Fatal Vision (9 page)

Freddy Kassab had stayed in close touch with Colette throughout her marriage. In addition to the frequent family visits, he had made it a practice to call her at least twice a week on the WATS line from his office, often taping the conversations and replaying them for Mildred at night.

In September 1969, when Jeff was transferred from Fort Benning to Fort Bragg, Freddy had driven Colette and the children to their new home. He and Mildred had returned for a Christmas visit, and it was the memory of that time which was affecting him most strongly now, as he sat in tearful silence in the white convertible on Castle Drive.

He remembered, in particular, Christmas morning. He had risen early, as was his custom, and at about 6
a.m
., as he had been making coffee in the kitchen, Jeff had come out of the bedroom and had said, "I've got a surprise for the kids and I want you to come down and take a look."

The two of them had dressed quickly and quietly and had driven a few miles to the stable which housed the pony Jeff had bought. Returning to the apartment, Jeff had told Colette that he'd ordered a gift for the children but that the department store had fouled it up. If they would all get in the car, however, he could at least take them down and show it to them in the window.

They had started down Bragg Boulevard toward Fayetteville, but had quickly turned off on a side road. Colette had asked why. Jeff had been vague, saying, "Well, I've got to stop here and pick something up."

Then they reached the corral and got out of the car and Jeff said, "I want you to see something over here," and he and Freddy led them over and showed them the pony.

For years, Jeff and Colette had told friends that their dream was to someday have a farm in Connecticut, with five children, horses, and lots of dogs. Jeff would practice at a university hospital—probably Yale—and Colette would have her teaching certificate. This Christmas pony was the first tangible step— other than the two children, with the third due in July—toward that goal.

Colette had been so happy, Freddy Kassab recalled, that it had taken her almost half an hour to stop crying.

Residents of Castle Drive were now beginning to emerge from their apartments, some in bathrobes, just bending over to pick up the Sunday paper from the stoop. It would soon be time for Freddy Kassab to return to his grieving wife. But he lingered just a few minutes longer in front of 544 Castle Drive. This was the last place he had seen Colette and Kimberly and Kristen alive and it seemed as close as he would ever be to them again.

The bodies were flown north at 1
p.m
. Sunday, in the cargo hold of the Piedmont Airlines plane on which Freddy and Mildred Kassab and Jeffrey MacDonald's mother rode.

Five days earlier they had flown down together, their nervous, apprehensive curiosity gradually giving way to a stifling, overwhelming sense of dread.

Now, as they flew back in silence, there remained nothing to dread. The worst had happened—the worst that could ever happen to anyone—and its effects would govern the remainder of their lives.

Mildred Kassab stared out the window of the plane. The one thought that tormented her above all others was a recollection of her final conversation with Colette.

She had called from Long Island late Sunday afternoon—less than thirty-six hours before Colette's death. Jeff had been working his twenty-four-hour shift at Hamlet Hospital, and Colette, five months pregnant, had been stuck without a car, in February, in the small, cramped apartment on the Southern military base, with her two children bored and restless and confined to the apartment by the rain.

Colette had asked if she could bring Kimberly and Kristen north for a visit. Mildred had looked out at the backyard, where snow was falling. In the fall, the Kassabs had begun construction of a swimming pool. When completed, they felt, it would be something that the children coul
d enjoy for years to come. Now,
however, in mid-February, it was just a deep hole in the ground, surrounded by tall piles of slippery, snow-covered dirt. Mildred had thought that it might pose a hazard for Kimberly and Kristen. So instead of saying, "Catch the first flight tomorrow,'' she had responded with words that would haunt her the rest of her life. "Wait until spring," she had said.

Now, on the plane, she was suddenly struck by the unwelcome thought that Colette had not had to wait until spring after all. And that she and the children were coming north not for a visit, but to stay.

The Voice of Jeffrey MacDonald

Through that year, my freshman year at Princeton, Colette clearly became the love of my life. There was no question about it. That was the year our love flowered.

I remember your heart would just leap into your throat at a phone call or when you'd see her return address on a letter and you would joyously finish school on a Friday at noon and start hitchhiking or taking the bus up to Skidmore.

It was an enormously exciting time but it was also a delicate time because Colette was not at all like my prior girlfriends. She was very delightful and warm but yet she had this little bit of aloofness about her which some people took to mean snottiness, but it was never that, it wasn't that at all. If anything, it was timidity on her part. As I got to know her well and we fell in love and whatnot, I realized that it wasn't from a real aloofness, but more from a hesitancy and a slight fear of the world in general.

Basically, she was a very shy person without too much self-confidence. She did not at all have the sort of widespread contact that I enjoyed or my brother or my sister enjoyed, and she kind of leaned on my self-confidence and we had—that was part of our relationship: she liked my leadership and I liked her vulnerability and femininity.

She was always questioning and bright and intuitive and alert, but she had this—sort of an underlying anxiety at all times—very soft and feminine and attractive in a way—and it was nice, sort of, to be her—her boyfriend and her protector.

We were writing each
other constantly. I remember I
wrote her a long, urn, poem, several pages in length, and she thought it was extremely romantic. I think, probably, in retrospect, it was one of the worst things ever written. It was terrible. It was very sophomoric. But I remember that she kept it and—it was, you know, a sophomoric thing to do, but we were young and in love.

I was pretty active in my pursuit. You know, it was okay for me to go to New York and possibly pick up a girl, or even have Penny Wells down on a weekend, but it wasn't special anymore. There was nothing neat about that. The specialness was Colette.

She said she had occasional other dates and I think that's true. As a matter of fact, L remember one specific weekend during the winter. I called her and she apologized—you know, I was going to go up to see her on short notice—and she apologized profusely because she had a blind date arranged by her roommate.

The blind date came over from Dartmouth for the weekend, and I remember spending the whole time kind of jealous and angry and hurt, and waiting all through the week for a letter, which I got about Friday of the following week, in which she said the weekend was a bust.

Whether that was a transparent lie or not, it certainly lifted my
spirits. I remember, like, refal
ling in love when I got the letter saying that her weekend with the blind date was a disaster, the guy from Dartmouth was a quote, animal, unquote, which was what we all kidded everyone from Dartmouth about being.

I remember Thanksgiving of that freshman year. Colette was not going to come down, which seemed very strange, and she told me that it was because of funds. She didn't have the funds to come down. And I remember thinking ^ how weird that was, with Freddy and Mildred living in such, you know, supposed splendor in Greenwich Village.

And I know this sounds ridiculous and self-serving, but it's not. I sent her something like thirty dollars or forty dollars for her bus ticket down to New York. Now I know it sounds ridiculous, but I remember writing to her and sending her either, like, two twenty-dollar bills or a forty-dollar check, and told her don't be absurd, you know, come down for Thanksgiving, it would be very lonely for you to be up there at Skidmore.

And I remember her calling me and thanking me, and then she invited me in. Now, I wasn't there the whole weekend, I don't remember exactly how long, but I stayed overnight at the apartment in Greenwich Village, on Washington Square, and the things that I remember most were two things.

One was the walk through the Village, because it was one of those beautiful fall days and we were holding hands and we were very much in love, and we stopped at an outdoor cafe, and we went through the park at the end of Fifth Avenue and watched the organ grinders and the, the, you know, ah, the people at the time when there were a lot of guitar players, urn, and we thought, you know, that Greenwich Village was super, um, that it was neat and artsy-craftsy, et cetera, cetera, and we had a very, like, lovely day.

I also remember that night, the nice dinner we had at Freddy and Mildred's apartment. Mildred was a good cook and the dinners were always a little more formal than I was used to at my house. My house was very casual.

At Mildred's, you know, everyone sat in certain places and you stood behind a chair until the table was all ready to go and then we all sat down and certain, ah, ceremony was always performed with the wine, and, ah, it was much more formal.

We kind of enjoyed it. Colette and I were learning from it and it seemed very chic, although we used to occasionally make light of it and think that Freddy and Mildred were blowhards about it, that they were a little pretentious.

But the other thing I remember about that night is when Mildred and Freddy went to bed, Colette and I sat up. I was sleeping on the couch in the living room. It was a long, I believe, green couch which they'd had for a long time. It was a very expensive couch. Colette had set up the bed— you know, set up the sheet and the pillowcases and the pillow and blanket and stuff, and we were sitting out there talking and we began kissing and ah, making out, as it were, um, and Colette, ah, got a little flustered and said that she really shouldn't be doing this at home.

She didn't want Freddy walking out or Mildred walking out and, you know, I said fine and she went to bed, and I remember it was very strange because this was a little atypical of Colette: she came out about twenty minutes later and lay down on the couch with me, very quietly and a little apprehensively, and we began kissing and—and caressing each other.

We ended up making love, and I remember it was one of those exquisite times where we were trying to be so incredibly quiet, and it was one of those times that Colette, ah—it was sort of the excitement of doing something, I guess, ah, that we shouldn't have been doing, and in a place where we shouldn't have been doing it, and the threat of Mildred and Freddy walking out at any moment, but it was more exciting than even usual, and she was sort of like giving herself to me by coming out of her room and getting into bed with me, and it was the first time that this had ever really happened because we had just recently begun making love, and we—it was a—incredible, very exciting session. We talked about this for years afterwards, in fact, as one of our most memorable lovemaking sessions.

We never openly discussed whether she or I had slept with anyone else. She always avoided the subject of Penny Wells. She was not really jealous of Penny. She always felt, like, unthreatened by her, but she didn't see any need to discuss it. I think she wondered what the attraction was between Penny and I, but we never talked about it. I never told her that we'd had a tremendous physical thing going and, you know, we never discussed it. We sort of avoided those topics.

We did talk about her feelings for Dean. Never about potential lovemaking with Dean. I'm not sure if she made love with Dean Chamberlain or not. My strong impression is that she didn't. She always implied that in conversation. We never talked—I never said to her, "Were you a virgin?" I never said to her: "Did you ever make love to Dean Chamberlain?" It always seemed like sort of a too-jealous thing to ask, and too immature, and I—we always tried to respect each other more than that. She never, for instance, said to me: "Did you make love with Penny Wells?" I think we tried to be honest with each other and so we skirted that type of question.

We did make love in some wild places, though. I remember one Saturday morning I was up seeing her—as a matter of fact, I believe it was Happy Pappy weekend at Skidmore, and Freddy Kassab did not go up, I went up. I believe this episode was Happy Pappy weekend. I may be incorrect. Happy Pappy weekend possibly was during the winter.

But in any case, on Sa
turday morning—it may have been
a later weekend in the spring, because it was warm—she took me out to the Saratoga racetrack. They were either not running or the horses were running later in the day, but there were workouts going on at the track. In other words, there were grooms working horses and I remember there were, oh, you know, probably fifty or a hundred people wandering around the stands, and there were people cleaning up. There were people mowing the lawn and doing the hedges and stuff like that, so the horses must have been in session.