Jeffrey MacDonald had been schooled to believe that the system treats deserving individuals justly. He was an all-American achiever who had always found his merit rewarded. An honors student at Princeton, he married his high school sweetheart, went on to Northwestern University Medical School and an internship at New York's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. When MacDonald joined the Army as a doctor, he went after and earned a Green Beret.
Then one terrifying night last February, Captain MacDonald awoke to a nightmare. As he tells it, three long-haired young men and a blonde girl invaded his home at Fort Bragg, N.C., while he was sleeping. They left his pregnant wife and two daughters stabbed and beaten to death. MacDonald himself was stabbed 19 times and clubbed on the head. Horrible as that was, it was only the beginning of his ordeal. Agents of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID) soon concluded that the young doctor had made up the hippie story to cover his own guilt, and they set out to prove it. They did not do well. In fact, so clumsy and so slipshod was the CID investigation that the Army has now been forced to undertake the embarrassing task of re-examining various aspects of the entire proceeding.
Flowerpot. It was not that the investigation had been too brief. Local police rounded up scores of young people who might have been the invaders described by MacDonald. When none of them seemed to be the murderers, the CID turned back to the captain. Though the agents apparently found little that was damning in his background, they formed the theory that MacDonald and his wife Colette had had a violent argument over his younger daughter's bed wetting and that the angry words ended in the slaughter. Then MacDonald ripped up the house and, being a doctor, added a few careful stab wounds to those already inflicted by his wife as she fought back. The CID's chief reasons for accusing MacDonald seemed to be its view that 1) there was no firm physical evidence of any intruders; 2) part of MacDonald's ripped pajama top was found under his wife's body, suggesting that they had been struggling; 3) a flowerpot was found standing upright, though its contents were spilled out on the floor, indicating staged disorder.
For MacDonald, the major blow was not so much that the CID disbelieved him as that it pursued its investigation so ineptly that it gravely damaged his chances of establishing the truth of his own story. According to an official Army report obtained by TIME reporters, the investigation was all but criminally sloppy. The problem began almost as soon as MacDonald summoned the military police.
Within half an hour, the murder site was overrun with milling MPs and representatives of the CID. While one officer wandered around ordering everyone not to touch anything, another investigator calmly used the phone, leaving a smudged collage of fingerprints. In the end, a variety of fingerprints found throughout the house turned out to belong to investigating agents. Because the house remained unsealed for at least two hours, no one could be sure whether dirt stains discovered on the rug had come in with the investigators or with earlier intruders. In addition, the area around the base was supposed to have been quickly blocked off, but it later came out that no one had ever thought to give the necessary order.