Behind the closed doors, Bernie Segal was discovering— to his amazement and to his client’s delight— just how confused, disorganized, and riddled with procedural error the Army’s case against MacDonald really was. Segal’s vigorous and exhaustive cross-examination of prosecution witnesses unearthed a series of investigative blunders far more extensive and significant than he would have ever dared hope.
From the earliest moments at the crime scene, when the military police sergeant had picked up the dangling telephone, to the later laboratory ineptitude which had resulted in the loss of the blue fiber from beneath Kristen’s fingernail and the piece of skin from beneath the fingernail of Colette, the Army had been, as Franz Joseph Grebner had known since February, grossly incompetent.
It turned out, for example, that the flowerpot whose upright position had so aroused Grebner’s suspicions had actually been set aright by an ambulance driver who had ignored all instructions to leave the crime scene untouched. The same driver, according to the testimony of a military policeman who had observed him, had managed to steal Jeffrey MacDonald’s wallet from a desk— all while the crime scene supposedly was being preserved.
The doctor who had been called to 544 Castle Drive to pronounce death testified that he had rolled Colette MacDonald onto her side in order to check for wounds in her back, and that in so doing he had removed the blue pajama top from her chest. He said he did not remember where he had placed it, but would not rule out the possibility that fibers from it might have fallen within the body outline on the floor.
The pathologists who had performed the autopsies had neglected to take either fingerprints or hair samples from the bodies, and, when a laboratory technician was later dispatched to the funeral home for the purpose of obtaining fingerprints, he found Kimberly and Kristen, already embalmed, “looking like two little angels lying there,” and he could not bring himself to disturb them further. Thus, the children’s fingerprints were never obtained, leaving many more “unidentified” fingerprints on the premises than might otherwise have been the case.
The CID had not realized that hair samples were lacking until after the bodies were buried. For “known hair samples” to match against the blond hair found in the palm of Colette’s hand, the CID chemist was forced to rely upon hairs taken from her coat collar, not from her head. The efficacy of this procedure was severely undermined when it was determined— much to the prosecution’s chagrin— that a “known hair sample” obtained from a sweatshirt of Jeffrey MacDonald turned out to be not his hair at all, but a strand of hair from his pony.
Each day’s testimony— even during the prosecution’s portion of the case— seemed to produce less evidence linking MacDonald to the crimes than it did new examples of CID bungling. The discarded pajama bottoms, the emptied garbage, the flushed toilets, the destroyed footprint which, superficially at least, had appeared to match a test print taken of the left foot of Jeffrey MacDonald— the string of errors would have been highly comical had their consequences not been so serious.
Segal learned, for example, that following Ron Harrison’s February 19 press conference, investigators and technicians alike had rushed to read the Esquire magazine found in the MacDonald living room. By the time the blood smear across the top of the pages was finally noticed and the magazine dusted for fingerprints, the only ones found were those of CID personnel and military policemen.
Back at Fort Gordon, when the fingerprint technician developed the film on which he had photographed prints found inside the apartment, he discovered that more than fifty of the pictures were so blurred as to be useless. Perhaps, he theorized, trucks passing by or firing from a nearby artillery range had caused his camera to vibrate. Whatever the cause, when he returned to 544 Castle Drive to rephotograph the prints in question, he found that moisture had penetrated the protective tape he had placed over them and that more than forty had been obliterated and would thus remain forever unidentified— markedly decreasing the certainty with which the prosecution could claim that there was no evidence of intruders inside 544 Castle Drive.
As the toll of blunders mounted, Bernie Segal suggested ever more pointedly to the hearing officer, Colonel Rock, that irreparable damage had obviously been done to the crime scene and that this damage had rendered useless— indeed, had thrust into the realm of wild conjecture— any inferences which might otherwise have been drawn from the so-called physical evidence.
