← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 11040 | Posts: 6 | Started: 2003-11-12
2003-11-12 08:46 | User Profile
[I]You wonder what sortof a world we live in when everybody (on two continents!) "knows" that Mumia Whatsisface was "framed", but Dr Jeffrey MacDonald watches his life eke away inside prison for the past 25 years, with no end in sight.[/I]
[url]http://www.themacdonaldcase.org/newrepub.htm[/url]
Fatal Revision By Ruth Shalit
May 26, 1997
On April 16, The Wall Street Journal published the results of an investigation into the practices of the increasingly beleaguered FBI crime laboratory. The article, written by reporter Laurie P. Cohen, uncovered two apparently fraudulent affidavits submitted by FBI hair-and-fibers examiner Michael P. Malone. An examination of Malone's actions, wrote Cohen, "raises serious concerns about the FBI crime lab, which is already under scrutiny for allegedly biasing its findings to favor prosecutors over criminal defendants."
One victim of this practice, wrote Cohen, may have been Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald, the Princeton-educated Army surgeon whose sensational 1979 murder conviction was the basis for Joe McGinniss's best-selling book Fatal Vision, and whose lawyers have been complaining for years that the FBI manipulated forensic evidence to make their client look guilty. As Cohen reported, a strand of synthetic blond fiber--now revealed, in contradiction to Malone's sworn testimony, to be composed of the type of fiber used to make human wigs-- has become the basis of a habeas petition to gain a new trial for MacDonald, who is currently in jail for the murder of his wife and their two small children, a crime he has maintained for twenty-seven years he did not commit.
But MacDonald's lawyers go further. They say that prosecutorial bias, far from being confined to a single rogue agent, permeated the entire investigation. "We've known for a long time that the forensic testimony in this case was utter nonsense," says Harvey Silverglate, the Boston criminal defense lawyer who has been handling MacDonald's appeal, pro bono, since 1989. "For years, people have been telling us, `You don't accuse the FBI lab of perjury. This is the foremost forensic lab in the world!'" When Silverglate and his associates read in the paper that the FBI lab was under fire for falsifying evidence, "we were electrified," he says. "What this case has always needed is a scandal swirling around the FBI lab. Maybe now someone will believe us." Malone declined to comment.
The facts of the MacDonald case are as well-known as they are lurid. In the early morning hours of February 17, 1970, the military police at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, logged a phone call from MacDonald, a Green Beret captain and an Army group surgeon who lived with his family on the Fayetteville base. "We've been stabbed," gasped MacDonald. "People are dying.... I may be dying." When military police arrived at the scene, they found MacDonald's pregnant wife, Colette, lying on the floor of the master bedroom in a pool of her own blood. The couple's young daughters, Kimberly and Kristen, had been hacked to death in their beds. All three bore the marks of multiple weapons: an ice pick, a Geneva Forge knife and a wooden club later found in the backyard. MacDonald was found alive but unconscious. He was revived by medics, given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and taken to a nearby hospital. When he regained consciousness, he told a bizarre tale. His family, he said, had been butchered by a pack of drug-crazed hippies. MacDonald remembered a black man in an Army field jacket with sergeant's stripes, two white men and a woman in a blond wig and floppy hat. According to MacDonald, the group had cut a macabre swath through the small apartment, carrying a candle and chanting "acid is groovy" as they stabbed and clubbed and slashed his wife and daughters.
MacDonald's account of the hours leading up to the murders are as follows: after sharing an orange liqueur, he and Colette got into bed and watched Johnny Carson. But soon 2-year-old Kristen, who couldn't sleep, crawled into their bed. Unfortunately, Kristen wet MacDonald's side of the bed. MacDonald cleaned her up, tucked her in and crashed on the living-room sofa--only to awaken hours later to the frantic screams of his dying family. Struggling to his feet, he was set upon by three men, who beat and slashed him until he passed out. When he opened his eyes, the intruders were gone and the apartment was silent. He staggered to the rooms of his wife and children, only to find them broken and bleeding. After pulling a knife out of his wife's chest, he attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He also attempted to revive his daughters. When this failed, he managed to pick up a phone and summon the Army medics. At that point, MacDonald--who, hours later, would receive treatment for multiple head contusions, a collapsed lung, as many as seventeen ice-pick wounds and at least four knife wounds, including one so deep it exposed his stomach muscle--lost consciousness again. When Army medics arrived at the scene, they found him slumped over his dead wife.
William Ivory, the 26-year-old lead Army investigator, did not believe MacDonald's story. For one thing, the crime scene looked suspiciously tidy. If the MacDonald living room had indeed been the site of a bloody struggle with marauding intruders, as MacDonald claimed, why was a flowerpot standing upright? Even more graphically damning, it seemed, was the forensic evidence-- gathered at the crime scene by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division and turned over to the FBI when, nine years after the murder, the agency decided to conduct its own probe. As Justice Department prosecutors would argue at trial, this circumstantial evidence overwhelmingly fingered MacDonald. On the bedspread, investigators found a bloody strand of Colette's head hair entwined with one of MacDonald's pajama fibers, evidence that a battle had taken place between MacDonald and his wife. The imprint of MacDonald's bare, bloody feet was found in Kimberly's doorway--proof, according to the prosecutor's scenario, that MacDonald had paused in his daughter's room while carrying Colette's lifeless body into the master bedroom. Most damningly, investigators claimed, two of MacDonald's pajama fibers were found on the murder club. Lead prosecutor James Blackburn called this ominous discovery the "most important" evidence in the case.
Also problematic for MacDonald was what was not found in the apartment. MacDonald said he'd struggled with the intruders in the west entrance to the hallway before falling to the ground, wounded and unconscious. But investigators claimed to have found none of MacDonald's pajama fibers or blood in that area. And there was a bigger problem. According to investigators, there was not a shred of evidence to support MacDonald's far-fetched tale of chanting, candle-bearing crazies. "It doesn't make any difference if there were 5,000 hippies outside Castle Drive at four o'clock in the morning screaming `Acid is groovy; kill the pigs,'" explained Blackburn in his summation. "Because they have not shown that hippies were inside the house."
In interviews after the verdict, several jurors revealed their discomfort with the government's case. The prosecution, they told reporters, could offer no explanation for how MacDonald, a doting father who had just delighted his family with surprise gifts of a bunny rabbit and a Shetland pony, could experience such a profound psychotic snap. In the end, they said, it was the lack of evidence of intruders--together with the lack of blood on the floor where MacDonald said he'd bled--that led them to accept the prosecution's claim that MacDonald was lying. Try as they might, MacDonald's lawyers proved unable to explain the discrepancies between their client's story and the forensic evidence. After a mere six hours of deliberation, the jury convicted MacDonald of triple murder. A judge sentenced him to three consecutive life terms at the Sheridan Federal Correctional Institution, in western Oregon, where he remains to this day.
But there is a strong argument to be made that the government's case against MacDonald was, at least to some degree, rigged, an argument that indeed has been made by investigative journalists Jerry Allen Potter and Fred Bost in their book Fatal Justice, just out in paperback, which presents an exhaustive argument for MacDonald's innocence. As Potter and Bost note, during the four years leading up to the trial, MacDonald's lawyers repeatedly asked the prosecution for a look at the original source documents--investigative reports, witness statements, handwritten lab notes and other unfiltered primary material--that would substantiate the government's damning interpretation of the evidence collected at the crime scene. Brian Murtagh, the Justice Department attorney in charge of the case, refused to turn anything over; and Judge Franklin T. Dupree refused to compel him to do so. Dupree soothed the apoplectic lawyers with a promise that, if the sought-after lab notes were later discovered to contain exculpatory information, the prosecution's case would "get reversal."
The government documents weren't released until thirteen years after the murder, when MacDonald's attorneys lobbied senators and congressmen to compel disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (foia). MacDonald's lawyers say this belated disclosure, which began in 1983 and continues even today, confirmed their suspicions. The handwritten notes, tens of thousands of pages of them, did contain information that was kept off the FBI's typed summations, information that contradicted the prosecution's central claims at trial. We now know from the notes that, when the government claimed that MacDonald's footprints in Kimberly's doorway inculpated him in the murders, it ignored eyewitness accounts that MacDonald, as he was being carried out of the apartment on a gurney, stumbled off the gurney with bare, bloody feet at precisely the point where the footprints were found. We also know that, when the jurors were told of a pajama fiber entwined with a hair, they never learned the truth--that Army investigators had examined debris from the bedspread three times in 1970 and found none of Colette's bloodstained hair; nothing entwined. The notes reveal no explanation for such a dramatic change in forensic evidence--evidence that was hand-carried from the Army's evidence depository to the FBI lab by the lead Justice Department prosecutor himself.
What about the troubling absence of blood and pajama fibers on the hallway floor, where MacDonald insisted he'd battled multiple intruders? This claim, too, is countermanded by source documents that the government refused to allow the jurors to see. The notes reveal that, when Robert Shaw of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division first got to the apartment, he reported a "pile" of blue fibers and a spot of blood (diagnosed as probably type B, MacDonald's type) at precisely the spot in question. This evidence, too, was kept from MacDonald's lawyers and from a jury who cited its absence as their main reason for doubting MacDonald's account.
As for the fibers on the murder club--the "most important" evidence--the original, handwritten lab notes reveal that, when lab technicians examined the club debris, they found not pajama fibers but two strands of black wool, wool that didn't match any clothing in the apartment. Somehow, these foreign "wool fibers" became "pajama fibers" in the government's final report.
During their decade in the MacDonald foia archives, Potter and Bost found evidence to dispute every major claim by the government of circumstantial evidence against MacDonald. As they write: "We found each one grossly short of proof, and many of them intentionally distorted. We would be hard-pressed to mention a single important item that had not been somehow manipulated to throw suspicion away from intruders who left substantial evidence in the home, in the victims' hands, and on and around the bodies."
One piece of evidence kept out of MacDonald's trial that showed up in the foia documents was a confession of murder--actually multiple, polygraph-verified confessions--by Helena Stoeckley, a Fayetteville hippie, drug addict and self- styled "witch" who admitted to owning a blond wig, floppy hat and ice pick; who was spotted by five eyewitnesses in the vicinity of the MacDonald home, in several instances in the company of two white males and a black male in an Army field jacket, on the night the murders occurred; and who never came up with an alibi for where she was during the early morning hours of February 17, 1970. In her confessions, Stoeckley explained that "MacDonald was just one of several people giving the drug users a hard time. And I don't know really who started the idea." Stoeckley explained that the group, "peaking out on mescaline," allowed matters to get out of hand. "From what I understood, there was simply going to be a little pushing around, you know, and trying to get a point across, and that was it." Before she knew it, "there was blood and I realized that things were out of control." Despite his earlier promise to reverse MacDonald's conviction in the event of documented prosecutorial suppression, Judge Dupree ruled the confessions irrelevant, due to a lack of forensic evidence tying Stoeckley to the crime scene. Such evidence later surfaced, in the form of blond wig hairs suppressed by the FBI and finally disclosed through foia in 1990. But this, too, was deemed insignificant. FBI expert Malone swore that the synthetic fibers had to be doll hair. "Unless the defendant wants to maintain that Ken and Barbie did it," said government prosecutor John F. DuPue in 1992, "I don't see how this hair helps them very much today." A three-judge panel agreed with DuPue: "Without any evidence that saran is used in the production of human wig hair the presence of blond saran fibers in the MacDonald home would have done little to corroborate MacDonald's account of an intruder with a blond wig."
The April 16 Journal story, which established that saran fiber was indeed used to make wigs--and that FBI hair expert Michael P. Malone knew this at the time he testified to the contrary--has vaulted the MacDonald case back into the media spotlight. From his makeshift studio at the Sheridan Federal Correctional Institution, a haggard-looking MacDonald has been storming the talk-show circuit, appearing on "Larry King Live," the "Today" show and ABC's "This Week" to proclaim his innocence, and to declare himself the victim of a malicious government prosecution. The recent avalanche of criticism of the FBI reflects "precisely what I have been saying for years," a tearful MacDonald told Larry King. "I didn't murder my wife or children. I never harmed any of them...."
To those of us weaned on Fatal Vision, Joe McGinniss's slickly tendentious account of an Ivy League golden boy's descent into psychopathy, MacDonald's telegenic persuasiveness comes as a queasy surprise. For, even more than the jury's stinging verdict, this true-crime page-turner has come to define Jeffrey MacDonald in the public eye, turning a loving father and dedicated physician into a soulless monster of depravity. Not only did the McGinniss book smoothly lay out the government's case--papering over discrepancies and eliding crucial contradictions, until an iffy circumstantial case began to seem an airtight web of verification--it also gave the prosecution's argument a psychological superstructure. For McGinniss's literary narrative provided something the government's legal narrative did not--a plausible motive for why MacDonald would kill his wife and children. In turning MacDonald into his Raskolnikov, however, McGinniss faced a crucial stumbling block. The blandly middle-class Army doctor refused to display any of the traits associated with people who kill: prior to trial, five psychiatrists--including three hired by the government--had found MacDonald sane and unlikely to have committed the crimes. In trying to imbue his protagonist with the requisite horribleness, McGinniss fell back on Hervey Cleckley's The Mask of Sanity, which held that, for victims of a particular "grave psychiatric disorder," outer normalcy was proof of inner psychopathy. According to McGinniss's surmise, MacDonald had murdered his family in a fit of "boundless rage" against the female sex, suppressed since childhood but lethally detonated after Colette voiced threatening "new insights into personality structure and behavioral patterns," gleaned from a psychology course in which she had recently enrolled.
Fatal Vision became a national best-seller and the inspiration for a top-rated television movie of the same name. And McGinniss's book became doubly famous as the object lesson at the center of The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm's exploration of the morally perilous relationship between writer and subject. During the years in which McGinniss was preparing his portrait of MacDonald as a psychopathic killer, he had, Malcolm reported, posed as his devoted fan and supporter: commiserating with MacDonald about his "nightmare"; offering him legal advice; lulling him with forty friendly letters. In truth, though, by the time the conviction was announced, McGinniss had already decided MacDonald was a cold-blooded murderer. As McGinniss later told a radio host, "[M]y mind was made up the same day the jury's mind was made up." After the verdict, MacDonald sued McGinniss, alleging breach of contract; the case was settled for $325,000.
Malcolm was scrupulously agnostic on the question of whether MacDonald committed the crime. As MacDonald's lawyers sent her ream after ream of what they claimed was newly discovered exculpatory evidence, Malcolm found herself "oppressed by the mountain of documents that formed in my office," she wrote. "I know I cannot learn anything about MacDonald's guilt or innocence from this material." When Malcolm was finishing up her book, a pleading letter from MacDonald arrived. She wrote: "It tells about developments in his criminal case--extraordinarily powerful new evidence,' which he isnot yet free to make public,' but which he will send me if I want it. I do not want it."
Neither, it seemed, did anyone else. Over the years, the journalistic industry that has grown up around the Jeffrey MacDonald case has received far more attention than the case itself. MacDonald and his tedious protestations of innocence have become almost incidental to the affair's ancillary titillations: Did McGinniss betray MacDonald? Did Malcolm betray McGinniss?
But now something new is happening. Journalists, armed with the mountain of foia documents Malcolm found so understandably oppressive, are asking the unsettling question: What if MacDonald is innocent, after all? Errol Morris, who exposed a famous miscarriage of justice in his award-winning documentary, The Thin Blue Line, says he is now trying to get money to make a movie about the MacDonald murders. "One gets the impression reading Fatal Vision that there was an overwhelming case against Jeffrey MacDonald. In fact, that is just not true," Morris told me. "It's the quintessential postmodern nightmare--a man who is in jail because everyone thinks they know the story, when the story, for the most part, has been framed by a book and a television movie, rather than a careful examination of the underlying evidence." Janet Malcolm has now brought herself to look at the foia documents as well. "The more I read about the case," she told me, "the more I move toward the view that he could very well be innocent."
As evidence mounts that MacDonald did not commit the crime, his attorneys have been grinding their teeth in frustration, realizing that exculpatory evidence is no longer sufficient to reopen a habeas petition. Thanks to reforms to the writ of habeas corpus passed in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, it is no longer enough for the defense to show that crucial evidence was suppressed by the government; the burden is on the defense to show that government agents did so deliberately. But now that Michael Malone's testimony has been forcefully rebuked (Malone swore under oath that the FBI's textbooks said that saran could not be used in wigs; at least one textbook, in fact, says the exact opposite), MacDonald's lawyers say they finally have the hook they need to drag into the public record a wealth of explosive exculpatory evidence the jury never saw.
foia documents, some of which were released after the publication of Fatal Justice, reveal that evidence of intruders never entered the official, typewritten case record. We now know that, on the very day of the murders, Army investigators discovered five bloodstained gloves in the kitchen, a bloody syringe in a closet and an unidentified bloody palm print on the footboard of the bed in the master bedroom. Wax drippings were found at three critical locations in the apartment, including Kimberly's bedding, and the color of the wax did not match candles found in the MacDonald apartment. A burnt match was found at the foot of baby Kristen's bed--even though no one in the family smoked, and there was nothing in the room requiring the use of a flame.
foia documents also reveal that hair and fiber evidence--unmatched to MacDonald, or to any other known sources in the home--was found in every location in the apartment where, according to MacDonald's account, a struggle occurred. In addition to the intriguing blond wig hair, plucked from Colette MacDonald's hairbrush, two unidentified "pubic or body hairs" were found next to the bodies of Kristen and Kimberly. An unidentified "short brown hair" was found clutched in Colette MacDonald's left fist. And an Army investigator, examining scrapings from the dead children's bloody fingernails, found brown hairs under the nails of both Kristen and Kimberly. According to the authors of Fatal Justice, the hairs exhibited "dissimilar characteristics," meaning that they may have come from two different attackers. Chillingly, their roots were intact, suggesting that the struggling girls had actually gouged hairs out of their killers' bodies. When the lab technician found that the hairs couldn't be linked to MacDonald, it seems he decided to keep them a secret. A handwritten note reads: "They are not going to be reported by me."
Evidence of foreign fibers was also omitted from the prosecution's typewritten report. Two blue acrylic fibers--one found clutched in Colette's hand, the other in the hallway where MacDonald claimed he lay unconscious--were catalogued and tested by the FBI, but were ultimately unmatched to anything in the apartment. Meanwhile, several crucial fibers catalogued as MacDonald's turned out not to be his after all.
Oh, and remember the telltale flowerpot? The one that supposedly proved that MacDonald murdered his family, then staged a bogus crime scene to cover his own tracks? It turns out that, moments after MacDonald was wheeled out on a gurney, a man at the scene "picked up the overturned flowerpot and set it upright on its base."
"Things do not lie," prosecutor Blackburn told the North Carolina jury in 1979. "But people can and do." Given the voluminous and persuasive evidence pointing to MacDonald's innocence that has come to light since his trial, the prosecutor's words ring uncomfortably true. Should Judge James C. Fox grant a new trial to a defendant already convicted in the public consciousness, the Fatal Vision murderer may indeed walk out of prison a vindicated man.
[url]http://www.themacdonaldcase.org/introduction.htm#INTRODUCTION[/url]
[QUOTE]The case of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald has been infused with controversy since the murders took place, almost 34 years ago. Convicted, based on the lack of physical evidence supporting his claim of intruders, MacDonald steadfastly maintains his innocence, despite years of court rejections. Fueling this controversy, however, are thousands of pages of government reports, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, that prove the existence of outside assailants. In fact, not only do these documents show MacDonald's claims to be true, they also show how the prosecution deliberately set out to suppress evidence supporting these claims before, during, and post-trial.
The MacDonald case has served as an example of malfeasance in the investigation of the FBI Crime Lab's misconduct, and the case has been featured in numerous congressional hearings and in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe and The New Republic. As DNA testing of the evidence draws to a conclusion, the case promises to be one of the most important examples of injustice and wrongful conviction in American legal history.
This summary will provide an overview of the case, and cite some of the key pieces of evidence suppressed by the prosecution. Using the government's own documents, the defense demonstrates the ways in which this evidence has been kept from inclusion at a public evidentiary hearing. It also demonstrates how the government continues to keep the whole of the evidence from a courtroom, even after MacDonald was awarded the right to perform DNA testing by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Most of all, it illuminates the fact that Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, incarcerated since 1979, is innocent.
[B][COLOR=Blue]CASE OVERVIEW [/COLOR] [/B]
The Murder Night, February 17, 1970
On a cold, rainy night at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, military policemen responded to a telephone call from Green Beret group surgeon Jeffrey R. MacDonald. Upon their arrival at the apartment, the MPs discovered the slaughtered bodies of Captain MacDonald's wife, Colette, 26, and their daughters Kimberley, 5, and Kristen, 2.
An MP revived MacDonald via mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. MacDonald said that he had been asleep on the sofa when he awoke to the screams of his wife and oldest daughter. MacDonald stated that three men, standing over the sofa, attacked him - one black man wearing an army field jacket with E-6 stripes, and two white men. MacDonald said that the black man wielded a baseball bat. One of the white men had a bladed weapon. Behind these men, MacDonald said he had caught a fleeting glimpse of a blonde woman wearing a floppy hat. She was saying "Acid is groovy. Kill the pigs." MacDonald told the MPs, "She carried a flickering light, perhaps a candle."
[COLOR=Blue]The Army Hearing[/COLOR]
After a six week Army pre-court martial hearing, presiding officer Colonel Warren V. Rock concluded that the charges against Captain MacDonald were " not true". Colonel Rock had also learned that cult member Helena Stoeckley, daughter of a retired colonel, had made statements that suggested she had been involved in the murders. He discovered that army investigators had failed to reveal that Stoeckley, a key narcotics informant for the local and army police, had made admissions to them. She had admitted that she had worn a floppy hat, blonde wig and boots on the murder night, that she was on drugs that night, and had no alibi for period during which the murders took place. She later admitted that she burned the hat, wig and boots, fearing they would incriminate her. She was seen by military police at a street corner on post as they rushed to the crime scene. Colonel Rock requested that Stoeckley be thoroughly investigated by civilian authorities.
The MacDonald defense has since obtained information provided by former army investigators that other sons and daughters of key military officers on post were involved in drug trafficking. One in particular was known to be "a problem in the case", because she was allegedly associated with the Stoeckley group. The facts of these claims, even though made by Army CID investigators personally involved in the case at the time, cannot at this late date be verified. However, if true, they offer a reason why the top brass on post might have pursued Dr. MacDonald: To avoid suspicion of their own children.
[COLOR=Blue]A Colonel's Daughter: Helena Stoeckley[/COLOR]
At age 17, she was a key drug informant for local and army police. This was admitted by the lead army investigator, William Ivory, during the 1970 Article 32 hearing. She fit the descriptions given by Captain MacDonald and by MP Kenneth Mica, who said he saw a woman in a floppy hat while enroute to the murder scene at 3:55 a.m. Mica says he was ordered that morning not to talk about what he saw. On that same morning, the top law enforcement officer on post failed to tell FBI agents that the MP had seen a woman matching MacDonald's description, three blocks away, only moments after the crimes.
In 1971, Helena Stoeckley failed a polygraph administered by the CID, in which she denied being at the crime scene. Years after trial, she confessed, before television cameras, to being with the intruders at the murder scene.
[COLOR=Blue]Greg Mitchell[/COLOR]
A heroin addict and soldier, Mitchell was Helena Stoeckley's boyfriend. After his death, Mitchell's friends said he also had confessed to the crimes. Mitchell stated on numerous occasions that he and his group had gone to the MacDonald home to assault the family, because he believed MacDonald would not help him obtain methadone - a substance used to aid drug addicts. Mitchell said the group was strung out on drugs, things "got bad" and they left after the phone rang unexpectedly (and was answered by Helena Stoeckley).
Suppressed Physical Evidence Indicating That Someone Else, Not Dr. MacDonald, Murdered His Family
Although the Army's hearing officer cleared MacDonald, he was later brought to trial in the civilian courts. During that trial, prosecutor Brian Murtagh assured the jurors that nothing was found at the murder scene to support MacDonald's story of intruders. When the defense attorneys asked to see the withheld laboratory notes, so that they could determine for themselves if any corroborating evidence, the prosecutor untruthfully insisted that the documents held nothing that supported MacDonald's claims. Upon this promise, the judge then refused to force Murtagh to turn over the documents.
As shown below, those documents, later released through the Freedom of Information Act, contradict the prosecutor's statements. They demonstrate that the Army deliberately suppressed a great deal of evidence that indicated the presence of intruders in the house.
[COLOR=Blue]Suppressed Evidence on the Body of Colette MacDonald[/COLOR]
Human skin under Colette's fingernail, left hand, was lost. The loss wasn't reported, even though it appears clear that MacDonald's injuries (at least 15 stab wounds and 3 head contusions) did not include fingernail scratches. (Autopsy and CID reports; interview with Dr. Severt Jacobson)
A brown hair in Colette's left hand was found not to be MacDonald's or any of the victims', but was reported untruthfully by the government as being too small to test. (CID Lab Note R-11;CID Exhibit E-5) Note: CID stands for the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigative Division.
Unmatched black wool fibers were found on Colette's mouth and shoulder. These were not reported. The fibers were important because the FBI also found black wool fibers on the murder club. At trial, these black wool fibers were misrepresented to the jury as blue cotton fibers from MacDonald's pajama top, and were used to convict him. They were also important because Stoeckley, a self-styled witch within her cult group, was known to have affected a wardrobe of black clothing around the time of the murders. (CID Lab Note, March 6, 1970; FBI Lab Notes
A blue acrylic fiber found in Colette's right hand proved to have no source among the fabrics and clothing in the MacDonald home. Another blue acrylic fiber was found where Jeffrey MacDonald said he lay unconscious. (CID Lab Note on E-32, debris from the hallway; Lab Note by Paul Stombaugh of the FBI on Q94; letter by Brian Murtagh, 1978, to the FBI Lab on E-4, debris from Colette MacDonald's right hand.)
[COLOR=Blue]Suppressed Evidence on the Bodies of Kimberly and Kristen[/COLOR]
A brown hair, with root intact, was found under Kimberly's bloody fingernail. This hair was found not be Jeffrey MacDonald's. It remains a foreign hair in the hand of a murder victim, and was unreported. (CID Lab Note R-11)
A brown hair, with root intact, was also found under baby Kristen's bloody fingernail. The hair possessed different characteristics from the hair in Kimberly's hand. It was found not to be Jeffrey's or Colette's hair, yet this too was kept secret. (CID Lab Note R-11)
Knowledge of hairs under the nails of murder victims, hairs that didn't match Jeffrey MacDonald, should not have been kept secret, but in long-suppressed lab note R-11, the Army lab tech writes in the last line: "...they are not going to be reported by me."
[COLOR=Blue]Additional Suppressed Evidence[/COLOR]
Blonde, synthetic wig hairs, 22 inches in length, were found in a clear-handled hair brush on a table in the living room where MacDonald said he saw the blonde female. These wig hairs would have been critical to MacDonald's defense. Army investigator William Ivory knew Helena Stoeckley wore a blonde wig, which matched the descriptions given by MacDonald and MP Kenneth Mica, but didn't reveal the presence of these long blonde wig hairs at the crime scene. (CID Lab Notes April 20 and May 7, 1971, items E-323 and Q75)
A bloody, adult palm print was found on the footboard of the master bed on the morning of the murders, near Colette MacDonald's body. The print did not match palm prints of either Jeffrey or Colette MacDonald, nor could it be matched to palm prints from persons known to have been at the crime scene that morning. Despite extensive efforts by the FBI, the source of this bloody palm print remains unidentified. (CID Lab Reports, CID Lab Notes, a prosecution memo, and FBI Report on Palm Print 3X30)
Defense Counsel Good & Cormier has prepared a "Top Ten List of Suppressed Evidence" To view this list now, click here
[B][COLOR=Blue]CHRONOLOGY OF APPEALS[/COLOR][/B]
[U]1970:[/U] Article 32 Hearing Colonel Rock, presiding over the hearing, stated in his final report: First, the accusations against MacDonald "are not true" and there "is no evidence" to support any suspicions. Second, he recommended that the appropriate civil authorities investigate Helena Stoeckley and her group.
[U]1971-72:[/U] CID begins a reinvestigation of the case. This occurred after MacDonald was honorably discharged from the Army, even though the CID is legally prevented from investigating civilians.
[U]1974-75: [/U] Federal Grand Jury is convened. Victor Worheide is aided by former CID - now Department of Justice - prosecutor Brian Murtagh. The prosecution shaped the data now known to be false. Further, they met with witnesses and the discussions held with these witnesses resulted in altered testimony at the Grand Jury.
[U]1979-Trial [/U] - The judge severely restricts forensic testing by the defense. He also refused to allow the admission into the record of the Rock Report (Article 32). The jury was not allowed to hear Helena Stoeckley's admissions of guilt to seven persons, including law enforcement officers.
The most important fact of this case is the following:
The government tried the case under the theory that MacDonald could not prove the presence of outside assailants inside the home at 544 Castle Drive. They set up an elaborate, hypothetical scenario and presented a logical explanation for the hairs and fibers they claimed were found therein. All existing evidence of intruders, i.e. wig hair, black wool fibers, candle wax, bloody handprint, human blood, skin, hair, and fingerprints not matching anyone in the MacDonald family or crime scene investigators, was suppressed, altered, misrepresented, lost or destroyed. MacDonald had no evidence at the time of trial to substantiate his memory of the crime, and, therefore, was not believed.
[U]1979 (August) -1980[/U]-Jeffrey MacDonald Serves Time in Prison
[U]1981- [/U] MacDonald Wins Appeal. After being incarcerated for over one year, Dr. MacDonald was released through an appeals decision stating that he was denied a speedy trial.
[U]1982 (March 31) [/U] - The speedy trial victory was overturned, on grounds it didn't apply since MacDonald was not indicted until 1975, and he was returned to prison where he remains currently, serving a triple life sentence.
[U]1982-First Round of Appeals[/U]. Defense claims of trial error were denied. It was stated that the court's was able to disallow Helena Stoeckley's confessions because no forensic corroboration was found linking her to the crimes.
[U]1983-85 [/U] - First Round Habeas Corpus Appeal. Judge Dupree's former son-in-law, James Proctor, was the first prosecutor appointed to the case, following MacDonald's discharge from the Army. Despite this fact, the judge did not recuse himself, claiming he and his son-in-law never discussed the case. In his rejection of the appeal, the judge declared that there was no evidence tying an outside group to the scene inside the house. The new defense scenario, based on new evidence acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was unilaterally rejected.
[U]1985-1990 [/U] - Total Reinvestigation of the Case. New FOIA requests filed.
[U]1990-[/U]Harvey Silverglate, Esq. files the second Habeas Corpus Appeal, alleging suppression of evidence proving the presence of Helena Stoeckley and co-assailants inside 544 Castle Drive (the main evidence being 22" and 24" long saran fibers from Stoeckley's wig, black wool found on the murder weapon (the club) and the mouth and shoulder of Colette.
[COLOR=DarkGreen][I]NOTE: The saran was found, cataloged and analyzed in 1970, but left off the formal reports. The black wool was carefully expunged from all typed lab reports to the defense. Both items were the topic of frantic and secretive FBI forensic investigations in the winter/spring of 1979. This fact was only discovered by the defense via FOIA releases in the late 1980's. Even worse, the jury heard that blue cotton threads from the pajama top were found on the murder weapon, when these "threads" were actually black wool.
The judge denied this appeal based on the following:
That saran was not used in wigs for humans and could not be produced as a "tow" fiber, which would be essential to wig making. This was the false testimony of FBI hair/fibers expert Michael Malone, later reported by Laurie Cohen in the Wall Street Journal (Click here to go to this article.)
That the black wool information seemed to be cumulative to the 1979 and 1983-85 appeals of exculpatory evidence, and therefore was not valid. It is important to note that Judge Dupree found that, based on restrictions that can be enforced under "due diligence", the defense could not call the presented proof "new". Thus, he saddled the defense with the onus of not having discovered this evidence, which was hidden in the files. Essentially, the court told Dr. MacDonald that his proof and evidence were "too late". In 1992, the appeals court upheld Dupree's ruling.[/I][/COLOR]
[U]1997-98 [/U] - Motions to re-open the case were filed based on evidence that Michael Malone perjured himself with his saran testimony in 1990. Evidence was presented that proved, among other things, that saran was used in human wigs made at the time of the murders. The defense also requested the use of new advances in DNA testing to help prove the existence of outside intruders. Though Judge James Fox (who replaced the late Judge Dupree) denied all defense motions, the right to DNA test the evidence was eventually granted by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in October, 1997.
[U]1998-Fall 2003 [/U] - Awaiting DNA Testing- [B]Despite being granted the right to DNA biologic material, six years of delays have been caused by government objections, lab personnel changes, and issues regarding how to achieve accurate results from degraded and limited exhibits. At present, no date has been set for the conclusion of testing.[/B]
PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT
"At what point in time must exculpatory materials be disclosed to the defense in a criminal proceeding?" -Brian Murtagh, MacDonald Prosecutor
In 1975, immediately following the indictment, defense attorney Bernard Segal retained forensic expert Dr. John R. Thornton of the University of California, Berkeley. "I pressed the government for four long years before the trial to let Thornton analyze the crime scene evidence they claimed they had against MacDonald," Segal said, "but the government's case was being run by a former Army lawyer, Brian Murtagh, and this guy insisted we couldn't test the evidence."
After many requests to lab-test the evidence, followed by many refusals, Segal received a letter from Dr. Thornton warning him that the prosecution's stalling tactics suggested that the government was hiding something.
Segal sent Thornton's letter to Judge Dupree in his next request. "Then, at the last minute," Segal said, "Murtagh finally agreed to allow lab testing, but then Dupree immediately proceeded to hamstring us with prohibitions which in the end, made it impossible, only days before the trial, to lab-test anything except a few swatches of material which were too old to test successfully for blood type anyway. And they knew it. They still weren't giving us the hand-written lab notes."
Segal continued, "Then, only a few days before the trial, Murtagh finally let us eyeball the evidence. They stacked it up in a holding cell, not a laboratory, and said 'Okay, now come see the evidence, but, hey, remember guys, you can look at it, but you can't test anything.' After fighting for four years, Dr. Thornton actually was only allowed a tour through the cell to look at stuff in stacks upon stacks of boxes. There wasn't even any way to catalog it."
FOIA records reveal that sometime during the period before trial, Murtagh had one of his law clerks, Jeffrey S. Puretz, research certain questions concerning a prosecutor's "discovery" obligations. One question Murtagh posed read this way: "At what point in time must exculpatory materials be disclosed to the defense in a criminal proceeding?" Puretz indicated that the prosecution could avoid penalty in cases where evidence is expected to be challenged as exculpatory, and as having been withheld, if the prosecution proves the defense had "opportunity" to examine the evidence. The defense then loses its right to charge the prosecution with suppressing evidence. The course of later events indicates that Murtagh "successfully" hid exculpatory evidence, proving Dr. MacDonald's actual innocence, by following the suggestions of his law clerk.
Murtagh's continual attempts to hide or manipulate the truth are well documented:
Murtagh failed to report or turn over to the defense any record of Helena Stoeckley confessing to him in a secret pre-trial meeting. In a bench conference during the ninth day of trial, Murtagh told Judge Dupree that he himself had once interviewed Stoeckley and that she had tried to confess to him.
Grand Jury witnesses changed their testimony after meeting with Murtagh. 1974 Grand Jury hearing witness Pamela Kalin, MacDonald neighbor and sometime baby-sitter, denied any positive recognition of the ice pick or knives used in the murders as belonging to the MacDonalds, and was excused. Brian Murtagh met with her, and when the Grand Jury reconvened, she was recalled and suddenly remembered the ice pick.
Murtagh limited the scope of expert witnesses' testimony to suppress exculpatory lab findings. Janice Glisson, the CID lab technician who examined both the blonde synthetic hair found in a hair brush (noting it was wig hair), as well as a brown human hair found in Colette's hand (which she compared to hair taken from Dr. MacDonald and noted that it did not match) was brought to the stand, qualified by Murtagh as an expert in blood analysis, and questioned only about blood. By limiting her testimony to blood analysis, Murtagh prevented cross examination by Segal that might have exposed her work with the hair and fiber evidence.
Murtagh overstated expert witness Paul Stombaugh's credentials. "I know he has a Bachelor's Degree in Chemistry, I believe from the University of North Carolina," Murtagh stated at a bench conference. Stombaugh actually had one year of Chemistry at Furman University, and received a minimal grade. This was only one of several lies told by Murtagh about witnesses and their expertise.
Murtagh failed to share requested copies of lab notes. He requested two copies of each lab note in the CID's files, stating "One copy will be for eventual release to defense counsel." Despite this written promise, at no time did he give any of these notes to the defense either before, during, or after trial. In fact, when asked for them repeatedly and officially, he refused to turn them over, and was protected by Dupree's failure to rule that he share them with the defense. (Dupree took Murtagh's word that none of the notes requested contained Brady material, or in any way were misrepresented by the typed summaries given to the defense. Of course, the defense now knows that the official typed laboratory reports omitted all but a few key items of evidence supporting MacDonald's claims.)
Other Examples of Misconduct
Perjury by FBI Agent James M. Reed
In early 1984, lead defense counsel Brian O'Neill asked Dr. Ronald Wright, Broward County, Florida, Medical Examiner, to study the government investigators' recently released crime scene reports and autopsy photos. Dr. Wright reported in an affidavit that "...the blow which fractured Colette MacDonald's skull was struck with a club that was swung in a left-handed swing by a person facing Mrs. MacDonald at the time she was standing. As the blow was very forceful, I have concluded that it is consistent with someone who was left-handed." O'Neill included Dr. Wright's affidavit in his 1984 appeal papers.
During oral arguments, O'Neill learned that FBI agent James M. Reed had visited Dr. Wright, and that agent Reed had written an affidavit saying that Dr. Wright had "retracted" his statement. This dealt a devastating blow to O'Neill's efforts.
Five years later, O'Neill learned that Dr.Wright had never retracted his findings as the government claimed. In a declaration signed 10/24/89, Wright emphatically stated, "At no time, and to no one, including Special Agent of the FBI, James M. Reed, have I ever recanted my declaration of February 15, 1984."
Federal Posse Comitatus Act
In the fall of 1970, the CID began to pursue MacDonald after his discharge from the Army, despite the statutes of the Posse Comitatus Act, which makes it illegal for military authorities to investigate a civilian.
In December, 1973, the Assistant Attorney General, Henry Peterson, wrote to the CID stating that his office would not prosecute MacDonald due to the exculpatory nature of some of the evidence, but invited the CID to continue its (illegal) investigations, and to feel free to inform him of any relevant information.
Pre-trial, Dupree wrote to the prosecution: "Let me know immediately when Segal responds to your letter of May 11, and I will be prepared to rule on his motion."
Earlier, Dupree advised Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Stroud about what he "should do" to proceed towards the MacDonald trial.
The defense was not notified of these communications between the judge and prosecution during trial. They were discovered post-trial through FOIA releases.[/QUOTE]
For the full story of the MacDonald railroading - and/or to contribute to his defense fund - you can visit
[url]http://www.themacdonaldcase.org[/url]
2003-11-12 16:27 | User Profile
IR, are you sure Shalit didn't collaborate with Glass on this one? I was told recently that Shalit and Glass, the two "white" counterexamples to Blair and his progeny, are in fact Jewish. Shalit was easy enough, wasn't sure about Glass.
2003-11-12 17:42 | User Profile
Glass is a common enough Jewish name, IE: the character Seymour Glass in J. D. (jewish dirtball) Salinger's writings.
The question is: Who benefits? Was McDonald doing some research, writing, or some activity that harmed a Jew's, or the Jews', interest? That would warrent a Mossad or Mossad type hit. Or, was he just a White guy with a happy and growing family, which is enough in the Jews' minds to warrent extinction by violent means right there? It might be possible to solve this case if the info is dug up, and if McDonald is re-tried in a court of his peers (humans).
2003-11-12 19:57 | User Profile
I've been aware of this case for many years. I always thought his story of drugged-out hippies marching through his house carrying candles and chanting "acid is groovy!" while killing his family was pretty far-fetched - but this mountain of suppressed exculpatory evidence should be enough to prove his innocence to any reasonably intelligent person. Murtagh, Malone, Dupree and all the rest are/were scum. They should be thrown in the nigspic sh-tholes that are AmeriJOG's prisons for life themselves. Let them know the feeling of being entombed alive.
And of course this isn't the first time such vermin have deliberately destroyed the lives of innocent men. Plenty of prosecutors just want to convict somebody - anybody - when the heat is on during a particularly sensational case. And all the weasels scream bloody murder whenever a defense team questions their evidence, their forthrightness, or want a new trial.
It's important for us to take a sympathetic interest in cases like this - especially now that jews like the loathsome Chertoff are rounding up Whites on spurious "terrorism" charges.
2003-11-12 21:53 | User Profile
Yeah, there's no getting around the fact that MacDonald's defense team is pretty much 100% Tribe - but in this case, the miscarriage of justice supercedes even the motives of his lawyers.
NB, I agree - that "acid is groovy" bit tended to convict him in my mind the first time I heard it, too. But the prosecution tended to lean on the explanation that people on acid are usually incapable of tying their shoes correctly, let alone staging a murderous home invasion. On the other hand, 90% of people who [I]think [/I] they're doing LSD are actually doing PCP, which is practically a chemical precursor for violent psychosis.
And there's one other thing. If MacDonald were black, with a case this full of holes, he'd've been a free man years ago. The Mumia case isn't even [I]comparable [/I] in terms of suppresssed exculpatory evidence, doctored crime scenes, prosecutorial stonewalling and lack of physical evidence.
It pisses me off that Pollard will likely be free before this guy will - and it pisses me off that there was no tv-movie featuring Karl Malden as Mumia's victim's father, weeping in rage before the Arriflex cameras. There is no way on God's earth a DNA test should take six-plus years to conduct, unless the powers that be know that the result is going to put their heads on the chopping block.
2003-11-13 01:08 | User Profile
IR, the last time I read anything about this case was almost 20 years ago. I remember MacDonald's in laws, the Kassabs, struck me as being absorbed in finding someone, anyone, to take the punishment for the crime. Are the Kassab's themselves jews, or not? I ask because the only person I've ever met with that name was jewish. But in this case, maybe they aren't. I also remember that the doctors on the base(s) at the time were considered 'snitches' by other staff and officers.
The "... acid is groovy," stuff struck me as strange, or an example of "amateurish" dialogue on the part of a 'storyteller', but you never know. Look at the science fiction story that Mumia (and crew) cooked up that the mouthbreathers take as the gospel. The zhidsters in the media enjoy the spectacle through the sheer fun of stirring the pot.