Fatal Vision (38 page)

Helena Stoeckley had always liked to make up stories. "Fabricating," many of her acquaintances said, was one of the things she did best. A teacher recalled the day she had come to school wearing a Duke University class ring and telling everyone that she had become engaged to a student at the Duke medical school. "The tale was completely made up and she had no boyfriend at all, except in her mind," the teacher said.

Following her graduation in June 1969, Stoeckley had begun to work in the Haymount section and to associate with what was generally considered to be the hippie element of Fayetteville. Her use of drugs, which had begun during high school, increased to the point that, in the fall of 1969, her parents told her that she was no longer welcome to live with them.

To P. E. Beasley, Stoeckley appeared to be "starving for attention," and was so eager for praise from him that—in order to please him—she turned in some of her best friends for dealing in narcotics. "Helena would do anything to get me to pat her on the back and act proud of her," Beasley said.

By January of 1970, Stoeckley was living in a trailer with two Fort Bragg soldiers named Greg Mitchell and Don Harris. Two weeks later, she had taken up residence on Clark Street, with two male civilians. Within days, she had moved next door to live with two young women from New Jersey. "We all hung around together," explained one of them, "and it really didn't make any difference where we slept." Stoeckley's drug addiction had by now worsened to the point that she was using marijuana, LSD, mescaline, and heroin—and beginning to take the heroin intravenously.

At 2
a.m
. on February 17, 1970, Prince Edward Beasley completed what had been almost a twenty-four-hour shift and went home. Five hours later he was awakened by a phone call from headquarters and informed of the MacDonald murders. His first thought—he would say some years later—was that the description MacDonald had given, vague as it was, resembled Helena Stoeckley and her friends. He had known her to wear a floppy hat, boots, and a blond wig. He also recalled having seen her in the company of males, both black and white, who wore Army fatigue jackets—not in itself extraordinary, since much of the Fayetteville hippie contingent was composed of soldiers either recently discharged or AWOL from Fort Bragg.

Beasley got out of bed and drove to the trailer where he had known Stoeckley to be living with Mitchell and Harris. Finding it empty, he looked for her in several other locations. Then he went back home to bed. Late that night, he drove to Clark Street and waited outside her apartment. At about 3
a.m
. a car containing Stoeckley and several male companions pulled into the driveway. Beasley approached her.

"Well, Helena," he had said—according to his later recollection—"You and these people you are with fit the description that was given of the MacDonald murderers. Now, I am going to ask you straight out: I know you and you know me. I want you to tell me the truth."

Stoeckley—who was not wearing a floppy hat, blond wig, or high boots—at first appeared to Beasley to be in a "joyful" mood. "She joked about her icepick," he said. "Then I told her this was a serious matter and not to act that way."

At this point, he said, Stoeckley took a step backward and lowered her head. "In my mind," he recalled her as saying, "it seems that I saw this thing happen." But then adding, "I was heavy on mescaline."

Beasley would later say that he had radioed the Fort Bragg CID and told them that he had suspects in custody. He waited for an hour and a half, he said, but when no one from the CID either called him back or came to Clark Street by 4:30 he felt he could not hold Stoeckley's companions any longer, and so he released them. Except for Helena, he said, he never saw any of them again.

Stoeckley herself, however—like hundreds of other Fayette-ville area hippies—was questioned several times by authorities in the days immediately following the murders.

"Every time I go out they pull me in," she complained to a newspaper reporter. "The reason they're hassling me is I don't have an alibi. The night it happened, nobody saw me." Her comments were printed in a Fayetteville paper.

Eventually, Stoeckley was questioned by William Ivory of the CID. Already convinced that MacDonald was the killer, Ivory had conducted this first interview in even more perfunctory fashion than he did the one which followed Posey's testimony. By the end of February, despite her attempts to draw attention to herself, nobody was taking Helena Stoeckley seriously as a possible suspect.

On April 13, 1970, Stoeckley—whose own parents described her as "a girl who was always seeking constant attention"—was admitted to Womack Hospital, suffering from a pain in her right side and symptoms of drug addiction. The next day, she and her father were interviewed by a military psychiatrist.

"She admitted to drug abuse," the psychiatrist said. "Using Seconal, heroin, and many other drugs. She said she would shoot up almost constantly. She said this had been going on for almost two years."

The psychiatrist concluded that "currently, she feels terribly worthless and unwanted, and states that no one is sincere and no one really cares about her. She is extremely rebellious and sets up situations where she asks for help and then makes sure that you can't give it to her." He recommended that she be hospitalized at the University of North Carolina Medical Center in Chapel Hill for "long term psychotherapy."

She was admitted there on April 17 and placed on a methadone withdrawal schedule. She told the admitting psychiatrist that she had been taking "everything available, including heroin, opium, LSD, cocaine, methadone and barbiturates." She said that in February she had begun to feel "depressed and reclusive," and had increased her heroin consumption to eight or nine doses per day.

The psychiatrist noted that at the time of her admission, "she was oriented to person and place, but thought that the date was April 26 when it was actually April 17." She told him that two days earlier she had felt "outside" herself, and at times had felt that "someone was standing over her with a knife, about to kill her.''

Having completed the methadone treatment, Stoeckley was discharged on May 11. It was noted that throughout her hospitalization she had "remained extremely reclusive and mistrustful." The final diagnosis was "narcotics addiction in a schizoid personality," and the psychiatrist wrote that "the prognosis of this patient seems poor."

Less than a month later, Stoeckley was readmitted to Womack Hospital, complaining of abdominal tenderness. She remained there until June 26, having been diagnosed as suffering from serum hepatitis and a history of drug abuse. Her liver was enlarged and needle tracks were observed along her veins.

In August, William Posey had seen Stoeckley in the Haymount district and had told Bernie Segal his story about her. Posey's testimony of the Article 32 hearing received extensive publicity— thanks to Segal and his assistant, Dennis Eisman—and soon after Ivory had reinterviewed her, Stoeckley decided to leave Fayette-ville.

On September 11, she wrote to one of her former female roommates from Clark Street saying that the MacDonald case was causing problems for her:

I am in
deep deep
trouble with the CID. Remember how I didn't have an alibi for the night of the murder? Well, our dear next door neighbor stepped up and pinned the blame on me once again. I know I did mescaline that night and borrowed somebody's blue Mustang—do you remember who owned the car? All I remember is I took off and came back about 4:30. . . . they have enough circumstantial evidence against MacDonald to try him for murder, but first they have to rebuke Posey's testimony. He saw me leave in that car but I sure don't know where I was. . . .

Stoeckley moved to Nashville and took up residence in a small white house on the corner of Belmont and Portland avenues.

Among those with whom she became acquainted was a freelance artist named Jane Zillioux.

"Helena's house was—a lot of hippies lived there," Jane said. "I lived across the street. At first I thought she was a runaway. She seemed very young to me. I didn't know how old she was. I never asked her. She just looked too young to be away from home.

"She was sick. She had hepatitis. A lot of the time, when I would see her, she would be yellow. Even her eyeballs would be yellow. One day, when I hadn't seen her for a few days, I thought, 'Well, I better check on her.' I didn't know if those hippies were feeding her or not. So I went over there. It was in the evening, sometime before Thanksgiving.

"I knocked on the door and I said, 'Helena, are you there?' And she said, 'Yes,' and I went into her room. She was weak and shaky and she sat down on the bed and I sat beside her and I asked her if she was all right.

"She said, 'I've been sick,' and I said, 'Well, Helena, why don't you go home?' You know, 'Why don't you go home to your family and let them take care of you?' And she said, 'I can't. I can't ever go home again. I was involved in some murders. My family don't want me around.'

"I didn't say anything. I was just too shocked. You know, I expected a teenage confession, like, 'I hate my mother,' or 'I'm a runaway.' I didn't expect that. I was horrified. But finally I said, 'Well, did you do it?'

"And she said, 'I don't know whether I did or not. I've been a heavy drug user and when you are on drugs you do funny things. When you're on drugs, you do things that you don't think you did. And other things that you think happened really didn't. So I don't know. I can't remember.'

"But then she said, 'When I came to myself—when I came to myself I was in the rain. It was raining and I was terrified.' Then she took her arms and wrapped them around herself and hunched her body over. The tears were running down her face and the mucus was dripping from her nose, and she was just hysterical. She flipped her hands up and said, 'So much blood, so much blood. I couldn't see or think of anything except blood.'

"I was trying to calm her down, but I wanted to get out of there, too. I didn't know if she was on drugs right then or not but I wanted to get out of her apartment. I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to hear that.

"So I said, 'Well, who were you with?' And she said, 'Three boys. I didn't know them. I was with them for the drugs.' She also told me it had been a woman and two small children that they'd killed and that she had been wearing her blond wig and white boots. I know they were white plastic-leather boots because before that when we were in a store once she pointed out a pair and she said, 'I had a pair of boots like these, and I loved them but I had to get rid of them.'

"Anyway, she just got all blubbery and incoherent—sobbing and crying, you know—and then she grabbed hold of my arm and said, 'You won't tell, will you?' And I said, 'No, I won't,' and just as quickly as I could I got out of there.' "

Three days later, Jane Zillious did call the FBI office in Nashville to report the conversation and to give them Helena's name and address and to say that she believed it had something to do with the MacDonald murders at Fort Bragg. The FBI, however, simply thanked her politely and did nothing.

In early December, another acquaintance of Stoeckley's, Red Underhill, approached her apartment and heard the sound of crying from within. As he entered, she began to scream hysterically: "They killed her and the two children! They killed the two children and her!"

Not long afterward, Stoeckley returned to Fayetteville. On December 29 and 30, she was interviewed by CID agents who were just beginning the new investigation. She repeated to them her story of taking mescaline, getting into an automobile, and driving off alone. "Because of the drug use," one of the agents reported, "she couldn't remember anything that happened after that."

In January, Stoeckley returned to Nashville. She wrote to Prince Edward Beasley on January 20:

Beasley, what does the CID want of me? I didn't murder anyone?!! Are they going to keep hassling me? Is there any way I can take a polygraph to find out whether I was at MacDonald's house or not the night of the murders, without the CID finding out the results? . . . Are they still suspicious of me or can I come out of hiding now?
...
I'm living in constant paranoia. . . . Please let me know anything and
please
don't give the CID my address.

Beasley, however, was cooperating fully with the CID. Not only did he provide them with Stoeckley's Nashville address, but on February 27, he accompanied a CID agent to Nashville and participated in further questioning of her.

"She said she did not remember anything that had happened on the night of the murders," he later recalled, "except getting into a blue car she thought was a Mustang and that it belonged to a Bruce Fowler, who was in the Army at the time. She said she remembered starting the car and backing out of the driveway and after that she remembers nothing.

"She said the last person she knew to see her on the night of February 16 was Greg Mitchell, her boyfriend at the time, and that he was the one who gave her the mescaline.

"When I told her that this type of narcotic would not cause her to black out, and, if it did, she would not stay blacked out for that long, she said she knew this and was afraid she had a mental block that must have been caused by some awful thing that she had seen that night."