Fatal Vision (55 page)

"You bought a stereo down there, didn't you?"

"That's right."

"How much did that cost?"

"I don't know. It was a package deal with the color TV and it was on time. Like two years of payments or something and the total was seven or eight hundred dollars for the two together, stereo and TV."

"Did she get upset about that?"

"No, she liked it. It was the first time we had had nice possessions."

"So, I take it, your testimony is that your marriage was serene, was calm, and there were no problems of any concern." "That's right."

"Nothing that troubled the still waters of your marriage." "That's right."

"How about the kids? Any problems with the kids?" "Absolutely not."

"In some of the material I saw, it indicated that Colette was somewhat concerned about bed-wetting. Would you consider bed-wetting a problem?"

"No, and she didn't consider it a problem either. The only one that considered that a problem was the CID agent."

"Was this something you discussed with one another?"

"Sure."

"But these discussions didn't result in any arguments or disputes?"

"Absolutely not."

"Or misunderstandings?"

"Absolutely not. The problem was that Kristy still had a bottle at two and a half years of age and I thought Colette should take the bottle away when she goes to sleep. Colette said she didn't mind getting up and getting her a bottle. That doesn't sound like a very big problem." Neither did it sound like the situation Colette had described to her child psychology class on the last night of her life.

"How about Kimberly? Was she a bed-wetter?"

"No."

"She had long since outgrown that?"

"Right." This, of course, was contrary to what the nurse from San Antonio had said to the CID reinvestigators.

Woerheide moved to close range, asking Jeffrey MacDonald to describe the events of February 17 and the days immediately preceding.

"I guess Valentine's Day was Friday," MacDonald said, "and on Saturday Ron Harrison came over in the afternoon." (In fact, Valentine's Day had been Saturday, and Ron Harrison had come over that night.) MacDonald described the discussion of the contents of the
Esquire
magazine. "We thumbed through the magazine," he said, "and that was it. That's all there ever was, and for some reason this has become a tremendously important tiling in my life."

He continued:
"I
don't know if Ron ate dinner with us or not.
I
don't even remember what we did that night. I presume we stayed home because I had to work the next morning."

He described driving to Hamlet, eating a steak for breakfast, and passing a quiet day in the emergency room.
"I
had several meals during the day," he said. "I took a nap or two, probably in the morning right after breakfast I went back to my room and slept for an hour or two. Did some reading. And I probably had about five and a half or six hours of sleep Sunday night, from roughly midnight on." (During the April 6, 1970, interview, MacDonald had said, "Now, when I'm at work I—I hardly ever sleep. I mean, the nurses can tell you that. They just call me and, you know—I'm there like that.")

Now, in 1974, he described driving back to Fort Bragg, eating breakfast, and going to work. "I did office work, mainly," he said. "My title was preventive medical officer, which the newspapers took to be, you know, counseling a lot of people on drug abuse when it was in fact keeping latrines clean.

"I presume that I was at my office most of the day.
I
may have run over either on the way home for lunch or sometime during the day to see this sergeant on the boxing team. I don't really recall that. This was kind of suggested to me, and it seems like a reasonable possibility. Really, nothing stands out at all, you know, about that day, except I believe we played basketball for a short period of time starting around 4:30.

"Most of the officers, we either played—I tried to get them to play either volleyball or basketball. The guys were always out of shape and they didn't like to run the mile or the number of laps but they'd play competitively, so I think I got the whole office to go over and play basketball for a while that day.

"Then I believe I went home, picked up both the children, and went down to feed the Shetland pony. And we had dinner at home and Colette split for class. So I probably, you know, cleared off the table—normal procedure—and got the kids in their pajamas. And relatively soon Kristy would go to bed. You know, I'd put her to bed.

"Kimberly stayed up with me. Sometime shortly there after dinner I think I probably—I was probably on the floor with Kimmy and had a nap. We were waiting for
Laugh-In.
We watched
Laugh-In
together. She liked the little guy who used to ride a bicycle and hit a telephone pole and fall over."

He described Colette's return h
ome from class and said, "After
Johnny Carson came on, she went to bed.
I
was still up.
I
was in the middle of a—
reading something. I believe it was
a
mystery at the time. I read a lot of mysteries.
I
started reading after Kimmy, you know, went to bed. I had the TV on and I was reading something or something like that. I usually just leaf through something, or was reading while the TV was on. I didn't just sit and watch TV.

"I think Johnny Carson was a good show that night or something, and I watched it. There was somebody interesting on or something, so I watched most of that. And when that was over, I did the dishes and finished reading, or something. There was something like twenty pages or something in whatever I was reading, and I finished it.

"And sometime in here Kristy had started crying. So I went in and got her a bottle, which—you know—she didn't cry anymore. This was, you know, the thing the CID thought was so critical that Colette and I disagreed about. So I got her a bottle, and gave her a bottle because we had not yet decided not to give her
a
bottle if she woke up in the middle of the night. That's all."

"Did Kristen wake up crying often?"

"No. No, a couple of times a week."

"It wasn't a nightly routine?"

"No."

"Do you know of any particular reason she woke up crying that night?" "No."

"As opposed to any other night?" "No."

"Did you ask her?"

"No. It didn't seem unusual at all. It just seemed like something kids do sometimes."

"Did you ask her if she had a bad dream or something like that? What was wrong?"

"Oh, I probably did. I probably said, 'Everything's okay, Kris.' And she said she wanted a bottle, so I gave her a bottle."

"But you have no specific recollection?"

"No. Really what I recollect is she was crying and I went in, and we sort of talked or something and I got her a bottle."

"Do you remember what you talked about?"

"No."

MacDonald resumed his recitation.

"And then after I finished the dishes and finished reading this book, paperback style, I went in to go to bed. And Kristy was in bed with my wife and she had wet the bed, you know, on my half of the bed.

"I don't know, really, honestly, if she, you know—or if she did not have a bottle. I presume if she did have a bottle there with her I would keep it with her, and brought her to her own bed and put her in bed.

"She was two and a half years old. She wasn't diapered. She had, you know—the bed-wetting was a relatively infrequent thing. You know, she didn't wet her bed every night or every other night or even like that.

"It was kind of an infrequent thing or a weekly thing by now and she didn't wear diapers, and I didn't change her diapers. She had a—you know—wet thing, and she had her bottle and was going to sleep the rest of the night, so I just let her go to sleep.

"So I pushed back the covers to let the bed dry where she had been and I got a blanket and went to sleep on the couch. Big deal.

"And the next—you know, there was some lights on in the house. There was a light on in the kitchen and there was a light on in the main bathroom. So the next thing I remembered was I heard my wife screaming, and she said, 'Help, Jeff!' And at the same time I heard Kristy—Kimberly—I'm sorry, it wasn't Kristy, it was Kimberly. She was screaming, 'Daddy!'

"Colette said, 'Help, Jeff, why are they doing this to me?' And it sounded very loud to me. It still sounds loud. Kimberly said, 'Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, help!'

"And I started to sit up, and there was some people at the end of the couch the CID said was never in my house. And they couldn't find any evidence of fourteen investigators and three medics and the CID and MPs and doctors, and because they couldn't find evidence of these people, I'm guilty.

"The CID can't even fingerprint a phone that an MP has used and get his fingerprints, and they tell me they have no evidence of these people and that's why I'm here today. That's why.

"It is the most preposterous—they had no evidence that Ron Harrison was in my house, they had no evidence that my mother was in my house, no evidence the Kassabs were there, no evidence my brother was there, no evidence that anyone I ever knew was in my house except me, so I'm guilty.

"That's crazy! That's like something out of a TV show.

"I never said I saw hippies," MacDonald said. "I never said that. The provost marshal said I saw hippies. I said I saw people. I saw a person with long blond hair and a floppy hat on, and there was a light on her.

"And I never said I saw candles either. It was a light on her face, and I had the impression that there was something—you know, a wavering thing of an intermittent light or something, but I still think it was like candlelight—you know, it was an impression.

"It was in the midst of a dark room and over a period of ten to twenty to thirty seconds, and I never really saw her. I saw hair, I saw a face outline, and a hat, and that was it. That was all I saw, and while this was happening, Colette was screaming and Kimberly was screaming, 'Daddy,' and this guy hit me with something I thought was a baseball bat."

MacDonald c
ontinued his description of the
fight, saying, "I couldn't use my hands well, because my pajama top was all around my hands. And I've been asked fifty million times, how did the pajama top get around your hands? I don't remember that. It could have been pulled over my head as I was struggling and let go of the guy's arm. It could have been ripped around my back. I just don't know. I just had—it was around my arms all of a sudden, and I was trying to push and I couldn't get my arms out of my jacket. Like when you see in a hockey fight when a guy pulls a shirt over the other hockey player—you know—I couldn't do anything.

"And the next thing I remember I was falling and I saw a glimpse of a knee, and that's the extent of all these allegations made by the provost marshal in the newspaper about fringed boots and white boots and black boots and muddy boots.

"What I saw was a glimpse of a knee in the top of what I thought was a boot and, you know, it seemed—what I really remember, it seemed shiny. So when they asked me was it wet, I said, yeah, it seemed like it was wet or was vinyl leather or shiny leather, that kind of thing.

"I never said to anyone that I know of that there were muddy boots, or anything like that, and all these things get taken—well, you'll get to that.

"So the next thing, I was lying on the floor. And I absolutely, distinctly remember I was lying there and my teeth were chattering, and there was absolute silence and I was laying sort of on my stomach with my arms under me, wrapped up in this pajama top.

"And I remember laying there, and then I remember thinking— Jesus, I heard all these screams, and it's silent, and I got up and walked down the hall to the bedroom."

He described discovering Colette, Kimberly, and Kristen, then returning to the master bedroom and dialing the operator, only to be told that if he was calling from on post, he would have to contact the military police himself.

"I don't know if I said anything or not, but I dropped the phone. I couldn't figure out what the hell she was talking about. So I checked Colette again—sometime in here I had covered her with my pajama top that I think was still on my arms as I was coming in the room—coming in—and first—you know—as I was coming in the room the first time, I took it off and Colonel Rock was very interested in whether I dropped it or threw it.