About jeffrey macdonald
the fatalities
guilty..?
In one of the trials Jeffrey MacDonald had admitted to having affairs, which led investigators to believe that him and his wife could have been fighting about the affairs when the argument got really heated and MacDonald lost control. He swung the chunk of wood, busting Colette's head, and continued to attack her. Daughter Kimberley heard her parents fighting and came out of her room to see what was going on and saw her mom being attacked, so she tried to go help her mother but instead was also hit by wood, splattering her brains on the wall in the master bedroom. After realizing what MacDonald had done, he decided he had to finish what he had started and stabbed each of his daughters and wife to death. When he stabbed his wife he was so devastated with himself that he had to put his pajama top over her so that he wasn't looking right at her, leaving holes in the pajama top from the ice pick. He then went to his kitchen and took latex gloves from the cabinet so that he could imitate the writing of "PIG" of the wall, like in the Manson murders. He had supposedly gotten this idea from the Esquire magazine sitting on his coffee table in the living room. Once he finished posing the murders he went into the bathroom and proceeded to stab himself in precise spots knowing that he would only have minor injuries compared to the rest of his family so that he still lived, but enough damage so that it looked like he was also attacked.
The biggest piece of evidence against Jeffrey MacDonald was his pajama top, presented in court by the prosecutors Brian Murtagh and James Blackburn, and FBI analyst Paul Stombaugh. Strombaugh came to court and stated that MacDonald's claim to have wrapped his pajama top around his arm to fight off the intruders is false because all forty-eight holes in the pajama top made by the ice pick were completely cylindrical, meaning that the top couldn't have been moving and must have been completely stationary when the holes were made. The prosecutors, Murtagh and Blackburn, also staged a reenactment of what Jeffrey MacDonald described as the attack he faced. Murtagh wrapped a pajama top around his hand and proceeded to try to block the blows from Blackburn. From this reenactment two strong points were made. First, Murtagh had received a small wound on his arm from this small staged fight, and MacDonald did not have a single scratch on his arms. Second, all the holes made from that fight n the pajama top were jagged and not perfectly cylindrical. Strombaugh then showed the jury that if he folded to pajama top in a specific way all forty-eight of the holes matched up to be only twenty-one blows from the ice pick, exactly the number of stab wounds Colette MacDonald had. With this single piece of evidence the prosecution managed to convince the jury that Jeffrey MacDonald was in fact guilty.
..or innocent?
It is not known why the CID was so sure that MacDonald was guilty seeming that their handling of the evidence was disastrous. During the initial arrival at the crime scene a dozen MPs had walked to and from the jeep and the house in the mud from the rain, walking from room to room leaving marks. Furniture in the house had been moved, telephones replaced, surfaces wiped clean, and someone had pocketed Jeffrey MacDonald's wallet. Some of the more important pieces of evidence were destroyed or went missing, such as MacDonald's pajama bottoms being burned by the hospital, and skin from under Colette's fingernail and a blue pajama thread from under Kristen's fingernail disappearing. Over fifty of the photographs that the fingerprint expert had taken were too blurry to recognize anything and use them for evidence. So he went back to retake these photographs only to find out that the moisture in the air had made 80% of the fingerprints useless. The prosecution had tried to say that Jeffrey MacDonald was lying when he said that he layed his pajama top on top of Colette because a blue thread was found underneath her body, but it was later stated that one of the responding MPs rolled over Colette's body when he got to the crime scene, possibly transferring a blue thread under her body. So much evidence had been compromised that it was extremely hard to use anything against Jeffrey MacDonald in court.
The biggest piece of evidence that the defense had to prove MacDonald's innocence was Helena Stoeckley's confession to the murders. Helena Stoeckley was the woman in the floppy hat wearing a blonde wig at the murders. Before she died in 1983 she said that the break in had originally started as a visit to scare Jeffrey MacDonald because he was one of the officers working to put away drug users instead of helping them. Before the trials Stoeckley had admitted to the murders, but when she was on the stand in court she denied ever saying she had a part in the murders. Below is an interview with Helena Stoeckley where she continues to go back and forth on her story not keeping to one consistent confession of what she was doing that night and who could have been involved. A lot of the information she presents is contradicting and includes an accidental confession of the murders.
It is assumed that the army is trying to protect Helena Stoeckley because she is the daughter of a retired colonel, even though she was well known as a junkie, instead of trying to help their highly skilled doctor, Jeffrey MacDonald.
my opinion
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