Fatal Vision (6 page)

I remember specifically, she kept coming back to our relationship and she sort of left the door open for it, like, "It would be nice to hear from you again. Maybe you could even come up to see me sometime." Words to that effect.

And I remember I sort of leaped at it in my mind. It sounded like so much more than the words actually said, and I remember being on top of the world and going to class for the next several days thinking how fantastic it was that we were gonna possibly begin seeing each other.

And it was not too long after that that I first went up to Skidmore. I don't remember exactly which weekend but it was in the fall and it was an off weekend for football—in other words, the Princeton Tigers were not playing at home, they were away—and I took a bus up and I remember that slight, sweaty-palmed, heart-pounding feeling, like: what was going to happen? How was it going to go?

By 7:30
a.m
., the extent to which Jeffrey MacDonald's right lung was impaired by the puncture had increased from 20 to 40 percent and the chief of surgery at Womack Hospital decided to insert a chest tube as a precautionary measure. MacDonald was given 50 milligrams of Demerol intravenously at 7:30 and again an hour later to alleviate the discomfort caused by this procedure, but he remained conscious throughout and in fact, at about 8
a.m.,
even asked if a friend could come to visit.

The friend was an unmarried Green Beret lieutenant named Ron Harrison, who had been a frequent visitor to the MacDonald residence throughout the fall and winter.

Unlike MacDonald, Harrison did have combat experience in Vietnam and would soon have more, and spoke often of having participated in covert Special Forces operations.

From the start of their relationship, MacDonald—the doctor fresh from civilian life—had seemed extremely proud that a "real" Green Beret like Ron Harrison was willing to consider him an equal, and Harrison had become MacDonald's best friend at Fort Bragg.

Harrison had, in fact, been the last person to see the MacDonald family alive. It had been on Saturday, Valentine's Day. During the afternoon, Jeff had taken Colette and the girls down to Hamlet, a small town sixty miles from Fort Bragg, to show them the hospital at which he had just begun moonlighting. That evening, after supper—as he did about two or three times a week—Harrison had visited 544 Castle Drive. Colette had served Jell-O and cookies, and the three adults had sat in the living room chatting, while Kimberly and Kristen had watched television.

Harrison had left at about 10
p.m
. At four the next morning, MacDonald had awakened and had driven back to Hamlet Hospital, where, from 6
a.m
. Sunday to 6
a.m
. Monday, he had worked in the emergency room. It had been a quiet day by emergency room standards—an average of only one patient per hour—and on Sunday night he had even managed a few hours' sleep on a cot.

Awakened at 6
a.m
. Mon
day, he had driven back to Fort
Bragg, showered, eaten break
fast, changed into his military
uniform, and gone to work. M
acDonald was preventive medical
officer for a Special Forces unit at Fort Bragg. His work was
mostly clerical: he was responsible for the sanitation of mess hall
and latrines, and for filling o
ut the monthly venereal disease
report.

Monday had been an ordinary, quiet day. In late afternoon, he had gone to the gym to play basketball for an hour and then had come home and had taken his daughters to feed the pony he had bought them for Christmas.

He had showered again after that and had changed into an old pair of blue pajamas. Supper had been rushed because Colette was hurrying to get to an evening class at the North Carolina University extension at Fort Bragg.

He had put Kristen to bed at about 7
p.m
. and then had fallen asleep on the living room floor. At 8
p.m
. Kimberly had awakened him so that he could watch
Laugh-In
with her. It was her favorite television show, and she especially enjoyed watching it with her father.

At 9
p.m
., Kimberly had gone to bed. Colette had come home about forty minutes later, having stopped after class to drop off a female friend and to pick up a half gallon of milk for the next morning.

Six hours later, the Fayetteville operator had received the first call for help.

At 8
a.m
., Ron Harrison, who had heard on his car radio as he was driving to work that there had been some sort of tragedy in the Corregidor Courts housing area, and who had discovered, upon reaching his office, that the tragedy had been the murder of Jeffrey MacDonald's wife and children, was told that MacDonald wanted him to come to the hospital.

Harrison arrived soon after the chest tube had been inserted. MacDonald appeared to him—as he had appeared to everyone else who had seen him that morning—to be extremely distraught and agitated. He was twitching from side to side in his bed with such force that Harrison was afraid he might dislodge the tube.

Harrison approached the bed and said,
^‘‘
Calm yourself, Jeff. Calm yourself."

MacDonald looked up and began to cry. He said,
^‘
They clubbed me, Ron. They clubbed me and I couldn't get to her."

Harrison was standing at the bedside. MacDonald reached out and grabbed Harrison's arm as he spoke. So hard did he squeeze it that that night, when Harrison removed his uniform shirt, he noticed bruises on his forearm, caused by the pressure of MacDonald's fingers.

During the morning and afternoon, MacDonald was interviewed by agents of both the CID and FBI. The CID agent remarked later that MacDonald had displayed surprisingly little emotion when describing the at
tack upon him and its aftermath
— except when he talked about discovering the body of Kristen.
^‘
‘
He would talk about the wife and he would talk about the older girl," the agent said.
^‘‘
He just didn't want to talk about Kristen."

MacDonald told both agents that after his wife's return from class, they had watched television together, sitting on the couch and sipping a liqueur. They had seen a Bob Hope special and Glen Campbell and the eleven o'clock news. Shortly after the start of Johnny Carson, Colette, who was four and a half months pregnant, had gone to bed. MacDonald had stayed up to watch the rest of Johnny Carson. At 1
a.m
., still not tired, he had read the last fifty pages of a paperback novel he'd started earlier. At some point, he had heard his younger daughter, Kristen, start to cry, and he had brought her a bottle of chocolate milk. Finishing the novel at 2
a.m
., he had washed the dinner dishes. Then he prepared to go to bed, but had found his younger daughter in bed with his wife and had found also that she had wet the bed. He had carried her back to her own room and had placed her in bed. Then, not wanting to awaken his wife in order to change the wet sheet, he had taken a blanket from Kristen's room and had returned to the living room and had immediately fallen asleep on the couch.

He did not know how long he had slept, but the next sound he'd heard had been the sound of his wife shouting,
"Jeff, Jeff, help!’
And,
"Jeff, Jeff, why are they doing this to me?!"
At the same time, he had heard his older daughter, Kimberly, screaming,
"Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!"

As he opened his eyes, he saw four people standing over him: a black man wearing an Army fatigue jacket with sergeant's stripes on the sleeve, two white men, one of whom had a mustache and wore a red-hooded sweatshirt, and the blond woman in the floppy hat, holding a candle in front of her face. She wore high boots and a short skirt. He could not recall the exact color of the boots but said they were so wet they appeared to be black. "They were all wet," he said. "The water was just dripping off them, like they had just walked in out of the rain."

"Acid is groovy
..."
the woman was chanting. "Kill the pigs . . . Acid and rain
..."

As he had tried to sit up, the black man had hit him on the sid
e of the head with a baseball b
at. As he grabbed for it, he found it to be slippery, as if it were covered with blood.

Struggling with the intruders, MacDonald had suddenly felt a sharp pain on the right side of his chest. At first, he had thought, "This guy throws a hell of a punch," but then he looked down and saw the glint of a blade—an icepick blade.

He said he wrestled his way off the end of the couch and toward the two steps that led up from the living room to the hallway. At that point, he fell forward and passed out. When he regained consciousness—he did not know how much time had passed—the house was silent and dark and he was shivering so hard his teeth were chattering. His pajama top, bloody and torn, was twisted around his wrists.

He had gone from room to room and had discovered the bodies of his wife and daughters. He had felt for pulses and heartbeats, and tried in each case to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but had heard only gurgling sounds, indicating that blood and air were escaping through the lungs.

He had pulled a small knife from his wife's chest. He had covered her with his torn pajama top. He had gone to the back door to look for signs of the intruders. He had gone to the hall bathroom to check the extent of his own injuries. He had used first the bedroom telephone and then the kitchen phone to call for help. The operator, he said, would not accept his complaint until he had given her his Social Security number.

One of the white males, he said—the shorter one—had been wearing lightweight gloves. They could have been surgical gloves. He kept several pairs of surgical gloves around the house. Colette had used them while washing dishes.

Two floors below, in the basement morgue, autopsies were performed.

Colette had been stabbed nine times in the neck and seven times in the chest with a knife. One of the wounds had put a hole through her major pulmonary artery—the vessel that carries blood from the heart to the lungs. This had caused massive bleeding into her chest cavity and into the s
ac surrounding her heart. That
had been what had killed her: the bleeding, both internal and external.

She had also been stabbed twenty-one times in the chest with an icepick. The thrusts had been so powerful that the blade of the icepick had been driven into her chest up to the hilt.

She had been hit at least six times in the head with a club: once on each temple, causing lacerations in which the skin was torn right down to the skull; once in the middle of the forehead, fracturing her skull; once on top of her head; once across the jaw, near the chin; and once above the right ear, that blow, too, delivered with enough force to break the skin.

In addition, both of Colette MacDonald's arms had been broken. The pathologist described these as "defensive type injuries." He said they had apparently been sustained as she had held her arms up in front of her face, in an attempt to ward off the blows. Both bones in the right forearm were broken and one of the bones in the left forearm was broken twice.

During the autopsy, a male fetus of four to five months' gestation was removed from her womb, a blond hair, about six inches long, was found stuck with blood to the palm of one hand, and a piece of what appeared to be human skin was removed from beneath a fingernail.

Kimberly had died from being hit with a club, at least twice, on the right side of her head.

The blows had shattered her skull and caused extensive b
ruising of her brain. The largest-fr
acture line extended almost the entire length of the
right side of her
skull, and there were many other, smaller fractures. The blows had been of such severity as to have caused coma, and quite likely death, soon after they were delivered.

It was apparently after she was already unconscious and near death that she was stabbed with a knife on the right side of her neck. The pathologist could determine this from the relatively small amount of bleeding at the wound sites, indicating little or no blood pressure at the time these injuries were sustained.

The neck wounds cut through her windpipe and some came out the other side. Because of overlapping, it was not possible to obtain an exact count, but there appeared to be eight to ten separate incisions.

Kimberly also had been hit once with a club on the left side of her face. That blow had been de
livered with such force that it
produced multiple fractures of the
cheekbone and nose, and left
the piece of cheekbone protruding through the skin.