For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) definitely thinking about the relationship between public perception and persecution.
Because of the lack of concrete evidence, the MacDonald case more than many others comes down to an issue of competing narratives. Specifically, it comes down to the narratives of three people: MacDonald, Stoeckley and a special surprise witness I'll save for last. The only definite witness to the crime is Jeffrey MacDonald. He is the only person known for a fact to be in possession of the truth. Stoeckley is the only person to have corroborated any part of his narrative. Since the ouroboros of evidence swallows itself into nothing, these two narratives are crucial. They are the bulwark against the "Green Beret Murder" narrative. That these folks' narrative could be true is the only real argument Morris has for MacDonald's innocence.
Morris proves that the investigation was inadequate at best and makes a so-so case for prosecutorial malfeasance (although, again, defense council Bernard Segal deserves to be sitting in a cell alongside MacDonald for all he did to secure a conviction) but he doesn't come in the realm of providing proof of innocence. As a reader, if you care about the truth or falsity of MacDonald's innocence more than any shenanigans with judicial procedure, you have to weigh the truthfulness of MacDonald, Stoeckley and the surprise witness. Two of them are proven, undisputed, on-the-record liars in regards to the case. The other one told the truth repeatedly when he had nothing to gain - in fact, he told the truth in the face of governmental resistance. Bewilderingly, Morris takes the liars at their word and dismisses the truth-teller - I spent the whole book thinking "I can't believe what I'm reading. I wish could ask Morris just what the hell is going through his mind."
So much of Jeffery MacDonald's conviction is tied to Fatal Vision, the book by Joel McGinniss about the case that was developed into a wildly successful TV miniseries. There's a troubling bit of sleight-of-hand going on with A Wilderness of Error where Morris made me feel like MacDonald's federal trial and ultimate conviction came about because of the popular opinion he was guilty, an opinion popularized by Fatal Vision. But the sleight is this: the book and the miniseries came after the trial, at a moment when public opinion on the case would have been more or less irrelevant. MacDonald wasn't convicted because Fatal Vision had poisoned the public's image of the doctor - rather, the book and miniseries crystalized the public consciousness of the case.
But reading Morris' book, the way he frames his argument around a discussion of Fatal Vision and devoting a great deal of its culmination to author Joel McGinniss and whether he acted ethically, I was left with the impression that the book and movie were somehow at fault for the public perception of MacDonald. But that's not really so - the case was nine years old by the time of the second federal trial in 1979, in which MacDonald was convicted and the "Green Beret" was a fairly well-known public presence at that point. It was in fact MacDonald's deeply weird 1974 appearance on the Dick Cavett Show that touched off the public doubt of his innocence and convinced his father-in-law (the public face of anti-MacDonald sentiment) that he was involved in the murders.
Morris acknowledges the Cavett interview's importance and admits that MacDonald comes across as strange. Morris positions MacDonald as a victim of a false narrative, but dances around the fact that MacDonald went a long way towards writing that narrative. The Article 32 hearing should have laid the issue of his innocence to rest; it was only his subsequent presentation of himself and his approach to moving on with his life that allowed the Fatal Vision/"Green Beret Murders" narrative to take hold. Fatal Vision didn't create the dominant image of Jeffrey MacDonald - Jeffrey MacDonald did. That image was so forceful that Joe McGinniss' submission to it was inevitable - McGinniss originally lived with MacDonald while writing his book and actually intended to write a pro-MacDonald narrative before MacDonald's behavior changed his mind.
Morris is correct that it's not fair to use MacDonald's post-murder behavior to convict him of murder. He moved to sunny Southern California, bought a sports car, picked up a new young wife, snidely demanded financial retribution from the government and expressed little public sadness over the killings. It's fair for Morris' book to imply "so fucking what?" It's fair for anyone to say, "What's the right way to grieve? Let's judge him on the evidence and not ambiguous ideas about psychopathy and anti-social personality disorders manifesting themselves in TV talk show appearances."
On the other hand, Morris has a tendency to shy away from MacDonald as a subject. He spends scarcely three pages on interviews with MacDonald - he spends more time ruminating on the testimony of one of Stoeckley's neighbors who saw her come home at around 4:00 a.m. on the day of the murder. Or the day before. He can't remember. Until he's certain. Also, she was with a man and giggling. And what about her hippie roommates doing some painting at that ungodly hour?! Sure, no one thinks they're in any way involved, but isn't that weird? Anyway, that detail is what helps him remember the date. Which he might be wrong about. Anyway, with his testimony, we can now confirm that she definitely got out of a blue car. Case closed.
Usually, the way Morris obsesses over minutiae is one of his greatest assets: it helps him get the record straight and, in the case of The Thin Blue Line, uncover details overlooked even by the defense. So the short shrift he gives MacDonald feels particularly disingenuous. Maybe he assumes that his audience is intimately familiar with the case, but I wasn't so several details Morris casually throws out feel like bombshells. He doesn't even follow up on them or luxuriate in their weirdness. The indisputable fact is that MacDonald is weird, his actions are suspect, and that combination does inadvertently make you second-guess his innocence. When Morris finally brings up the subject of MacDonald's multiple extra-martial affairs, he spends less than a full sentence dwelling on it.
Morris has made many films about the collision of the banal and the bonkers - Gates of Heaven, Tabloid and Vernon Florida are nothing if not treatises on the jaw-dropping craziness of "regular" folks. That's one of the virtues of Morris' work as a filmmaker: the ability to draw out the deep weirdness and everyday insanity lurking very close to the surface within us all. In the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, he seems intent on hiding the weirdness and downplays it at every opportunity.
And it feels disingenuous, not just in the larger context of Morris' interests and methods as an artist, but how it creates the effect of making it seem like MacDonald (and by extension, Morris) has something to hide. Since when does Errol Morris treat his subjects with kid gloves? The glee and amusement he frequently derives from his subjects' more difficult aspects is one of the consistent criticisms of the filmmaker. Morris has been accused of over-playing the weirdness of his subjects, but with MacDonald, he waves us on our way with a literary "nothing to see here, folks."
The absolute strangest thing in the book, the bit I just don't know what to make of it, is initially mentioned in the preface to the second section, Book Two. Each of the book's seven sections has a brief timeline delineating major events and right up front at the beginning of "Book Two" is: "Jeffrey MacDonald calls Freddy Kassab and tells him that he has killed one of the perpetrators."
I think you will agree that this is fucking insane.
Just think about what an utterly bizarre, utterly bananas thing this is for MacDonald to have done. What narrative can you write around this fact? "Jeffrey MacDonald calls Freddy Kassab and tells him that he has killed one of the perpetrators."
Kassab and his wife spear-headed the public defense of MacDonald during the initial Article 32 hearing, but did a complete 180 and ended up spear-heading the public character assassination that led to his federal trial. Morris allows an unseemly amount of petty smearing when it comes to the Kassabs, but who cares, I guess? If they were unpleasant people, they were unpleasant people. It does irk me a bit that he allows off-point critiques of their apparently brusque, vengeful personalities while he goes out of his way to downplay MacDonald's notorious arrogance - just one of the little hypocrisies that make his case weaker and feel totally out of character for him as an artist and thinker. We're not supposed to fault MacDonald for being the wrong kind of grieving widower, but we're supposed to fault the Kassabs for not being the right kind of vengeful parents?
What I find strange is that Morris doesn't seem to have any sympathy for the fact that the Kassabs changed their tune on MacDonald not after the Cavett interview, but after he told them this insane, egregious lie. Then when MacDonald appeared on Cavett's show and whined about money without mentioning his murdered family (their dead grandchildren!) the Kassabs decided something was up. MacDonald's insane lie - that he found the real killer and murdered him?!1 - provides us not only with an example of MacDonald's extremely weird behavior, but also provides us with a concrete lie in regards to the case from one of the three witnesses whose narratives matter most.
Imagine if O.J. Simpson (also found "not guilty" and not just in an internal military Article 32 hearing) called Nicole Brown's parents and assured him that he had found the real killers and murdered them! If they were on his side, at that point they clearly no longer would be. It's a crazy lie, a just bonkers lie told by the one person indisputably in possession of the truth. I don't know how you can believe anything that comes out of his mouth after saying such a thing. You can't take him at his word. You just can't. A liar who tells that kind of story is liable to say a Manson-style hippie murder cult broke into his house and killed his wife and kids.
Morris undercuts this bonkers lie not by refuting it (he can't - no one disputes it happened), but with his tonal treatment of the Kassabs, his presentation of them as being intense and unlikable. The implication is: of course MacDonald told them he found the killer and then killed that dude - they wouldn't get off his back about finding out who killed their grandkids with a stomach-churning brutality. Those Kassabs, what a bunch of gauche jerks. Get off MacDonald's back already, granddad.
So, MacDonald is a confirmed, jaw-dropping fabulist who's willing to tell outrageous lies specifically, directly about who killed his wife and kids. Next up is Helena Stoeckley, drug addict and police informant. Let's come at the Stoeckley issue more obliquely. The Thin Blue Line hinges on Morris ferreting out the truth in four areas: police and judicial malfeasance, a near-confession from the real killer, a revised time-line and the credibility of the witnesses. One of the strongest sections in the film is Morris demolishing the testimony of Emily Miller, the lady who says "everywhere I go there's murders, even 'round my house" and waves her finger at Randall Adams in court as she says "That's the man who did it!" Morris' film catches her slipping up and admitting to perjury (she had lied under oath about whether the police helped her identify Adams). Additionally, the film casts aspersions on her motivations for providing testimony favorable to the prosecution - her daughter was "inexplicably" able to strike a plea deal on unrelated charges around the same time, likely in exchange for Miller's testimony.
Morris' destruction of Miller as a star witness is so thorough and devastating that his footage was entered as evidence in the appeal that led to Adams' exoneration. Remembering Miller drove me crazy while reading Wilderness; there's no explanation for how Morris could use Miller as proof of Adams' innocence but build his case for MacDonald's innocence around Stoeckley. Wilderness proves Stoeckley is guilty of perjury (either that or her defense of MacDonald is bogus) and her entire existence is based on her career as an informant: she offers her testimony in order to strike favorable deals with the police. Stoeckley is the same as Miller, only far far worse. She's a bigger liar and even more reliant on quid pro quo transactions with the cops. Morris uses Miller's dubious character as a coup de grace to the prosecution's case in The Thin Blue Line and then turns around and builds his argument for MacDonald's defense around a similar but far less credible witness. It's unfathomable.
Another issue when it comes to truth and lies from the mouth of Stoeckley is Morris' obsession with her lie detector test results. Morris wastes reams of paper on the pointless issue - everyone knows that lie detector test results are not admissible in court for two reasons: 1) They don't prove truth, they only purport to measure whether the test subject believes they are telling the truth. If a crazy man thinks he's from Mars, he can "pass" a lie detector test even while espousing such decisively untruthful ideas. That kind of a distinction can confuse juries. 2) The test can easily be influenced by the test administrator and manipulated by the test subject. In short, the tests aren't credible. The results don't really mean anything, they don't prove anything in particular and there are countless examples of the weird results and tests generating results in open conflict with verifiable reality.
Stunningly, during Grantland's recent Errol Morris Week, during a Q & A the filmmaker had this to say about the issue: "One of the reasons I hate the idea of lie detectors is that we think of the brain as being a recorder, a memory recorder, so you can go back in there and find out what happened, and whether you think the person is lying or telling the truth." That statement makes it seem like a clear-cut case of hypocrisy on his part to focus so much on Stoeckley's lie detector results in the book. He hedges slightly, though: "Well, maybe you can figure out whether they're misrepresenting what they know or think they know, but we all can confabulate, we've all lied, we all change things in innumerable ways." He spends so much of the book talking out of both sides of his mouth - the hypocrisies become even more apparent in the context of his larger career.
It simply doesn't matter whether Stoeckley passed or didn't pass the lie detector tests - if there are any distinctions to be made between her believing she was at the scene of the crime in a mescaline/LSD-induced haze or able to believe her lies as a matter of being a professional liar, they are small distinctions indeed. It'll come up later in this article, but Morris seems to lack first-hand experience with drugs and doesn't give much weight to the significance that, by her own admission, she would have been high on both LSD and mescaline at the time of the killings.
This is not a small matter: being on serious hallucinogenic drugs affects your hold on reality a little more than marijuana or half a bottle of wine. Mescaline and LSD are heavy hitters and even hardened addicts aren't going to have a whole hell of a lot of lucid memories from the time in which they were peaking on that particular combo. Her being on drugs, specifically those drugs, matters - Morris' willingness to wave off the effects of psychotropic mind-melters as well as MacDonald's lurid stories of a real murderer murdering make me resist any over-arching points he might be willing to make about the ambiguous nature of truth in regards to these folks - they both appear to be extremely unreliable and are demonstrably untruthful.
Stoeckley told many different stories about the night of the murders - at least a half dozen must be untrue. That she frequently told whatever story was most self-serving only makes her testimony all the more worthless: she tells one story to grease the wheels with cops in her life as a small-time addict and an entirely different story to avoid charges of perjury and yet another story when defense investigator Ted Gunderson pays her to play into his delusional conspiracy theories. The only consistency about Stoeckley's testimony is that it will always be as favorable to Stoeckley's needs as possible.
For the lie detector results to be useful, Stoeckly has to prove - not assert - her confession, and lie detector results are proof of neither jack nor shit. That is to say, the lie detector needs to confirm evidence, confirm timeframes, demonstrate how an argument is correct versus a counterargument - it needs to be a validation of facts that exist independently of the statement. For example, if she had said "I was wearing a wig" that was found to correspond to the 22-inch saran fiber, that would be useful. She can claim whatever she likes happened, but a statement taken by itself is useless, regardless of any inexact, shifting measurements of her blood pressure, pulse and respiration.
That's the element that makes dwelling on Stoeckley's on-again, off-again confessioneering feel like such a pointless waste of time: she never provides the defense or prosecution with any information they don't already have.2 Compare this to the Manson murders: when the family confessed, they were able to provide a wealth of information previously unknown to the police including the whereabouts of the gun used in the slayings3 and victim Jay Sebring's wallet (which they had jammed in a toilet tank in a gas station bathroom in a "black" part of town. The wallet was still there months later, so obscure was their chosen hiding place.) Guns, items removed from the scene: this is major, irrefutable evidence provided months after the crimes along with a host of small, coherent details that could have been known only by the killers.
Stoeckley sure loved confessing to the MacDonald murders, but what she didn't love was saying anything that wasn't already known to investigators or that didn't fit with either of the defenses' version of events. I might have missed it, but I'm not aware of anything to which she "confessed" that went beyond even public knowledge. She initially claimed to have committed the crime with two white men and a "negro" as per MacDonald's account of the incident, but couldn't provide names or any info about them - she just went out for a murder with a couple of strangers, washed up at a convenience store and went home in a blue car to giggle and paint (ominously) with her room-mates. Her boyfriend Greg Mitchell naturally got fingered as a suspect, so Morris makes hay about how freaked out he seems by the investigation into him. I think we can all agree it's pretty surprising that a guy got nervous when his drug addict informant ex-girlfriend began implicating him in a brutal trio of homicides.
Morris wants to save MacDonald from a false narrative, so he contorts himself to build anything resembling a convincing new story. At no point does Stoeckley say anything remotely useful, provide physical evidence (like the blonde wig from which the saran fiber could have been conceivably plucked), name accomplices or take the investigation beyond where it stood before she entered. After she's tampered with by Gunderson, forget it. At that point, her confessions could have been scripted by anyone even mildly familiar with the case.
A name, a glove, a boot, a candle, a wig, a pair of scissors, a dress, an address for an accomplice - anything Helena Stoeckley could have reasonably added to advance the investigation never materializes. If she knew something, there's no evidence of it. All we know is that she changed her story once put on the witness stand. She clammed up, so she's either a perjurer or didn't want to risk perjury by testifying about something she knew nothing about. She lied repeatedly about the case, whether in confessions or retractions - that she lied repeatedly and offered testimony for personal gain are basically the only things about Helena Stoeckley that aren't in doubt.
Which brings us back to the surprise witness: first responder Ken Mica. [Pause for shocked courtroom to gasp!] En route to the MacDonald crime scene in his ambulance, Ken Mica noticed a woman in a wide-brimmed hat and boots standing alone in the rain several blocks away from his destination. When he arrived at the scene, he told the investigators that he had seen a woman matching the description MacDonald gave of his female assailant. The investigators blew him off, seemingly already convinced they had their man in MacDonald (again that being the scenario with the greatest likelihood.)4
A month later, Mica ran into MacDonald's mother at the post office and repeated his hippie sighting to her. The defense team and investigators alike went into action. A local cop tracked down Stoeckley, whose appearance he believed matched Mica's description of the mystery woman; Stoeckley began pussy-footing around confessing to her involvement. Mica, when asked about whether or not Stoeckley was the woman he had seen on the street, insisted that it was not her. No ambiguity. Stoeckley is a short, tubby, dowdy-looking drug addict (here's a clip of her interview with Gunderson.) Was Mica sure it wasn't her? How did he know? In his words, from Wilderness: "Just a total different appearance. There was no resemblance. It just wasn't her." In another interview, Morris presses Mica on the issue. Mica points out he knew Stoeckley before the murders. Morris wants to know how he can be sure it wasn't Stoeckley. Mica replies "Well, I knew what she looked like, and I knew what the woman I saw that looked like. And they were just not even close."
Now, because of the wretchedly incompetent nature of the investigation and the hack-job crumminess of McGinniss' writing, I suppose I can understand Morris getting drawn into believing MacDonald's tale, even in spite of MacDonald's direct, on-the-record lies about who committed the murders.5 If you believe MacDonald, then everything around Stoeckley's confessions begins to sound like damning coincidences. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you are willing to entertain the idea that Stoeckley is telling the truth, then her story is tough to disbelieve.
But how could Morris cast doubt on Mica? Remember: investigators ignored Mica's account of a suspect matching the description given by MacDonald. They were caught up in the Scenario Most Likely and not interested in imaginary hippie thrill killers. Mica relayed his story in order to help MacDonald's defense - he told the man's mother what he saw just to make sure that the lead would be pursued. His actions were made on behalf of the defense. His story has never changed. He has never told a lie in regards to the case. There is zero, zero reason to doubt his account. Because of his truthfulness, consistency and interest in all leads being pursued, there is no reason to believe the woman he saw was Stoeckley. None. But that's what Morris does and in the most outlandish, silly hypocrisy in the whole damn book, he concocts the most false, psychologically presumptuous narrative of all. Look at this nonsense, these musings written by Morris that come just after a passage where Morris transcribes Mica relating his unwavering tale to a documentary film crew:
We are constantly struggling to make our beliefs fit together. Imagine Ken Mica on his way to 544 Castle Drive. He sees a woman standing in the light rain, but he and his partner keep on driving to the house. He wonders: Who was she? At first he was pressured to deny he had seen anything. But conscience got the better of him, and he told MacDonald's mother and his attorneys what he had seen and testified to that fact at the Article 32 hearing. It is only in the decades since that that impression has been replaced.
Wait, what the hell?
What impression had been replaced? Mica never denied seeing a woman in a hat on the road. He testified under oath to that effect and did so, as Morris points out, despite being "pressured to deny he had seen anything." He identified that woman on the road as not being Helena Stoeckley.
What impression is Morris referencing?
It doesn't make any sense.
There's only one context in which Morris' statement is even intelligible: if you dismiss an untruth (the untruth that Helena Stoeckley is the woman Ken Mica saw on the road), the whole precarious argument for MacDonald's innocence collapses. Since Stoeckley isn't the woman Mica saw, there's no reason to believe any of her account. The suggestive coincidences begin to look like narrative conveniences, empty confessions begin to look like the tools of a professional tattler. In regards to Mica and Morris' fanciful rumination on his testimony, Morris is the only one who appears to be operating under false impressions. Just re-reading it, I feel ashamed for Morris.
There are three crucial narratives in the MacDonald case. Two are told by proven liars who had something to gain by lying. One is told by a man who maintained a steady truth in the face of governmental resistance. A Wilderness of Error hinges on believing the liars and dismissing the truth-teller. I can't for the life of me figure out why.
That's not true. I know exactly why and just can't believe one of my heroes would stoop this low: if you remove Stoeckley from the equation, there's almost nothing to Morris' new investigation. Without Stoeckley, A Wilderness of Error would be nothing but so many empty pages. A couple bits of black wool, a 2-inch brown hair and a 22-inch saran fiber, some mislabeled samples and an intransigent judge. It's nothing. Without Stoeckly being the woman Mica saw in the rain, the book is a failure. Do you believe Mica? Or Stoeckly? It becomes the same question as "do you believe MacDonald?"
What troubles both Morris and me the most about the case can be found in the psychologizing of the crucial players and how the analysis of their psyches is used to create stories that damn them. Morris spends a healthy chunk of the beginning of the book going through the various accounts of the psychological analyses done on MacDonald. This is a cherished bug-a-boo for Morris, who first stumbled across The Thin Blue Line's Randall Adams while researching James "Dr. Death" Grigson. Grigson was a notorious prosecution witness in Texas brought in during the penalty phase to declare the guilty party a dangerous psychopath who the jury would live to regret not giving the maximum punishment allowable by law, if they so foolishly failed to do so. He would arrive at this ironclad diagnosis after a cursory evaluation session that consisted of little more than a few puzzles and word association tests. Adams had been damned by Dr. Death.
This kind of cheap psychological analysis drives Morris crazy: he's mentioned it in countless interviews, it's evidenced directly in The Thin Blue Line and the "Mr. Personality" episode of his First Person TV series about Dr. Michael Stone, who developed a truly absurd personality test used to size up the psychological profile of criminal offenders. Throughout Wilderness, Morris rightfully harps on this theme: MacDonald's post-murder behavior resulted in a catch-22. He was a psychopath because he didn't act like a psychopath. That no one in his life thought him deranged or capable of such a crime proved just how maliciously deviant he truly was: like all true psychopaths, he hid behind a mask of sanity. Morris tears apart these damning narratives rendered from a simplistic version of complex human psychology. MacDonald's options were to act like a malevolent nutjob and be damned as such, or act like a regular joe and be damned for psychopathy.
Morris' desecrations of sacred psychobabble are so forceful and effective that when he begins to trot out positive analyses of MacDonald, it stopped me dead in my tracks. Now, hold on one second - if I shouldn't believe the negative diagnosis of MacDonald for being hollow and too convenient, why should I buy into the equally hollow and convenient positive diagnosis? On what basis are the new opinions being rendered? Morris blows a hole in an entire field of criminal psychology and then doesn't bother to repair the damage before trying to use it to his new story's advantage. I can't take the positive verdicts on MacDonald's sanity at face value because Morris has so thoroughly undermined the mechanisms by which these verdicts are rendered in every case. It's yet another bad example of how I felt like Morris was talking out of both sides of his mouth throughout the book.
Morris is one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived and deserves my utmost respect in all things - those facts only served to up the level of my frustration with his lack of consistency. After tearing down the discipline, he throws out the sentiment (almost as a given) that new doctors said MacDonald was fine, totally not a psychopath at all. He doesn't elucidate us as to what tests were done to arrive at the new conclusion or discuss the circumstances in which his new doctors are generally employed as witnesses and evaluators. Since he's spent such a significant amount of his book on pulling apart the very concept of psychopathy as it exists in a criminal context, it just doesn't track to accept a positive analysis without discussion or rigorous inspection. At some point, I realized I hadn't read a description of the symptoms of psychopathy that Morris would accept (and therefore could be used to rule out MacDonald as a candidate for the classification) - if we're going to satisfactorily declare MacDonald "not a psychopath," don't we need a solid definition beyond the ones Morris has kicked the shit out of?
Worse still, in these later sections with all the Dr. Goodvibes speaking on MacDonald's behalf, when we are finally offered a cursory description of the symptoms of psychopathy, it turns out several of them do apply to MacDonald. A doctor named Rex Beaber says "a psychopath has a very specific kind of history: engaging in illegal conduct, poor performance in school, conduct disorders as a child, disrespect for authority, failure to learn from experience, frequent long-term affairs, drug and substance abuse..." Wait, hold on one second: in his brief interview with Morris, MacDonald mentions his infidelities and says of them such: "You know, my great sin in life is that I had a couple of one-night stands. Who didn't in the sixties?" Who hasn't had an affair? Is that really what he's asking? Try thousands upon thousands of people including your murdered wife and I bet Mr. Errol Morris himself. It's the traditional "lack of remorse" and long-term infidelities in one grotesque package. He cheated on his dead wife and doesn't even feel bad about it!
Also, doesn't MacDonald's loyalty to his incompetent lawyer and total lack of self-awareness fit comfortably into the whole "failure to learn from past mistakes" criteria? He's still out there giving the kind of interviews he gave to Dick Cavett. MacDonald's constant ranting about being railroaded and tirades against the prosecutors certainly fit that bill as far as "disrespect for authority" is concerned. But again, Morris doesn't offer any rigorous inspection of what that list of characteristics means, what behaviors might qualify or how anyone might comfortably come to the conclusion that they definitely don't apply to MacDonald. It's such a hypocritical maneuver on Morris' part.
The mention of drug abuse is interesting - not only for how it ties into the definition of a psychopath, but for how drugs floated around the periphery of the entire case, the murders being drug-related serving as one of the more likely scenarios for exonerating MacDonald. One of the bombshells in Fatal Vision is McGinniss' discovery that MacDonald had been downing 3-to-5 capsules of dextroamphetamine a day in the 3-4 weeks prior to the murders, resulting in a weight-loss of 12-15 pounds. Yep. You read that right: at the time of the murders, Jeffery MacDonald was tweaking on speed as part of a shock-loss weight management regimen.
Doctors strictly recommend against losing more than 3 pounds a week because of its significant physiological effects and, incidentally, they also consider heavy amphetamine use6 to be drug and/or substance abuse. Morris totally blows off this angle - it's even listed in the book's appendix under "alleged amphetamine use." First off, the only person "alleging" this use of speed is MacDonald himself - McGinniss gets it directly from a MacDonald's diary. Morris seems utterly clueless about drug use: he writes, "If MacDonald, a highly trained emergency room physician had overdosed on amphetamine, wouldn't he be aware of that fact?" That's his response to McGinniss pointing out that hospital workers had noted MacDonald's withdrawal symptoms in his time there after the murders.
It's a ludicrous position for Morris to take - why wouldn't the highly trained physicians treating MacDonald be aware of the facts of amphetamine withdrawal? Good ol' Dr. Beaber attempts to downplay the importance of MacDonald's drug abuse by saying "abuse of stimulant medications7 amongst physicians, especially physicians who do emergency work...is extremely common." These are doctors, folks - they are exempt from having drug problems. It's one of the book's more shameful passages, the attempt to erase the relationship between drug abuse and erratic, criminal behavior, as if being high out of your mind has no effect on your decision-making, irritability and rationality while responsible, doctorly drug usage is of zero consequence.
This is another example of drug issues where I just don't get the sense that Morris understands what it means to be high on speed for weeks at a time. Also, as someone who lost 60 pounds over the course of 3 months, I can tell you that extreme weight-loss does insane things to your mind and body. And I lost it without tweaking on amphetamines for 3-4 weeks straight. The drug addiction provides another component for a diagnosis of psychopathy and Morris disregards it, as though it's totally innocuous and the suggestion that MacDonald had his mind and body effected by drugs is absurd. There's physical proof of the effects right there in MacDonald's own journal: extreme weight-loss! We know the drugs were affecting MacDonald because of MacDonald's own measurements of their massive effect.
MacDonald decisively meets a significant portion of the criteria for a diagnosis of psychopathy and Morris ignores it. Does one need to fit all the criteria to be considered a psychopath? Does MacDonald's constant public display of contempt for the courts, lawyers and police count as "disrespect for authority?" Does his drug abuse count as "engaging in illegal conduct?"8 His "failure to learn from experience" and "conduct disorders as a child" remain unexplored as Morris once again shies away from MacDonald as a subject.
When Morris interviews the attorney overseeing MacDonald's appeals, the lawyer makes a show of how he's never even met MacDonald and thinks it's best to not even know him. I get the sense that Morris feels the same way - he wants to write the story of the "MacDonald Family Murders" but not have to deal with Jeffrey MacDonald. As a filmmaker, Morris is famous for his use of an invention of his own devising, the Interrotron, which allows his subjects to look directly into the camera and engage in largely uninterrupted monologues. With A Wilderness of Error, Morris refuses to look MacDonald in the eye.
In their brief conference call that comes eyebrow-raisingly late in the book, Morris speaks roughly as much as MacDonald himself and uses the opportunity to express head-on his book's themes about objective truth and the sky's indisputable blueness9 Even in this brief chat (it runs three pages total in the hardcover - for comparison, the nonsense with the utterly irrelevant Rex Beaber runs well over a page), MacDonald manages to shoot himself in the foot repeatedly, not only with a jaw-dropping unsolicited aside about his extramarital affairs, but his analysis of what went wrong during the trial. He doesn't seem in any way concerned with Stoeckley, but rather obsessed with fighting the judge and slandering the psychiatrist who gave him a damning evaluation. If you had sympathy for him up until this point, I can't imagine sustaining it after his unprompted digression about the joy of getting remarried yet again while in jail. It's the Cavett interview all over again - what is up with this guy? Of course Morris wants to hide him from plain sight.
That's the biggest problem with the case: MacDonald does not do himself any favors. He feels deeply indebted to the idiotic lawyer who torpedoed his chances, he allows McGinniss total access to his life, he has a terrible feel for how he comes across in conversation and hurts himself even worse in public forums. To a certain extent, Morris is right that some of these issues should be off-limits; at very least, they shouldn't dominate the discussion of the case to the extent they have. But at the same time, Morris argues that the question of MacDonald's motivation for killing his family is an open issue. That's where hiding MacDonald from his own story gets more than a little dicey. If the idea is that this is a story about stories and there needs to be a new, fairer one written for MacDonald, trying to keep MacDonald out of it feels unsettling if not outright dishonest.
If we consider scenarios and their likelihoods, it's not hard to see how MacDonald fits in - husbands kill their wives with sickening regularity, parents kill their children with sickening regularity. Drug-addicted, philandering husbands kill their wives. There are plenty of cases where this happens without a prior history of violence, without a prior history of criminality. Add this to the story: a man taking 3-5 methamphetamine tablets for 3-4 weeks to engage in extreme weight loss. A man who works two jobs to stay afloat financially. A man who tells his wife's stepfather and mother lies about who killed their daughter. A man who moves across the country without informing his wife's surviving family. A man who immediately gets a new girlfriend and buys a sports car. A man who never expresses public interest in the tragedy that befell his family, but takes every opportunity to decry the injustices he has suffered. A man who has affairs and feels no remorse. A man who possesses some of the attributes of a psychopath. An inciting incident when his daughter wets the bed. A drug-intensified rage, a liar, an outlandish story of Manson copycat home invasion. An adulterer who buys a new sports car and marries a beautiful new wife. Black wool fibers, a 22-inch saran fiber, a 2-inch brown hair.
I wish there were a better story to be told. I really do.
christopher funderburg — APRiL 17, 2015
