Errol Morris is essentially a documentary filmmaker, and he is the best of the lot. His 1988 film, The Thin Blue Line, demonstrated that a man long imprisoned for the murder of a police officer, Randall Dale Adams, was in fact innocent, and that another man had committed the crime. His 2003 film about Robert McNamara, The Fog of War, is as good a documentary as I have ever seen.
In 2012 Morris published a book, A Wilderness of Error, about the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, imprisoned since the 1970s for the murders of his wife and two small daughters. The case was made famous by the 1983 book Fatal Vision (inartfully stated, since the MacDonald case was actually very famous long before Fatal Vision was published.) Anyway, let us begin here with the definition of a psychopath, since this is part of Morris’s argument. In 2011 a man named Jon Ronson wrote a very good book, The Psychopath Test. Mr. Ronson also spoke recently at a TED Weekend event; his talk can be viewed by googling "Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath test". It’s an extremely interesting little lecture, well worth the time it has taken me to watch it three times.
Ronson tells about a man named Tony who decided to fake insanity in order to dodge criminal prosecution for a relatively minor offense. He had believed that, if he faked insanity, he would be sent to a cushy mental hospital, rather than a prison. Unfortunately, he was sent to Broadmoor, an ancient and horrible psychiatric hospital near London. It is a place well known to the readers of crime books. Tony had faked insanity far too well. Because he was cunning and manipulative, the psychiatrists decided—after he had already been sent to Broadmoor--that he was a psychopath. Because psychiatrists had decided that he was a psychopath, he was trapped in Broadmoor for a long, long time, far longer than the punishment he could potentially have received for his crime.
Ronson’s point—and the point that Errol Morris makes about Jeffrey MacDonald—is that the definition of a "psychopath" is a trap, that once a person has been labeled a psychopath his world is turned upside down. The first two points on the "psychopath test" are glibness and superficial charm. If a person dresses well, for example, this becomes evidence that he may be a psychopath. If a person is charming, it becomes evidence that he is psychopath. And once you are given that label, how do you prove that you are sane? How does a sane person sit? How does a sane person hold his arms? What does a sane person talk about? Once you are given the label of "psychopath", anything and everything you do can be used as more evidence that you are a psychopath.
The conclusion that Ronson reaches is that a person should probably not be held in confinement indefinitely because psychiatrists have placed a certain label on him. I’m not sure that I agree with that. My home state, Kansas, pioneered a program in which child molesters are held in confinement for psychiatric treatment after their prison sentences have ended, if psychiatrists say that they are still a danger to society. I am often at odds with my home boys as to social policy, but I don’t have a problem with that one, and the United States Supreme Court looked at the program and didn’t have any problem with it, either.
Ronson says that 1% of the public, 1% of those people walking the street, are psychopaths as defined by the standard psychopathic diagnostic test, and this figure rises to 4% of business leaders and high-ranking political leaders. There is a certain set of traits that cluster together: Glibness, charm, a lack of empathy, a cunning ability to manipulate others, grandiosity, etc. Psychopaths will lie about anything they can get by with lying about, and they tend to have a long series of short-term sexual relationships. A fair number of people share these traits or many of these traits, including Jeffrey MacDonald.
A fair number of people, also including Steve Garvey, Reggie Jackson, Julius Caesar, and one of our recent Presidents. (Caesar, immensely charming, would have sex with anyone he found attractive, male or female.) Let me hasten to add that I am not saying that Steve Garvey or Reggie Jackson is a psychopath; I’ll explain why in a moment, but I don’t want to be misquoted on that. What I am saying is that if you apply the psychopathic checklist to them, you’re going to conclude that they’re psychopaths. Ronson’s point—closely related to Errol Morris’s point about Jeffrey MacDonald—is that you should not be held in prison indefinitely because psychiatrists have placed a certain label on you. I’m not sure that I agree with that point, but there is a much more direct conclusion that we can draw from his book: that the definition of a "psychopath" used by psychologists, or used at least by some psychologists, is seriously flawed.
Errol Morris gives a short history of the term "psychopath", which is not accurate. The word "psychopath", invented in the 1860s, was in common usage a hundred years ago. It was a word that everybody knew and used in 1913. Belleview hospital had a psychopathic ward. The definition of the word "psychopath", introduced in the 1860s, was not very much different than the definition given by Ronson and Morris.
But the word "psychopath", as it was used a hundred years ago, clearly implied a person who was prone to the use of violence. It creates obvious problems to take the violent element away from the word, and start applying it to people like Steve Garvey, Reggie Jackson, and 4% of our business and political leaders. It is obviously bad judgment to do that.
Psychology and other social sciences, by the deliberate choices of psychologists, tend generally to avoid using terms that are loaded with connotations; in fact, we have added hundreds of words to the dictionary which are derived from nothing other than the effort to avoid the negative connotations of the old words. Psychologists normally avoid using words that have negative connotations, like "crazy", "lunatic", "stupid" or "slut". This use of the word "psychopath" flies in the face of this convention. It takes a word which was in common usage, loaded with the most negative connotations imaginable, and applies that word willy-nilly to 1% of the population, 4% of our business and political leaders.
I think it is useful to get more people to understand that politicians often have these psychopathic tendencies. What is stunningly obvious, in the study of history, is that a good percentage of political leaders have always been self-serving, manipulative, clever, charming people who were perfectly willing to condemn 50,000 people to death if it was necessary for them to do so to achieve some personal ambition. That’s what kings were, for the most part, and that’s what politicians are, for the most part: they’re self-serving people who say nice things and would as soon kill you as look at you, as long as they don’t have to kill you with their own hands. I want people to understand that; it has been proven by much sad history to be true.
But at the same time, to use the same word for political and business leaders that we use for Ted Bundy is obviously a poor choice. What is needed is two words—the word "psychopath" for the Ted Bundys and Dennis Raders of the world, and some other word for the Steve Garveys and Reggie Jacksons and Bill Clintons who have this set of characteristics and character flaws, but who don’t kill people.
Jeffrey MacDonald, immensely charming and intelligent, was labeled a psychopath after his family was killed. Errol Morris’s view, which I agree with up to a point, is that this is a kind of a trap. No one ever suggested that Jeffrey MacDonald was a psychopath before his family was killed. He was brilliant, charming, hard-working, and success-oriented; heck, he was apple pie and ice cream come to life. What, then, is the point of saying that he is a psychopath after his family has been murdered?
The point of it is to justify his conviction by saying that he is the kind of person who could have done this; that’s all. Errol Morris is entirely right about that. This could be done to any of us. If your family was killed or mine or anyone else’s, some psychologist could look at us and say that we are the kind of person who could have done this. It is not right or fair to use that kind of evidence to convict anyone of a crime.
But Morris attempts to go further than that, and introduce a question as to whether this kind of personality actually exists. In Popular Crime, I made a similar argument about John and Patsy Ramsey, the parents of JonBenet Ramsey. My point was, in a lifetime of reading crime stories, I have never heard of parents like this committing any crime remotely like this one, and I frankly don’t believe that such a thing has ever happened. What the Boulder police thought happened was something that, to the best of my knowledge, has never actually happened in the history of the world. I would point out now that my book has been out for a couple of years, and, although I specifically challenged the readers to tell me when or where anything similar had ever happened, no one has stepped forward to answer the challenge.
Morris, mixing that up with the argument about psychopaths, says something similar about Jeffrey MacDonald, arguing, in essence, that he is not convinced that things like this ever actually happen. I am less convinced that he is right about this. My point about the Ramseys was, of course parents sometimes kill their children; we all know of hundreds of cases in which this has happened. But there is a vast gulf that separates any and all of those cases from this case. Actually, there are two vast gulfs, which add up to make an ocean:
1) There is a huge difference between the Ramseys and the types of people who murder their children, and
2) There is a huge difference between the sorts of things those parents do (at the time of the murder) and the sorts of things the Ramseys are alleged to have done.
I am less convinced of this in the case of Jeffrey MacDonald. There are actually many cases of fathers who seem a lot like Jeffrey MacDonald who do things quite a lot like what MacDonald is alleged to have done. Take, for example, the case of Chris Coleman of Columbia, Illinois. He’s a guy who seems a lot like Jeffrey MacDonald—a nice, charming, middle-class young man—who got involved in an affair with his wife’s best friend from high school, and wound up murdering his wife and two children, apparently just to get them out of the way. He seemed like a loving father. He was seen one afternoon playing baseball on the front lawn with his two little boys, and that night he killed them. Like MacDonald, he still denies that he committed the crime, but there is good evidence that he did.
There are lots of family murders, honestly, that don’t seem all that different from Jeffrey MacDonald’s. ..Christian Longo and Nikolay Lazukin, to name a couple. So I’m not convinced that Morris is right about that point, but then, I’m not entirely convinced that he is wrong, either. The allegation against MacDonald is that he snapped in the middle of the night and committed this crime. Chris Coleman, it seems clear, plotted the murders of his family for at least a couple of months, as did Christian Longo. The evidence that they committed the murders is, for the most part, the evidence that they were planning to commit the murders. There is no evidence at all that Jeffrey MacDonald was planning to murder his family, so then, he is entitled to ask: Does this sort of thing really happen? Nice young man, hard-working, Green Beret, a doctor, decides suddenly in the middle of the night to kill his family, and then the next day seems to be the same sort of person that he has always been. Does that really happen? If that’s your theory of the crime, shouldn’t we be skeptical of it?
MacDonald was working or had just worked a long, long shift. Doctors in training used to work 24-hour and even 36-hour shifts in the emergency room, as interns, until research established that they were so prone to making mistakes after long hours on the job that they were accidentally killing a lot of people. But in 1970, emergency room doctors/interns used to work absurdly long shifts.
Also, MacDonald was using amphetamines which were on the market then as diet pills. They were marketed as diet pills and MacDonald was using them as diet pills, but Joe McGinniss argued in Fatal Vision that MacDonald was also using them to stay awake through his long, long shift at the hospital. McGinniss’ argument goes like this: Methamphetamines are dangerous drugs. They were on the market then as "diet pills", but they have since been taken off the market because they’re dangerous. We know for certain that MacDonald was using some of these drugs, as a part of a weight loss program (although he wasn’t notably overweight.) As a doctor, he had access to a (virtually) unlimited supply of such drugs. He worked a long, long shift at the hospital and then, by his own testimony, he could not get to sleep on the night of the murders. Why?
Because he had taken a bunch of methamphetamines to stay awake, that’s why. McGinniss’ argument—which I found to be 100% convincing at the time that I read his book, even though I disliked the book and dislike McGinniss—his argument was that MacDonald took a bunch of these amphetamines to stay awake over his long shift, and then something happened in the middle of the night between him and his wife and, his psyche frazzled by the drugs, he just snapped.
Errol Morris attacks this argument in this way:
1) There is no real evidence that MacDonald gulped down a bunch of these pills, as McGinniss claims.
2) Those pills were not taken off the market because they were dangerous; they were taken off the market because there was no evidence they were effective in helping people lose weight.
3) Was Jeffrey MacDonald the only person to whom this happened? These pills were on the market for a long time; they were used by millions of people. Did anybody else kill his family because he was using too many of these pills, or just MacDonald?
Well. . ..methamphetamines are dangerous drugs, regardless of what reason was given by the FDA for banning their use as weight-control agents. And there have been lots and lots of cases of people using methamphetamines who lost track of reality, snapped, and killed people. Diet pills. . .I don’t know; but amphetamines, certainly.
Errol Morris does not succeed in convincing me that Jeffrey MacDonald is innocent, but he does move the needle a long distance in MacDonald’s direction. What he is certainly right about is this: If one assumes that MacDonald murdered his family, then McGinniss’ explanation is very useful for understanding how it happened. But one still has to prove that MacDonald did, in fact, murder his family. Like the label "psychopath", McGinniss’ explanation lowers the burden of proof against MacDonald, but offers no actual evidence as to what happened. And that’s not really right, or just; in a criminal case, one should have first to prove that it happened, before we get to the business of explaining why and how it happened.
In the pre-DNA blood typing system there were four major blood groups: A, B, AB, and O; still are, I guess. It happened that the four members of the MacDonald family represented the four different blood types, so that, in studying the blood in the house after the crime, one could tell whose blood was where, which was quite unusual at that time.
This fact became critical to the prosecution of MacDonald. Because they knew exactly whose blood was where, the prosecution argued, the blood would "tell the story" of the murders. (Except, of course, that millions of people have Type O blood, for example, so if there were intruders who also shed blood at the crime scene, that blood could easily have been confused with the MacDonalds’. But never mind.)
This "blood story" is the essential evidence against MacDonald; it was this whose-blood-is-where stuff that was the structure and substance of the case against him. Joe McGinniss in Fatal Vision spends tens of thousands of words. .. it seemed to me hundreds of pages. . .going over this evidence again, and again.
And again, and again.
And again.
That was what I hated about McGinniss’ book, actually; he "analyzes" the blood evidence in minute detail, repeatedly, and I couldn’t make head nor tail out of what he was talking about it. It was total gibberish to me.
On the cover of Morris’ book is a diagram of the apartment, presumably from the prosecution’s case, with the blood patterns included, the "A’s", "AB’s", etc., so it could be said that Morris puts this element of the case on the cover of his book (except, of course, that authors don’t normally have very much to do with what goes on the cover of their books.) But having put it on the cover of his book, Morris then totally ignores that angle of the case. He makes no effort to rebut it. I don’t believe he spends one paragraph of the book discussing the blood evidence; maybe one. The chart is repeated and explained inside the book, but nothing really is done with it.
This works for me, because, as I said, I never understood that stuff anyway. For me, personally, it didn’t need to be rebutted. But it is the guts of the prosecution’s case, and, for whatever it might be worth to somebody else, it stands untouched.
Morris’ questions Joe McGinniss’ integrity, suggesting repeatedly that McGinniss’ wrote Fatal Vision the way he did because he (McGinniss) saw that as a more marketable story than the story told from MacDonald’s perspective. McGinniss’ integrity is inherently suspect. He began his career with a book about the 1968 Presidential election, The Selling of the President 1968. He did the same thing to the Nixon campaign that he did to the MacDonald defense team: he approached them about writing a book about the Nixon campaign, from an internal perspective. He gave Nixon’s team every reason to believe that he was going to write a positive book that they would like—and then he wrote a book that is, essentially, about these sneaky, deceptive advertising people who hoodwinked the nation into electing a defective President.
Morris argues that McGinniss stabbed MacDonald in the back in order to sell books, but I don’t see it that way. McGinniss is kind of a professional creep, but still. . .McGinniss concluded that MacDonald was guilty, and he said so. I don’t see a problem with that.
Morris argues that the judge in the case, Franklin Dupree (formerly of the law firm You, Me and Dupree) was biased against MacDonald, ruled repeatedly against him, and blocked all of his appeals. In fact, Morris argues implicitly, the judge was really the only person in the case who was fully convinced of MacDonald’s guilt; the prosecutors were, in their minds, doing the best they could with the case they had, but they didn’t really know whether he was guilty or not. The judge, on the other hand, was just trying to make sure that this scoundrel got what he deserved. In the index to the book there are 30 pages referenced under Dupree, Franklin T—bias of.
I have no idea whether Judge Dupree was or was not biased, frankly, and I don’t take too seriously Morris’s repeated claims that he was. But again, Morris does have a point here. After MacDonald was convicted, many of his appeals, in one form or another, had to go back through Judge Dupree’s court.
That’s not right, for this reason. Of course the judicial system makes every possible effort to find judges who are able to rise above their assumptions, their biases—but, in the interests of fairness, the system should never assume that the trial judge was unbiased. The system should assume, in the interests of fairness, that there is a possibility that the appellant has been unfairly treated, and should ask someone else to look at all appeals.
I would go further than that: I would ban anyone involved in a prosecution—judges and prosecutors—from playing any role in the case, after the conviction, insofar as it is practical to avoid this. I would prohibit them from commenting on or being involved in appeals. I would prohibit them from appearing before or even from writing to parole boards.
I have often observed, in reading crime books, that the worst injustices occur because police, prosecutors or judges are absolutely convinced that they know what happened when they really don’t. Once a person has reached a conclusion about a set of facts—and this is one of Errol Morris’ central arguments—once a person has reached a conclusion, created a story in his mind, almost any fact that emerges can be worked into the pattern created by that story. A fine young man named Ryan Ferguson is in prison in Missouri for a crime that he quite obviously did not commit. If a hundred of you readers were to look into the facts of that case, probably all one hundred of you would reach the conclusion that Ferguson was obviously innocent. There is no case against him. But the prosecutors and the judges won’t admit that they made a mistake, and, because the case keeps going back to the same prosecutors and the same judges, Ferguson can’t get out of prison.
I embrace Morris’ argument that, once people become convinced that they know what happened, it is nearly impossible to un-convince them. Morris’ infers from that in this way: that Dupree was a bad judge because he formed an early opinion about the merits of the case. I would infer about it this way: that the system is flawed, in that it sends the new issues in the case back to the old judge, when there is the possibility that that judge may have formed a firm opinion about the merits of the case.
The key witness in favor of Jeffrey MacDonald was a woman named Helena Stoeckley. Within an hour of the attack, Jeffrey MacDonald said that his family had been murdered by a group of hippies, including a woman in a floppy hat, wearing a blond wig and holding a candle. One of the police officers, hearing that, said immediately that he had seen a woman in a floppy hat standing on a street corner a couple of blocks away, as he was responding to the call. It was odd, seeing a woman standing on a street corner in the rain in a residential area at 3:30 in the morning. If he hadn’t been responding to a call for help, he would have stopped to check her out. Nothing was done immediately to look for the woman, and she vanished into the mist.
The next day, an officer involved in the case said, "You know, that sounds like it could be Helena Stoeckley." (paraphrasing.) Helena Stoeckley was heavily involved in the local drug scene, and had often been used by police as an informant, so she was well known to the fuzz.
When police talked to her about the case, she didn’t exactly deny that she was at the scene of the murders. What she said was more like "I don’t know; I was doing a lot of drugs that night. Maybe I was there, I don’t remember." For the rest of her life, which ended in 1983, Ms. Stoeckley would talk incoherently and at times semi-coherently about her involvement in the MacDonald murders. When Jeffrey MacDonald was actually on trial, however, she insisted that she had not been in the house at the time of the murders, and that she had no first-hand or direct knowledge of the murders.
McGinniss’ treatment of Helena Stoeckley—which I accepted when I read McGinniss’ book—is "there was this extremely flakey and unreliable person who said lots of things to various people at various times about possibly being involved in the murders, but who, asked about it under oath, denied any knowledge of the crime." Break that down, and it remains incontrovertible:
Helena Stoeckley was as flakey and unreliable as anyone could possibly be. At the time of the murders she was doing heroin and LSD on a daily basis. She was into witchcraft. She did testify that, about midnight on the night of the murders, she had taken mescaline, and she had no clear memories of anything that had happened after that time.
Over the years, she did talk to dozens, hundreds or perhaps thousands of people about being present in the MacDonald house at the time of the murders, offering a vast variety of vague half-formed memories about the crime.
At the trial, she said she had not been there.
Stoeckley, however, is central to Morris’s book; she is the second-most important person in his book, behind MacDonald himself, but ahead of Joe McGinniss, Freddy Kassab, or the victims of the crime. I can’t summarize in ten words all of Morris’s arguments about Helena Stoeckley, so I’m going to have to back off and run at this several times.
False confessions, Morris argues, may be relatively common and relatively insignificant in many cases. But what are the odds, Morris asks, that Jeffrey MacDonald would describe a person who had committed the crime, a police officer would immediately say, "Oh, I saw that person just a few blocks away a few minutes ago," and the police would later go and interview that person and she would say, "Oh, yeah, I was there." Isn’t that a pretty incredible string of events, if in fact he was just making it up?
Well, no, actually, it isn’t. Murder cases are full of incredible coincidences, most of which—like this one—are not really all that incredible if you look at them more skeptically.
Morris presents these facts in a linear relationship, but they don’t exist naturally in a linear alignment. First, the police officer who said that he saw the woman in the floppy hat near MacDonald’s apartment on the night of the murders absolutely insisted that it was not Helena Stoeckley, and didn’t look anything like her. Second, murder investigations of high-profile crimes create a powerful vortex that sucks hundreds or thousands of people into their orbit—witness Morris’s book, which references probably a thousand or more persons in some way involved in the case. Many, many of those people tend to be flakey, half-crazy lowlifes who are likely to say damned near anything. It is actually extremely common for police investigating a case such as this one to find their time being wasted by some jackass who suggests that he has some knowledge of the case, but who never quite comes through with the goods. People pretending to be involved and offering half-confessions is just the routine flotsam of a murder investigation.
And she matches the description, but what is the description? A floppy hat, a blond wig, a candle and white boots. Shit, that could be anybody. Every hippie chick I knew had floppy hats, white boots and candles. That Stoeckley "matches the description" given by MacDonald may not be untrue, but it is not a profound truth, either.
There are certain characteristics of bullshit, and there are certain characteristics of the truth. The truth tends to be specific; bullshit tends to be vague and imprecise. The truth tends to involve facts that can be checked out; bullshit is always built around things that you have no way of checking out. The truth tends to be told consistently, the same from one day to the next; bullshit changes every time it is told. Stable, responsible honest people tend to tell the truth; unstable, dishonest, unreliable people tend to bullshit. The truth is coherent and logical; bullshit is incoherent and illogical.
The stories told by Stoeckley have every conceivable characteristic that would be associated with bullshit, and no characteristic at all that we would normally associate with the truth. Her "confessions" were vague to the point of total obscurity. She talked in the most general terms imaginable about possibly remembering that she might have been in the apartment. She remembered a child’s toy, or a hairbrush, or a lamp or a table. She had taken a lot of drugs that night, and didn’t really remember anything clearly. It’s obvious bullshit.
But there is a point here on which I agree with Morris. After Stoeckley took the stand and insisted she had never been to the scene of the murder, MacDonald’s defense attorneys wanted to call other witnesses to impeach her testimony, establishing that she had said the opposite to dozens of other people on other occasions. Judge Dupree denied the defense the right to call witnesses to impeach her testimony.
Bias?
Well. . ..legally, I think he’s right, isn’t he? As best I understand the law, which is very dimly indeed, the defense (MacDonald) would have to somehow establish a reasonable belief that Stoeckley was at the scene of the crime before they could impeach her testimony that she was not. That she said some other things at other times, just chattering. . .you can’t get into that without a foundation. The defense had no independent avenue to establish that Stoeckley was at the scene of the crime, so it’s hearsay, and it doesn’t prove anything material.
But there is an argument, not about the law but about fairness. Fairness requires that you give the accused every possible opportunity to establish his case. Since Stoeckley’s out-of-court confessions to being at the scene of the crime were central to the defense’s case, fairness would require that they should have been heard, somehow, that some avenue should have been created to get that issue before the jury. It might not have made any difference, but. ..the defendant’s case should have been heard.
Twenty-four hours before she appeared on the stand, Stoeckley had told the defense attorneys a different story. After that she talked to the prosecutors, and after she talked to the prosecutors she changed her mind about her testimony.
Morris alleges that Stoeckley was intimidated into changing her testimony by threats that she would be prosecuted for murder if she said on the stand that she was in the house at the time of the murders. A person who was present at the time the prosecution interviewed Stoeckley would say, years later but repeatedly and vehemently and under oath, that this was true, that Stoeckley was pressured to change her testimony. The lawyers who were involved all swore that this never happened.
Well. . .if you testify under oath that you were unlawfully present in the house at the time of a murder, you should be prosecuted for murder, shouldn’t you? Is it "intimidation" for a lawyer to say to a potential witness that "If you say that under oath, you can be prosecuted for murder," if that is an obviously true statement? Further, aren’t you doing a favor to the witness, in telling them that? And is it intimidating the witness, to do them a favor? I think it’s just a matter of perspective, or interpretation. Years later, people would remember it differently.
Judge Dupree spoke about Stoeckley being an unreliable witness, and ruled (on appeals) that it didn’t make any difference if her testimony was impeached, because the jury wasn’t going to believe whatever she said, anyway. Paraphrasing. Well. . ..but "unreliable" does not mean "false"; it means "unreliable". If there is a possibility that the jury could have been made to believe that Stoeckley was present at the time of the crime, then, in fairness, the defense should have been given whatever opening was available.
Errol Morris writes about Helena Stoeckley on almost every page of his book. As to the alleged motive for the murders, that MacDonald was involved in sexual affairs with other women, this is mentioned only twice, in passing. One of those references is this (page 483):
You know, my great sin in life is I had a couple of one-night stands. Who didn’t in the sixties? That doesn’t make me innocent of adultery. Okay. But it certainly doesn’t make me guilty of murder.
MacDonald "confesses" to his "great sin"—but immediately minimizes it, first by reducing it to "a couple of one-night stands", second by saying that everybody was doing it, and third by contrasting adultery with murder. It is a masterpiece of rationalization—but it wasn’t just a couple of one-night stands, and everybody wasn’t doing it, and nobody ever suggested that it was equivalent to murder.
By writing about Helena Stoeckley on almost every page of the book and minimizing MacDonald’s philandering to a pinpoint, Morris creates the impression that Stoeckley is central to the case, and MacDonald’s infidelity is irrelevant to the case. If he wrote about MacDonald’s infidelity on 350 pages and reduced Helena Stoeckley to a couple of passing references, that would create the impression that the opposite was true. It is not clear, to me, that one choice would be more justified than the other. It’s really not clear that Helena Stoeckley had any actual knowledge of the crime, or that MacDonald’s infidelity did not create a motive for murder.
But having said that, Morris does seem to establish that there is much more to the Helena Stoeckley story than I had believed there was, based on my previous knowledge of the case. Stoeckley was supposed to be carrying a candle. Morris says that un-identified candle wax, not matching any candle in the apartment, was found in the apartment after the crime. Helena Stoeckley was supposed to be wearing a blond wig. Morris says that a plastic hair which could have come from a blond wig (and could not have come from a doll) was found in the apartment. Morris says that another man, connected with Stoeckley, running with her at the time of the murders, also confessed (many years later) to being involved in the murders (sort of. The male’s confessions are even more qualified, tentative, and elusive than are Stoeckley’s.) Morris says that witnesses did see Stoeckley and other people arriving back at her apartment in the middle of the night on the night of the murders, riding in the car that she said (sometimes) that they were riding in.
More significantly than that, what I understand from reading Morris’s book, and did not understand before, is that the MacDonald murders became the central event of Helena Stoeckley’s life. Before, I endorsed this characterization of Joe McGinniss’ view:
McGinniss’ treatment of Helena Stoeckley is "there was this extremely flakey and unreliable person who said lots of things to various people at various times about possibly being involved in the murders, but who, asked about it under oath, denied any knowledge of the crime." Break that down, and it remains incontrovertible.
That is true—but it creates the impression that this was just idle gossip in which Stoeckley may have engaged at some time. What becomes clear from Morris’ book is that Helena Stoeckley genuinely feared that she may have been present at the scene of the murders, obsessed over that fear, and brooded over it until her dying day. She didn’t really know whether she had or had not been a part of a murderous rampage, but the fear that she might have been haunted and terrified her, and she talked about it, over the years, to hundreds of people.
Stoeckley’s testimony under oath, it seems, was an aberration in the stream of her memory. That was the only time she spoke about the night in question with any clarity, and that was the only time she clearly denied being there. Otherwise, she said everything about the night of the murders that you can imagine, except that she wasn’t there.
Morris talks about the investigation being bungled. It’s exaggerated; the investigation wasn’t nearly that bad. Still, Morris does leave me half-convinced that MacDonald is innocent. These things I understand now that I didn’t understand before:
1) That applying the "psychopath" label to Jeffrey MacDonald is unfair, because it has no meaning at all unless you assume that he is guilty.
2) That the McGinniss explanation—the diet pills story—has the same flaw; it means nothing unless you first assume that MacDonald is guilty.
3) That MacDonald’s defense attorney may have been ineffective,
4) That the Judge may have been biased against MacDonald and against his attorney,
5) That MacDonald’s key witness deserted him without warning,
6) That she was probably lying when she said under oath that she was not there (when in truth she probably didn’t know whether she was there or not,)
7) That many of MacDonald’s appeals went back to the same judge who may have been biased against him at the time of the trial, and
9) That the immense success of a rather bad book by an execrable author, Fatal Vision, has so poisoned the well against MacDonald that it may have made it impossible for him to get a fair hearing.
The case against Jeffrey MacDonald, as best I understand it, is not compelling. I am not convinced that he is guilty. If it were in my power to set him free, I would set him free.