Fatal Vision (62 page)

"It's very difficult for me to converse with my brother and really make any sense. In other words, I really can't get into a conversation with him anymore and really have an understanding at a certain level. I think, philosophically speaking, my thoughts go off in a totally different direction from his own. My value system is altogether different from his. Now why his value system developed the way it did—if it was just because of the position by nature that he was placed at—I don't know.

"I went into the Marine Corps. You know, like in the gung-ho sense, the rah-rah American-type situation, I think the only thing that could be better than that would be the Green Berets, and that's probably why, in my mind, he chose the Green Berets. Although if I said that to him, not only would it offend him, but he would deny it vehemently. But you tell me why he went in the Green Berets. You tell me why if I do a hundred sit-ups, he wants to do a hundred and one. If I drive five thousand miles in two days, he wants to drive six thousand. But not to beat me. Well, you tell me why.

"As far as what motivates Jeff, I think as he was growing up there was more of a sense of desperation on his part as to what the future held, or what was going to happen, because he was always following in my footsteps and they might not have been pleasant footsteps to follow.

"Like I always had a job and he could never get the same job. He'd have to take something a little bit less. When I was working as a stock clerk, he was delivering newspapers because I had already delivered newspapers. Then when he got to be a stock clerk I was working on the back of an asphalt truck. And when he was working on the back of an asphalt truck, I was driving the truck.

"He had to become a doctor because he knew that I wasn't a doctor. He was going to be a political scientist or whatever. He became a doctor. I don't know why, but I do know why, if you can understand what I'm saying. It's one of those unspoken things. I can't—I know why inside of me, and yet if I say it, that ruins everything and then—because it would be denied.

"I
think he still is—he had a tremendous sense of loss when my father died. I called him about ten minutes after my father passed away, when he was living in Chicago, and I said, 'Jeff, I have some bad news. Daddy died.' And he instantly broke down on the telephone and cried.

"He really sensed a tremendous loss. I don't know if he ever really developed a—I think everybody needs a father of sorts. Somebody that they can talk to or lean on or cry on his shoulder once in a while. And I don't know who that person would be in my brother's case, after my father passed away. There was no one alive that would be an adequate substitute. If he was looking to me for guidance, he didn't see any, and so he went on his own.

"And, well, I think myself and my sister and my brother, we realized how much effort and how much of my own mother's and father's lives were literally given to us as children, in order for us to have things they never had. The things they had to give up in order for us just to go to school. My father would get two jobs so my brother could go to college. And my sister went to college and my mother had the job. Things like that.

"We never talked about it, but then you begin to think, well, now, we can almost see the end of the tunnel and we'll be able to help them—meaning my mother and father, financially. Start to give them back the things they had to give up. But after you lose a parent, you can't repay those things. Now we can't repay anybody. You can buy a bigger headstone."

"Speaking in terms of Jeff, now," Worheide asked, "would that leave him with a sense of guilt?"

"I don't see what that has to do with the case. Guilt could enter into the picture in the sense of an unfulfilled desire, or a disappointment, but if you are a reasonable person, and my brother was a truly reasonable person, you'd have to assume that he knows that he had no control over the fact that my father died."

Woerheide then asked Jay MacDonald about his brother's attitude toward Freddy and Mildred Kassab. First, Jay expressed his own opinion.

"Mildred—I wouldn't waste my time telling you what I think about her. If she had twelve cents in her pocketbook, she would go out and get a twenty-five-dollar hairdo just to keep herself on the chopping block.

"She marries Freddy and he treats her very well. Puts her in, you know, a five-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment that's not good enough for her. She wants a thousand dollars—living in the best place in New York, you know. They should have been living in a two-hundred-dollar-a-month place. They were living way over their heads.

"But Jeff, you know, sort of liked that kind of life. I think he saw in the way they were living that that's the way he would like to live someday. From the way we grew up as kids, in a house that was constantly under construction, with very poor-parents, to see Freddy and Mildred living in these luxury apartments, I am sure that was the way he wanted to live. But Jeff was too much of a real person to do it on credit. He wanted to pay as he goes.

"Still, he admired Freddy. Like the day they were married we parked the cars in front of the apartment house and went upstairs to drop off some gifts, and we got back down and there were 'No Parking' stickers slapped on the windshield, that the doorman had put on the car.

"Well, Freddy ran downstairs, and I had never seen that done before. He chewed the guy out, berated him in front of everybody, made the guy get a bucket of water and a sponge and wash these things off the car. That made Jeff laugh. He said, 'Gee, I like the way he does things.'

"But, in other words, the guy didn't have a pot to piss in, and he was ordering people around, living in these big fancy places, and I guess Jeff just figured, because of the way he was brought up, that's the way he would like to live. In other words, Jeff is the kind of a guy who would sit down with Freddy and say, 'Freddy, you are a schmuck. You are really a phony son of a bitch, but I like you.' I mean, that's really where it's at with Jeff."

"Well, were the Kassabs supportive of Jeff and Colette?"

"Are you kidding? Jeff was going to be a doctor. He could have been blind, deaf, and dumb, and a four-legged nanny goat, and Mildred would have been happy that Colette was marrying him because he was going to be a doctor. She was just marrying off a daughter for the money angle. So if you are asking me did they back Jeff and Colette, yes. If that is what you call backing."

"Has there been any change in this relationship?"

"Well, I would daresay that Jeff probably has lost respect for the man since Freddy has done a 180-degree turn. Not because he's against my brother but because he was for him and now he's against him. He was totally for him through the whole pretrial hearing. Now, you know, after the whole thing's over and because somebody hasn't been brought to justice or to trial or whatever, he's willing to turn around and sacrifice somebody he'd really supported."

"Does Jeff talk to you about this?"

"If I talk to him on the phone, like he'll say, 'Freddy's making waves.' Meaning that the guy is—I mean my brother lost a wife and two kids and is at a loss for what to do. And he sort of gets to feeling that Freddy and Colette's mother think that they are the only people that lost somebody. And Colette's not even Freddy's own daughter."

"Let's go to February 17th," Victor Woerheide said. "When did you first hear about the fact that Jeff was in the hospital and Colette had been killed?"

"I was at a friend's apartment in Queens, and I heard a radio broadcast that said there had been a murder in North Carolina, that a Captain MacDonald had been wounded seriously and that he was in a hospital and that his wife and two children had been murdered."

"Did you make any arrangements to go to North Carolina?" "No. I made arrangements to go back to the hospital." "Well, did you subsequently go to North Carolina?" "Yes."

"Did you stay very long?"

"I don't know how long we stayed. But we attended a ceremony at a Catholic shrine or one of the churches at Fort Bragg and there were three white coffins on the podium where the honcho stands, and my brother was in front of me.

"I remember him walking in very, very slowly. He was in uniform, but he seemed to be like—like he could hardly walk. He shuffled like an old man would shuffle.

"My brother's the kind of guy that would—he's always breaking something, breaking bones or getting hurt or something, but the kind of guy that, you know, two salt tablets and another mile. You know, never give up. And he wouldn't have showed that he was hurting unless he had to.

"And he was hurting when he walked into that church. The whole thing didn't last too long. And when we walked back outside, there was nothing to say. He stood in front of me and he was shaking because he was quite weak, plus he was emotionally drained. I knew that he was really hurting. I knew that he was hurting physically and I knew that he was hurting emotionally. And I was at a loss for words. For the first time in my life I didn't know what to say. I mean, I didn't even know how to console him—my brother. I didn't know what to say. He just stood in front of me and there was nothing I could say. Then he was put into one of the Army cars and taken back to the hospital."

"I'm not trying to pinpoint this as to time and place," Victor Woerheide said, "but sometime thereafter did you talk to your brother about what happened on February 17th?"

"Well, I know there was no conversation about it until he was charged by the Army. Then, like, a little seed was planted in the back of my mind as to, you know, thinking that the Army can never make a mistake—that if the Army would charge my brother, then quite possibly he might be guilty.

"So I felt that in order to live with myself, I had to make up my mind whether or not my brother was a murderer. It took me two years to decide that he wasn't, only because I never, ever wanted to ask him point-blank."

"I take it you did not point-blank ask him?"

"I never did. No."

"But you talked to him?"

"Right."

"What did he say to you?"

"He used to get so mad and upset that I had the audacity to ask him those kind of questions to the point where he would yell and scream at me—not yell and scream, but I mean, like, more or less tell me to mind my own business and how could I be so stupid as to ask a question like that."

"You said that ultimately you became satisfied in your own mind that Jeff did not, in fact, kill Colette, Kimberly, and Kristen. What was it that satisfied you?"

"We were on a long-distance telephone conversation, I believe between Pennsylvania and California. And this has been after like months and months, if not years, of talking back and forth on the phone and when we were together and me asking in my own stupid way about what happened.

"And as stupid as this sounds I don't remember what the question was, but the way my brother responded left no doubt in my mind that he was innocent."

"What was it he said? What was the clincher?"

"The clincher was there was nothing he could say. He was crying. He broke down over the telephone."

"He cried?"

"And cried. In other words, it was—the only other time that I ever heard him like that was when I called him and told him that Daddy died. Like I could hear him break down on the phone and there was silence for a long time. And that was what happened when I talked to him in California.

"What I was trying to do was to get him to break. I wanted him to yell at me and tell me to shut up or go fuck myself or get lost, or something like that which would cast a doubt in my mind, but when he broke down the way he did—as if: 'the government's against me, I lost my family, and now you, my own brother, are going to turn on me.'

"That was like the straw that broke the camel's back. 1 realized once and for all, come hell or high water, that my brother was absolutely, totally innocent of all charges.

"The embarrassing thing is I don't even remember the question I asked him, but because of the nature of his response—the emotional level—that was something that could never possibly be faked. There is no way to fake something like that."

"Did Jeff ever tell you, after the Article 32 was over, that he was going to get revenge?"

"He told me he had been out looking for these people in North Carolina."

"Did he tell you at any time that he had found one of the people?"

"I vaguely recollect hearing that. Now, I don't know whether Jeff told me or whether that's just part of my knowledge of the case."

"Did he tell you what he had done when he found this person?" "No."

"Did he tell you that he had forced him to admit that he was one of the intruders and after forcing this admission from him, that he killed him?"

"No."

"Had he told you that, would you believe him?" "Well, depending on the circumstances. In other words, if he told me that in a joking manner, I would take that as a joke." "Let's say he told you over the telephone." "It's not a joking matter."