The Journalist and the Murderer Read Free Page B

often entertaining them with rides in his thirty-four-foot boat named (what else?) the
Recovery Room
. He was a handsome, tall, blond, athletic man of thirty-five, who had grown up in a lower-middle-class household in Patchogue, Long Island, the second of three children, and had always had about him a kind of preternatural equipoise, an atmosphere of being at home in the world.
    MacDonald went to Princeton on a scholarship in 1961, then to Northwestern University Medical School, and then to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, in New York, for his internship. In the summer following his sophomore year at Princeton and her sophomore year at Skidmore, MacDonald’s girlfriend, Colette Stevenson, becamepregnant. The couple decided against abortion and were married in the fall of 1963. Colette left Skidmore, and Kimberly was born in Princeton; Kristen was born in Illinois. Photographs show Colette to have been a pretty, blond girl with a soft, rounded face; all accounts of her stress her reserve, her quietness, her kindliness, and her conventional femininity. At the time of her death, she was taking an evening course in psychology at the North Carolina State University extension at Fort Bragg.
    A few days before the fund-raising dinner dance, McGinniss went to see MacDonald at his apartment and interviewed him for his column. Near the end of the interview, MacDonald asked McGinniss if he would like to attend the murder trial—in Raleigh, North Carolina—and write a book about the case from the perspective of the defense team, with whom he would live, and to all of whose plans, strategies, and deliberations he would be privy. This proposal had a special appeal for McGinniss. The situation that MacDonald outlined resembled McGinniss’s situation with the Nixon advertising people, which had had such a successful result. Although none of us ever completely outgrows the voyeurism of childhood, in some of us it lives on more strongly than in others—thus the avid interest of some of us in being “insiders” or in getting the “inside” view of things. In my talk with McGinniss in Williamstown, he used an arresting image: “MacDonald was clearly trying to manipulate me, and I was aware of it from the beginning. But did I have an obligation to say, ‘Wait a minute. I think you are manipulating me, and I have to call your attention to the fact that I’m aware of this, just so you’ll understand you are not succeeding’? Do little bells have to go off at a certain point? This has neverbeen the case before. This could inhibit any but the most superficial reporting. We could all be reduced to standing in the street interviewing the survivors of fires.”
    McGinniss, of course, wanted to be in the burning house itself, and when MacDonald presented his proposition, the allure of the flames was strong enough to cause him to accept a condition that another writer might have found unacceptable—namely, that he give MacDonald a share of the book’s proceeds. McGinniss was not the first writer MacDonald had approached. For many years, at the prodding of his lawyer, Bernard Segal (who had defended him before the Army tribunal, and who remained his lawyer until 1982), MacDonald had been offering himself as a subject to writers. It had been Segal’s idea—fantasy, as it proved—that a book would bring in a sizable portion of the money needed to pay for MacDonald’s defense. “We were running into the red substantially,” Segal testified at the McGinniss trial. “People were working without salaries … and I thought a book with an advance that was substantial and fair would help out.” Two writers who had nibbled at the bait but had not been netted were Edward Keyes and Joseph Wambaugh; Keyes couldn’t get the necessary advance, and Wambaugh couldn’t come to the trial, because he was making a film. The hope of finding a writer had been pretty much abandoned, and when McGinniss turned up on the eve of the trial he was like