"I got into his use of alcohol. He talked about using it socially, judiciously, minimally really. He said he used medication, and, in fact, his wife had taken diet pills for some period of time in order to lose weight, and he, himself, had taken diet pills to lose weight when he was on the boxing team in college. He said that he was a fighter. His nose was broken four times while he was in high school. And that, essentially, was my first interview with him, which I deliberately kept relatively bland.
"I initiated the second interview by talking with him about his father. Apparently, there was a lot of feeling in the family about the father's death. He talked about his mother crying when he, Jeff, was around. He created the impression that he was sort of -the person who carried the family through the father's death. He added at that time that Colette's father had committed suicide. I asked him if he could tell me any more about it, but he couldn't.
"I was not aware until he told me that Colette was pregnant at the time they got married. He made a point of the fact that they had intended to get married later anyway.
"He discussed entering service. All doctors, when they enter, go to Fort Sam Houston for a basic officer's indoctrination course, and while he was there his thought was that he was going to end up in Vietnam, which was the expectation of most young doctors if they went into the service at that time.
"He spoke of a colonel coming down and giving a talk to the group about Special Forces. He was extremely impressed by the physical appearance of this man. He really was very impressed. There was a lot of feeling expressed about this man. It was almost as if the appearance and the presentation of the man, more than a judicious discussion of what would be involved in going into Special Forces—it was almost as if his impression of the man was more important.
"He volunteered further sexual history in terms of having an affair with an airline stewardess. I began to get a, you know, a question in my head in terms of whether—I didn't pull this out of him—whether he volunteered this to impress me, or what. I don't know. They apparently—she spent a weekend with him in Texas, and this was apparently a second-time encounter that he had had.
"We talked more about his brother. He made the point that he was the only one in the family that could really handle his brother. He expressed that he didn't really understand his brother and his family didn't understand his brother, and he talked about his brother's potential for violence. He was very upset that his mother had to see this violent behavior that the brother displayed. He expressed this with an affect of anger and shame. He said he was ashamed of his brother.
"Then we got to the night of the 16th and the morning of the
17th. He talked about having come home from work, having gone with the kids to feed Trooper, the pony he had bought.
"He talked at some length about having purchased the pony very secretively. That it was a big surprise to the family. He talked with some pride about having worked with the man whom he bought the horse from or. whose property he was going to keep the horse on and how the two of them had—he would make up stories about where he was going, and he would go over and they built the shed the horse would stay in. He made quite a big deal of it.
"I was aware that one of the points the prosecution was making had to do with some conflict between Captain MacDonald and his wife over the handling of the children in terms of bedwetting and in terms of the children climbing into bed with them.
"I had not raised it yet, but somehow at that point in the interview it came up. His wife that night had discussed it with her psychology teacher.
"I have in the back of my mind—it's characteristic of doctors—it seems true in my family that my wife never takes my advice. I can treat my kids' colds but when it comes to medical opinions, you know, I'm low man on the totem pole. I'm not sure that isn't true in a lot of physicians' families. But I think there was a flavor of that there, and I began to probe and try to feel for areas of conflict between him and Colette. Because, again, the point had been made so strongly to me by the prosecutors that they saw this as a potential motive.
"I didn't get a degree of reaction like that from him. He said, in fact, that he wasn't upset that she had discussed it with the professor. I think I would have been, but he said he wasn't. The professor, he said, advised a firm hand, which is exactly what he had advised.
"He said, 'Colette could take less crying than I, and that's probably why Colette tolerated it more'—that is, she couldn't tolerate putting Kris back in her own bed and making her stay there.
"He mentioned that his wife was four and a half months pregnant. He also mentioned that he was reading a novel by Mickey Spillane called Kiss Me Deadly that night. He described his wife coming home from the course. He talked about having a friendly conversation with his wife. He was interested in what the professor had had to say and so forth.
"He later described how he went to bed, and Kris was in bed on his side and had wet the bed. He picked her up and put her back into her room. There were periods here when he would become emotional, become tearful, but he recovered quickly.
"I recognized that he had been interrogated previously, and so I allowed him the lack of affect that I would have expected from a person describing these things about his family. I did not get much feeling from him at that time. It was matter-of-fact, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt, because he had gone through this story so many times.
"As the interview progressed, I was becoming a little more probing. Kristy was wet. Why didn't he change her? If she had wet the bed enough to make it so wet that he didn't want to sleep in it, I figure that would be a pretty wet diaper. He said that it wasn't. She was not very wet. She was asleep and there was just a small amount of urine on her pants, and he didn't want to disturb her, didn't want to wake her, so he just put her to bed.
"I didn't buy that. But that was it. Then we talked about him falling asleep on the couch. He decided not to disturb Colette and make the bed or cover up the wet spot and go to sleep with Colette. He said this again in a very matter-of-fact way. Then we went through the arrival of the people in the house. He was awakened by screaming, and these people were around him. He related this again in a fairly matter-of-fact way.
"Later, he talked about running into Colette first, giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, feeling her pulses, running into the children's rooms, feeling for pulses, giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Finally knowing that they had been stabbed because when he would breathe in, the air would come out of the chest. He talked about coming back down the hall, talked about making the phone call, all of this again without much feeling. More of a clinical thing.
"Then he became angry. He said he was put in an ambulance. Some son of a bitch wanted to know his serial number. He was yelling. He was swearing. There was affect then. Feelings expressed.
"I asked him what he was going to do when this was all over. And he said something fairly insightful, in the sense—I, by now, which is after about a total of four hours of interviewing him—I had the impression that he was depressed. That what I was seeing as being clinical, as being matter-of-fact, was interpreted, by me anyway, as being controlled, very controlled, very—I hope you understand what I mean by controlled: in terms of controlling his feelings, not allowing his feelings to well up.
"He substantiated that a bit in the sense of—he said he didn't know what was going to happen when this was all over. He said that what was keeping him going was that he was fighting and that he was a fighter and had been a fighter all his life—a fighter in the sense of defending himself.
"We talked about his mother having sold her house in order to help pay the legal fees. He said he didn't care about the money. He felt that he would recover—that he would go back to being a doctor.
"Then he got a very quizzical look on his face, almost wanting me to empathize with him, and he said, 'You know, those bastards want to have a victory party when this is all over.' He was talking mainly about his lawyers. And he said, 'I don't want to have a vic
tory party. I mean, this is a fight but I don't feel there is any victory. I've lost my family and I just—and I will be relieved, that's all.
"And that's the essence of my two interviews with him. As I have expressed before, I had a fairly strong impression that Dr. MacDonald is a pretty controlled guy. He is capable of maintaining control, but he also has this device of going into some kind of tirade to avoid allowing emotion to become expressed. That is, the emotion may be sadness but he turns it into anger about what they are doing to him.
"An impression that I began to get also was that he seemed extremely dependent on what other people thought of him. For all of us, how other people respond to us affects how we feel about ourselves, but that can go to an extreme and 1 think it did for this man. He needs much, much more than the average person in terms of reassurance from other people that he's a good
guy.
"I think that partly explains what we saw initially as a kind of naivete, openness, honesty. I'm talking about a matter of degree. I'm not trying to put a label on him or say this is sick. I'm talking about it more as a way he operates."
"All right," Victor Woerheide said. "Now could you put this all together and tell us what your psychological evaluation of Jeffrey MacDonald is? What makes him tick?"
"Well, I see this man—who was twenty-six at the time I examined him—as the sort of person who uses—probably his primary mechanism of defense, his primary mechanism of handling stress, is denial.
"I think that explains, for example, his not putting a story together for himself until April 6—or at least he says he didn't. He didn't think about it. It's sort of inconceivable to me that someone wouldn't be ruminating and thinking about it and trying to put it together. I think he's capable of just blocking it out.
"I think he used other mechanisms—action. I think I described earlier that he talked with some sense of grief about not relating as well with his family as he thought he ought to, and yet being able to relate to patients easily. I think to wear his doctor's coat was easier for him than to be a man. I think that's his orientation. I think that's probably why he is oriented to the kind of work that he is doing—emergency medicine: because he knows what to do.
"In talking to other people about him, I've used the word hysteric. I don't mean hysterical in the sense of histrionic, blowing-your-cool kind of thing. By hysterical what I mean, as a professional, is a person who is extremely effective at using denial. If presented with twenty pieces of data, he is capable of seeing only three or four and drawing his conclusions from those. I see him as that kind of person.
"I was very struck by how his story seemed almost as if it were reconstructed. I don't like to use the word canned because that can be misinterpreted or distorted. But the story—even about the 17th, let alone his life history—was told in a way, not so much rehearsed, but with very little feeling. That's what I mean by reconstructed.
"And that is part of the characteristic of the hysteric type of person. I'm not going to apply a label to him. I don't feel he is pathologically ill. But all of us have personality types, all of us have lifestyles, and I'm trying to describe his type.
"Part of it is impulsiveness—example, buying the pony, I suppose. Example: responding to the colonel and the impression he made by joining the Special Forces.
"Also, tremendous dependence, again, on what other people think of him. And creating a good impression: the tremendous importance of creating a good impression. The tremendous importance of not letting other people see him break down and cry. As he put it, almost in a paranoid way—if you'll pardon my use of a clinical term—"They get benefit out of my crying. I don't get any benefit out of it.'
"And the importance of being an achiever. The importance of being a fighter."
"All right," Woerheide said, "I take it your conclusion was, as far as mental disease, he must be classified generally within the normal range?"
"Yes, sir."
"Do you agree that he is a man with basic inner feelings of inadequacy—a possible lack of manliness, by his own definition of the term?"
"I hope I've conveyed that. He needs to compensate. He needs to achieve. He needs to volunteer for jump training. He, in fact, had to lie. He had to lie in order to get into jump training, because on the physical exam, on the questionnaire—'Have you ever had back trouble?'—he checks no. Because if he had had any history of lumbar disc disease, the result of his high school football injury, they would never have let him into the paratroopers. But he needed to do that. So, yes, I see him as—well, having to work against a feeling of inadequacy."
"Having these feelings of inadequacy and having to work so strenuously to overcome and compensate for them—maintaining the front, the facade, that he had to maintain—do you think it's appropriate to say he had some underlying pre-psychotic tendencies?"
"There, I have trouble."
"I'm just wondering if it's possible."
"I think it's possible."
"You've testified that under a situation of stress he tends to lash out verbally at others." "Yes, sir."
"Let me ask you this: in a situation of stress, let's say extreme stress in a family atmosphere where you have a combination of, say, fatigue, a possible recent quarrel—where he might be accused of a lack of competency, a lack of adequacy, in the family situation—could he react in a violent way? In your presence he lashed out verbally. I'm talking about lashing out physically."
"I think he could. Yes, sir."
"And could he lash out physically with sufficient violence to kill members of his own family?"
"I believe he could. That's not to say he did. That doesn't say that at all. But, you see, interestingly, there are a lot of cliches thrown around. He was brought to us—to me, initially—as Jack Armstrong, the all-American boy. He had been, you know, just peachy-keen, achiever, super-wonderful all his life.
"He didn't come across to me as Jack Armstrong, the ail-American boy. He came across to me as having lots of holes. I can't label that as pathology, but if you're talking about the realm of possibility in this man, yes, I think it does exist.
"We answered the standard questions in the sense that there was 'no evidence of mental disease, defect, or derangement,' which was the primary question.
"But was there defect such that, even knowing the difference between right and wrong, he could not adhere to the right? We said no. But there may have been. We did the best we could. We certainly used every device we could to try to uncover illness if it was there. Did we miss the boat? We may have.
"Again, in terms of what you described—of a man who could suddenly lash out—if I were his psychiatrist, I would certainly play that in terms of defense as much as I could."
"Temporary insanity?"
"Yes, sir. We had no evidence, but—I said we did everything we could. We didn't actually do everything we could. There were periods of the night of the 16th, morning of the 17th, about which he was very vague and hazy. And I offered to arrange for an amytal interview.
"It's frequently treated in newspapers as if it's truth serum, but it's really not that. I mean, it's not something that makes you tell the truth. What it does is, it's a procedure in which you use an anesthetic to a point where a person loses some degree of his conscious control of thought processes. And in a person who has a lack of memory, very frequently it can help. Lack of memory, by the way, very frequently is because of a need to not remember, rather than events just passing away.
"We offered to do an amytal interview, and quite frankly, our purpose was twofold. As I said, he was a warm, engaging person. We were concerned about him. We did not want to precipitate more of a depression, but we felt that if it was underlying, then we might as well surface it and treat it, rather than have him live with this tragedy for the rest of his life.
"But we also felt that it would—if he were innocent—it would help him be more clear in his description of the people and of the events. He refused that."
At this point, one of the
grand jurors asked a question. "If you were in Dr. MacDonald's shoes, wouldn't you agree to take this test?"
"If I were in his shoes and I implicitly believed in my innocence?" "That's right."
"I would certainly take the test. It could only help me."
"There is no way it could harm him—I mean, mentally?"
"As I said, we might have precipitated a greater depression, but then we could treat it. That would have been the only risk. But, yes, if I were in his shoes—and thank God I'm not—but if I were and it were offered to me, I would take the test."
"You added one element in your previous answer," Victor Worheide said. "If you were in his shoes and you knew you were innocent, you wouldn't hesitate to take the test."
"That's right."
"But if you were in his shoes and you knew that you had done it, would you take the sodium amytal?" "No, sir."
Jeffrey MacDonald's brother was called to testify. He had arrived in Raleigh with shoulder-length hair and a buckskin bag fastened by a large wooden peg. Six feet tall and weighing well over two hundred pounds, he was the only witness among seventy-five equal in physical stature to Victor Woerheide.
"Where do you live now, Mr. MacDonald?" Woerheide asked.
"Now?"
"Yes."
"Right here."
"Before you came here, where were you living?" "Yesterday?"
"What's your address—your residence address?" "I don't honestly know what you mean by residence. I've always been curious to know what that means." "Let me ask you this: when did you come here?" "What do you mean, 'come here'?" "When did you come to Raleigh?"