The Journalist and the Murderer (8 page)

Bostwick, as if suddenly remembering that he was no longer in the courtroom and could relent toward his adversary without risk to his side, nodded agreement. “Things weren’t simple for him. He had conflicted emotions.”

Janette, who hadn’t spoken very much, now said, “In my work, a patient will come in and say, ‘This is the truth about me.’ Then, later in the therapy, a significant and entirely opposite truth may emerge—but they’re both true.”

“It’s the same with the judicial process,” Bostwick said. “People feel that it’s a search for truth. But I don’t think that is its function in this society. I’m convinced that its function is cathartic. It’s a means for allowing people to air their differences, to let them feel as if they had a forum. You release tension in the social body in some way, whether or not you come to the truth.”

“But in a criminal trial,” I said, introducing the subject to which every discussion of the MacDonald-McGinniss lawsuit inevitably leads, “isn’t there only one truth? Didn’t MacDonald either commit these murders or not commit them?”

“I don’t believe he did,” Bostwick said, “and I wouldn’t have taken the case if I thought he had. I probably explained it best to my daughter when she started being harassed at school because of my involvement in the case. I said to her, ‘Look, nobody knows. I’m not saying I
know
he didn’t do it. Only God and Dr. MacDonald know, and neither of them is talking. But I
believe
he didn’t do it. His descriptions of the four intruders matched people seen within five or six miles of his house a couple of hours before the murders. I’ve never had it explained to me how he was able to describe those people.”

At the trial, Bostwick had pressed McGinniss on his certainty that MacDonald had committed the murders, reading aloud a passage from
Fatal Vision
in which McGinniss, referring to MacDonald’s mother, wrote, “There were too many things I could not say [to her], for instance that I knew her son had killed his wife and children.” Then Bostwick said to McGinniss, “You don’t really
know
he killed his wife and children, do you?” The exchange continued:

Now, at the restaurant, Bostwick spoke of his own willingness to live with doubt. “Given the facts as I know them—and there’s a lot of evidence on both sides—I prefer being uncertain to taking the easy way out and getting rid of my discomfort by being absolutely certain. I don’t
know
, and no one on this earth can be absolutely certain of the truth here. Anyone who professes to be absolutely certain I really distrust.”

M
Y FIRST
sight of MacDonald—which took place the next day—was of a tall, well-built man in a light-blue cotton jumpsuit negotiating a feat of poise. A prisoner at Terminal Island is brought to the visitors’ room in handcuffs; he is released from them when he puts his wrists through a slot in a barred door so a guard on the other side can remove them. Meeting a visitor under these circumstances
would not seem to offer much scope for a soigné entrance, but MacDonald somehow managed to get through the humiliating ritual as if he were an actor swiftly shedding his costume before greeting friends in the green room, rather than a prisoner coming out of solitary confinement for a few hours. He had been transferred to Terminal Island from the federal prison in Arizona where he was serving out his sentence so that he could attend the McGinniss trial, and had not yet been sent back. During the trial, for bureaucratic reasons, he had been kept “in the hole” at the prison, and was still being held there. His cell was five feet by nine, and was furnished with a bunk bed and a toilet; he was allowed out for exercise for one hour a day.

MacDonald and I sat facing each other across a small, plastic-topped table in a very small room that was separated from an identical visitors’ room (which remained unoccupied) by a glass partition. The rules had changed at Terminal Island, and journalists were now allowed to bring in notebooks and tape recorders; thus a tape recorder sat on the table between us. MacDonald had brought a clipboard to which a thick sheaf of papers was attached, and he talked rapidly and relentlessly, like an executive or a politician with a prepared line of patter always at the ready; he used “we” a lot, instead of “I.” However, unlike many compulsive talkers, who regard what you may occasionally say as an annoying interruption, he would fall silent and pay very close attention whenever I spoke. I could almost feel the intensity of his listening, and I was struck by his intelligence as an interlocutor. Only gradually would the string of his interest in what I was saying slacken and would he relapse into the old, armored, obsessed, aggressive story—“unjust conviction,” “biased
judge,” “suppressed evidence,” “new witnesses”—by which his existence had been shaped for the eight years since his conviction.

Both in the prepared story and in his unpremeditated responses MacDonald used language that was at curious odds with his person: he himself bristled with tense aliveness, but his language was dead, flat, soft, clichéd, unnuanced. The discrepancy became even more marked when, back in my hotel room, I listened to the tape recordings I had made in the prison. Isolated and stripped of the man’s strong gestural presence, the plain words had an awful puerility. In
Fatal Vision
, a great many pages are given over to excerpts from the tape recordings that MacDonald made for McGinniss in prison, and I recognized the language: “The year at Princeton was incredibly great,” a section entitled “The Voice of Jeffrey MacDonald” begins, and goes on, “I was in absolute love with Colette and I thought having Kimberly was neat and we had tons of people over to the house.”

A few months after seeing MacDonald, I had dinner with Michael Malley, and at the end of the evening he brought up the problem of MacDonald’s speech. “Language is not one of Jeff’s skills,” he said. “He doesn’t express his feelings well, and he doesn’t express subtleties. If I were to remake Jeffrey MacDonald, I’d start with his language—simply to make him more expressive. Language is what makes people human, and it is the primary way we have of knowing who other people are. I think there were two reasons why Jeff lost the criminal trial. One was that the judge hamstrung us in the evidence we could present. And the other reason was Jeff. He didn’t have the ability to make the jury believe him. This is an idea that Jeff doesn’t like. He thinks he tells his story well. But I always
say to him, ‘The best time I ever heard you tell your story was at the Army hearing, when you broke down and stopped talking, when you couldn’t go on talking’—and that grizzled Army colonel and those three Army officers sitting up there with him choked back their sobs.”

At the time of the dinner—in April 1988—I was in correspondence with MacDonald, and in my next letter I took the occasion of the meeting with Malley to delicately broach the subject of his speech and ask if he himself had any sense of it as a problem. MacDonald’s reply ran to fourteen pages. He wrote, in part:

I did not press MacDonald further on the subject of his speech. Later, on rereading the transcript of the McGinniss trial, I came across a section of testimony that, had I remembered it, would have made me think twice before suggesting to MacDonald that there was something funny about his speech. This was the testimony of the psychiatrist Michael Stone, who had been hired by Kornstein to confirm the truth of McGinniss’s theory, expressed in
Fatal Vision
, that MacDonald suffered from the Kernbergian complaint of pathological narcissism. (In his cross-examination, Bostwick was able to point out that pathological narcissism does not appear in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
of the American Psychiatric Association—which, however, doesn’t mean that the disorders that do appear are any less questionable; our standard psychiatric diagnostic nomenclature has all the explanatory power of the nomenclature of medieval physiology involving the four humors.) Although Stone, a graduate of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute and a professor of clinical psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College, had never examined (or even met) MacDonald, he was in no doubt, after reading the six-hundred-page
transcript of the tape recordings MacDonald had made for McGinniss, that the man suffered from something even worse than pathological narcissism—namely, “malignant narcissism, which is … like pathological narcissism-plus.” Stone told the jury that he had made a concordance of the “various abnormal traits and qualities and examples” he had found in the transcript, but that “the most impressive bit of evidence vis-à-vis pathological narcissism … is not what is on any given page but what is
not
in any of the pages.”

“What do you mean by that?” Kornstein inquired.

Stone replied, “In all of this, there is nothing that touches one as genuine about either [MacDonald] or anybody else, with the possible exception of his own peevishness and propensity to anger when his will is thwarted. But, apart from that, no one comes alive for the reader. I read this material twice. I have, as I say, made a concordance tool. I couldn’t tell you what Colette was really like; I couldn’t tell you what Kimmy was really like.… None of them come alive; they’re all stiff figures. And that is an amazing thing to experience when reading six hundred pages of autobiographical material.”

In writing to MacDonald that “less comes through about you in your writing and in transcripts of your speech than is usual,” I had made the same error that Stone made in marvelling at MacDonald’s incapacity for rendering Tolstoyan portraits of himself and his family. MacDonald’s bland dullness on tape seemed unusual to me and to Stone (and also to McGinniss, who had told me how he groaned whenever a new tape arrived from the prison) because of its contrast to the excitingly dire character of the crime for which he stood convicted: a murderer shouldn’t sound like an accountant. But in fact—as every journalist will
confirm—MacDonald’s uninterestingness is not unusual at all. In Philip Roth’s experimental novel
The Counterlife
, the novelist-narrator Zuckerman observes:

However, when a journalist fetches up against someone like Henry (“naïve and uninteresting” and “perfectly ordinary” is Zuckerman’s description of him), all he can do—since his job is to report, not to invent—is flee from him and hope that a more suitable subject will turn up soon. For while the novelist, when casting about for a hero or a heroine, has all of human nature to choose from, the journalist must limit his protagonists to a small group of people of a certain rare, exhibitionistic, self-fabulizing nature, who have already done the work on themselves that the novelist does on his imaginary characters—who, in short, present themselves as ready-made literary figures. In the MacDonald-McGinniss case we have an instance of a journalist who apparently found out too late (or let himself find out too late) that the subject of his book was not up to scratch—not suitable for a work of nonfiction, not a member of the wonderful race of auto-fictionalizers, like Joseph Mitchell’s Joe Gould and Truman Capote’s Perry Smith, on whom the New Journalism and the “nonfiction
novel” depend for their life. MacDonald was simply a guy like the rest of us, with nothing to offer but a tedious and improbable story about his innocence of a bad crime. In the normal course of things, McGinniss would probably have quickly recognized MacDonald’s ordinariness, abandoned the project of writing about him, and once again taken up the search for the larger-than-life subject that is as crucial to a journalist’s work as the quest for a rare image is crucial to the photographer’s art. But, for various reasons, McGinniss chose not to see what was staring him in the face. One reason, it may be assumed, was his old weakness for being “inside”; the offer of being privy to conversations that no other outsider could hear, of having “access” to MacDonald that would be withheld from others, was no doubt irresistible to him. Another was the pressure of MacDonald’s desire to be written about. As my reading of the transcript of MacDonald’s prison tapes has shown me what poor McGinniss was up against in trying to fashion a Raskolnikov out of a Jeffrey MacDonald, so have my relations with MacDonald himself permitted me to feel some of the man’s seductiveness and to understand why McGinniss would have succumbed to its force. By the time McGinniss was fully aware that MacDonald would not work out as a character—and one of the leitmotivs of McGinniss’s letters to MacDonald in prison is his constant attempt to prod him into being interesting, even to the point of trying to stir him up by revealing a number of sexual indiscretions of his own (which Bostwick took great pleasure in reading out loud in the courtroom)—he was too deeply implicated in the process whereby a piece of writing is transformed into a commodity, and also too heavily in personal debt. (His money problems—his
need for a mortgage and a new furnace and so on—are another leitmotiv of the correspondence.)