Fatal Vision (16 page)

CID investigators were also informed that no fingerprints— neither Jeffrey MacDonald's nor anyone else's—were present on the handle of the Geneva Forge paring knife which he said he had pulled from his wife's chest. Nor were there prints on any of the other weapons. The club, however, was found to contain paint stains which were identical in chemical composition to paint on homemade bookshelves in the bedroom of Kimberly MacDonald.

By far, the most important laboratory finding had to do with blood analysis. While examination of a sample of Jeffrey MacDonald's blood and urine "did not indicate the presence of dangerous drugs" and demonstrated that he "was not under the influence of alcohol," it was determined, against all statistical probability, that each of the four members of MacDonald's family had possessed a different blood type.

Colette MacDonald's blood was Type A.

Jeffrey MacDonald's blood was Type B.

Kimberly MacDonald's blood was Type AB.

Kristen MacDonald's blood was Type O.

Thus, by mid-March it was possible for investigators to determine where within the apartment the blood of each family member could be found. The thrust of this evidence—the story told by the blood—seemed, to William Ivory, to Franz Joseph Grebner, an
d to Robert Shaw, to contradict
more strongly than anything before it the story that Jeffrey MacDonald had told.

The laboratory eventually identified the location and type of every stain and drop of blood inside the MacDonald apartment and on the weapons found outside. From this huge mass of fact, a few details stood out in bold relief:

—The drops of blood which formed the six-inch circle near the entrance to the master bedroom were in the Type AB blood of Kimberly MacDonald. Her blood was also found on the rumpled sheet and on the torn blue pajama top in the master bedroom, and it was her blood which formed the trail of drops between the master bedroom and her own room, in which her body had been found.

—The Type A blood of Colette MacDonald was found in the bedroom of Kristen. There were spatters of it on the wall above the bed and a heavy stain on the top sheet of Kristen's bed. In addition, the footprint leading away from the bed—a print made by the bare foot of Jeffrey MacDonald—had been made not with Kristen's Type O blood but with the Type A blood of her mother. Colette's blood was also found, in large quantity, on the bedspread and sheet that had been rolled up together and deposited on the master bedroom floor.

—The Type B blood of Jeffrey MacDonald was found in significant quantity in only two locations within the apartment: on the kitchen floor in front of the cabinet that contained the box of rubber gloves, and on the right side of the hall bathroom sink, in a pattern suggesting it might have dripped from the right side of the chest of a person who had stood in front of the sink while making a neat, clean incision between two ribs—an incision, perhaps, only one centimeter long, and just deep enough to puncture a lung without doing any other damage.

With the hysteria that had swept over Fort Bragg in the first days after the murders having abated (in the absence of any further homicidal outbursts), Grebner was inclined to proceed cautiously. He wanted as much evidence as possible available to him before he summoned MacDonald for a formal interrogation.

To himself he could justify this approach by saying that since flight would be an admission of guilt, it was unlikely that MacDonald would flee, and since the murders had been—he was certain—the result of an explosion of rage which had built up within the confines of a troubled domestic situation, MacDonald did not pose a threat to anyone else at Fort Bragg.

The young doctor had returned to duty and was now in residence in the BOQ room assigned to him, and, for the moment—despite ever increasing impatience on the part of superiors who wanted a quick announcement that an arrest had been made—Franz Joseph Grebner was content to let the matter lie, hoping that the worst of the mistakes had already been made and that the strands of circumstantial evidence, in time, would weave themselves into a noose.

Besides, the longer he waited, the more Grebner learned. He had learned, for example, that the Valentine found in MacDonald's desk had been sent by Josephine Kingston, the wife of Col. Robert Kingston, MacDonald's first commanding officer, who had been transferred to Vietnam in the fall.

On Saturday, April 4, Jeffrey MacDonald located an unfurnished apartment not far from Fort Bragg and convenient to the civilian hospital in Fayetteville where he was working emergency-room shifts during his off-duty hours. He decided that he would prefer to live off post.

On Sunday, April 5, his mother finally went back to Long Island.

On the morning of Monday, April 6, he was summoned to the headquarters of the Fort Bragg Criminal Investigation Division. Upon his arrival he was directed to the office of Franz Joseph Grebner.

Six weeks had elapsed since the murders and the Fort Bragg provost marshal, as well as his superiors, both at Fort Bragg and at the Pentagon, were by now extremely impatient. Since the provost marshal's own mind—like Grebner's—had been made

up long ago, he had grown weary of saying "No comment" when asked about the investigation's progress, and wearier still of reading newspaper stories about how the Army's apparent inability to crack the case was just one more example of the incompetence that was leading to the loss of the war in Vietnam, and to the public's complete loss of faith in the military.

Daily, the provost marshal would receive pressure from above, and, daily, he would make Franz Joseph Grebner aware of it. By April 6, the CID chief—despite his unease in regard to the incomplete nature of the investigation—felt he had no choice but to act. Perhaps, he thought, once MacDonald was made aware of the evidence the CID had assembled, he could be persuaded to confess.

In preparation for the interview, Grebner, who before joining the Army had been a school superintendent in South Dakota, summoned William Ivory and the other agent—Robert Shaw—who had done the majority of the investigative work on the case. The two detectives took seats on either side of Grebner's desk. A gray, armless chair was positioned alongside the desk, facing Grebner and the windows behind him. Grebner took a tape recorder out of the desk. Having long ago misplaced the microphone stand, he propped the microphone on top of some books on his desk and asked that MacDonald be sent in.

MacDonald, in uniform—planning, in fact, to go to his office— stood directly in front of Grebner's desk. He smiled, then looked quickly at the unfamiliar—and unsmiling—faces of Ivory and Shaw. He still had no idea that the Army investigators considered him their prime suspect.

Motioning to the armless chair alongside his desk, Grebner told MacDonald to take a seat. He then turned on the tape recorder.

"Before we begin," he said, as the smile faded from Jeffrey MacDonald's face, "I would like to advise you of your rights."

The Voice of Jeffrey MacDonald

Internship year, though, the year at Columbia Presbyterian, was a very tough year, a down year, a brutal year. There were months when I worked the entire month, every other night on. That meant thirty-six hours straight at the hospital and only twelve off, and you never really got the full twelve, it was always eleven or ten or nine and a half, and I had to go home, clean up, eat, see the kids, play with them, see Colette, catch up on the news, fall asleep, then get up at four or five in the morning and go back on rounds at 6
a.m.

Basically, it was a horrendous year. Really bad from the point of view of my workload, lack of family interaction, and total physical exhaustion.

Now, that was not my doing. And I refuse to take any, um, negative credit for working too hard. That's just the way it was being an intern at one of the best hospitals in the world. But our apartment in Bergenfield, New Jersey, was hot and cramped and not nearly as pretty as what we had just come from in Chicago, plus the neighborhood was not nearly as nice.

Of course, intellectually, Columbia Presbyterian was very exciting. As a medical learning experience it was phenomenal, and I became one of the hot interns, there was no question about it.

On chest surgery I scrubbed at some of the open hearts which were—you know, this was still big news in 1969. These were very tense operations and different surgeons handled the tenseness in different ways.

One of my most vivid re
collections was I was assisting
the most brutal of these surgeons—this guy was a pusher and shover and swearer and a knife-thrower, and he had an awesome reputation for pushing interns out of the way and being nasty to them.

And I was assisting and I did something he didn't like and he pushed me. I didn't say anything, just did my job, and he asked me some questions and I answered them and then something happened that he didn't like—he wanted me to move or something—and he, really hard, gave me an elbow in the middle of the chest and I just sort of gave him a very light elbow back and I said, "I don't have to take that from you. You know, you don't need me here at the table. I seem to be in your way, but if I'm not in your way and you want me here, then you'll have to treat me as a physician."

And there was silence in the room and I probably broke out in a sweat, but I was just so furious that I just sort of stood there thinking I was correct and maintained my position and the surgeon didn't say anything.

For the next two weeks he treated me as an absolute gentleman and finally sat me down and asked me if I wanted to be on the thoracic surgery service, which I thought was phenomenal. I thought he would throw me out of my internship but I had stood up to him because it just seemed so outrageous that he was physically abusing physicians who were assisting him. I just reacted and sort of pushed him back with my right elbow and he had hit me with his left elbow, and I said, "If you want me in here you'll have to treat me like a gentleman." And then he offered me a position on the service. I thought that was phenomenal.

But the year, on the whole, wasn't filled with a whole lot of fun. We did have brief spurts, you know, nights out together. I remember one specifically, I think it may have been for my birthday, my brother Jay was taking us out, and he met us somewhere in Brooklyn.

He was in his Cadillac and we had the Chevy and we made three or four stops at his Italian hangouts, and then we followed him for what seemed like miles and miles and miles and miles through side streets, and the neighborhood kept getting worse and worse.

It started out industrial, then it was residential, then it got shabby residential, then it got tenement, then it got abandoned slums, and pretty soon we went, it must have been, half a mile through a slum in which there was nothing but abandoned tenements and these shells of cars that were up on cinder blocks or just down on the axles, no tires on them—they're colloquially referred to as "Brooklyn Foxholes" —when the shooting starts, everyone dives for an abandoned car.

But we eventually came to this little side street and it was jam packed with cars that people were getting in and out of, and then there was a parking lot across the street and you'd pull up to this place and a guy was standing at the front door with a white shirt with no tie, open at the collar, and the sleeves were rolled up to his big biceps, and he took the car, talking in an Italian accent, and you went inside.

Jay had already told me that it was a real place—that, you know, people did carry guns into the restaurant and the lot of the guys were heavy-duty Mafia types, and we went in and that's in fact what it was: Monte's Venetian Room.

We were treated to this grand and glorious nine- or ten-course Italian meal with three or four courses of pasta, and it took all night, from seven-thirty till about midnight.

And I can still remember, Colette and I were just stuffed, we couldn't move, we felt like gluttons, and then we had the ice cream and coffee—Coffee Paradise—where they put in some anisette and a twist of lemon peel while they strike a match at the same time and it all flames up and they drop the burned lemon peel in the cup.

Jay and several of the Italian guys were ordering bowls of these noodles mixed with peas—shells mixed with peas— for dessert, and Jay proceeded to eat at least a quart of these noodles after, you know, after this incredible nine- or ten-course meal in which we had chicken and steak and fish and several orders of different type of pasta, and salads, and we had started off with a great big bowl of meatballs in the middle of the table, and everyone had a fork and you'd just spear a meatball and keep eating until this several gallons of meatballs were gone and all of these guys had their shirt sleeves rolled up and their pearl stickpins—they undo their tie and then cross their tie in front of themselves and put their stickpin through it so they can leave the collar open— and the women ail have beehive hairdos and minks, mink stoles around these sequined dresses. All this in Monte's Venetian Room, this little restaurant in the middle of Brooklyn, in the sleaziest area I've ever seen.

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