Here is how McGinniss handles the central and troubling matter of Helena Stoeckley: for one, while he does recount her known admissions at the time of writing, he makes them sound more tentative and hazier than they were. He prefers to emphasize her testimony on the stand, when she devastated the defense by denying any memory of the house and saying she could not recall her prior confessions. In that testimony, she also said, oddly, that she burned her blonde wig two to three days after the crime “because it connected me with the murder,” but you wouldn’t know that from reading Fatal Vision.
The judge then excluded any testimony implicating Stoeckley from the six people prepared to give it — a ruling that became the focus of appeals. (McGinniss could not have known that a retired Deputy U.S. Marshal named Jimmy Britt would come forward in 2005, citing a need to lift a “moral burden,” and state in a sworn affidavit that he was present when Stoeckley told a prosecutor immediately before testifying that she had been inside the MacDonald house during the crime. The prosecutor, James Blackburn, responded that if she testified to that effect, he would indict her for murder, the affidavit said. Blackburn denies it. Morris can’t resist going for the jugular and pointing out that Blackburn was later disbarred and imprisoned for forgery, fraud, and embezzlement.)
On various occasions, Stoeckley spoke about trying to quiet a German Shepherd near the MacDonald house, about lighting a candle and carrying it around inside, about an upside-down book on MacDonald’s chest while he slept with his glasses on the floor next to him, and about the rocking horse. When Stoeckley told police that “it did not begin to rain hard until after the homicide,” they asked how she knew. She replied, “I have already said too much.” Perhaps this was all a lot of nothing, scraps she had cobbled together over time, and on some occasions she added new bits that didn’t jibe, particularly under Gunderson’s questioning. But the inconsequential details like the upside-down book and the glasses — I find them eerily plausible.
