Fatal Vision (59 page)

"Do you recall," Victor Woerheide asked, "whether there was an icepick in the house?"

"Yes, I do. When I was working at the refrigerator—I had brought: some little puff pastry hors d'oeuvres and things down with me for her for the holidays, and they had to go directly into the freezer and it was already loaded and I couldn't move the ice trays. So I got the icepick out, jabbed around until I got the ice trays loose and could use one of them for the pastry. So I know
I
used the icepick."

After Christmas, Mildred Kassab said, "my husband felt that Colette might be a little bit angry with him for something because her voice was different when he called her on the phone. He would call her frequently from his office because he had a trunk line, and she had always been very fond of him, since her father died when she was quite young.

"But after Christmas she didn't sound the same. I would like to mention also that Colette never forgot a birthday, anniversary, Easter, Mother's Day, and all that sort of thing. There were always cards.

"But January 19th was Freddy's birthday and it was the first time in sixteen years that he didn't get a card from Colette—the first time she ever forgot. She'd always sent Valentines, too, and let the children put their little mark on and we didn't receive any Valentines. We thought about that afterwards. She must have been upset."

"Do you remember the last time you spoke to her?"

"Yes, I called her on—it was the day after a big snow
storm, right around the 14th of
February, and she said she was alone. Jeff was working.

"She said they had taken someone to the airport a day or two before, and she said she was wishing she could have gotten on the plane. And Kimmy had asked, 'When can we go to Grandma's again?' And she said they would like so much to be able to come home.

"And I said, 'Well, the snow is very deep and it's covering the pool.' There was just a light cover of plastic on the pool and I was afraid at that time because there was no indication of where the pool was, and we had just put it in. The children wouldn't know where it was, and I said, 'Wait until spring.'

"So then she told me Jeff might have to go to Russia with the boxing team and if he did he would go in April and he wouldn't be back until the end of July, and he would be in Russia, so therefore there would be—no one would be able to communicate with him, and she would be alone when she had the baby and would I surely be there on the 18th of July? She really believed that he might forcibly be sent away without asking. In other words, he would have to go. I think she was becoming increasingly worried about the pregnancy. She hadn't been to a doctor yet, and she had already put on twenty pounds, she said, and she was worried about whether it was going to be a very large child.

"I said, 'I will be there. Regardless of anything in the world, I'll be there.' "

The former chief of psychiatry from Walter Reed Army Hospital testified. He was the same
doctor who had testified at the
Article 32 hearing, but the grand jury setting—with its privacy and absence of cross-examination—permitted him far greater latitude.

"The initial question that was put to me," he said, "was that a civilian psychiatrist had evaluated Captain MacDonald and had stated that he was incapable of committing such an act, and so I was asked if I would evaluate him and testify as to my own opinion as to that issue.

"The first contact I had was with Captain MacDonald's military attorney, who briefed me for about an hour and a half without Captain MacDonald being present, sort of giving his side of the story.

"Later that afternoon I was approached by the military prosecutors and by Mr. Ivory, the CID man. They arrived around four o'clock and I was exposed to pictures of the house and the bodies. I considered it a bombardment, and I used that word. Frankly it was rather disturbing to me, having six children of my own. I got out of my office about 6:30. I had a thirty-five-minute drive home and I trembled as I drove. I lived out in Galesville, Maryland, and when I drove home it was getting dark. I trembled and I did not sleep that night.

"The next day, I saw Dr. MacDonald. I met him at the door and shook hands with him.

"He was a very cordial, smiling, cooperative, warm person. He expressed his feelings of being upset at having to go through all of this procedure, upset that he was accused, but at the same time he created an impression of being a very engaging sort of person who was very facile in his ability to talk.

"I deliberately, in my first interview with him, did not discuss February 17 at all. I did the past history. He gave me a very bland past history, of what he considered to be a relatively normal family upbringing. Said that it was a happy family.

"We talked about his father dying of pulmonary fibrosis. He described his father as a leader, as a very masculine type of person; described his father in an interesting way: as a man who was constantly at battle with the world when he didn't need to be. And he described his father as feeling that women—I've got a quote here: 'That women had taken over the country.'

"I had the impression that between him and his father, in terms of emotional closeness, there was not much. He described his mother as a very calm, quiet, strong person. He talked about his brother, Jay. Everyone liked Jay, he said. Described Jay as a failure who'd had some fifteen to twenty jobs, who was on amphetamines, who'd had a paranoid schizophrenic break.

"He talked about Judy, his sister. And I got the flavor that somehow, even though his mother was described as a strong person, that somehow, within the family, women were put down.

"I asked him about himself. He described himself as a striving person, making the point that he would never have achieved what he had achieved or gotten where he had gotten if he had not been a striving person. That he was good at athletics. He made a point of never having cheated.

"Usually, when I ask that kind of question, I'll say, 'Okay, those are some of your good points. Can you tell me some of your bad points?'

"He described himself as compulsive. And here was the first time that any feeling, or what he called 'affect' came out. He became sad, almost tearful. Said that he was not accepting of his own family. Said not as accepting as a good father should be. He volunteered that he saw that as strange in himself because he was never annoyed by patients. He always could take all the crap that any patient could give him.

"He talked about what could have been if his family had not been killed. Said he could have had a closer relationship with Colette. He could have had a better relationship with the children. He described his wife as being the best mother in the world: warm, understood the kids completely.

"He talked about knowing her since eighth grade and dating since eighth grade. They had broken off a couple of times. I did not ask why. I asked him more how he reacted to these breaking-ups. He said that he would feel hurt and he would sulk. That she would cry and that that would hurt him.

"I obtained a sexual history. He said he'd had his first sexual encounter with the mother of one of his friends when he was fourteen years old.

"He talked about Kimberly, who was a very feminine child. He talked about Kristy as being a tiger. There was very little affect at this time. I was impressed with his coolness in giving me this information. He talked about his feelings about the Army, the implication being that he had a lot of anger toward the Army.

"He talked about his family's approach to Jay. He said his parents had been more casual toward Jay's accomplishments. He said that he, Jeff, had gotten more recognition than Jay. He felt bad about that. He felt that somehow that might be responsible for Jay's becoming a bum.

"I got into his use of alcohol. He talked about using it socially, judiciously, minimally really. He said he used medication, and, in fact, his wife had taken diet pills for some period of time in order to lose weight, and he, himself, had taken diet pills to lose weight when he was on the boxing team in college. He said that he was a fighter. His nose was broken four times while he was in high school. And that, essentially, was my first interview with him, which I deliberately kept relatively bland.

"I initiated the second interview by talking with him about his father. Apparently, there was a lot of feeling in the family about the father's death. He talked about his mother crying when he, Jeff, was around. He created the impression that he was sort of -the person who carried the family through the father's death. He added at that time that Colette's father had committed suicide. I asked him if he could tell me any more about it, but he couldn't.

"I was not aware until he told me that Colette was pregnant at the time they got married. He made a point of the fact that they had intended to get married later anyway.

"He discussed entering service. All doctors, when they enter, go to Fort Sam Houston for a basic officer's indoctrination course, and while he was there his thought was that he was going to end up in Vietnam, which was the expectation of most young doctors if they went into the service at that time.

"He spoke of a colonel coming down and giving a talk to the group about Special Forces. He was extremely impressed by the physical appearance of this man. He really was very impressed. There was a lot of feeling expressed about this man. It was almost as if the appearance and the presentation of the man, more than a judicious discussion of what would be involved in going into Special Forces—it was almost as if his impression of the man was more important.

"He volunteered further sexual history in terms of having an affair with an airline stewardess. I began to get a, you know, a question in my head in terms of whether—I didn't pull this out of him—whether he volunteered this to impress me, or what. I don't know. They apparently—she spent a weekend with him in Texas, and this was apparently a second-time encounter that he had had.

"We talked more about his brother. He made the point that he was the only one in the family that could really handle his brother. He expressed that he didn't really understand his brother and his family didn't understand his brother, and he talked about his brother's potential for violence. He was very upset that his mother had to see this violent behavior that the brother displayed. He expressed this with an affect of anger and shame. He said he was ashamed of his brother.

"Then we got to the night of the 16th and the morning of the

17th. He talked about having come home from work, having gone with the kids to feed Trooper, the pony he had bought.

"He talked at some length about having purchased the pony very secretively. That it was a big surprise to the family. He talked with some pride about having worked with the man whom he bought the horse from or. whose property he was going to keep the horse on and how the two of them had—he would make up stories about where he was going, and he would go over and they built the shed the horse would stay in. He made quite a big deal of it.

"I was aware that one of the points the prosecution was making had to do with some conflict between Captain MacDonald and his wife over the handling of the children in terms of bedwetting and in terms of the children climbing into bed with them.

"I had not raised it yet, but somehow at that point in the interview it came up. His wife that night had discussed it with her psychology teacher.

"I have in the back of my mind—it's characteristic of doctors—it seems true in my family that my wife never takes my advice. I can treat my kids' colds but when it comes to medical opinions, you know, I'm low man on the totem pole. I'm not sure that isn't true in a lot of physicians' families. But I think there was a flavor of that there, and I began to probe and try to feel for areas of conflict between him and Colette. Because, again, the point had been made so strongly to me by the prosecutors that they saw this as a potential motive.

"I didn't get a degree of reaction like that from him. He said, in fact, that he wasn't upset that she had discussed it with the professor. I think I would have been, but he said he wasn't. The professor, he said, advised a firm hand, which is exactly what he had advised.

"He said, 'Colette could take less crying than I, and that's probably why Colette tolerated it more'—that is, she couldn't tolerate putting Kris back in her own bed and making her stay there.

"He mentioned that his wife was four and a half months pregnant. He also mentioned that he was reading a novel by Mickey Spillane called
Kiss Me Deadly
that night. He described his wife coming home from the course. He talked about having a friendly conversation with his wife. He was interested in what the professor had had to say and so forth.

"He later described how he went to bed, and Kris was in bed on his side and had wet the bed. He picked her up and put her back into her room. There were periods here when he would become emotional, become tearful, but he recovered quickly.

"I recognized that he had been interrogated previously, and so I allowed him the lack of affect that I would have expected from a person describing these things about his family. I did not get much feeling from him at that time. It was matter-of-fact, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt, because he had gone through this story so many times.