Prying Open a Cold Case

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/books/errol-morris-takes-on-macdonald-murder-case.html

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DID Jeffrey MacDonald, an Army doctor and Green Beret stationed at Fort Bragg, stab and bludgeon his family to death early on the morning of Feb. 17, 1970?

Over the last four decades many courts and more than a few journalists have concluded that he did, but for Errol Morris that settled nothing. Best known as a documentary filmmaker whose investigation and film “The Thin Blue Line” freed a man convicted of murder, Mr. Morris started tugging on the loose ends of the MacDonald case over a decade ago. After unsuccessfully shopping a film about the tortured legal case, he decided to write a book instead.

“A Wilderness of Error,” which will be released Tuesday by Penguin Press, is a reinvestigation of a case that many thought they knew, written by an obsessive who never leaves well enough alone. With his book Mr. Morris is reopening a lurid, deep wound that preoccupied much of the nation for years after the crime took place.

No wonder. A handsome military doctor, Ivy League educated with a brilliant career and the kind of family that decorates a Christmas card, Mr. MacDonald made the short trip from victim of a hateful crime that rubbed out his family to a man who was inducted into the pantheon of American evildoers.

Ever since, Mr. MacDonald, 68, has asserted his innocence and right to appeal at every turn, but no court has ever concluded that he is right. That’s where Mr. Morris comes in.

The case began when Mr. MacDonald called the military police at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, to his home and told them that a band of marauding hippies, including a woman in a floppy hat, beat and stabbed his family while chanting, “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.” Mr. MacDonald’s pregnant wife and daughters, Kimberley, 5, and Kristin, 2, died in the violence, and Mr. MacDonald was injured but survived.

Coming, as it did, in the months after the Manson murders and during a period of civil unrest and burgeoning drug use, the crime created widespread suspicion and worry. But soon after the murders Army investigators began to focus on Mr. MacDonald, believing that he had killed his family in a rage and staged the scene to mimic the Manson murders.

Mr. MacDonald eventually found himself not only convicted and sentenced but also rendered as a calculating sociopath in “Fatal Vision,” a 1983 book by Joe McGinniss that has sold over 2.5 million copies, and in a matching NBC mini-series, which was watched by an average of around 30 million people on each of its two nights. Without the car chase and acquittal, he was the O. J. of his time.

The MacDonald story, populated by disheveled hippies and ramrod military types, generated a legal controversy that never seemed to be settled and the tantalizing possibility that an imprisoned man might be innocent. Through the decades there have been books, magazine investigations and endless reconsiderations. The case’s lurid details fed public fascination, and the coverage sparked a further debate about the nature and morality of journalism itself.

“A Wilderness of Error” may not exonerate him, but it makes a forceful argument that his conviction was riddled with shortcomings. The case will be the subject of a new hearing on Sept. 17 in United States District Court in Wilmington, N.C., after the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last spring that the lower court had failed to consider the entire body of evidence.

That body of evidence just got a little bigger. “A Wilderness of Error” is a more than 500-page book of enormous investigative heft, with page after page deconstructing fibers, flower pots, hobby horses and source documents. What it does not have is a neat little ending where the reader comes to believe that a wronged man is in jail. Mr. Morris is, however, convinced.

“I believe he is innocent. I don’t see any evidence to suggest that he is guilty,” said Mr. Morris, sitting in his office on a rugged retail stretch in Cambridge, Mass., in the former Globe Department Store. “One thing we do know is that evidence was lost, some of it went uncollected, and some of it was contaminated. One of the reasons we can’t prove he is innocent is that so much of the evidence is unavailable to us.”

That did not stop Mr. Morris from trying. Now 64, Mr. Morris is a contrarian by nature and practice. A graduate in history from the University of Wisconsin and a trained investigator who worked on Wall Street cases for a private detective agency, he accepts nothing at face value. In his film “The Fog of War” (2003) he recast Robert S. McNamara, a much-reviled architect of the Vietnam War, as a careful thinker who made some grievous yet altogether human mistakes. In “Standard Operating Procedure” (2008) the military police personnel who took photographs at Abu Ghraib that horrified the world were recontextualized as a logical extension of United States military and foreign policy.

He observes few strictures of documentary film, paying his subjects when he chooses and creating re-enactments as he sees fit. He is eccentric in his pursuits but is equable in person, careful in his speech and a fan of civilized but endless argument.

In the MacDonald case he says that investigators and journalists latched on to a theory that Mr. MacDonald had snapped, and that they disregarded evidence to the contrary. “That story held that Jeffrey killed his family in the heat of an argument and then came up with this cockamamie story about hippies to cover up what he did. I decided to look at the flip side.”

After prosecutors focused on Mr. MacDonald, he did himself no favors, admitting he had been unfaithful to his wife, lying to members of her family and coming off as uncaring and arrogant in news media appearances. “If you are accused of slaughtering your whole family, what is the appropriate way to act?” Mr. Morris said.

Mr. Morris had a precocious interest in capital crimes and Edgar Allan Poe as a young boy, so it may be no surprise that he ended up burying himself in a decades-old crime. He was undaunted that many of the material witnesses were dead.

“That is actually what I like about it,” he said, giving a pat to one of the sibling bulldogs, Ivan and Boris, who accompany him to his office every day. “It is on the borderline between journalism and history. In history everybody is dead or heading in that direction, yet new understandings emerge.”

His interest in a kind of frozen history is etched by a horse’s head that seems to have rammed itself through a wall above his desk, a desk that hosts the head of a monkey. Mr. Morris said he likes shopping at the Paris taxidermy store Deyrolle, although it’s hard not to see the animal heads as totems of his preoccupation with the morbid.

In matters MacDonald he was schooled by Harvey Silverglate, a friend and lawyer who lives in Cambridge and was lead counsel in the MacDonald case for many years. “I didn’t mean to get him interested, but he was fascinated by what happened because of his background as an investigator,” Mr. Silverglate said. Mr. Morris said he didn’t have much luck pushing a movie on the subject, even after he won an Oscar for “The Fog of War.”

In the new book he outlines his plans for a studio executive, and she stops him cold. “ ‘We can’t make that.’ I asked why. ‘Because he’s guilty,’ she said. ‘The man killed his family.’ And I said, ‘But he might be innocent.’ And she said, ‘No, he killed his family.’ ”

Mr. Morris, who often writes for the opinion pages of The New York Times, then proposed a multipart serial on the case. He was rebuffed, eventually deciding to write the book instead, one that adds more questions than it answers.

“With ‘The Thin Blue Line’ there was a feeling of closure,” he said, pointing out that Randall Dale Adams, sentenced for the murder of a Dallas police officer, was exonerated and released from prison a year after the movie came out. But for the MacDonald case, “the more I investigated, and I investigated for years, you would see the evidence pointing in one direction rather than another,” he said. “I know what happened. In this case it’s not that it became muddier. There is always a hope. I felt so close, but I couldn’t bring it to some satisfactory resolution.”

He does argue convincingly that a witness, Helena Stoeckley, a known drug user, confessed repeatedly that she was the woman in the floppy hat mentioned by one of the investigators, who spotted her in the area on the way to the crime scene. But when she was called to testify in the case, she said she was never there. (Ms. Stoeckley died in 1983.) Mr. Morris uncovers an episode of her supposed intimidation by prosecutors, which may be part of the evidence presented this month at Mr. MacDonald’s hearing. “It would be wonderful to have interviewed her and so many others on film,” Mr. Morris said wistfully.

If the dead aren’t talking, some of the living take a beating in Mr. Morris’s book. Although he says he holds the tenets of journalism in high regard — the pursuit of truth and the music of fact — he finds two of its practitioners highly wanting with respect to the MacDonald case. In the book he suggests that Mr. McGinniss, who lived and worked next to the defense team, was callow and opportunistic, a writer who traveled “a slippery slope of tergiversation, opportunism and self-interest.” This is famously well-covered territory, of course, in Janet Malcolm’s New Yorker article and later book, “The Journalist and the Murderer” (1990), which both begin with this indelible line: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

Mr. Morris finds some of the basis of her critique — that journalism itself is morally compromised and built on deception — appalling. “Janet Malcolm wrote about Joe McGinniss as if he were representative of journalism per se, and I respectfully disagree,” he said. “There was something very pathological in the relationship between McGinniss and his subject.”

“I despise versions of postmodernism that suggest that there is no such thing as truth, that the truth is up for grabs, relative and subjective,” he added. “Narrative does not trump all; it does not trump the facts. The facts are immutable. You may not be able to apprehend them or they may be elusive, but they are there.” (Ms. Malcolm declined to comment because she has not read Mr. Morris’s book.)

Mr. McGinniss said that Mr. Morris did not attempt to contact him, and Mr. Morris said that Mr. McGinniss did not respond to his e-mails. But Mr. McGinniss, whose book “Fatal Vision” is about to be reprinted and issued for the first time as an e-book, said he is comfortable with his conduct and conclusions.

“There is no question in my mind that he did it, and that it was proved in a court of law, and that every court that has looked at that jury verdict has upheld it,” he said, adding that he has been subpoenaed to appear at the hearing this month in North Carolina and that he “looks forward to going wherever I need to to play whatever small role I can play in keeping him where he belongs.”

When Mr. Morris was informed that Mr. McGinniss will be testifying, something he had not known, he was visibly excited by the prospect. “I will be there.”

Of course he will be, even though he is done with the book and now on to “The Unknown Known: The Life and Times of Donald Rumsfeld,” a documentary about the former secretary of defense.

After giving me a short peek at some of the 35 hours of interviews with Mr. Rumsfeld, he dived back into the MacDonald case, offering a 15-minute soliloquy on a children’s hobby horse from the crime scene, a mysterious piece of evidence that has lodged itself in his mind. On the way out, the same model of hobby horse stands like a sentry in an office full of curios, dead animals and obsessions. “You can ride it if you want,” he said cheerfully.

That isn’t going to happen — it’s too small, for one thing. But if anybody will be riding that hobby horse, it will be the man who found it on eBay after hours of searching.