Chatological Humor: Weingarten discusses his feature article on Brian Murtagh

Good afternoon.

Welcome to an unscheduled Flash Chat about my Sunday magazine story on the Jeffrey MacDonald murders and the prosecutor who is still on the case.

This is an odd thing to say about a 6,400-word story, but I found myself without the space to tell it as completely as I’d have liked.    The introduction to this chat is mostly for those of you who have read the story and are still not persuaded, beyond a reasonable doubt, that MacDonald killed his family and that “A Wilderness of Error” is a deeply flawed and manipulative book.    All the rest:  Feel free to plow ahead into the questions.

I remember the killings.  I was an 18-year-old hippie at the time, roughly the same age as Helena Stoeckley.   I didn’t do as many drugs as she did, but I did plenty, including mescaline, LSD, and heroin.   When I read in the newspaper that Jeffrey MacDonald – still presumed an innocent victim – told police that his attackers had been vicious hippie intruders who chanted “acid is groovy – kill the pigs,”  I knew he had done it.   As did every hippie in every city who read that statement with any degree of analytical thought.   No self-respecting killer hippie would ever have uttered, let alone chanted, that uncool, anachronistic thing as late as 1970.    That was exactly what some ramrod-straight 26-year-old Ivy League frat-boy doctor who was contemptuous of the counterculture would have thought a hippie would say.

Not to mention that hippies, um, didn’t kill people, at least not while stoned in drug-induced trances.  The Manson gang were not hippies.  They were weirdo murderers.  They went around murdering people, not just Sharon Tate and her friends.   They did not come out of the dark, descend on a house, do their savage thing, and then disappear back into the world never to be heard of again.  That’s not how it works with murderous gangs who would kill sleeping children.   Oh, and hippies also don’t arrive at a house intent on mass murder without remembering to bring along any weapons, relying on whatever knives and pieces of wood they might happen to find inside the house.   The Manson people brought a shotgun.

But, okay.   Forget all that.   That’s just me bloviating.    Maybe the MacDonald killers were different from all other killers.    Maybe they were really disorganized, absentminded murderous hippies who talked funny and only killed just this once.  Oh, and who came to hassle the doctor for drugs because they were drug addicts, and who killed his family, but never opened a closet to discover a big stash of syringes and drugs, including amphetamines.   Or maybe they saw that stuff but didn’t steal it because murder may be one thing, but stealing is just plain wrong.

So, fine.  I’m just bloviating.  Let’s just go to the evidence.

It is true that the cops focused on MacDonald almost from the beginning.  They did not do this because they were lazy and wanted to go home early and pop a brewski, or because they had a grudge against the handsome, arrogant, smug doctor.   They focused on MacDonald because just about every single thing they found suggested that his story was a desperate, audacious lie, from beginning to end.   Some of these things were in my story; some I didn’t have room for.   You’ll get a few of that second group here.

One of the first things Jeffrey MacDonald told police when they arrived was that he had pulled out of Colette’s chest a short, dull knife with a bent blade.   But that knife had not inflicted her chest wound, nor the knife cuts to her pajama top; the forensics were very clear on that.   She had been stabbed only by the ice pick and the Old Hickory knife, not by the Geneva Forge knife with the bent blade.    Why did MacDonald volunteer that odd lie, then, not once but twice, as medics were working on him?   Brian Murtagh’s guess: because the doctor suddenly remembered that the curved-blade knife had his fingerprints on it – it was the one he likely grabbed from Colette as she was trying to defend herself -- and he had to account for those prints.

Do you know where they found the knife and ice pick and club used in the murders?  The murderous hippies didn’t carry them away, to ditch the evidence where it couldn’t be found.  No, they left them right outside the back door of the house, in a bush, a place that someone could reach by opening the back door and leaning out and pitching them there, without having to step out into the rain and getting your feet and shoes and clothes wet, or leaving your own footprints in the dirt, all of which might have made police suspicious.    So, see, they were outside the house -- suggesting intruders who left -- but not so FAR outside the house you’d have to walk in the rain to get there, or maybe be seen by a neighbor disposing of them.  So.

Much of the so-called exculpatory evidence produced by the defense over the many years of this case has been focused on various fibers and hairs and fuzz and other detritus found in the house that cannot now be linked to any of the people living in the house on the night of the murders, any of the people who lived in the house or to the household items which had been collected and retained in evidence.  Each and every such item, it seems to the defense, is evidence of intruders that night.   The prosecution has always made the reasonable argument that these things are proof of nothing more than the fact that this is a rental apartment used by many, many families over the years.  Stuff accumulates.  Both the original jury and countless appellate courts have agreed with this repeatedly over the years.

The hero of the original investigation was a 30 year old Army investigator named Bill Ivory, who Jeffrey MacDonald really didn’t like at all.  Bill was not Ivy League educated.  He was plodding and methodical.  He was the guy who discovered that MacDonald’s pajama top, when shredded down a certain seam, had leaked highly distinctive v-shaped seam threads all over the crime scene, most notably in the master bedroom where prosecutors contend the violence began – where they think Colette, trying to ward off Jeffrey, had reached out and torn his top.    The most notable place there were NO seam threads?  Anywhere near the sofa on which MacDonald claims he was sleeping when attacked into unconsciousness  -- the place where he says his pajama was torn.

So what about “A Wilderness of Error”?     Didn’t the methodical Errol Morris deal with all these seemingly inculpatory things?   The answer, in a nutshell, is no.   Errol Morris doesn’t like the physical evidence.   He basically dismisses all of it as unreliable, or so compromised by bad police work as to be useless.   And it is true that if your attitude is that no physical evidence is of any value – why, the case against Jeffrey MacDonald suddenly seems pretty weak!

Except, you know what?  It DOESN’T!   It STILL doesn’t fall apart -- or at least the alternative explanations still make no sense!  

Morris spends a bizarre amount of his book on the completely discredited Helena Stoeckley – whose fingerprints and DNA were not found inside the house, who has told wildly impossible and conflicting stories about the night of the crime.     Morris seems mesmerized by the fact that one police investigator, on the night of the murders, responding to the call, saw a woman in a floppy hat standing out in the rain not far from the scene of the crime.    It is only very late in the book that Morris finds and interviews the man – his name is Ken Mica – who tells him, in the interview, that the woman he saw was definitely NOT Helena Stoeckley.   This gobsmacks Mr. Morris!   He’s outraged.   And he spends a few more pages speculating about why Ken Mica might be lying about this.

Yet Morris seems to believe unquestioningly anyone whose story supports his conspiratorial version of events.   Take this moment from the book:

Morris is interviewing Robert Sadoff, a psychiatrist from the case.  Sadoff, like many people interviewed in this book, has his doubts about whether MacDonald did the deed. 

Sadoff:  “I don’t think he’s a killer.  I don’t think he stabbed himself.   His chief of surgery at Columbia testified that it was so close to the heard that not even a cardiac surgeon would know exactly where to place the ice pick in the chest to collapse the lung without hitting the pericardium.  And if it hits the pericardium, he’s dead.” 

That’s it.  Then the book goes on to other things.

Whoa!   When I read “A Wilderness of Errors,” I hit two points where I stopped and circled a passage that I found actually persuasive that MacDonald might have been railroaded.   This was the first one.   I do not believe Jeffrey MacDonald, alleged psychopathic narcissist AND emergency room doctor, who knew quite well where organs are located, would have risked his own life in setting up this alibi.

So I did a few seconds research.  MacDonald’s chest wound was below the RIGHT nipple, some three inches to the right of the midline of his chest.   An eighth grader taking biology would know that is nowhere near the heart. 

Did a doctor really ever testify that it was?  Probably not, but I don’t know. Did Errol Morris have an obligation not to use this ridiculous statement, or at least to point out it was self-evidently wrong?  That, I do know.

I am going to end by telling you the second thing I circled in this book, the second moment where I thought to myself:  Whoa.  This might be seriously significant.

It’s a little complicated.  It’s a moment in Errol Morris’s book where he quotes from a bench colloquy between defense lawyers and the judge, midway through the original trial.   Helena Stoeckley is on the stand, and she has just flat-out denied having participated in the murder or knowing anything about the murder scene.    Bernard Segal, the chief defense counsel, asks for a conference at the bench.

From “A Wilderness of Error: --

You can almost hear the walls crumble around him.

When the lawyers for the defense had met with Stoeckley the day before, presumably she had been their witness.  Now she remembered nothing.  Why?

(then Morris quotes from the transcript of the bench conference:)

Segal:  At this time, Your Honor, I ask for leave of Court to take this witness as on cross, because she is a surprise and hostile witness. I represent to the Court that during the interviews with me and with other persons present she stated that when she looked at the picture she had a recollection of standing over a body holding a candle, seeing a man’s body on the floor. "

Whoa!   Really?  She reversed herself entirely from what she told defense lawyers the day before?   This surprised me, and troubled me.  It seemed to give some credence to the notion that maybe the prosecution HAD threatened her, in some way.  It wasn’t evidence, to me, of MacDonald’s innocence – Stoeckley was completely unreliable – but it MIGHT have shown prosecutorial misconduct, meaning MacDonald might have not gotten a fair trial.

Except.   Except after dropping that little bombshell, Morris wanders off into his wilderness of other conspiracy theories.   He eventually gets back to this moment at trial, way later, in the middle of another chapter.   And in this new chapter you learn – assuming you remember the first reference – that Bernard Segal was almost certainly lying in what he told the judge.   Helena Stoeckley had never told defense lawyers about a man on the floor or having held a candle.   We know that because Segal’s own co-counsel, Wade Smith, reveals it in testimony.  Smith would repeat this unambiguously on the stand in Wilmington:   Helena Stoeckley had flatly denied to both Smith and Segal that she knew anything about the crime.   Segal  -- absolutely desperate, watching his case go down in flames – had outright lied to a federal judge so he’d be allowed to get nasty with Helena in court.   And it still hadn’t worked.

But Morris won’t accept that.   He spends a lot of time trying to persuade Smith to say that Segal wasn’t the sort of person who would lie.   And Smith finally agrees, yep, Segal was a nice, believable guy; maybe he was remembering some OTHER time she maybe said that to someone.    And Errol Morris goes on to make his next point, as though nothing of significance had just happened.

(Tiny sweet point:  This lie by Segal was not in “Fatal Vision,” even though Joe McGinniss had been present at the questioning of Helena Stoeckley by the defense.  Why wasn’t it in the book?  Because Joe didn’t know about it.   Why didn’t Joe know about it?  When Bernard Segal sent all trial documents to McGinniss, he neglected to send one:  The bench colloquy with the judge in which he, Segal, had lied.   (Not being a lawyer, McGinniss was not allowed to hear what happened in whispers up at the bench. Had he seen the transcript, he would have recognized the lie immediately, and put it in his book.)

And finally finally, The Post decided that one photograph that was key to the story – the one that persuaded Brian Murtagh to enter the case – was too gruesome to use in the magazine.  I understand that decision and am publishing it here at the other end of a click. I am overwhelmed by its bleakness. This is Kristy, the two year old.   Warning: It’s disturbing.

Photo link

A better one to go out on.   The victims, shortly before the crime.   May they rest in peace: Link

the book doesn't get into. 

The jury noticed this.  Murtagh noticed this.   McGinniss noticed this.    Morris doesn't mention it:

When Helena Stoeckley took the stand, MacDonald  barely looked at her.   He just chatted with lawyers, etc.   Here he was finally confronting, after 9 years, the lady in the floppy hat who watched as the monsters murdered his family.  And he's not really interested.  

Adding to the previous answer: 

Another thing that never happened:  If Helena was in that house, as she says, if she answered the phone (as she once said) if she tried to ride the rocking horse (as she once said) she appears to have been wearing gloves.   None of her prints were found anywhere.   So she was the drugged out woman holding a candle, chanting "acid is groovy, kill the pigs" while wearing gloves. 

Thank you.  We're done. Really good questions.  I loved this chat.  

Next week: Either a full chat or an update.   Gonna depend on the quality of my life.      See you all, either way, next Tuesday.