Captain MacDonald's Ordeal

Jeffrey MacDonald had been schooled to believe that the system treats deserving individuals justly. He was an all-American achiever who had always found his merit rewarded. An honors student at Princeton, he married his high school sweetheart, went on to Northwestern University Medical School and an internship at New York's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. When MacDonald joined the Army as a doctor, he went after and earned a Green Beret.

Then one terrifying night last February, Captain MacDonald awoke to a nightmare. As he tells it, three long-haired young men and a blonde girl invaded his home at Fort Bragg, N.C., while he was sleeping. They left his pregnant wife and two daughters stabbed and beaten to death. MacDonald himself was stabbed 19 times and clubbed on the head. Horrible as that was, it was only the beginning of his ordeal. Agents of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID) soon concluded that the young doctor had made up the hippie story to cover his own guilt, and they set out to prove it. They did not do well. In fact, so clumsy and so slipshod was the CID investigation that the Army has now been forced to undertake the embarrassing task of re-examining various aspects of the entire proceeding.

Flowerpot. It was not that the investigation had been too brief. Local police rounded up scores of young people who might have been the invaders described by MacDonald. When none of them seemed to be the murderers, the CID turned back to the captain. Though the agents apparently found little that was damning in his background, they formed the theory that MacDonald and his wife Colette had had a violent argument over his younger daughter's bed wetting and that the angry words ended in the slaughter. Then MacDonald ripped up the house and, being a doctor, added a few careful stab wounds to those already inflicted by his wife as she fought back. The CID's chief reasons for accusing MacDonald seemed to be its view that 1) there was no firm physical evidence of any intruders; 2) part of MacDonald's ripped pajama top was found under his wife's body, suggesting that they had been struggling; 3) a flowerpot was found standing upright, though its contents were spilled out on the floor, indicating staged disorder.

For MacDonald, the major blow was not so much that the CID disbelieved him as that it pursued its investigation so ineptly that it gravely damaged his chances of establishing the truth of his own story. According to an official Army report obtained by TIME reporters, the investigation was all but criminally sloppy. The problem began almost as soon as MacDonald summoned the military police.

Within half an hour, the murder site was overrun with milling MPs and representatives of the CID. While one officer wandered around ordering everyone not to touch anything, another investigator calmly used the phone, leaving a smudged collage of fingerprints. In the end, a variety of fingerprints found throughout the house turned out to belong to investigating agents. Because the house remained unsealed for at least two hours, no one could be sure whether dirt stains discovered on the rug had come in with the investigators or with earlier intruders. In addition, the area around the base was supposed to have been quickly blocked off, but it later came out that no one had ever thought to give the necessary order.

No agent interrogated MacDonald in any detail for weeks. He was well enough to leave the hospital in twelve days, but it was not until six weeks after the murders that he was suddenly questioned at length by the CID man in charge. Ordered to return to his quarters, where he was to be confined, he found his phone line cut. He was prevented from reaching an attorney until the following day.

When he was taken to the staff judge advocate's office, MacDonald was assigned a military attorney who, he remembers, greeted him by saying, "We've got a defense all set for you. We've been working on it for a month." Then one of the two lawyers who had been peripherally involved in the defense consultation was switched over and made a junior member of the prosecution team. Before that happened though, MacDonald had decided to call in civilian lawyers.

Blood Print. Philadelphia Attorneys Bernard Segal and Dennis Eisman found their skills tried in uncommon ways. During closed hearings to determine whether there should be a court-martial, the CID sought to obtain hair samples from MacDonald. One day after a courtroom session, Army agents simply ran MacDonald's car off the road, flipped the protesting Eisman to the ground and took MacDonald off in "protective custody." After one doctor had taken snips of hair from all over MacDonald's body, the agents decided that the captain did not need protective custody any more.

The CID had already bobbled one bit of analysis when it claimed that some hair on MacDonald's coat was his wife's; it turned out to have come from his horse. The new samples taken from MacDonald were to be compared with bits of hair found under his wife's fingernails, but when pressed for a finding during the preliminary hearing, Chief Investigator Franz Grebner said that he had lost the reports. When finally presented to the court, the information revealed that the blonde strands under Colette MacDonald's fingernails did not match the hair of any other member of the family.

The defense also belatedly learned that wax droppings had been found at the murder scene and that these also did not match any possible sources of wax in the house. The prosecution did not mention this information before the hearing, though MacDonald had maintained from the beginning that one of the intruders had carried a soft, candlelike light while chanting "Acid is groovy. Kill the pigs. Hit 'em again." Then there were the unidentified fingerprints. Though 46 such prints were found--including one in blood in Mrs. MacDonald's jewelry box--none was ever sent to the FBI for a check with its master file.

During cross-examination of witnesses, the doctor who examined the bodies at the scene contradicted earlier testimony by saying that he had turned Mrs. MacDonald's corpse completely over. Since MacDonald claimed that he had tried to cover Colette's wounds with his torn pajamas, the movement of her body seemed a plausible explanation of why his garment was found beneath her. As for the upright flowerpot, some investigators admitted that they had seen it on its side when they first entered.

The prosecution's case was further weakened by medical testimony. Psychiatrists called by both the prosecution and the defense said that MacDonald seemed entirely normal; the defense psychiatrist added that MacDonald appeared incapable of committing so atrocious a trio of murders. Also, five of six doctors who testified said that at least one of MacDonald's wounds could easily have been fatal and that not even a physician could have inflicted it on himself safely.

Presenting its own case, the defense introduced a witness whose testimony suggested the identity of the woman Mac-Donald claimed to have seen. Though she had already been investigated and dismissed as a suspect by civilian authorities. Colonel Warren Rock, the infantry officer who presided at the hearing, recommended that she be reinvestigated. As for the evidence against MacDonald, Rock concluded in his confidential report that all charges be dropped because they "are not true." His superior, Major General Edward Flanagan, then quashed the case for "lack of sufficient evidence."

By last fall, the Army was more than happy to give MacDonald an honorable discharge when he requested it. But neither the captain nor his father-in-law, Alfred Kassab, was satisfied. Kassab has mounted a petition campaign to members of Congress and others to prompt a new effort to find the intruders he believes killed his daughter and grandchildren. "From now on," says MacDonald, "I'll be thought of as the man who got away with murder." Perhaps not. Responding to a variety of accusations about the case, the Army has said that it will at last investigate the manner in which the prosecution and the investigators handled matters. Two weeks ago, three CID agents from Washington arrived at Fort Bragg to begin work. Jeffrey MacDonald can only hope that they are more competent than those who first looked into his case.

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