A FOREST OF SYMBOLS:
Following Errol Morris Into the Wilderness of Error
PART I by Christopher Funderburg
Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes give voice to confused words;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
Which look at him with understanding eyes.
-Charles Baudelaire, probably not writing about a murder.
Introduction:
A couple years ago, World's Greatest Filmmaker candidate and experienced belayer Errol Morris began to write. Along with Philip Gourevitch, he put together an excellent companion piece to Standard Operating Procedure that expanded and improved upon his most flawed film. He wrote a regular NY Times blog column that initially focused on the nature of the photographic image and covered, among other things, the Israel/Palenstine conflict, the inception of criminology and cannonballs used during the Crimean War. Those columns were eventually collected into a book (Believing is Seeing) and in 2012 he published a re-examination of the notorious 1970 "Green Beret Murders."
Fans of Errol Morris were naturally excited for him to tackle the case - his intentions to provide evidence exonerating Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald bore more than a passing resemblance to his landmark 1988 film The Thin Blue Line. We're nothing if not Errol Morris disciples here at The Pink Smoke. Both I and John Cribbs rated Tabloid and The Unknown Known as among the best of their respective years; Mr. Death ranked 18th on our Favorite Films of the 90's list (I ranked it 4th on my individual ballot); I wrote a long piece on my personal connection to an episode of Morris' TV series First Person and another half-dozen short pieces on the series for my 200 Days/200 Movies blog.
We love Errol Morris.
Which is why the crushing failure of A Wilderness of Error to convincingly make its case caught us so off guard. I proposed writing a long piece responding to my issues with the book (most of which are shared by Cribbs), but I took too long to finish and it quickly felt like old news: in contrast to The Thin Blue Line, the book's position gained little traction and Morris failed to make MacDonald's imprisonment into a cause celebre. To spend a 15,000 word, three-part series on a book no one cared about seemed crazy even by our lax standards.
However, two weeks ago, Grantland held "Errol Morris Week." In addition to premiering a handful of excellent sports-themed short films, the website also featured several interesting pieces on the filmmaker and a new Q&A. Almost simultaneously, perhaps intending to coat-tail on the success of SERIAL and JINX, a new cable TV mini-series based on A Wilderness of Error was announced. This announcement, combined with comments (which I will detail in my piece) made during the Grantland interview, made finishing and publishing the proposed, half-written piece make sense.
One final note: we're not journalists. This article straddles the line between review and my own interpretation of the case. It should be noted, however, that I did no original investigation or made any attempts to contact any of the involved parties for their response - I simply read Morris' book and responded to it, with some of my other knowledge of the case bleeding in.
A Winner's History of the Greatest Trials of the 20th Century.
When I was a teenager my mother, who was and will ever be convinced I should have been a lawyer, gave me a copy of a thick paperback encyclopedia entitled The Greatest Trials of the 20th Century. Falling in tone somewhere between lurid true crime salaciousness and a scholarly appraisal of a century of law and order, it consisted of chapters reviewing landmark cases in the American justice system like the Scopes Monkey trial, Leopold & Loeb and Brown vs. Board of Education.
The two cases that stuck with me most from the book were grisly incidents I had never heard of before I perused that engrossing volume, a pair of horrifying cases with vague but iconic nicknames: the "Central Park Jogger" and the "Green Beret Murders." The details of both cases shocked and infuriated me; they stood out from the rest of the encyclopedia not only for how their repulsive nature blind-sided me, but for how obnoxiously those convicted of the crimes in question pursued their innocence.
In one case, a cadre of gang-rapists played legalistic games after confessing while their parents spit on the prosecutors and had to be physically restrained from assaulting them. In the other, Green Beret/ER physician Jeffrey MacDonald told police a ludicrous story about hippies chanting "Acid is groovy, kill the pigs!" before they killed his wife and daughters in a phony-sounding imitation of the Manson family crimes. I had a natural hatred of the military, soldiers and doctors* as well as a sympathy for the ways in which countercultural types where mischaracterized and demonized by the mainstream, so MacDonald's implausible-sounding story irked me deeply. Another "too convenient" touch: he had been reading and discussing a magazine article about the Manson crew earlier in the evening before the murders.
With the Central Park Jogger case, police had a series of confessions from wild man-beasts who attempted to exploit legal protections designed to shield the innocent and get those confessions thrown out. With the Green Beret Murders, an obnoxious, money-grubbing, adulterous military man brutally murdered his wife and daughters before pathetically scrawling "PIG" on his bed's headboard and giving himself a few cosmetic injuries to make it seem like crazed hippies had decided to make a Manson sequel.
They both hit a nerve; they outraged me on a primal level. Not to hammer the point too much, but I'd be willing to bet that the creeping amorphousness of their nicknames contributed to my fear and anger - these were not single incidents, but somehow representative. They weren't just cases, they were examples: black youth running wild in NYC, raping and pillaging; psychopathic veterans blind to their own sickness, hypocritically blaming the counterculture for society's ills, the ills of which they are actually the source.
At the time, I didn't know that these crimes led to not just two of the greatest trials of the 20th century, but two of the most controversial judgements as well. I didn't know and I couldn't have known because the encyclopedia handled each case from the perspective of the winner - that is, with both the Central Park Jogger rape and the Green Beret murders, the chapters presented the stories from the prosecution's point of view.
Yes, the book touched on exculpatory evidence like the dubious, forced nature of the "wildin'" rapists' confessions and the hippie with a "wide-brimmed hat" spotted near the crime scene that matched MacDonald's description of one of his assailants, but the writing nevertheless decisively aligned its analysis with the final verdict of the cases, heavily weighing both respective narratives towards winners and against the dismissible points of view of the losers. I remember being surprised that even O.J. Simpson more or less got let off the hook by Greatest Trials' authors.
Of course, in recent years, the prevailing narrative of the Central Park Jogger case has been rewritten repeatedly with the original teenagers involved generally being more and more accepted as improbable suspects and the race-baiting language of "wildin'" and the racial tensions of 1980's New York City disappearing from the argument for their guilt. They are now generally accepted as victims of a miscarriage of justice who were uninvolved in the rape which was the centerpiece of their convictions.
MacDonald's case has remained much more intransigent, MacDonald's guilt much less in doubt in the public imagination - the societal factors like poverty, race and youth that made the Central Park Jogger defendants sympathetic were notably absent from the MacDonald case. When my cinematic hero Errol Morris announced he would be releasing a book re-examining the case even I, a devoted superfan, cringed a little. In his book, the meticulously researched A Wilderness of Error, Morris argues that MacDonald's fate has been sealed by a false narrative; the truth of his tale having no chance of being sussed out not just because of evidentiary mismanagement and governmental malfeasance, but because the story had been written on MacDonald and the general public swallowed the story as written, hook, line and sinker.
I could see where he was coming from: the first time I heard about MacDonald, I heard the popular version, the one espoused by the government to put him behind bars for life and seared into the public consciousness by Joe McGinniss' Fatal Vision and Gary Cole's portrayal of the Green Beret murderer in the mini-series based on the book. I can't honestly say I ever doubted that narrative, the one lodged in my mind by The Greatest Trials of the 20th Century and its fidelity to verdicts rendered.
Morris identifies the MacDonald case as the story of a story, a narrative which has ruthlessly taken hold of Jeffrey MacDonald's life despite the shaky foundation on which that tale is constructed. Despite that story's spell over me, I wanted to give Morris the benefit of the doubt and try to drop all preconceived notions about the veracity of the tale. I'm sorry to report I couldn't do that, and even now I wonder how much of my reaction to Morris' book is based on the way in which the story of the "Green Beret Murders" had wormed its way into my mind.
This analysis of Morris' book is my attempt to come to terms with the evidence Morris has presented and make sense of the case to the best of my ability. The problem is that while Errol Morris wandered into a wilderness rife with obvious errors, I'm not sure he emerged with anything resembling clarity. And he presented his findings with a maddening inconsistency that I find to be uncharacteristic of the usually meticulous researcher.
Morris claims his fame from the 1988 film The Thin Blue Line, the only film to my knowledge to discover and rectify an injustice on the scale of a capital offense. The "discovery" aspect can't be over-looked, either: in Thin Blue Line's wake, advocacy documentaries have become a sub-genre to themselves and countless films have sought to shine a light on the failings of our legal system here in the U. S. of A. and bring justice to wronged parties - for example, Ken Burns co-directed a new film about the Central Park rape case. What separates Morris' film from those that have followed in its wake is that almost none of the imitators have discovered the injustice themselves; Burns' film focuses on a widely-publicized trial which has been vociferously criticized from all angles for going on a decade. Burns and Co. are presenting the story of a well-known perceived injustice.
When Morris stumbled upon Randall Adams while researching another project and pieced together the sleazy tactics that had been used to railroad him over the shooting of a police officer, no one knew who Adams was and his attorneys themselves (featured in the film) scarcely appeared to be working on the wrongfully convicted man's behalf with any sense of outrage. Morris' film became the zero point of a new investigation and did the grunt work of re-interviewing witnesses (several of whom proved to be liars and perjurers), piecing together timelines (he introduced the movie listings that showed the prosecution's narrative was off by several hours) and then even got the real murderer to more or less confess on tape.
Morris' films didn't simply shed light on the hard work of Adams' attorneys or throw fuel on the fire of a public outrage, but constituted a stand-alone investigation; if Morris hadn't gotten involved, there is no debating that Adams would still be in prison. Morris' credentials on the subjects of guilt, innocence, systemic malfeasance, truth, justice, right and wrong go beyond simple advocacy. If Morris demands I spend 500 pages considering court transcripts, crime scene diagrams, evidentiary labels and all manner of MacDonald minutiae, I'm going to give him my full attention and respect. You'd have to be an arrogant fool not to.
But there's crucial difference between Wilderness of Error and The Thin Blue Line: one amplifies the ambiguities of an unsolved mystery, the other corrects a miscarriage a justice. Finding the real cop killer, David Harris, and proving his guilt as conclusively as it is possible for a film to prove offers a closure that Morris' exploration of the MacDonald case cannot. Even if you believe that any of Morris' book points to MacDonald's innocence, it does not point towards a convincingly guilty party. The Thin Blue Line solved a case. A Wilderness of Error argues that one remains unsolved.
This is not a criticism of Morris' book per se (and I suspect Morris would throw up his hands here and say, "But I point quite clearly at Helena Stoeckley and her floppy hat!"), only an observation that it's easy to blur the little grey line between the two works. Because Morris had previously done the unthinkable and saved a man from life imprisonment, there's a (wholly justified) tendency to give him the benefit of the doubt again. But the two works have wildly different structures and effects. Keep that in mind as you read my response to his book and consider the evidence. He works towards clarity in his film, but the book trades in ambiguity.
I think that even Morris himself would admit he didn't emerge from the titular wilderness with anything resembling the truth. I've tried to come to grips with what I've read: Morris' revised tale of a brutally-murdered wife and pair of daughters. There's a new narrative with which Morris intends to replace the one put forth by the prosecution, Joe McGinniss and the TV movie made from Fatal Vision. It pains me to say it, but I have far more issues with Morris' replacement narrative than I do with the idea that MacDonald is guilty.
* This is true. When I was teenager, I had my appendicitis misdiagnosed by an indifferent, dickish ER doctor and a broken leg improperly set by another ER moron. To this day, I've had almost no good experiences with physicians, who I find to be as a group callow, condescending and wildly overpaid. If you meet a nice doctor who is actually good at their job, let me know, because despite a lifetime of nagging health problems, I've yet to have met one who has provided me the slightest fucking use beyond what a nurse could have done.
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