Not long afterward, however, MacDonald estimated that it would be midsummer at the earliest before his lawyers would be ready to proceed, despite the fact that "We know the people who were in the house that night, and we are on the road to locating them." Later he said no motion would be filed before fall.
The people named by Stoeckley in 1981 were located—not by MacDonald's investigators, however, but by FBI agents and, in February 1983, by a Fayetteville newspaper reporter named Steve Huettel. With the exception of Greg Mitchell, who had died in June of 1982 from liver disease (and who had been investigated and cleared by the CID in 1971 and by the FBI ten years later), all denied any knowledge of the murders.
One called Stoeckley's story "totally insane" and "the craziest thing I've ever heard." Another termed it "the ravings of a madwoman." These two were individuals who, like Mitchell, had been investigated and cleared of involvement, both by the CID in 1971 and by the FBI in 1981 and 1982, following the delivery of Stoeckley's statement to the Justice Department by representatives of Jeffrey MacDonald.
A key figure in the Stoeckley "confession"—one she had not named in prior statements—was Allen Mazzerolle, who was traced to a small town in Maine. His denial of involvement was supported by Cumberland County court records, which showed he had been arrested on January 28, 1970, for possession and transportation of LSD and had remained in jail until March
10—thus making his presence in or near 544 Castle Drive during the early morning hours of February 17 a physical impossibility.
"It's ridiculous," Mazzerolle said of Stoeckley's allegation. "She was the informer who fingered me to the narcotics agents."
MacDonald, however, still would not admit that it was over. "The Rock won't crumble," he wrote to one admirer, and, after telling me in a collect phone call from Bastrop that he was "80 percent certain" that the Mazzerolle court records had been falsified by government agents in an attempt to discredit Stoeckley, he said, "I just believe there will be a major break in the next few months. The things we sensed were there are there. The facts will bear me out. This time, we're going to win."
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."
5
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.
While generally considered an affable fellow (except by Jeffrey MacDonald), Dean lacked Jeffs drive, Jeff's flair, Jeff's star quality. He had also lacked acceptance by Princeton and had instead attended, and then withdrawn from, Kutztown State Teachers College in Pennsylvania.
"Look, Colette," Mildred had told her daughter, "don't continue this because you'll end up being big in the local fire department's ladies' auxiliary and pushing a second-hand baby carriage to the village, and I didn't raise you for that." What she had raised Colette for, she continued, was marriage to someone with prospects: someone like Jeffrey MacDonald, who was not only at Princeton but who had already announced his intention to pursue a career in medicine.
In response, Colette had written:
Dear Mom,
As mother and daughter we are very alike in some ways and very different in others. It's funny in a way, I guess we are alike physically. For example, we both have weak stomachs. We both threw up when reading the other's letter. But what happened to us other than that? Our ideas are so different. I don't mean just in relation to Dean, but in a lot of other things: religion (or lack thereof), prejudices, aim in life, materialism, etc. I'd like to talk to you about all of these things when I come home but I doubt if you will understand.
I'm trying to understand your point of view but it's very hard because what you want you want very, very much and it is the same with me. We both have special interests in mind and I know that you think "it is the best thing" for me. But maybe you don't know all the details or all of the feelings inside me. I'd like to tell you, I'd like you to understand me, but will you?
Next week when I come home it will probably be the last time before summer. I'd like
to have everything settled and out in the open. I want to go out and relax. But if you say no even after we talk I won't sneak or defy you. I will, however, know that it is due to a lack of understanding and forgive you. Anything else I have to say had better wait until we talk.
A lot was said, but by the fall Colette had severed her ties to Dean Chamberlain and had resumed her relationship with Jeffrey MacDonald. By the following summer she was pregnant. Within weeks after that she was married to the all-American boy—the man whom her mother had always thought would be the ideal husband for her. Until, "with the last blow he crushed her head like an eggshell."
I saw him once in the fall of 1980. I was in California and he was out of prison on bail. We went to the home of a friend of his for a barbecue supper. Only one thing about the evening stands out: MacDonald, in the kitchen, as the steaks and chops were booking over charcoal, complaining that the knives were not sharp enough. And then, as I watched, removing them one by Dne from a drawer and sharpening each blade, precisely and expertly, against a grindstone.
Two weeks later he sent me his children's baby albums. Ever since, I have had them on my desk, within arm's reach: two white, satin-covered volumes, one called "All About Me" and he other titled "Babyhood Years."
They are Kimberly's and Kristen's baby books, filled with Colette's writing about them and also containing locks of their lair. In addition, glued to one page of Kimberly's book is the irst of her baby teeth to fall out. The date was November 13, 1969. She was living at 544 Castle Drive.