Book 10: Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss

Do not trust this man.

I can't imagine a time when people believed that Jeffrey MacDonald didn't kill his wife and children. In ealry 1970 Fort Bragg military personnel answered an emergency call at the home of Dr. MacDonald, a Green Beret surgeon. The MPs found an injured MacDonald and three corpses. His pregnant wife and two daughters, 5 and 2, had all been bludgeoned and stabbed multiple times. MacDonald's injuries were not life-threatening.

MacDonald claimed that four "hippies" had broken in, attacked him, and killed his family. "Pigs" was written in blood on the headboard of his bed. Only 6 months after the Manson family murders of Sharon Tate and her friends, MacDonald's story threw Fort Bragg and the neighboring community of Fayetville into a panic that lasted months. The investigation of the physical evidence was seriously bungled by military investigators and it took another 6 months for the team handling the case to look at MacDonald as a suspect.

Nearly a decade after their deaths MacDonald hired journalist Joe McGinniss to chronicle his murder trial, as well as his life up to that point. With complete access to MacDonald, the closed courtroom trial and all of the documents of the defense, McGinniss quickly became convinced that the well-respected doctor was guilty.

Fatal Vision is a chilling read not only because McGinniss is brilliant at building tension, but also because MacDonald is so clearly guilty. It was only about 30 pages in that I thought "That motherfucker killed them." The physical evidence is staggering, but MacDonald dug his own grave by being, in turn, cold, violent, sarcastic andso egomanical that it's hard to believe that he wasn't a suspect from Day One.

It is sobering to read an account of a crime committed before DNA testing and the explosion of forensic science in American popular culture. I cringed at the mistakes made by investigators; a single episode of CSI has taught me enough to know that 20 people should not run in and out of a crime scene, that garbage should not be taken away, and that investigative personnel should not be using the phone or the toilet inside a house full of physical evidence.

With hindsight, MacDonald's story was completely ridiculous. I do understand that it would have been a lot easier for people, especially for military personnel, to believe in roving bands of murderous hippies, in 1970. Now we know enough about the drug culutre of that era to realize that the Manson family murders owed much more the Manson's personal magnetism and control over weak minds, not to drug use. The LSD counterculture (MacDonald claimed that the assailants chanted "Acid id groovy") is practically quaint in the spectre of the heroin and crack industries.

MacDonald, serving threee life sentences, refuses to waver from his story. He has always manitained his innocence, and his continuing self-promotion is disgusting. McGinniss was a clever enough writer to let MacDonald hang himself in the book, by interspersing long passages of transcripted stories from MacDonald, with accounts of the crime and subsequent trials. MacDonald comes off as a sociopath and liar, hundreds of pages before court testimony, letters and diaries reveal that even his accounts of dating in high school are almost completely ficticious. All of MacDonald's stories reveal a sad need to always cast himself as a hero living a life full of challanges that he ably meets. He's a classic egomaniac.

MacDonald was convicted without the help of Fatal Vision; he specifically hired McGinniss to make him look good. Although McGinniss had insisted on editorial priviledge before contracting with MacDonald, he did not tell anyone on the defense that he was convinced MacDonald was guilty. He let them believe, for years, that he was working to clear MacDonald's name; he did this so that his access to the convict and all documents would be continued until the book was finished. After it's publication, MacDonald sued for fraud and after a mistrial and the threat of another law suit McGinniss settled out of court. This relationship is popularly cited as a case of journalistic malfeasance, as exploitative as Capote and Perry Smith.

Frankly, I don't care that McGinniss crossed the line with Jeffrey MacDonald. All I care about is that after years of appeals that went all the way to the Supreme Court, MacDonald remains in prison. It's clear that he committed a terrible crime out of anger, but also clear that his is a kind set to snap at any moment. We are all safer with him behind bars. As for McGinniss, his talent trumps the ethical question. We learn, as he learned, that MacDonald is a monster, and he deserves whatever life prison has to offer him.