Fatal Justice:Reinvestigating the MacDonald Murders

"A devastating rebuttal to Fatal Vision."
Boston Phoenix
"Fortunately, two extremely dedicated journalists did the unthinkable."
Celia Farber, SPIN Magazine
"Potter and Bost have done something rare and truly impressive."
Errol Morris, Director of "The Thin Blue Line"

A New Book  Asks an Old Question:

Did Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald really murder his wife and two daughters at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1970?

A new update will follow an important pending court decision.

Joe McGinniss: "I'm not convinced that it actually happened."

Fourteen years ago, Joe McGinniss's best-selling book, Fatal Vision, depicted MacDonald as guilty. McGinniss theorized that MacDonald had abused diet pills, had suffered a violent amphetamine psychosis, and in a fit of rage, had murdered his family because one of the children wet the bed. The book and the pursuant movie convinced millions that this actually occurred.  Yet, in a sworn deposition on October 30, 1986, McGinniss, incredibly, admitted he did not personally believe his own theory. He explained, under oath, that he had introduced the diet pill theory as a dramatic device in his "new journalism" where the story is more important than the facts. When asked why he said that he'd learned MacDonald had ingested an overdose of diet pills (which he had not learned at all), he said he hadn't wanted to give his readers the same old "rehash of the trial."

McGinniss finally revealed his true feelings about his central theory, the theory that had made him rich, and had convinced millions of people that MacDonald was guilty. Under oath, during hard questions by MacDonald's attorney, he admitted, "I'm not convinced that it actually happened."

Now comes a new book, Fatal Justice

Published in hard cover in 1995, and paperback in April, 1997, the new book is based largely upon laboratory notes suppressed at trial and secured years later through the Freedom of Information Act. Besides debunking Joe McGinniss's facile and unfounded drug theory and showing how McGinniss worked closely with his editor to delete references that might make "MacDonald look innocent," Fatal Justice reveals glaring contradictions and discrepancies between the government's claims about the evidence at trial and the evidence as it was actually found, recorded, and tested by the government's investigators and technicians.

Fatal Justice, and this web page deal with the following subjects:


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Jeffrey and Colette MacDonald at their Wedding 


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Kristen, Colette, and Kimberley MacDonald 

The Murder Night, February 17, 1970

On a cold, rainy night at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, military policemen responded to a telephone call by Green Beret group surgeon, Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald. Upon their arrival at his apartment the MPs discovered the horribly slaughtered bodies of Captain MacDonald's wife, Colette, 26, and their daughters, Kimberly, 5, and Kristen, 2.

An MP revived MacDonald by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. MacDonald told him he had been asleep on the sofa when he awoke to the screams of his wife and oldest daughter. Three men standing over the sofa attacked him, he said. They were a black man wearing an army field jacket with E-6 stripes, and two white men, apparently under the influence of drugs. Dr. MacDonald said that the black man, who showed no signs of being drugged, wielded a baseball bat. The two whites used bladed weapons. Behind these men, MacDonald said, he caught a fleeting glimpse of a blond woman wearing a floppy hat. She chanted, "Acid is groovy. Kill the pigs." MacDonald told the MPs, "She carried a flickering light, perhaps a candle." 

Drawing of female intruder

Drawing of black male intruder

The Army Hearing

After a six week army pre-court martial hearing, presiding officer Colonel Warren V. Rock, concluded that the charges against Captain MacDonald "are not true." Colonel Rock had also learned that cult member Helena Stoeckley, daughter of a retired colonel, had confessed involvement in the murders, and that the army investigators had failed to reveal that Stoeckley, a key narcotics informant for the local and army police, made incriminating admissions to them. She actually admitted that she wore a floppy hat, blond wig, and boots on the murder night, that she was on drugs that night, and had no alibi for the time of the MacDonald murders.

Colonel Rock requested that Stoeckley be investigated by civilian authorities. But that investigation never happened.  The authors have since encountered information provided by former army investigators that other sons and daughters of key officers on post were involved in the drug traffic, and one other daughter in particular was known to be "a problem in the case" because she allegedly was buying her drugs from the Stoeckley group.  The facts of these claims, even though made by Army CID investigators personally involved in the case at the time, cannot at this late date be verified, however, if true, they offer a reason why the top brass on post might have gone after Dr. MacDonald instead of their own offspring. 


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A colonel's daughter, Helena Stoeckley

At age 17, she was a key drug informant for local and army police. This was admitted by the lead army investigator, William Ivory during MacDonald's pre-court martial hearing.  She fit the descriptions given by Captain MacDonald and by MP Kenneth Mica, who said he saw a floppy hatted woman while on his way to the murder scene at 3:55 a.m. Mica says he was ordered that morning not to talk about his sighting.  On that same morning the top law enforcement officer on post blocked the FBI from customary control and succeeded in forcing them from the case within a week. 


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Greg Mitchell, heroin addict, soldier, and Helena Stoeckley's boyfriend. Upon his death, Mitchell's friends say he also confessed to the crimes. The army reported, years later, that they cleared Mitchell with a polygraph examination.

Suppressed Physical Evidence that Someone Else, Not Dr. MacDonald, Murdered His Family

Although the Army's hearing officer cleared Dr. MacDonald, he was later brought to trial in the criminal courts. During that trial prosecutor Brian Murtagh assured the jurors that nothing was found at the murder scene to support MacDonald's story of intruders. When the defense attorneys asked to see the still withheld laboratory notes so they could determine for themselves if any evidence had been found to support MacDonald's story, the prosecutor untruthfully insisted that the documents the defense was asking for held nothing to support MacDonald's claims. Upon this promise, the judge then refused to make Mr. Murtagh turn over the documents.

As shown below, those documents, later released through the Freedom of Information Act, contradict the prosecutor's claim, for they prove that the army actually found a great deal of evidence showing that intruders were in the house and in mortal combat with the victims - - and then the army and prosecutors covered up that knowledge.

Suppressed Evidence on the Body of Colette MacDonald

Suppressed Evidence on the Bodies of Kimberly and Kristen
Long, Blond Wig Hairs
A Bloody Palm Print

Status of the Case

In 1988 a new team of defense attorneys led by Harvey Silverglate, Phil Cormier, and Andrew Good of Boston's Silverglate and Good, began working the case pro bono, without pay.  Silverglate and team, understanding the previous prosecutorial withholding of the lab notes and believing MacDonald innocent, filed a motion for a new trial in 1990.  They presented much of the new evidence, including the blond synthetic wig hair. But Judge Dupree turned them down without considering the evidence, even though he had promised during the trial that if suppressed evidence was ever found in the lab (lab notes he wouldn't let the defense see), then MacDonald's sentence would be reversed. Judge Dupree based his denial on two things: One was an affidavit filed by FBI agent Michael P. Malone, who swore that his investigations in the field and in the lab had proved that the 22 inch blond fiber found in the MacDonald home and which MacDonald's lawyers thought might have come from Helena Stoeckley's wig, couldn't have been from her wig because that particular fiber, saran fiber, had never been used to make wigs. It was used to make dolls, he claimed, so the wig hair probably came from a doll. Without considering evidence that such fiber had indeed been used to make wigs and that no doll with 22 inch hair had ever been found in the MacDonald home, Judge Dupree also used a technical loophole allowed by a recent Supreme Court case. Citing McCleskey v. Zant as a precedent Judge Dupree, incredibly, ignored his promise to MacDonald at trial and ruled it was now too late to present this new evidence, that the defense should have found it and presented it sooner!  This was a curious loophole favoring the prosecutors who had withheld the lab notes years earlier.  Judge Dupree, knowing that it was the prosecutor himself who refused to turn over the lab notes at trial, knowing the defense didn't even start receiving the suppressed lab notes via FOIA until four years after MacDonald had gone to prison, and without calling for an investigation into the defense's claims that they didn't have a confirming lab note on the wig hair until 1989, he ruled that, nevertheless, MacDonald's lawyers should have exercised due diligence and discovered the wig hair evidence before the 1984 petition.  It is troubling to MacDonald supporters that the judge ruled against MacDonald on the grounds that his lawyers should have presented the evidence earlier, when in fact the prosecutors, defending their withholding of it, said they hadn't really read the lab notes and didn't know about it the wig hairs and other exculpatory items themselves. The question arises: When did they lie?  When they told Judge Dupree at trial that there was nothing in the handwritten lab notes to help MacDonald?  Or when they later told him they'd never read the notes?

An exception to the McCleskey precedent which limits habeas petitions may be invoked when the new evidence actually demonstrates clear factual innocence. But there is a cruel Catch-22 - - It is up to the judge's discretion whether to grant a hearing in which MacDonald's lawyers would demonstrate that the government's trial evidence was finessed in the lab. Judge Dupree did not call for such an evidentiary hearing, throwing the MacDonald case, and MacDonald himself, into legal limbo while Congress and the Supreme Court laboriously develop a slowly evolving new stance on habeas petitions which may or may not ever allow MacDonald to present evidence the judge had ruled was found too late.

APRIL, 1997  MacDONALD LAWYERS FILE TO REOPEN THE FLAWED "WIG HAIR" APPEAL!

Dr. MacDonald's attorneys, testing this evolving habeas and appeals system, filed papers on April 22, 1997, asking for a new trial based upon the new evidence and also based upon their claim that FBI agent Michael P. Malone filed false affidavits in response to MacDonald's 1990 habeas petition. They now knew that agent Malone, who was named by the Justice Department to have testified falsely in other cases, filed false affidavits on the 22 inch blond saran fiber found in the MacDonald home. Remember, agent Malone swore that saran fiber was never used in wigs, only in dolls. But defense team investigators learned that Malone himself visited several fiber experts, and when they wouldn't confirm his statement, he simply filed affidavits of his own, making up his "findings," without reporting the truth of what he had actually learned in the field. He had found, we now know, that saran fiber was in fact used in wigs, and that Mattel Corporation fiber expert Judith Schizas told him explicitly that 22 inch saran fiber was never used in Mattel dolls or in any other dolls in the entire doll industry to her knowledge, because the machines used for doll hair only accept fibers up to fourteen inches.

But for Malone's false affidavit which gave the judge an excuse to deny his petition for a new trial, MacDonald might have been out of prison six or eight years ago.  He still awaits an open hearing into the merits of the new evidence.
 

AUGUST 1997  JUDGE JAMES FOX DENIES THE MacDONALD PETITION ON ALL POINTS

In his decision to deny MacDonald, Judge James Fox, who replaced the deceased Judge Franklin Dupree, found, incredibly,  that MacDonald had no right to DNA test the foreign hairs found under his children's fingernails, brown hairs known by the army lab not to have been his blond hair, hairs suppressed by the lab and by the government prosecution.  MacDonald's attorneys filed an appeal to the Fourth Circuit pointing out the logical problems with this stance.
 

OCTOBER 1997, THE FOURTH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS OVERULES JUDGE FOX AND ALLOWS DNA TESTING

Finally, a three judge panel at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, VA, overturned Judge Fox on the key issue of DNA testing of the foriegn hairs found under Kristen's and Kimberly's fingernails.  Judge Fox then ruled that the MacDonald defense could now DNA test certain items.  Since MacDonald had been denied the right to lab test the evidence for 27 years, this signified what was seen as a major victory in the case.

JUNE 2000, ANOTHER ROADBLOCK
But, nearly three years after the judge's ruling the defense team still has not been able to effect DNA testing due to legal jousting back and forth with the government lawyers.  A microscopist's initial report about the state of some of the more important items the defense wanted to DNA test, however, was that those items, including the all important brown hairs found under the childrens' fingernails, are not of sufficient quantity or quality to be tested - - even though an army examiner in 1970 compared them with MacDonald's hairs and stated that they were not his.  The issue of these hairs is the current focal point of contention between the government attorneys and Phil Cormeir, lead attorney of MacDonald's defense team at Silverglate and Good of Boston.  http://www.silverglategood.com/cases/macdonald/


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Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald remains in prison after 20 years. 

Media Praise for Fatal Justice:

Lois Gordon, RAPPORT, August 11, 1995:
. . . a superb achievement . . . exceptionally well written . . . impressively researched . . . spellbinding . . . recommended to all.
Errol Morris, director of "The Thin Blue Line":
Fatal Justice asks and answers many of the central questions in the case: What is the real evidence against Jeffrey MacDonald? Why was he charged with the crime? And why, if he is innocent, was he convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment? Potter and Bost have done something rare and truly impressive. They have written a detailed story of what Edgar Allan Poe has called a 'wilderness of error,' an excursion into the ultimate Twilight Zone epic of an innocent man unable to get anyone to listen. After reading this book, you can draw your own conclusions. But it establishes one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt: Jeffrey MacDonald did not receive a fair trial - - not in the court of public opinion or in the courts themselves.
Celia Farber SPIN, June 1995:
Fortunately, two extremely dedicated journalists did the unthinkable. Jerry Allen Potter and Fred Bost spent nearly a decade sifting through the mountainous legal documents and notes acquired since the murders . . . interviewing countless witnesses, researching clues from every perspective, and unearthing staggering amounts of suppressed evidence from the government's own laboratories.
Tom Hallman, Jr., OREGONIAN, February 24, 1995:
. . . fascinating . . . compelling. . . . thoroughly researched . . . the power builds slowly and steadily.
Tara Aronson, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, March 5, 1995:
. . . explosive . . . chillingly well-documented . . .. Potter and Bost's detective work, crisply presented and grippingly detailed . . . clearly establishes that MacDonald did not receive a fair trial in the court of public opinion or in the legal courts themselves. It reveals, too, that in a worst-case scenario, an innocent man has served more than 17 years of a life sentence behind bars.   Click here to link to entire San Francisco Chronicle review.
Janet Malcolm, NEW YORKER, October 16, 1995:
. . . a quietly convincing book . . ..
TO ORDER THE BOOK:

You can find or order Fatal Justice: Reinvestigating the MacDonald Murders in its newly updated paperback edition at local bookstores. When ordering, please use the publisher's name, W. W. Norton, New York, and the International Standard Book Number listed below:

ISBN: 0-393-31544-4

To order by phone from the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, call 1-800-223-2584

To view the publisher's descriptive page on FATAL JUSTICE, or to order from the publisher on line, use the following link:
W.W. Norton & Company

To order the book from Amazon, an online Bookstore, use the following link:
Amazon.com

Email comments about Fatal Justice: Reinvestigating the MacDonald Murders to:

 prebble@pacbell.net

Visit an Informative Web Page maintained by MacDonald Supporters:

http://www.themacdonaldcase.org/

The gracious host of this page is J. A. Majors, Inc, international distributors of medical and law books.  Visit them at: www.majors.com.


page last updated 06.27.00