains on the garment—stains made with Type A blood of Colette MacDonald—formed a perfect, contiguous whole.

To Stombaugh, and to Pruett and Kearns, this proved that at least some of Colette MacDonald's blood had been on her husband's pajama top
before
it was torn.

This could not have happened if the top had been torn either during MacDonald's struggle with four intruders in the living room, or when he had removed it from his wrists after discovering his wife's bloody body on the master bedroom floor.

It could have occurred, however, if MacDonald, while wearing the still untorn blue pajama top, had struck his wife—perhaps during an altercation in the master bedroom—causing her blood to stain it before she reached but, in anger or self-defense or some combination of the two, and ripped the garment down the front, tearing loose the pocket and showering the rug with dozens of fibers.

As the fight had worsened, the pajama top could have become more heavily stained with Colette's blood. And it could have been to account for the presence of her blood in such quantity on his pajama top that MacDonald had laid it across her bloody chest prior to the arrival of the military police at 544 Castle Drive.

By the middle of March 1971, Pruett and Kearns began to receive support from a source they considered almost as unlikely as MacDonald himself: his father-in-law and staunchest defender, Freddy Kassab.

Upon receiving his copy of the Article 32 transcript in early February, Kassab had been transformed. The transcript became for him a universe. At times he seemed its sole inhabitant. He read by day, he read by night. He read with the pure and ferocious attention that a biblical scholar might bring to a first encounter with the Dead Sea Scrolls. For a full month he did little but read.

As he read, Kassab began to underline, then to make notes in the margin. Most of these notes were on the pages containing Jeffrey MacDonald's testimony. By mid-March, Kassab had read these pages a dozen times. His marginal notes had spilled beyond the borders of the transcript and had grown into lists compiled on separate sheets.of paper—lists of inconsistencies, of contradictions, of elements of MacDonald's story which Kassab either knew from direct experience to be false or which, simply as a matter of logic, he found impossible to believe.

He then went back to the beginning and drew up an indexed summary of every statement contained in the 153 pages of MacDonald's testimony. Next to each which he disputed he made a note.

Page 8. He volunteered to go into the Army.
Jeff told Colette he had been drafted.

Page 24. He got a blanket and went to sleep in the living room.
Jeff normally slept with a pillow. Why did he not have one on the living room couch?

Page 25. He heard Colette scream, then say, "Help, help, Jeff. Why are they doing this to me?" and then repeated it at least once.
Colette could not have cried out after the severe stab wounds to her neck—the trachea was cut.

Page 26. He heard Kimmy screaming, "Daddy, Daddy," over and over.
Going on the assumption that Colette and the children were attacked first, Kimmy sustained several severe skull fractures and according to medical testimony these were inflicted prior to the knife wounds. It would have been impossible for her to cry out as Jeff says she did after the massive blow which caused the severe skull fracture. Also, at the time he says he heard her cry out, the club with which she was attacked was in the living room.

Page 29. He says he literally saw stars and was knocked back flat on the couch. He felt like he was blacking out.
The account of this first blow with the club would certainly lead one to believe that Jeff was temporarily stunned. If so, why did the assailants not pounce on him? Why wait for him to recuperate and start to sit up again? Also, the blunt trauma wounds to Colette and Kimmy were very severe, yet Jeff received only a slight blow to the forehead, in spite of the fact that he had just come out of a sound sleep and was in a semi-sitting position.

Page 30. He described a "rain of blows" on his head, neck, and shoulders.
Yet he received only one wound that was over
a ¼
inch deep. It is very strange that Jeff did not receive any knife wounds to his head, neck & shoulders, since his attackers were standing over him, swinging. Also, a person cannot be stabbed 10-12 times in the abdomen while in a seated position & especially leaning forward, if the person stabbing him is standing. Furthermore, not one drop of his blood was found in the living room from any of the approximately 23 incised wounds he claims to have sustained. Also, with the profusion of blood in those bedrooms, if there were assailants they would have gotten much blood on their hands and clothing. Why then was there no blood in the living room, where the struggle was supposed to have occurred?