'Killer' surgeon Jeffrey MacDonald fighting to clear his name

His case has captivated America for almost 50 years. But after 37 years behind bars for killing his wife and two daughters, the man at the centre of one of America’s most notorious murders remains resolute. 

“I am innocent,” says Jeffrey MacDonald. “I did not murder my family.” 

The former Green Beret surgeon – whose family’s savage slaying shocked a nation, was immortalised in bestselling book Fatal Vision and spawned a TV miniseries and documentary – may finally win his freedom.

An appeals court last week heard MacDonald’s plea for his conviction to be overturned, after the discovery of dramatic new evidence. 

MacDonald, 73, now known as Inmate 00131-177 at Cumberland Federal Corrections Institute in Maryland, has never wavered in proclaiming his innocence. 

“I have always told the truth about what happened that night,” he says. 

He claims he fell asleep on the living room sofa at his flat in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and was woken around 2am on February 17, 1970, by the screams of his pregnant wife Colette and elder daughter Kimberley. 

In a scene redolent of a Manson Family attack he found three men standing around him, and a woman holding a candle chanting: “Acid is groovy. Kill the pigs.” MacDonald was bludgeoned with a baseball bat and stabbed, before losing consciousness. 

He awoke to find his wife dead, with more than 37 stab wounds to her face, neck and chest. Kimberley, aged five, had been clubbed on the head and stabbed in the throat up to 10 times. 

Daughter Kristen, aged two, was stabbed more than 40 times with a knife and ice pick. 

On the headboard of his bed the word “Pig” had been daubed in blood, reminiscent of a Manson killing six months earlier. 

“It was a full-on, live nightmare,” says MacDonald, who was found unconscious on the bedroom floor beside his wife’s body. 

He had been stabbed 17 times and suffered a punctured lung. He and Colette had met at the age of 12 and married in college. 

He graduated from Princeton, became a surgeon for the elite Green Berets, and after two daughters they were expecting their first son when tragedy struck. 

Though MacDonald gave detailed descriptions of his attackers, after a three-month investigation the army suspected him of the slayings. 

But a six-week hearing with 70 witnesses exonerated him, and urged police to investigate troubled drug addict Helena Stoeckley, who admitted being at the MacDonalds’ home that night with her boyfriend Greg Mitchell. 

THE US Attorney General declined to press charges against MacDonald, citing “the exculpatory character of some of the evidence, together with the total lack of evidence as to motive”.

But Colette’s family the Kassabs pressed for a fresh investigation, leading to MacDonald’s arrest in 1975. At his 1979 trial prosecutors claimed he had killed his family following an argument and inflicted his own wounds. He got triple life.

Hoping to turn public opinion in his favour, MacDonald invited author Joe McGinnis to write a book. Yet he was horrified when Fatal Vision was published in 1983, arguing that he was a cold-blooded killer and “a narcissistic sociopath”. 

MacDonald sued McGinnis for fraud, winning a settlement of £262,000, but saw Fatal Vision become a bestseller and a TV series starring Karl Malden and Eva Marie Saint as Colette’s parents. 

Throughout, MacDonald protested his innocence – and new evidence suggests that his story may have been true.

DNA beneath Kristen’s fingernails, and in three hairs found beneath Colette’s body, does not match the family’s DNA. 

Black wool fibres on the baseball bat match nothing in the home. And long blonde wig hairs, matching the description MacDonald gave of a female intruder, were also found yet never introduced in court. 

“We didn’t know there were any blonde wig hairs,” says MacDonald’s forensic expert, Dr John Thornton, who complains he wasn’t given all the evidence, or enough time to test it.”

Military police had failed to photograph MacDonald’s injuries. His pyjama bottoms, which could have yielded valuable clues, were thrown away at the hospital. 

Other evidence not presented at his trial: Candle wax at the scene didn’t match any of the candles in the house, and a bloody palm print on the bed was not MacDonald’s. 

Most shocking: Helena Stoeckley, a drug addict informant to the local narcotics squad, confessed to prosecutors and friends that she witnessed the killings. 

Deputy US Marshal Jimmy Britt claims prosecutors threatened to charge her with murder if she undermined their case by saying she had been at MacDonald’s home.

On the witness stand, she claimed she could not remember where she was. Yet MacDonald’s description of the alleged intruders offered an almost perfect match to Stoeckley and her boyfriend Mitchell. 

He said one of his attackers wore an army jacket. Fayetteville Police Detective Prince Beasley, who knew Stoeckley, had seen her that night with a man in an army jacket. 

Stoeckley even told army prosecutors she was at the murder scene, and the “hippie element” was angry at MacDonald because “he would not treat them with methadone for their drug addiction.”

But investigator Robert Brisentine concluded that “her admittedly confused state of mind and her excessive drug use” made Stoekley’s testimony unreliable.

Yet in 2007, says her brother Gene, “She told my mum: ‘Jeffrey MacDonald is not guilty of the crimes.’

Her boyfriend, Greg Mitchell, also confessed to family and friends: “Greg just started crying and said to me: ‘Jeff is not the one that killed his family. We did it,’” reveals Mitchell’s friend Donald Buffkin. 

But Mitchell died in 1982, and Stoeckley died of cirrhosis in 1983. MacDonald appeared last week before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, hoping to convince three judges with the new evidence. 

Their ruling is expected this spring. Kathryn Kurichh, aged 56, whom MacDonald married behind bars in 2002, believes he is the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice,. But many are convinced he is an unrepentant psychopath. 

“Someone in that house wearing his pyjama top, with his blood type, with his footprints, killed those people,” says his former prosecutor, Jim Blackburn. “Everything that’s come out since then hasn’t really contradicted the physical evidence of the case.” 

But MacDonald won’t give up his fight. “My goal is to walk out of prison a free and vindicated man – not just a free man,” he says. “I won’t go any other way.”