Jeffrey R. MacDonald

• 1. Introduction

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  At 3:42 in the morning on the 17th of February 1970, a dispatcher at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, picked up a call from Jeffrey R. MacDonald, an Army physician with the Special Forces. His voice was faint. "Help! Five forty-four Castle Drive! Stabbing!... Five forty-four Castle Drive! Stabbing! Hurry!" Then the operator heard the receiver clatter against a wall or a floor, and the line went quiet.

  What the responders found at that address would split opinion for decades. MacDonald has always said that four intruders, three men and a woman, came through an unlocked back door. Prosecutors and appeals courts have instead pointed to strong physical evidence of his guilt.

  Who was this young doctor with a Princeton scholarship and a bright future? What did investigators see in that apartment that made them doubt him almost at once? And how did one night of violence turn into one of the most litigated murder cases in American criminal history?

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• 2. From Queens to Chicago

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  Jeffrey MacDonald was born in Jamaica, Queens, the second of three children of Robert and Dorothy MacDonald, whose maiden name was Perry. The family was poor and raised him on Long Island. His father was never violent toward his wife or children, but he demanded obedience and achievement from all of them.

  At Patchogue-Medford High School, the son delivered. He became president of the student council, and classmates voted him both "most popular" and "most likely to succeed." He was also crowned king of the senior prom.

  Towards the end of eighth grade, he noticed Colette Kathryn Stevenson, who was born on the 10th of May 1943. By his own later recollection, she was walking down a school hallway with her best friend, and he found her the more attractive of the two. Two weeks later they began talking, and he asked her to the movies. In ninth grade, he said, they fell in love while holding hands on the balcony of the Rialto Theater in Patchogue, watching A Summer Place. He remembered that whenever either of them heard its theme song on the radio, one of them would turn it up. The following summer, on Fire Island, Colette announced that the romance was over. He later dated a girl named Penny Wells.

  His grades earned him a three-year scholarship to Princeton University, where he enrolled as a premedical student in 1962. By his second year he and Wells had separated, and he picked up again with Colette, then a freshman at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs. He remembered her as shy, with a "slight fear of the world in general." He came to think of himself as her protector as well as her boyfriend. They exchanged letters, and he often hitchhiked to Skidmore to spend weekends with her.

  In August 1963 he learned that Colette was pregnant. He was dating other women at the time, but he resolved to marry her, and she left college to raise the child. With her family's consent, they wed in New York City on the 14th of September. One hundred guests attended, the reception was held at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and the couple honeymooned on Cape Cod. Their first daughter, Kimberley Kathryn, was born on the 18th of April 1964.

  After Princeton, MacDonald worked briefly as a construction supervisor. In the summer of 1965 he moved his wife and child to Chicago, where Northwestern University Medical School had accepted him. They lived in a small one-bedroom apartment. Colette kept the household running while he studied and took a string of part-time jobs. The next year the family moved to a middle-class neighborhood, and a second daughter, Kristen Jean, was born on the 8th of May 1967.

  He graduated in 1968, and the family settled in Bergenfield, New Jersey, while he served a one-year internship in thoracic surgery at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. He later called it "a horrendous year" for both himself and Colette. He often worked 36 hours at a stretch and then had only 12 hours at home, so he was exhausted and saw little of his wife and daughters. Before he joined the Army, the couple took a vacation in Aruba.

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• 3. A Green Beret Doctor

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  The Army commissioned MacDonald on the 28th of June 1969 and sent him to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, for a six-week basic course for physicians. There he volunteered for the Special Forces, the Green Berets. Paratrooper training at Fort Benning, Georgia, followed. He had joined knowing that Vietnam might claim him. He soon learned, however, that a Green Beret doctor was unlikely to be sent overseas.

  In late August he reported to the 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as the group's surgeon. His wife and daughters joined him, and the family lived at 544 Castle Drive. This was a section of the base reserved for married officers and watched over by military police. The couple grew popular with their neighbors, though they were known to argue now and then.

  Colette had completed two years of college study and hoped to earn a bachelor's degree in English literature and teach part-time. The girls had sharply different personalities. Kimberley was feminine, intelligent, and shy. Kristen was a boisterous tomboy who would "run over and crack someone" if she saw her older sister being bullied.

  On the 10th of December, the 3rd Special Forces Group was deactivated. MacDonald moved within the base to the 6th Special Forces Group (Airborne), where he served as a preventive medical officer.

  Shortly before Christmas 1969, Colette was about three months pregnant with their third child and first son. MacDonald bought his daughters a Shetland pony, expecting the family to move soon to a farm in Connecticut. He told no one. On Christmas Day he and his stepfather-in-law drove the family to the stable as a surprise, and the girls named the pony Trooper. That same month, Colette wrote to college acquaintances that she had never been so normal or happy. She said the baby was due in July and that her family would then be complete.

  By 1970 MacDonald held the rank of captain. Once his tour of duty ended, he planned to pursue advanced medical training at Yale University.

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• 4. Castle Drive

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  At about 5:45 on the evening of the 16th of February 1970, MacDonald and his daughters came home from a trip to feed and ride Trooper. He showered and put on an old pair of blue pajamas. After supper, Colette left for an evening teaching class at the North Carolina University extension at Fort Bragg. By his account, he let the girls ride on his back as if he were the pony, then put Kristen to bed around 7 p.m. He slept for an hour, watched Laugh-In with Kimberley, her favorite show, and saw her off to bed. Colette returned at 9:40 p.m. The couple watched television on the couch, and she went to bed partway through The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. MacDonald said he later fell asleep in the living room.

  Military police reached Castle Drive within ten minutes of his call, expecting a domestic disturbance. The front door was closed and locked, and the house was dark. Circling to the rear, a sergeant found the screen door shut but unlocked and the back door wide open. He stepped into the master bedroom, then ran toward the front of the house shouting, "Tell them to get Womack, ASAP!"

  Colette lay on the bedroom floor. She had been clubbed repeatedly, and both forearms were broken. The pathologist judged these injuries were likely suffered as she raised her arms to protect her face. She had been stabbed 21 times in the chest with an ice pick and 16 times in the neck and chest with a knife. A torn, bloodied pajama top lay on her chest, and a paring knife lay beside her. Jeffrey MacDonald was face-down next to her, alive and wounded, with his head on her chest and an arm around her neck. As the soldiers approached, he whispered, "Check my kids! I heard my kids crying!"

  Five-year-old Kimberley was in her bed. She had been bludgeoned about the head and body and stabbed in the neck between eight and ten times. Her skull was fractured, and one wound to her face had pushed her cheekbone through the skin. Across the hallway, two-year-old Kristen lay in her own bed with a baby bottle near her mouth. She had been stabbed 33 times with a knife and 15 times with an ice pick. Two of the knife wounds reached her heart, and the injuries to her hands looked like defense wounds. On the headboard of the marital bed, someone had written the word "PIG" in eight-inch capital letters. The blood used was later identified as Colette's.

  Revived on the spot, MacDonald sat up and cried out, "Jesus Christ! Look at my wife! I'm gonna kill those goddamned acid heads!" As he was carried out on a stretcher, he shouted, "Let me see my kids!"

  At Womack Army Medical Center, doctors found that his wounds were far fewer and milder than those of his family. He had cuts, bruises, and fingernail scratches on his face and chest, none needing stitches, plus a mild concussion. He also had a single stab wound between two ribs on his right side. A staff surgeon called it "clean, small, sharp" and five-eighths of an inch deep. It had partly collapsed his lung. He was discharged after nine days.

  Questioned by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, or CID, MacDonald said he had washed the dinner dishes around 2:00 a.m. and gone to bed. Kristen had wet his side of the mattress, so he carried her to her own bed. Not wanting to wake Colette to change the sheets, he took a blanket from Kristen's room and slept on the living room couch.

  He said screams woke him, along with Colette's cry: "Jeff! Jeff! Help! Why are they doing this to me?" As he rose, three men attacked him, one black and two white. The shorter white man wore lightweight gloves, possibly surgical ones. A fourth intruder, a white woman with long blonde hair, possibly a wig, stood nearby. She wore high-heeled, knee-high boots and a white floppy hat, and she held a lit candle. She chanted, "Acid is groovy, kill the pigs!" and shouted, "Hit 'em again!" as the men swung a club and an ice pick.

  MacDonald said his pajama top was pulled over his head to his wrists, and he used it to fend off the ice pick. Eventually he was knocked out at the living room end of the hallway. When he woke, the intruders were gone. He crawled from room to room, trying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on each daughter, and then found his wife. He pulled a small paring knife from her chest and tossed it aside. He could find no pulse, so he covered her with his pajama jacket and phoned for help.

  Within minutes, military police were told to check the occupants of vehicles in and around Fort Bragg. They were looking for two white men, a black man, and a blonde woman in a floppy hat. They found none, and the search was abandoned by 6:00 a.m.

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• 5. What the Evidence Showed

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  Shortly after daylight on the 17th of February, investigators found the weapons just outside the back door. They were an Old Hickory kitchen knife, an ice pick, and a 31-inch piece of lumber stained with blood and caught with two blue threads. All three came from the MacDonald house, and all had been wiped clean of fingerprints. MacDonald later said he had never seen them before.

  The Army CID soon stopped believing his story. Although he was trained in unarmed combat, the living room showed few signs of the fight he described. A coffee table lay on its side over a pile of magazines, and a plant had fallen to the floor. Neighbors had heard no struggle that night, but they had heard Colette shouting in a loud and angry voice. Their 16-year-old daughter, who sometimes babysat for the family, told investigators the couple had seemed quiet and indifferent toward each other in the month before the murders. By the 23rd of February, Colonel Robert Kriwanek, the Fort Bragg provost marshal, had advised the FBI to stop searching for the four intruders.

  Fibers told a different story from MacDonald's. None from his torn pajama top lay in the living room, where he said the garment was ripped. They lay under Colette's body and in both girls' bedrooms, and one was found under Kristen's fingernail. Bloodstained splinters that likely came from the lumber turned up in all three bedrooms, but not in the room where he said he was attacked. A fragment of skin was recovered from beneath one of Colette's fingernails, though it was later lost. Neither telephone he said he had used showed any blood or fingerprints. Beneath the headboard lay the bloodstained tip of a surgical glove, identical in composition to a medical supply MacDonald kept in the family kitchen.

  It had rained that night, and MacDonald said the female intruder's boots were "all wet," with rainwater "just dripping off them." Yet the only footprint at the scene was a bloody bare one in Kristen's bedroom, leading from her bed toward the doorway.

  By mid-March, lab results on the blood, hair, and fibers deepened the doubt. Kimberley's blood was on the pajama top, although MacDonald said he had not been wearing it in her room. His own blood showed up in quantity in only two places: in front of the kitchen cabinet that held the rubber gloves, and on the right side of the hallway bathroom sink. Colette's blood was found in Kristen's room, even though the three victims lay in separate rooms. That suggested the attacks happened separately. Blood evidence also showed that Kimberley had been attacked as she entered the master bedroom. Investigators asked why intruders would carry her back to her own bed to continue. Because the four family members had different blood types, the lab could follow each person's movements through the apartment.

  From this, investigators built a reconstruction. They theorized that an argument began in the master bedroom, perhaps over Kristen wetting his side of the bed or over his adultery. They thought Colette probably struck him on the forehead with a hairbrush, leaving a mark that did not break the skin. In their scenario he answered with his fists and then with the lumber. Kimberley, whose blood and brain serum lay in the bedroom doorway, may have walked in and been struck, possibly by accident. Believing Colette dead, he carried Kimberley to her room and stabbed her. Then he went to Kristen's room with the club, intending to remove the last witness. Colette, whose blood was on Kristen's bedcovers and on a wall of that room, apparently regained consciousness and threw herself over her younger daughter. After killing them both, he wrapped Colette in a sheet and carried her to the master bedroom.

  Investigators then theorized about a cover-up inspired by the March 1970 issue of Esquire, found in the living room, which carried an article on the Manson Family murders. Wearing surgical gloves from the kitchen closet, he wrote "PIG" in Colette's blood, laid the torn pajama top over her, and stabbed through it with the ice pick. He wiped the weapons and dropped them near the back door. Finally, he took a scalpel blade from the supply closet and stabbed himself once in the chest beside the bathroom sink. He disposed of the gloves, phoned for an ambulance, and lay down next to Colette to wait.

  That whole scenario rested on one assumption: that the four people military police found were the only ones in the house.

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• 6. The Army Hearing

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  On the 6th of April 1970, Army investigators cautioned MacDonald and then interrogated him. He repeated his story of four intruders, a struggle, a glimpse of "the top of some boots," and waking in the hallway with the symptoms of a collapsed lung. Midway through, CID investigator William Ivory asked, "You didn't do it yourself, did you?" MacDonald denied it. He pointed to his puncture wound and said he had been forced to persuade hospital doctors to insert a chest tube.

  The questioning turned to the physical evidence. MacDonald denied that any weapon came from his home, although the lumber matched wood from Kimberley's closet. Investigator Robert Shaw said four intruders on a killing frenzy would normally leave "busted furniture and broken mirrors and bashed-in walls." MacDonald had no plausible explanation for the tilted table and the fallen plant. After a break, investigator Franz Grebner listed more discrepancies and said repeatedly that the facts pointed to a staged crime scene. MacDonald replied that Grebner had "run out of ideas" and was trying to frame him to keep a 100% solved homicide rate. He had readily agreed to a polygraph test. Within ten minutes of the interview ending, he phoned to say he had changed his mind.

  That evening he was relieved of duty and placed under restriction. An Army lawyer was assigned the next day. On the 10th of April, at his mother's suggestion, he instead hired a flamboyant civilian attorney named Bernard Segal. On the 1st of May the Army charged him with three counts of murder. The same day he wrote to Colette's mother and stepfather, insisting he was innocent and predicting the Army would "never admit" its error.

  An Army hearing under Article 32, overseen by Colonel Warren Rock, opened on the 6th of July 1970 and ran until September. Segal went on the attack. He argued that the CID had "trampled all over" the crime scene and wiped out traces the intruders might have left. He said investigators had lost a thread from under Kimberley's nail, MacDonald's pajama trousers, four torn tips of surgical gloves from the master bedroom, and the skin from beneath Colette's fingernail. Testimony showed that an ambulance driver had stolen MacDonald's wallet from the living room. A pathologist admitted he had failed to take the children's fingerprints for comparison.

  The first defense witness, military policeman Kenneth Mica, said that on his way to the call he had seen a blonde woman in a wide-brimmed hat on a street corner about half a mile from the MacDonald home. He called the sighting unusual, given the hour and the weather. He also said an ambulance driver had set the tilted flower pot upright, against instructions. Colonel Rock himself testified that he had visited the scene and tipped the coffee table over. It struck a rocking chair and came to rest on its edge. He added that if investigators found no muddy prints from the alleged intruders, they had also found none from the many police and civilians who walked through the house.

  In August, a deliveryman named William Posey approached Segal with a name for the blonde woman. He suggested she might be Helena Werle Stoeckley, a 17-year-old local drug addict and police informant. Posey said that at about 4:00 a.m. on the morning of the murders, Stoeckley sat in a car outside her apartment with two or three young men. He said she stopped wearing her boots and floppy hat after the 17th of February and dressed in black on the days of the funerals. She told him she did not remember what she had done that night. Months later, he said, she told him she and her boyfriend could not marry until "we go out and kill some more people."

  Investigators found Stoeckley, and her answers were vague and contradictory. She recalled being with her boyfriend, Gregory Mitchell, on the night of the 16th and going "out for a ride," "driving aimlessly" in the early hours. She said she was "so far out" on mescaline that she could not tell whether she had been at the house. Witnesses said she had admitted involvement, and several recalled her wearing clothes like those MacDonald described. Even so, she was not subpoenaed.

  MacDonald himself testified for three days in mid-August, and parts of his account differed from what he had told investigators in April. He now said he had moved Colette's body, finding her "a little bit propped up against a chair" before he "just sort of laid her flat." He said he had "sort of rinsed off" his hands in the bathroom. He allowed that he "may have" washed them in the kitchen sink too, which could explain the type B blood found there. He also described several puncture wounds and bumps that he said had healed without treatment, none of which appeared in the medical reports. He admitted two affairs but insisted Colette never knew. A clinical psychologist then described tests that showed an extraordinary lack of anxiety, depression, and anger over his loss. The psychologist said MacDonald could "muster massive denial or repression."

  On the 13th of October 1970, Colonel Rock recommended that the charges be dismissed for insufficient evidence. He said he believed there was no truth in them and that the killers were insane or on drugs. He urged civilian authorities to investigate Stoeckley further. This displeased Colonel Kriwanek. Later that month all charges were formally dismissed, but a new CID investigation began in February 1971, with MacDonald still a suspect.

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• 7. Kassab and the Grand Jury

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  On the 15th of December 1970, MacDonald appeared on The Dick Cavett Show and came across as flippant as he complained about the Army's focus on him. He claimed he had suffered 23 wounds, some of them potentially fatal. Watching was Alfred Kassab, Colette's stepfather. Kassab had at first backed his stepson-in-law, and he and his wife, Mildred, had testified for him at the Army hearing. "My wife and I feel very strongly about Captain MacDonald's innocence," they told the press. "After all, it was our daughter and two grandchildren who were butchered."

  By November 1970, though, Kassab had grown uneasy. MacDonald kept dodging his requests for a copy of the 2,000-page hearing transcript. To discourage him, MacDonald claimed he and some Army colleagues had tracked down, tortured, and killed one of the four intruders. Then came the Cavett appearance, just days after MacDonald had hand-delivered 500 copies of an eleven-page letter to members of Congress asking for a new investigation. The Kassabs turned against him publicly.

  In February 1971 Kassab finally obtained the transcript from the Army. He studied it again and again and decided it was a "tissue of lies" that contradicted the known facts. One example stood out. MacDonald claimed life-threatening injuries, including ten ice pick wounds, yet Kassab had visited him in the hospital less than 18 hours after the attack. He had found him sitting up in bed, eating a meal, with very little bandaging. Hospital records confirmed there had been no such wounds. Kassab also learned that MacDonald had begun dating a young woman who worked at Fort Bragg within weeks of the murders. He discovered, too, that by 1969 MacDonald had renewed his relationship with Penny Wells. In March 1971, with the help of Colonel Kriwanek and other investigators, Kassab spent hours at the crime scene comparing the evidence with MacDonald's testimony. He left convinced of MacDonald's guilt and resolved to spend his life bringing him to justice.

  MacDonald received an honorable discharge from the Army in December. He worked briefly as a doctor in New York City, then moved to Long Beach, California, in July 1971 to put the past behind him. He took a post as an emergency room physician at St. Mary Medical Center. He also became an instructor at the UCLA medical school, medical director of the Long Beach Grand Prix, and a lecturer on recognizing and treating child abuse. He helped develop a national CPR training program. He lived in a $350,000 condominium in Huntington Beach and had a promiscuous lifestyle until the late 1970s, when he formed a relationship with a 22-year-old airline stewardess named Candy Kramer. In those years he had a large circle of supporters.

  Kassab's path to a trial was blocked. The Army's investigation was over, so his only route was a citizen's complaint through the Justice Department. He filed one in early 1972, but because MacDonald had been discharged by then, it was declared moot. The FBI declined the case. For two years it sat in limbo at the Justice Department. On the 30th of April 1974, the Kassabs, their attorney Richard Cahn, and CID agent Peter Kearns presented a new complaint to Chief District Court Judge Algernon Butler. They asked him to convene a grand jury. The next month, Justice Department attorney Victor Woerheide ruled the case worth prosecuting.

  The grand jury met on the 12th of August 1974 before Judge Franklin Dupree in Raleigh, North Carolina, and heard 75 witnesses. MacDonald went first and testified for five days. He admitted that, despite promising in 1970 to pursue every legal avenue and hire investigators, he had not done so. He said the false stories he had told the Kassabs and the media were meant to placate his in-laws. He claimed he had suffered more stab wounds than his records show and blamed medical malpractice. Asked to take a polygraph or sodium amytal test, he read out a statement from his lawyers declining.

  The surgeons who treated him at Womack testified that, apart from his punctured lung, he was "not in any great danger, medically." A reporter who had covered the Army hearing said LSD users seldom turn violent, whereas amphetamine users often do. Psychiatrist Bruce Bailey described MacDonald as controlling and "extremely dependent on what others thought of him." He said MacDonald found no mental disorder in him, but he could not rule out a killing under extreme stress. FBI crime laboratory chemist Paul Stombaugh testified that every cut in the clothing other than the pajama top came from the Old Hickory knife, not the paring knife MacDonald said he pulled from Colette's chest. A single hair in Colette's right palm turned out to be her own, not a blonde intruder's.

  MacDonald returned on the 21st of January 1975, and this time he was arrogant and sarcastic. Pressed on how his blood and Colette's blood had both reached a sheet from Kristen's room, he shouted, "I have no idea! I don't even know what crap you're trying to feed me!" He refused to discuss the results of a private polygraph he had taken in 1970.

  On the 24th of January 1975, the grand jury indicted him on three counts of murder. He was arrested in California within the hour. On the 31st of January, friends and colleagues raised his $100,000 bail. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment on the 23rd of May. Judge Dupree rejected his lawyers' double jeopardy and speedy trial arguments and kept a trial date of the 18th of August 1975. But the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the proceedings on the 15th of August. On the 23rd of January 1976, it ordered the indictment dismissed on speedy trial grounds. MacDonald later said he wept "tears of relief rather than tears of joy" and went home to a "big celebration."

  The Government appealed. On the 1st of May 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Circuit had erred in dismissing the indictment before trial. Alfred Kassab told the press it had been "a tremendous personal pressure to have someone running around that you are convinced killed your daughter and grandchildren." On the 27th of October, the Fourth Circuit rejected MacDonald's double jeopardy argument, and the Supreme Court declined to review that ruling on the 19th of March 1979.

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• 8. The Raleigh Trial

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  Jury selection began in Raleigh on the 16th of July 1979. Judge Dupree presided, and Bernard Segal and Wade Smith defended MacDonald against prosecutors James Blackburn and Brian Murtagh. The defense expected an acquittal, but ruling after ruling went against it. Dupree refused to admit a 1979 psychiatric evaluation suggesting a man like MacDonald was highly unlikely to kill his family. He said that without an insanity plea he did not want the trial clogged with conflicting psychiatric experts. He also refused to suppress the pajama top. On the first day he allowed the March 1970 Esquire with its Manson article into evidence. He did not, however, allow the Army hearing transcripts, which carried military investigators' opinions that MacDonald had killed in a drug-induced rage.

  In his opening statement on the 19th of July, Blackburn promised both physical and circumstantial evidence. He told the jurors that one person, "not two, three, four or more," killed Colette, Kimberley, and Kristen, and that person was the defendant. For the defense, Wade Smith stressed that nine years had passed. He said "Jeff" had worked to rebuild his life while others would not let him forget, and he urged the jurors to end his ordeal.

  On the 7th of August the prosecution called Paul Stombaugh. He showed the jury that MacDonald's pajama top had been pierced by 48 small, smooth, cylindrical holes after it was laid on Colette's chest. Such clean holes, he said, required the cloth to be stationary, which was unlikely if MacDonald had wrapped it around his hands to ward off blows. Folded the way the crime scene photographs showed, the garment could have been pierced in all 48 places by just 21 thrusts in an identical pattern. Segal raised his voice in a harsh cross-examination, but Stombaugh held firm.

  The jury also heard the audio tape of the April 1970 interrogation, played right after they returned from visiting the still-intact apartment. They heard MacDonald recite the murders in a flat, indifferent voice, then grow angry, defensive, and emotional when investigators suggested he was the killer. He asked why he would murder a family he loved, with "everything going for him," for no reason. When investigators confronted him with his affairs, he murmured, "Oh... you guys are more thorough than I thought."

  The prosecution had a weakness of its own: no obvious motive. MacDonald had no history of violence or abuse toward his family. The defense also argued that the scene had been so compromised that evidence was destroyed, lost, or never collected. It called character witnesses and a forensic expert named James Thornton. Thornton said he had stabbed a pajama top wrapped around a ham while an assistant moved it back and forth. He got clean cylindrical holes with no tearing. Murtagh and Blackburn answered with an impromptu re-enactment. Murtagh wrapped a pajama top of the same material around his hands while Blackburn swung the ice pick at him. The holes came out jagged and elongated, and Murtagh got a small wound on his right arm. MacDonald had no defensive wounds on his arms or hands. In the room where he claimed to have fought for his life, investigators had found only a small smear of blood on the Esquire and a speck on his spectacles.

  One of the last defense witnesses was Helena Stoeckley. Segal spoke with her privately for more than two hours, hoping she would confess and end MacDonald's years of "suffering unjustly." He promised her immunity because the statute of limitations had expired. She kept saying she could not help him, and she denied ever seeing MacDonald. Under oath, she denied any part in the murders. She said her heavy drug use made it impossible to recall where she was that night, and that the night of the 16th and the 17th of February 1970 was "by no means" the first or last she could not account for. On the 20th of August, Dupree refused to let the jury hear from witnesses to whom she had allegedly confessed.

  MacDonald testified on the 23rd and the 24th of August. Under Segal's questions he described his family. "We shared almost everything... we were all friends," he said. He told the jury he never remarried because he could not forget them. He said he worked up to eighty hours a week because it was "easier than sitting and thinking."

  On cross-examination the next day, Blackburn laid out the physical evidence that contradicted MacDonald's account. He often began with the words, "Dr. MacDonald. Should the jury find from the evidence..." MacDonald could not explain how the club came from a mattress slat in Kimberley's bed. He said there "may have been" wood in the utility room. He added that the club that hit him felt "sort of smooth" and could have been a baseball bat. Blackburn also showed that his story about moving Colette's body had shifted once he learned of the fibers under her. Segal objected repeatedly, calling the contrasts misleading, and was mostly overruled.

  In closing, Blackburn contrasted the injuries to Colette and the girls with the one serious wound MacDonald suffered. He said a struggle had happened in that house, but between "only one white male and one white female." Of the character witnesses, he said that if the evidence proved guilt, the state did not have to show "he is the sort of person that could have done it." He ended with the words, "things do not lie. But I suggest that people can, and do." Segal spoke for over three hours, calling the case a "campaign of persecution" and a "house built on sand." Smith pressed the missing motive. "It makes no sense. There is no motive," he said. In rebuttal, Blackburn argued that the crime came about because "events overtook themselves too fast." Dupree then told the jurors they could find MacDonald not guilty, guilty of first-degree murder, or guilty of second-degree murder on each count.

  Shortly after 4:00 p.m. on the 29th of August 1979, after six and a half hours of deliberation, the jury returned its verdicts. It convicted MacDonald of first-degree murder in Kristen's death and second-degree murder in the deaths of Colette and Kimberley. Four jurors wept. MacDonald's mother ran from the courtroom wailing. MacDonald showed almost no emotion. Dupree imposed three consecutive life sentences and revoked bail. MacDonald went first to a jail in Butner and then to the Federal Correctional Institution at Terminal Island, California.

  Alfred Kassab phoned his lawyer, Richard Cahn, right after the verdict. "Hi, Dick, I just got what I wanted. Three life sentences," he said. He and his wife told reporters, "Now, we can rest in peace." MacDonald appealed the bail revocation, asking to be freed while his appeal went forward. Today he is held at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland.

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