Fatal Vision (108 page)

He also said to a Long Beach newspaper reporter who interviewed him at Bastrop early in 1983: "I have the same nightmares. I still hear Colette's voice, and the sounds in the house
...
I
still see the blood. I still wake up in a cold sweat, exhausted."

As long as there is money to pay them, of course, the lawyers and private investigators will be able to keep busy for years. There will always be new "witnesses," new "leads." And, no doubt, there will be money: no small amount of it supplied by that remaining hard core of true believers—those who accept Jeffrey MacDonald at face value; those who did not attend the trial in its entirety (or at all) and who have never taken the time and trouble to read the record; those who are still so mesmerized by the glittery surface of MacDonald's personality (even though he is gaunt now, with graying hair, "a haggard replica of his former self," as one interviewer described him) that their allegiance remains unpolluted by fact.

"He's never going to accept his guilt," Brian Murtagh said not long after the Supreme Court's final decision in the case. "He's never going to just sit in jail. There is a temptation to say, The end. This is it. Finished.' But no. Not really. The case is never going to be in a posture where he just quietly sits in jail and lets the years roll by."

It is over for me, though. I have reached the end. I have followed the tangled paths as far as possible and they have led me to places where
I
did not ever want to be.

There was a day, a very hot and humid Saturday in early August, when in the company of two criminologists who were preparing to testify for the defense, I went inside 544 Castle Drive.

I remained for five hours, amid the mustiness, the clutter, and the dust. For the most part it was the little things to which my attention was drawn.

On the dining room floor there was a small wooden figure, about the size of my thumb: a piece of a Fisher-Price toy.

In Kristen's room, under her bed, there was a jumble of Golden Books and dolls and finger paintings which she had made on poster paper, nine and a half years before. There was also a large, rectangular hole in the floorboards where the bloody footprint of her father had been removed.

Across the hall, in Kimberly's room, there was a pair of white sneakers with holes in the toes. Her bare mattress was still stained by faded blood.

In the master bedroom, at the end of the hall, splinters of wood still lay on the bloodstained shag carpet, and on the windowsill stood a long-dead poinsettia, its pot wrapped in red tinfoil—a remnant of Christmas 1969.

Colette's beige bra, which she had removed as she had changed into her pajamas on the night of Monday, February 16, 1970, still lay on the green chair near the bed. The telephone receiver,
smeared with black fingerprint dust, dangled from a dresser alongside.

In the hall bathroom, three toothbrushes hung from a rack and a half-used tube of Crest toothpaste lay curled on the rim of the sink.

There was a calendar in the kitchen with a space next to each date so one could jot reminders of plans.
February 15: "Jeff ER."
In Colette's handwriting.
February 16: "Psych."

February 17: "Dinner Ron."
Lieutenant Harrison had eaten elsewhere that night.

Next to the kitchen sink was a rack in which, nine and a half years earlier, dishes had been placed to dry: three plates, two cups, and, turned upside down to facilitate the drying process, two liqueur glasses. A bottle of dishwashing liquid—blackened by fingerprint powder, like so many other objects in the house— stood next to the drain.

There was an unopened can of Diet Pepsi on the counter. A pantry contained a large bag of gum drops, a tin of sliced pineapple, and many, many cans of Campbell's soup.

Eventually, I became aware of a noise. A low hum, being emitted by the refrigerator. The CID agent who had opened the apartment that morning told me the refrigerator had never been unplugged. There was a standing order at CID headquarters: every six weeks send an MP to defrost it. For nine and a half years, the Army, as part of its continuing crime scene supervision, had been preserving the food that no one had eaten, that no one would ever eat.

I opened the refrigerator door. There were only two cans inside, both unopened. One contained cranberry sauce, the other ginger ale.

The freezer, however, was crammed with food. A bag of French fries, opened and with half the potatoes gone; a carton of strawberry ice cream, half empty, and next to it a full, unopened carton of chocolate ripple. There were also a box of rainbow trout, two pounds of hamburger meat (at 53 cents a pound), and a package of pork chops, still tightly sealed in supermarket cellophane.

I shut the door. The hum of the refrigerator seemed to grow louder. After a while, I lost all desire to open closet doors or to check under beds, or to make lists of personal effects or household furnishings. I didn't want to find any Christmas tree tinsel on the living room rug, or any threads from a blue pajama top, anywhere.

*
*

That night, for the first and only time, I dreamed of Colette. In the dream, she was on the witness stand, testifying, and as she looked across the courtroom at her husband, she cried out:
"Jeff, Jeff, what more do they want from us?! What more do they want us to do?!'
¹

I told him about the dream the next day, describing in detail its vividness and emotional power. He was sunning himself on the lawn, reading the Sunday papers, which of course were filled with news about the trial.

He looked at me when I had finished as if I had just told him it was raining in Portland, Maine. Then he mentioned that the Yankees had won the night before.

Then there was the day, months after the trial, that I spent with Paul Stombaugh in his basement office in Greenville, South Carolina—an office filled with notebooks and charts and photographs having to do with the MacDonald case. He showed me a picture I had never seen before. It was a picture taken in the master bedroom of 544 Castle Drive on the morning of February 17. It showed a suitcase on the bedroom floor. The area all around the suitcase was spattered with blood, yet there were not any spatters on the suitcase. To Stombaugh, this suggested that the suitcase had been placed there, near the closet where Jeffrey MacDonald's clothes were kept, after all the blood had been shed. To Stombaugh, it suggested that at least momentarily, before he made the incision in his chest which caused the partial collapse of his lung, Jeffrey MacDonald had been planning to flee.

Many months after the verdict, Stombaugh was still refining his scenario, still working on it as a hobby, like Rubik's Cube. Just one of the many who have grown obsessed.

I have looked at too many pictures that I did not ever want to see.

I have awakened, too many times, between 3 and 4
a.m.,
thinking about 544 Castle Drive and February 17, 1970, and knowing that my sleep was over for the night.

And, far too often and much too recently, I have maintained contact with people whose pain I did not any longer want to share. I am thinking, in particular, of Jeffrey MacDonald's mother.

Long after I knew the worst about her son—long after I had written it on paper—I called her to ask about the trip he'd taken to Texas during his sophomore year of high school. It was one of the little things that continued to nag at me, because I could just not bring the picture into focus. Like Stombaugh in his basement, I too, I suppose, had grown obsessed.

In any event, she assured me—as I'd known she would—that no family crisis had precipitated his departure. The only problem which arose, she said, was one which developed
because
of it. While she had viewed the episode in an extremely positive light—"an expansion of experience" for her teenaged son—Jeff's father had taken a darker view.

"If the kid wants to go," she recalled him as saying, "that means he doesn't love me. If he likes other people better than the people in his own home, then we've lost him." The longer Jeff had stayed away, the more upset his father had become, growing convinced that "he loves them better than us."

"My husband," said Dorothy MacDonald, "was a very charming man as long as there were people around. He possessed great charisma. He loved to stimulate argument. But after everyone else had gone home, a little of the man who felt rejected by circumstances would start to come out. The rejection he had suffered in his early life would start to get to him, and during the late hours of the evening he would become indignant and morose."

That his younger son had gone to Texas for a two-week visit and had remained for more than four months became a focal point for this anger and self-pity. "But because of his pride, he would never, never, never reveal to Jeff any of that sort of feeling."

We were having this talk during April of 1983: three months after the Supreme Court had rejected Jeffrey MacDonald's final appeal. Yet his mother, like himself, continued to express optimism. Recent developments, she said, had been "very positive." The investigation on the East Coast was "going well." A major letter-writing campaign to members of Congress was under way, and even astrologers had recently begun to inform her that they were picking up "positive vibes."

I really did not want to listen anymore, and there were too many things I could not say: for instance, that I knew her son had killed his wife and children and that Freddy Kassab had told me once that as far back as the Article 32 hearing in 1970, she had said, "Fred, how can you be so
sure
he's innocent?"

So I just took notes while she said, "Right now I feel like a soiled piece of baggage. Life
has
been kind of unusually difficult.

I'm not saying that all the things I did as a mother were right. But believe me,
please,
I never intended to cause anybody unhappiness."

I have been, too, to the home of Freddy and Mildred Kassab on Long Island. It is a new house, and much smaller than the one in which they lived in 1970. There is no swimming pool; in the backyard is just a small bed of roses to which Mildred, on nice days, devotes considerable time and energy.

The Quality Egg Company, which employs Freddy Kassab, has moved to Dayton, New Jersey, and Kassab lives alone in a New Jersey apartment during the week. He was sixty-two years old early in 1983, overweight and suffering from emphysema.

They talked to me for hours, and showed me pictures and letters and diaries. At first, I felt—especially when looking at the letters and diaries—the way I could imagine Brian Murtagh feeling as he'd stood at the grave site in September of 1974, waiting for the exhumation to begin: that this was a violation of privacy so gross in dimension that no end, however meritorious, could justify it.

Eventually, however, this squeamishness gave way to an acceptance of the fact that if this was where the path had led me, then, for the moment, this was where I would be. And it was, ultimately, plain and simple sorrow that I felt as I read the words written with such naive excitement so long ago by a girl no older than my own two daughters were now.

From 1957, when Colette was in ninth grade:

Dec. 27—Tonight Judy had a wonderful party. Jeff and I had a "PRAFTIOUS" time, which means, "Wow!" The room was simply loaded with mistletoe, but I didn't let him take advantage very often. When I think of the way he looked at me just before he kissed me, I simply flip.

Later in high school she had written retrospectively of "The times when Jeff and I had serious talks about him loving me. I kept trying to convince him that he doesn't, because I think this Is a very temporary thing with him."

And toward the end of that long and painful weekend, the Kassabs showed me the last written message they had ever received from Colette. It was a card, sent from Fort Brag, just before Christmas of 1969. The printed message said: "May the
Good Will and Peace of this Christmas Season be yours Throughout the coming year." She had signed it, "See you soon—Love, Jeff & Colette" and then had written at the bottom: "P.S. Please get pants for Jeff in 36" instead of 34"—he is gaining weight but doesn't like to feel it!"

That, of course, was before he had started his second moonlighting job and his workouts with the boxing team. And before he had started taking Eskatrol.

On the plane home that night I read a number of the letters Colette had written to her mother from Skidmore. One, in particular, lingers in memory. It was written during the spring of her freshman year, in response to a stern letter from Mildred, warning her to terminate her relationship with her old high school boyfriend, Dean Chamberlain.