Fatal Vision (5 page)

"Yes," he said, "that's Mrs. MacDonald."

At that point the CID photographer arrived. He did not stay long, however. He became nauseated at the sight of the bodies and Ivory had to escort him from the scene. Ivory returned to the, neighbor's house to again use the phone and request that the director of the CID photo lab come himself.

In response to Ivory's calls, more agents began to arrive. Fort Bragg's chief law enforcement officer, the provost marshal, came to the scene with an assistant. Despite the raw chill in the air, the crowd of neighbors and bystanders grew larger. By the time Franz Joseph Grebner reached 544 Castle Drive, shortly after 5
a.m
., there were so many people already there that he could not find a place to park his car.

Once inside the apartment, Grebner received a briefing from Ivory. They knew only what they had seen and what MacDonald had told the military police: that he'd been attacked by a group of hippies as he lay sleeping on his living room couch.

Franz Joseph Grebner l
ooked slowly around the living room. He had spent nineteen years in CID and had seen a lot of crime scenes and this one did not look to him the way it should. When one considered that it was an area in which a life-and-death struggle had taken place between a Green Beret officer and four intruders who had obviously been in some sort of murderous frenzy and at least some of whom had been armed, there seemed remarkably few signs of disorder.

A coffee table was tipped on its side next to the couch, its lower edge resting on a stack of magazines. An empty flowerpot stood upright on the floor, its plant spilled out alongside it. A pair of eyeglasses with a speck of blood on an outer lens lay in a corner of the room.

That was it. That was the sum total of the disarray.

And in a dining area immediately adjacent to the living room nothing at all had been disturbed. Plates remained balanced on edge in an unstable china cabinet and Valentine cards still stood upright on a table.

Grebner had been in poker games which had left premises in worse condition. He called the CID laboratory at Fort Gordon, Georgia, and asked them to send a team of technicians to the scene.

At 6
a.m
., just as the first chilly gray light began to spread across the drizzly sky, three weapons were found. A bloodstained club, measuring 31 by 1
^l
A
by 1
^l
A
inches, lay just outside the back door. Two blue threads were stuck to it with blood. Twenty feet away, lying side by side beneath a bush, were an icepick and a second paring knife. This knife bore the trade name "Old Hickory," and its blade was not bent but straight. The blades of both the knife and icepick—like the blade of the knife found on the bedroom floor—appeared to have been wiped clean of blood.

At 8
a.m
. medics arrived to remove the bodies of Jeffrey MacDonald's wife and daughters. Kristen's body was lifted from its bed and placed on a stretcher in the hallway. The body of her sister was carried from the room across the hall and laid upon the same stretcher. A Catholic chaplain made the sign of the cross and spoke a few words of prayer. Then the medics lifted the stretcher and carried it out of the house. They returned, with a separate stretcher, for Colette.

Using tongs, Ivory removed the bathmat from her abdomen and placed it in a plastic bag. Then, again using tongs, he lifted the torn and bloody blue pajama top from her chest. As he did, he could see that not only had the garment been ripped down the front, along a seam, but that across the back there were dozens of neat, round holes—there would turn out to be forty-eight altogether—that looked as if they had been made with an icepick.

Three hours earlier, Ivory had seen Jeffrey MacDonald wheeled, apparently unconscious, to an ambulance. Dozens of icepick holes in the back of his pajama top, Ivory assumed, meant dozens of icepick holes in his back.

Ivory immediately dispatched an agent to Womack Hospital with instructions to interview MacDonald as soon as possible in an attempt to get a better description of the intruders and a more detailed account of the attack. Indeed, Ivory feared that it might already be too late. He did not think it likely that a man with that many wounds was going to survive for very long.

Then, with the pajama top sealed inside a plastic bag, Ivory watched as medics lifted the body of Colette MacDonald from the floor. She had been dead long enough by this time for the process of rigor mortis to have begun. Her neck and the upper portion of her body had grown rigid.

As the medics lifted her, by the shoulders and legs, her head did not slump backward, and Ivory, who was standing close by, saw, directly beneath her head, a dark clot of blood about the size of his fist and, sticking up from the clot, pigtail fashion, something which appeared to be a thread. A blue thread.

He got down on his hands and knees and removed the thread from the blood clot with tweezers and placed it in a plastic vial. Then, looking within the body outline that he had drawn with yellow Magic Marker on the rug, he noticed more threads—perhaps as many as two dozen altogether. These threads were not microscopic. They ranged in length from 1 to
2
inches and all appeared identical to those used in the manufacture of the torn blue pajama top that had been found on Colette MacDonald's chest.

This immediately struck William Ivory as peculiar. He could not understand how—if, as seemed obvious, the torn blue pajama top had been placed on top of Colette MacDonald's body after it had come to rest on the floor—so many threads from it could have wound up underneath.

During the next hour, Ivory continued to gather evidence. He soon discovered additional blue threads. There would turn out to be eighty-one altogether, scattered across the entire room. Two were even found beneath the headboard of the bed, where the word
pig
had been written in blood.

Ivory also found two pieces of latex rubber on the rug. One was the size of a dime, the other the size of a quarter. They looked like they might have come from a rubber glove.

A few minutes later, as he unfolded the pile of bloody bedding that lay in the corner of the master bedroom, he found a finger

section of a disposable rubber surgeon's glove. The section seemed to have been torn at its base, as might happen if one were removing such a glove in a hurry. Also, it was stained, as if someone wearing such a glove had dipped a finger in blood, as one might if one were preparing to write in blood on the headboard of a bed.

The Voice of Jeffrey MacDonald

In the summer, during high school, Colette would go over to Fire Island. She stayed with her friend Bonnie Brown. Bonnie's father owned a big construction company and owned part of Davis Park or Leisure Beach
over on Fire Island. Very wealthy guy. Big political influence-type guy. And one summer—either after our freshman year or
over on Fire Island. Very wealthy guy. Big political influence-type guy. And one summer—either after our freshman year or sophomore year in high school—she started dating this kid who was a sophomore or a junior at Purdue.

I got off the ferry and saw them and Bonnie looked embarrassed and Colette looked mortified. But I walked up to her and she greeted me and then there was sort of this pregnant pause and she said she had to tell me something and
I
said what was that, and she told me that she was seeing someone else and that we were really not
going together anymore.

And I remember my world fell apart. A tremendously empty feeling, just like sort of destroyed. Tried to be brave about it in front of Colette but was really, really devastated.

I walked around aimlessly and got back on the ferry a short while thereafter and took the ferry back to Patchogue and that was the end of it until we really started dating again when I was a freshman at Princeton and she was a freshman at Skidmore.

I had been unable to get ahold of her and eventually went over one day on the ferry, and I remember very clearly being up on the second deck, and Colette was sitting down on the dock, on a seat that was right under the harbormaster's booth, with Bonnie Brown.

*
*
*

I believe her relationship with Dean Chamberlain had been severed by that time. Dean was a tall, kind of gawky, not bad-looking, left-handed kid who was the son of an art teacher at Patchogue Junior-Senior High School. They dated fairly heavily the senior year.

To be honest, Dean was a jerk as far as I was concerned. I always thought he was a nitwit. He was bigger than most kids at the time. I think he was only about six-two or six-three, but he grew up to that height very early so when we were in like ninth grade he was tall, he was a big kid, but he wasn't a tough kid or anything—he was just a jerk.

I could never understand Colette's fascination with him because he was a nonsupportive sort of drain on her. And they'd play all these dumb little games like, "If you leave me, I won't be able to live," and all this stuff. You know, really juvenile- stuff. I didn't think much of him at all. I didn't like him, never liked him.

It's funny, several things happened when I first went to Princeton. I went through this incredible transformation. I really don't know how it came about, but I suddenly decided that I wanted to become a doctor. I sort of came to a conclusion—kind of abruptly, as I remember it—that medicine was the thing for me. I transmitted this rather casually in a phone call to my parents who were, I think, stunned by the suddenness and the seeming casualness of the decision, and yet I seemed so positive.

Suddenly, in this first week of being at Princeton and this new, glorious experience in an Ivy League school, and meeting all these exciting people, it just came to me that I wanted to be a physician. That it was a field where I could sort of be on my own, make whatever I wanted to out of myself. That I could have a variety of possible specialties and sub-specialties that all sounded exciting—especially surgery at that time. Which is funny, because most of the kids I grew up with became cops or gas station owners or fishermen or carpenters or things like that.

I think that, in retrospect, my family doctor had something to do with it. I always remember him as being sort of Ivy League-ish; he always wore, um, soft desert boots, and, like, brown pants and a tweed jacket, although he was young and, you know, kind of attractive. And I always thought of him as being a neat sort of professional guy. I mowed his lawn, as a matter of fact, for a whole summer, and we had talked a little bit about it and he always encouraged me to go into medicine.

Our family doctor before that, Dr. Swenson, was kind of a big, rough-looking guy who seemed a little rough to me. He had a pock-marked face and—the only exam I ever remember was him examining my mother and I was there in the room, which I remember very clearly because he took her blouse off and I had never seen my mother without any clothes on, and he did a breast examination, a
nd I was thinking to myself, "I
hope he doesn't hurt my mother while he does that," and I remember seeing her without any clothes on.

Anyway, it was only a week or two after that that I started thinking of Colette. It was weird, my birthday was coming up on October 12 and I wrote her a letter, like on October 7 or October 5 or something like that. It was very strange because I was thinking of my birthday coming up and I wrote to Colette out of the clear blue.

I wrote her a long, kind of emotional letter saying that I was now at school and she was at school and we'd had such fantastic times in the past, and times were changing and life was moving on, and—-oh, geez, it's embarrassing, I remember it now—it was a sophomoric letter telling her how incredible our experience had been together and how much she had meant to me, and again I repeated that wouldn't it be fantastic if we could get together again, and I even closed it with, like, a four-line poem. Aaagh! I feel like—it's weird to think about that.

I got a letter back from her. Umm, it was funny, it was kind of tantalizing, it wasn't, like, by return mail. It wasn't prior to my birthday. It was, like, three or four or five days later, so it was, like, close to a two-week wait. I got a card for my birthday in which she apologized for being late but said she was so busy, and a letter. And the letter was very revealing in that she also opened up to me like I had opened up to her. She felt, I think, a little lonely at college, like everyone, I think, does the first couple of months. You're— you know—away from the parents, away from the home womb, and out in the big world, et cetera.

But it was a great letter. And I remember—oh, it was— it's so clear now! I remember sitting in my room in Witherspoon Hall, a fifth-floor walkup in Princeton, and

getting this letter from Colette in that beautiful handwriting of hers, and my heart jumped.

She didn't say, like,
^‘
i love you." She said things like we'd had such a great relationship and it was difficult to be away from home and it was such a shock and a surprise and it made her feel so good to get this long letter from me, and she was surprised that I had opened up to her as much as I did.