Fatal Vision (86 page)

Early in the trial, Dupree had noted the depth of bitterness which seemed to exist between the two men and had called them both to the bench to issue a warning.

^‘
'The reason I want you both up here," he had said,
^‘‘
is because it has been apparent to me from the very first time that the two of you appeared in this court that there was a certain amount of friction and animosity between you.

"I quite understand. I sat out there for thirty-four years. In the dog days of August and during the third week of a trial you may spurt off something that you, on reflection, would not have done. You did that yesterday," he said to Segal.
^‘‘
You were just about to do it again today, and I must say—and this applies to both of you—I am not going to have it.

"The thing that I am apprehensive about is this: one or the other of you, if you show these displays of temper and hostility and animosity, are going to prejudice your client. I am here to see that this trial is conducted fairly, and I am not going to tolerate its being tried in a climate of hostility for either side. We are going to try it calmly.

"It ain't your case," he said to Segal, "and," turning to Murtagh, "it ain't yours. It belongs to the parties in the case and you are just here in a representative capacity—both of you—and I am expecting both of you to so conduct yourselves.

"The last thing I ever would do, if I could avoid it, would be to embarrass a lawyer in front of a jury and his client. But if I have to do it in order to maintain order in this court and conduct this trial like it is supposed to be, then that is what I am going to do."

Following that lecture, Segal, for at least a few days, seemed to keep his distaste for Murtagh under tighter control, at least within the confines of the courtroom.

But as Dupree ruled against him time and again, and as his bitterness and frustration grew, Segal, who had been described as "the picture of confidence" in one newspaper account only a few days earlier, began to vent spleen in the press; and since it would have been grossly inappropriate (and counterproductive) to make public some of the private opinions he held regarding the attitude of Judge Dupree, it was Brian Murtagh who became the focal point of Segal's public outrage.

"What I dislike with considerable intensity," he told one reporter, "is that Murtagh is an anonymous, faceless little man who, in the outside world, would be of very little consequence to anybody's life. But he, as a bureaucrat, is suddenly draped with the power of the whole United States government, and people act as if he is a person with the judgment, intelligence, and maturity to be taken seriously."

Murtagh at thirty-two was just as thin and sallow, his hair was just as lank, and his manner was just as acerbic as it had been five years earlier when Jeffrey MacDonald had called him a little creep and a viper who did not know any of the social graces. Murtagh's sense of moral outrage that MacDonald had not yet been convicted and imprisoned had grown even greater over the years. (He had accompanied Paul Stombaugh to the cemetery in September of 1974 and had gazed into the opened coffins at the physical remains of Colette and Kimberly and Kristen, and the
memory of what they had been then, as compared to a vision of what they might have been had they been permitted to live, was not one which would ever fade.) He chose not to respond to Segal's attacks.

"I just don't deal with Bernie if I can avoid it," was all he said.

At a surprise party at the Kappa Alpha house—the occasion being Bernie Segal's forty-ninth birthday—the highlight was the presentation to Segal of a set of darts and an enlargement of a recent photograph of Brian Murtagh.

One by one, each member of the defense team took a turn throwing darts at the picture. Jeffrey MacDonald scored a direct hit. He cheered for himself as his attorneys and their assistants clapped and laughed. In high spirits, he seemed oblivious to the possibility that, under the circumstances, it might not have been appropriate for him to be propelling a sharp pointed object toward even the photographic representation of a human being.

MacDonald's buoyancy might have been lessened even further had he been aware of the private remarks which a criminologist, hired by the defense as an expert witness, had made to Bernie Segal after having learned of Paul Stombaugh's findings.

"This is very convincing evidence," the paid expert said, referring to Stombaugh's pajama top reconstruction. "Now I see why they got the indictment."

Segal attempted to be dismissive, discoursing at some length about how even the government's own theory of the crime offered no plausible explanation for why MacDonald would have placed his pajama top on his wife's chest
before
stabbing her with the icepick.

The criminologist simply shook his head. "You can raise all that, Bernie, but this is like a fingerprint. Holy Christmas! That's very convincing stuff. Bernie, I'm not an attorney, but after seeing this my advice to you"—and here he leaned forward and gave Segal an avuncular pat on a pin-striped knee—"is to get as much as you can into the record for appeal."

Over Segal's strenuous objections, the jury visited 544 Castle Drive. On a very hot and very sunny August morning—a day as different from February 17, 1970, as a day could be—the twelve somber, silent men and women (and four alternates) filed through the musty, cramped space in which Colette and Kimberly and Kristen MacDonald had been clubbed and stabbed to death.

Jeffrey MacDonald, wearing a dark, heavy pin-striped suit despite the heat, also re
-
entered the apartment for the first time since he'd been carried out on a stretcher, nine and a half years before. He had no role to play, no function to perform, but Bernie Segal wanted to be sure that the jurors were aware that no sense of guilt prevented MacDonald from returning to the scene of the crime. Afterward, he stood outside in the company of Segal and Wade Smith. A crowd of perhaps one hundred had gathered behind barricades erected by the military police.

As the jurors re
-
entered the van that would carry them back to Raleigh, and as MacDonald prepared to return to Wade Smith's station wagon, he was surrounded by a throng of excited housewives and smiling children who called out words of encouragement. Some of the children even rushed forward to shake his hand.

Like a baseball player signing autographs on his way out of a stadium, MacDonald worked his way slowly toward the car. It was the first time in nine and a half
years that he h
ad
m
ade physical contact with a child on Castle Drive. It was nice, he said, once he was inside and the air conditioning had been turned on. He appreciated such signs of support. The children waved at him as he departed.

Back in court, the prosecution played a tape recording of the April 6, 1970, interview. This was an event which marked for more than one member of the jury the end of the presumption of innocence.

"Until I heard that," a juror would comment later, "there was no doubt in my mind about his innocence. All the evidence had just seemed confusing. But
hearing
him turned the whole thing around. I began to look at everything in a whole new way. There was something about the sound of his voice. A kind of hesitation. He just didn't sound like a man telling the truth. Besides, I don't think someone who just lost his wife the way he said he did would have sat there and complained that her kitchen drawers had been a mess."

"There was a cockiness," another said. "Arrogance when there should not have been arrogance. It was so different from what I think my own attitude would have been under the same circumstances that it just started me wondering what kind of man he really was. After the tape, I started to believe he
could
have done it. And once you start to believe that—with all the evidence the government had—it's not a big step to believing that he did it."

And then came the day on which Mildred Kassab testified. For a while she had attended every session of the trial. Then the
judge had ruled that anyone who would later be called as a witness would not be permitted in the courtroom prior to testifying. After that, Mildred spent her days in a small apartment, just a few blocks from the courthouse, that she and her husband had rented for the duration of the trial. With the shades pulled low against the heat and the steady hum of air conditioning in the background, she resumed writing in the journal she had begun years before—forcing up the memories, even the worst of them, as a means of preparing herself to testify.

"March 18th, 1964—Jeff called us. Kimmy was born! Colette's narrow hips were not meant for babies. She was torn and exhausted before they did a Cesarean, but the moment I walked into her hospital room she lifted the infant from her breast and said, 'Here, Mom. Here is one of your lost little girls.'

"I had to leave Monday morning. I had an appointment made some weeks earlier to redecorate a funeral home (Kemp's—he buried them in 1970) and had to meet workmen there.

"Jeff took me to the train in Princeton. I said, 'Take care, I'll be back on the five o'clock train tomorrow.' He looked so proud standing there: a new father. (He only stood until the train pulled out and then drove into N.Y. to meet his girlfriend.) So, the great deception began
..."

She wrote of her life after the murders.

"The hunt for her letters . . . Looking at movies and slides to hold on to our memories . . . The feverish planting of roses and more roses . . . The pictures losing their meaning and becoming only pictures . . . Holding on to a dream . . . Tiptoeing through the day to try to keep the dream alive—to no avail.

"The first couple of years—looking through the fence at the five year old and two year old children next door. Then finally 'borrowing' them for hours at a time: someone to shower with all that bottled up love. It didn't work, though. The two and five year olds became six and nine and fantasy ended . . .

"Keeping our lives separate from others because our grief contaminated those who were too close to us. Their lives must not be infected by our feelings
...

"Freddy's company moving from New York to New Jersey but I could not think of moving, of leaving them behind. Living on with Freddy coming home weekends because I couldn't move away and leave them and all of the memories stored in the rooms of that house—they were still there.

"I wanted every stitch of clothing they ever owned, down to the last torn sneaker. No one else should get to wear those poor, shabby personal things. I kept every single thing, too, until 16 months ago when we moved to a smaller house. I still have a few things from each one that can recall a day or an event we shared. A doll of Kristy's. Kimmy's little purse from the jacket she wore last, with two dollars in it. A couple of colored shells . . .

"The beauties of the world they would never see, the music they would never hear. The sunsets and the mornings, watching the bird feeder through my binoculars and seeing a pair of courting blue jays strutting and posturing beneath the rhododendron bushes with the sun just rising through the trees
...
All so achingly beautiful, and they would never know.

"I think the reason I have kept my mind all these years is because my greatest grief has been for Colette and her poor, poor life with him. Forgetting my own pain in realizing hers. I pray she knows he is being given some punishment, however small and unbalanced it is."

The next day, from the witness stand, when asked on cross-examination by Bernie Segal if it were not true that she had become somewhat "preoccupied" by the subject of her daughter's murder, Mildred Kassab replied: "Of course. Wouldn't you be?"

She also said: "I devoted six years of pregnancy to having Colette. So I can certainly devote nine years to finding her killer."

From the first days at Kappa Alpha, Jeffrey MacDonald's own mother was a highly visible presence. The nine and a half years of sorrow and fear had rendered her high-strung and gaunt, but her energy and cordiality remained undiminished.

Whether her task for the day was to drive her son to court in the morning, to take his suits out for dry-cleaning, to aid (or sometimes supervise) Segal's student assistants in the downtown office, to replenish beer, wine, and snack food supplies, or simply to listen sympathetically to the defense's account of what sort of day it had been in court (like other witnesses scheduled to testify, she was prohibited from attending trial sessions), she performed with relentless vigor and a cheerfulness which, under the circumstances, seemed almost as remarkable as her son's expressed certainty that the case could not be lost.

When her time to testify did come, Dorothy MacDonald impressed all who saw her as a warm, gracious, and courageous human being—the same impression she had made on those who had known her in Patchogue when the MacDonald children were growing up, on those with whom she'd come in contact as a frequent companion to Jeff and Colette after their marriage, and upon all those—including Franz Joseph Grebner, Victor Worheide, Brian Murtagh, and now Jim Blackburn—with whom her life had been at cross-purposes since her daughter-in-law and grandchildren had been murdered.