The Journalist and the Murderer Read Free Page A

rather than punished, for his theft confuses the issue. Yes, a subject may occasionally grudgingly concede that what has been written about him isn’t bad, but this doesn’t make the writer any less a thief. The rare, succulent crabmeat, picked out of the shell, packed, sealed, refrigerated, jealously hoarded, is like the fragile essence of a person’s being, which the journalist makes away with and turns into some horrid mess of his own while the subject sleeps. (“That crabmeat has a very delicate flavor,” poor Styron whimpers on hearing of McGinniss’s Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce and bread crumbs and heavy cream.) When McGinniss wrote this chapter, he could hardly have known that someday he would be in a courtroom in California having his liver ravaged by a pitiless lawyer. Or did he write those letters to MacDonald to make sure that such a fate would be his?
    M C G INNISS met MacDonald in June 1979, in Huntington Beach, California. McGinniss had just finished
Going to Extremes
, a work of reportage about Alaska that was to restore to him the reputation he had lost with
TheDream Team
and
Heroes
, and establish him as a humorist of no inconsiderable gifts. He was in California as a visiting columnist for the Los Angeles
Herald Examiner
, writing a column of light, sharp commentary. However, the meeting with MacDonald put a halt to McGinniss’s traffic with comedy, and brought him to a genre—the “true-crime novel”—in which he had never worked. Fortunately for him, the books of this genre published in America today apparently need to fulfill only one requirement—that they be interminably long—and when
Fatal Vision
, the true-crime novel McGinniss eventually wrote, weighed in at six hundred and sixty-three pages it insured for itself the place on the best-seller list that its publishers had anticipated when they gave him a three-hundred-thousand-dollar advance.
    McGinniss was led to his subject by an item he read while scanning the Los Angeles newspapers for topics for his column: the Long Beach Police Officers Association was sponsoring a dinner dance to raise funds for the legal defense of Jeffrey MacDonald, a local physician, who was about to be tried for murder. McGinniss remembered the crime, which had occurred nine years earlier. On February 17, 1970, MacDonald’s pregnant wife, Colette, aged twenty-six, and his two daughters, Kimberly and Kristen, aged five and two and a half, were bludgeoned and stabbed to death in the family’s apartment at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where MacDonald was serving as a doctor in a Green Beret unit. MacDonald was charged with the murders and then cleared by an Army tribunal. But his story about waking up to the screams of his wife and older daughter and about seeing four intruders—three men holding clubs and knives and a woman with long hair holding a candle and chanting “Acid is groovy” and “Killthe pigs”—led to no arrests, and continued to raise the question of why no traces of the intruders had been found in the apartment, and why MacDonald had been merely knocked unconscious and slightly cut up when his wife and children were savagely done to death. In response to pressure from Alfred Kassab, the stepfather of the murdered woman, the Justice Department revived the investigation in 1971 and, over a period of years, built up a compelling enough case against MacDonald to bring him to trial. In the intervening eight years, MacDonald had moved to California, and had made a life for himself that appeared to be shadowed neither by the loss of his family nor by the cloud of suspicion that had hung over him from the day of the murders. He had not remarried and was leading a pleasant, blameless life in the California style. He was a hardworking, successful physician—he had become director of emergency at St. Mary’s Hospital, in Long Beach—and he lived in a small condominium apartment on the water, to which he liked to bring friends and girlfriends,