Fatal Vision (103 page)

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—had been stabbed in the chest with an icepick twenty-one times after his blue pajama top had been laid across her. And when he had sat down to write the first account of the night's events—knowing that he was now considered the chief suspect—his consumption of a drug which is capable of triggering psychotic rage had been the thing he had felt it necessary to mention first.

Though he had denied it under oath during his grand jury testimony, Jeffrey MacDonald had apparently taken a lie detector test during his brief visit to Philadelphia in April of 1970. His own psychiatrist, Dr. Sadoff, had made reference to it during his grand jury testimony, and to the fact that MacDonald "had not come through with flying colors."

Home from California, I put the question to MacDonald in writing. He responded on a tape from Terminal Island.

Ummm
...
I guess it was after my psychological interview. Bernie brought up the fact that he wanted me polygraphed. Actually, I guess it was sort of in the middle of these interviews. I felt uhh . . . you know, sort of
hurt.
I wondered why he wanted 'em . . . and then he explained that perhaps we could use these interviews to head off the Article 32 and the court-martial. That if they came out strong enough, conclusively in my favor, perhaps we could go to the Army
with
them. I said,
fine
...
if there was a chance for that we would go ahead and do it.

Now, there were two different men. One was John Reid, and the other was Cleve, I think, Backster. They're both well known in polygraph fields. These are not lightweights. These were expensive examinations.

Uuhhh, as I recall it, the first operator was John Reid. He at first seemed very, you know, very professional to me. He explained to me a little bit about the polygraph, what it can do and what it can't do. And then proceeded to hook me up to the
machine—told me the area of questioning that we would go into and then he began questioning me.

However, when he began questioning me, it seemed to me that he was basically a prosecutor. He was not satisfied with my results—by that, I don't even really know what the results were, but they were not conclusively proving my innocence . . . and
...
he had a consultation with Bernie, and Bernie uh, sort of abruptly dismissed him.
...
the results were not conclusive of my innocence.

But we moved on, because Bernie really wanted a very positive polygraph test. We went on to the second person, who I believe is Cleve Backster. This is the guy who does the polygraphs and is now famous for polygraphing plants. And he's on Johnny Carson all the time, I believe.

In any case, Bernie now spent a lot of time prepping me for this one—saying that this was much more professional, this guy was bigger in his field than Reid, and that I would find him a lot more congenial, and he would treat me a lot better.

Well, in fact, just the opposite happened. He basically gave me
no
prep, except sort of negative type of prep, in which he said that this machine can detect any sort of lying. . . .

Well, he hooked me up to the machine, and once Bernie was excused from the room, he began going over my sexual history. It was
very
bizarre. He started talking about had I ever had sex with women other than Colette. And I answered that. And then he asked had I ever had sex with men. And then he wanted to know if I
...
if there was a wild orgy the night of the occurrence of the murders.

And I stopped him, and I said uh, I don't understand what we're doing here. I thought this was a polygraph based on my current legal situation—and he says, well, he was just getting me used to the machine and getting a base line ready on truth and falsity.

So I said okay then, let's get back to the point. So then he said okay, and we started going back to some more questions, and he immediately reverted to premarital and extra-marital sexual activities, and unusual sexual activities, and I thought this guy was
crazy,
to tell you the truth. And I said look, I don't think we can continue. And at this point he made some comment about, well, have you considered the insanity defense. And I said, Jesus, that's the most outrageous thing I ever heard. You haven't even completed your polygraph, and now you're telling me that I should be going for an insanity defense.

And he said, well, in
his
judgment, and he said, basically, I've never been wrong on a major case. Uummm . . . you should start considering an insanity defense.

When I contacted Cleve Backster to ask for his recollection of the MacDonald polygraph examination, he said he would not be at liberty to discuss it without written authorization from Jeffrey MacDonald. When I asked MacDonald to provide such authorization, he refused.

The fact is, on many tapes Jeffrey MacDonald told me things which, even without the aid of a polygraph, I later determined to be untrue. He recounted, for example, a visit he made to the Fort Bragg boxing team "two or three weeks after I got out of the hospital" in 1970. "I went over and watched them work out and told them that I'm sorry, I wouldn't be able to go on this trip to Russia, and I found the sergeant who was in charge, and he said he understood completely and I wished him luck, and, as a matter of fact, he started crying while we were talking, and then
I
started crying."

Not only did the boxing coach fail to recall such incident, but the team—as Pruett and Kearns had determined in 1971—was not even planning a trip to Russia.

Once, in discussing Mildred Kassab, MacDonald said that after the death of her first husband, "She took a boat from San Francisco to Hawaii and was originally planning on going around the world, but ended up staying in Hawaii. And she told me many times—many, many times—both on a couple of occasions when she'd had too much to drink when Colette was alive and she was kind of bragging under the influence of wine, but certainly later on after the tragedy of 1970, when I was at their house for dinner, she told me in no uncertain terms that the reason she never went around the world was because she was having so much fun in Hawaii and that she had balled every houseboy on the boat going from San Francisco to Hawaii. She then went back to New York, apparently, and lived in the Plaza Hotel for a period of weeks or months—got a good room and got an excellent table and had lunch and dinner there every day, waiting to meet the right man, and I think that is how she did meet Freddy Kassab."

MacDonald's mother, of course, had told the grand jury much the same story, except that in her version Mildred
had
gone around the world for a full year and had then taken up residence in a high-priced New York hotel for six additional months, during which time she met Freddy Kassab, who, as MacDonald's mother recalled, was from "the South."

The facts are that for four months after her husband's suicide, Mildred Kassab remained with her children. Then, leaving them in the care of her sister Helen, she visited a female friend in California for a week and then
flew
to Honolulu, where she remained for three weeks. She recalls quite specifically arriving home in time to participate, as a class mother, in a group outing which Colette's elementary school class was making to Ebbets Field, to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers play a baseball game.

On New Year's Eve of that year, Colette was spending the night at a friend's house and Mildred—who had at no time taken up residence at the Plaza—was home alone with her son, then sixteen. Having earlier declined an invitation from friends to attend a New Year's Eve party at a Patchogue restaurant called Felice's, Mildred changed her mind in midevening, and, shortly before midnight, she and her son did join the group, and she attracted the attention of Freddy Kassab, who was there with friends of his own. Three months later Kassab managed to arrange an introduction.

There was another tape on which MacDonald talked at considerable length and in extraordinary detail about how the night before his wedding he'd had to drive one of the bridesmaids home to New Jersey, but she could not remember where she lived and they had become lost for several hours and as a result he had arrived extremely late for his own bachelor party. I wondered at the time why he had bothered to tell it at all. It was not until months later that I learned where he had really been: back in Patchogue, putting a red-and-black negligee on the front seat of Penny Wells's car.

I finally asked him, once, about the meeting with Penny Wells at the train station in November of 1969. At first h
e denied— as he had under oath
—that any such meeting had occurred. Then he said, "If it did occur, the most had happened is that I ran across Penny. She may have been working in New York at the time, and we ended up getting off the same train or something like that, and I kissed her hello. If I did see her at the train station it was absolutely by chance, and this so-called embrace was simply a kiss hello from an old girlfriend to an old boyfriend."

I did not even bother to ask him about her meeting him at the airport upon the occasion of his June 1971 arrival in California, because by then I had learned, as had Allard Lowenstein ten years before, that, "He'll say anything to anybody."

Thus, there had been no making love on the infield of the Saratoga racetrack during Happy Pappy weekend or a later spring visit to Skidmore. The Saratoga racetrack is open only during the month of August, at a time when Skidmore is not.

And, during the "fifteen days" between the completion of his internship and the date of his reporting to Fort Sam Houston, there had been no vacation to an island he thought might have been Aruba. There had been, in fact, only a single weekend between those two phases of his life—a strained and hectic weekend that had been spent moving Colette a
nd the children from the Bergen
field apartment to Patchogue, where they would be spending the summer.

There had also been no "most memorable" lovemaking session on the couch in the living room of the Kassabs' Washington Square apartment during Thanksgiving vacation of MacDonald's freshman year at Princeton. The Kassabs did not even move to New York City until the summer of the following year. In fact, throughout her freshman year at Skidmore, Colette had not even dated Jeffrey MacDonald: she had continued to see her high school boyfriend, Dean Chamberlain. It was not until her sophomore year that she and MacDonald resumed their relationship.

Thus, the entire, vivid recollection—of his first days at Princeton and the sudden excitement of having become an Ivy Leaguer and the impulsive decision to pursue a career in medicine, all being intertwined with his receipt of that first titillating letter from Colette, and of having rushed, with sweaty palms, up to Skidmore—is false.

A false creation, one might suggest, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain.

Of course, I was not the only one to whom he told stories that were not true. Having his nose broken four times in high school, and becoming the first Patchogue High School graduate in more than twenty years to attend any Ivy League college—statements he made to Dr. Sadoff in Philadelphia in April of 1970—these, too, were false.

There was no truth either to the story he told benefactor Bob Stern late one night in August of 1970, toward the end of the Article 32 hearing. This was during the week that the proceedings had been recessed to allow MacDonald to undergo psychiatric interview and testing at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington. In the midst of this trip, he had flown to Philadelphia to visit the Sterns for a weekend.

At that time—three months before he spoke to Freddy Kassab about it on the phone—Jeffrey MacDonald told Bob Stern that he had already tracked down and killed one of the hippies who had attacked him and had murdered his wife and children.

Gradually, I came to learn things about Jeffrey MacDonald from other sources: facts of which not even those who had prosecuted him had been aware.

Such as: he had actually made two trips to California in the summer of 1971. The first, by plane, was when Penny Wells had met him at the airport. But there had been a second trip, after a return to the East, when he had moved out to stay. This second trip was made by automobile and MacDonald had been accompanied by a sixteen-year-old-girl—the daughter of family friends from Long Island, whose parents thought she might find it an enriching experience to traverse the United States in the company of the all-American boy they had known so well ior so long, and who was struggling so hard now to recover from his recent tragedy.

Throughout the journey—all the way from New York to California—Jeffrey MacDonald had sexual relations with the sixteen-year-old girl.

I learned also that later that summer, not long after MacDonald had taken up residence in Huntington Beach, he received a visit from a close friend of his mother's—a woman he had known since childhood. She brought with her her ten-year-old son.