Civil Trial Brings ‘Fatal Vision’ Case Back to the Courts

Jeffrey MacDonald had all the makings of an American hero: a Princeton man, a former Green Beret, a captain in the Army, a physician.

But he was convicted for the savage murders of his pregnant wife and two young daughters in the middle of the night.

MacDonald, who has steadfastly claimed that the 1970 murders were committed by a group of drug-crazed hippies, lost his well-publicized bid for exoneration when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to overturn his sentence of three consecutive life terms.

Now, in Los Angeles, the 17-year-old murder case is back in a courtroom again as MacDonald, 43, presses his civil suit against an author he says spent four years as a close friend, confidant and member of his defense team, then portrayed him as a killer in the book and NBC miniseries, “Fatal Vision.”

In the trial that opened Tuesday before U.S. District Judge William J. Rea, MacDonald, in seeking $15 million in damages, is claiming that writer Joe McGinniss breached an agreement he signed to write a book that would preserve the “essential integrity” of the physician’s life story in exchange for confidences and personal memorabilia MacDonald had barely shared with his own defense lawyers.

While MacDonald claims there are inaccuracies in McGinniss’ wide-selling book, the case is not so much a libel case as it is an attempt to show that McGinniss led MacDonald to believe he would write, in MacDonald’s lawyer’s words, “a fair and open-minded book.”

McGinniss, a widely published writer and former reporter, has filed a countersuit against MacDonald, claiming the physician breached their contract by ignoring his promise not to sue and by signing a contract for the recently published book, “I Accuse: the Torturing of an American Hero,” which portrays MacDonald as the victim of prosecutorial abuse.

“This is a case about a murderer who did not like the book written about him. Rest assured that if the book proclaimed that MacDonald was innocent, we would not be here today,” McGinniss’ lawyer, Daniel Kornstein, told the jury.

MacDonald, he said, “wants two more victims. The victims now are Joe McGinniss and the truth.”

From the beginning, MacDonald, former emergency room director at St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, has been a media celebrity. Donations from fellow physicians, neighbors and well-wishers helped pay costs for his defense.

MacDonald, who is serving his sentence in a federal prison in Arizona, is in Los Angeles for the trial and is being housed, at his own expense, at Terminal Island Federal Prison.

Intriguing about the case were not only MacDonald’s impeccable credentials as an all-American husband and soldier, but reports and testimony that surfaced in apparent support of his claims that a group of hippies had broken into his Ft. Bragg, N.C., home, chanting “acid is groovy” before they killed his family and attacked him.

McGinniss lived with MacDonald and his lawyers throughout the lengthy murder trial in the summer of 1979, and it was as a result of testimony and evidence presented there, he says, that he finally concluded that MacDonald had committed the murders.

MacDonald claims he signed a book contract to help pay his legal bills and because he hoped to tell his story to the public.

“If you see any evidence that anyone demanded that the book find Dr. MacDonald innocent, I’ll be shocked,” his attorney, Gary Bostwick, told the jury. “What he did demand was that it be a fair book, and an open-minded book.”

MacDonald said he gave McGinniss hours of tapes recording his own musings on the case and his family, allowed him to sit in on defense strategy sessions and granted him access to intimate memorabilia from his past. Moreover, he said, he turned away other potential writers at McGinniss’ request--all in the belief that the author was his friend.

In his suit, he claims that McGinniss deliberately concealed the fact that he had become convinced of MacDonald’s guilt, continuing to gain access to MacDonald and his records long after he had decided to write a book depicting him as a narcissist, driven by amphetamines, to murder his family.

Bostwick claims he has evidence that McGinniss has made several public statements that he made up his mind about the case at about the same time the jury reached its verdict.

Yet letters the author wrote to MacDonald in prison after the conviction, filed in court, leave a strikingly different impression.

“How could 12 people not only agree to believe such a horrendous proposition,” McGinniss writes of the jury’s guilty verdict, “but agree, with a man’s life at stake, that they believed it beyond a reasonable doubt?”

Bostwick says McGinniss deliberately hid his conviction about MacDonald’s guilt, because he so desperately needed the physician’s help to finish it.

”. . . It had been a long, dry spell, and he needed the money,” Bostwick said. “He needed this book.”

Pointing to a California law which prohibits felons from profiting from their crimes--a law which didn’t apply to MacDonald’s North Carolina conviction--Kornstein argued in his trial brief against awarding any more proceeds to MacDonald.

“MacDonald would have the court reverse the old teaching that crime does not pay,” he argued. “For him, the wages of his sin has been a tidy profit and in this action he seeks still more. This court should not allow itself to be misused as a tool to further MacDonald’s moral outrage.”