Merged Jeffrey MacDonald did it. He really did.

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The FBI or Army CID never did a thorough or detailed investigation into Greg Mitchell, or Mazerolle, or any kind of extensive background check on them. It's true that some kind of female FBI agent interviewed Mazerolle after Dr. MacDonald had been put in prison. Mazerolle just replied what an awful person Helena Stoeckley was after giving his name and address.

At about that time Greg Mitchell had been telling witnesses about something that had happened at North Carolina and that he was badly scared and he was trying to get out of the country and that he had been interviewed by the SBI, which I think is the State Bureau of Investigation, without publicly giving details. Greg Mitchell died soon after, round about the same time as Helena Stoeckley.

Detective Beasley, who was a front-line detective, unlike the FBI or Army CID, always thought that Greg Mitchell and Mazerolle were involved. Unfortunately Dr. MacDonald ran out of money after being put into prison and his private detectives were then never able to take the next logical steps to interview people who know exactly what had happened and who are keeping a zippy on their lippies.

As JTF says that there don't seem to be forensics linking the suspects to the MacDonald murders. It's possible to get away with murder and bank fraud if you don't get caught. The investigation was bungled from the start. The police are apt to jump to conclusions.

There is a similar sort of miscarriage of justice in my own area at the moment. A female drama teacher was arrested for having consensual sex with a sixteen year old pupil, which she quite reasonably thought was within the law. Sex isn't illegal. The violently prejudiced magistrate then placed the case with the Crown Court because as she says she was unable to give sufficient punishment. Then because of the cuts and closures to legal aid that drama teacher is unrepresented in court. It's not fair and just.
 
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The point is that Murtagh never proved beyond reasonable doubt with credible evidence that Dr. MacDonald did it with all that nonsensical rubbish about bodies being carried in a sheet, and Colette hitting Dr. MacDonald with a hairbrush, and then Colette supposedly murdering the two little girls, and Kim supposedly having wet the bed instead of Kristen, as Dr. MacDonald said, and black wool fibers on the murder weapon supposedly being pajama fibers. It was just the same with Murtagh and the Lockerbie case.

The matter of Mazerolle and Greg Mitchell, who were known to the local police, was discussed at the 1979 MacDonald trial. This is part of it:

E X A M I N A T I O N 11:13 a.m.

BY THE COURT:
Q Let me ask you, Mr. Beasley, about several matters that either I didn't hear your answers, or you were not asked. You say you didn't arrest these people? Where did you detain them?
A At Helena's house.
Q Just out there in the driveway?
A Yes, sir; I stayed right out there. We was right out there in the street.
Q You kept them there for about an hour?
A Yes, sir.
Q You called in to the police department and asked them to get somebody on the radio, to get these people to come out there?
A That is correct.
Q After an hour, nobody showed up?
A Nobody showed up.
Q So you let them go?
A That is correct.
Q I assume you did get their names, didn't you?
A Yes, sir; I've got their names in the folder that is missing, Your Honor. We can't locate it anyplace. We have located these records, but that folder is missing.
Q Did you ever turn that folder over to the investigators?
A Yes, sir; it was turned over -- well, turned over to our office. Now, it was 1971 before I got any further contact with the CID and this folder was never requested. Had it been, they could have had it easily.
Q You never volunteered to let them have it?
A No, sir.
Q I see. And do you know whether or not any of these people were ever interviewed by the CID?
A To my knowledge, not one of them. The only one was Helena.
Q I say, do you know whether or not?
A To my knowledge; no, sir, except Helena Stoeckley.
Q Can you recall the names of any of the people that were with her that night?
A There was one name that I can remember -- his name was Greg Mitchell. And the other two I cannot. That name sounds familiar because he was one of the boys that was sort of in charge of a group of the hippie-type people there, and we had a special lookout on him. He lived somewhere here in North Carolina, but we can't find any records on him anywhere in our office.
Q As a result of any investigation that you ever made, do you know whether or not anyone was ever arrested or charged with anything in connection with these crimes?
A Not with the crimes, Your Honor, but the black man -- I signed a warrant for him and he was arrested and released on a $2,000 bond, and we have not seen him since. He never showed up and the case was nol pros'd in Superior Court.
Q What was he charged with?
A Possession of drugs. He was one of the men that I was looking for the day we hit the trailer with the other people that were supposed to have been there. The other three was not there -- or he wasn't there when we raided the trailer.
 
I can't quite see why Gene Weingarten thinks Murtagh has an abstract sense of justice, except for the fact that the Washington Post now has close connections to the CIA. Aljazeera TV thinks Murtagh's prosecution in the Lockerbie case was plain wrong. Prosecutors must be whiter than white.

Dr. MacDonald was cleared at the 1970 Article 32 proceeding, and so to get revenge the Army CID did an 'extensive reinvestigation' as JTF puts it, which just involved manufactured evidence which would sway a gullible North Carolina jury, supported by the unqualified FBI con artist, Stombaugh.

Greg Mitchell was interviewed by Bill Ivory after the Article 32. Greg Mitchell just categorically denied everything and said that if he was with Helena Stoeckley that night he would have been at the Dunkin Donuts in Fayetteville, or the Village Shop. He said he was probably staying with his parents that night, which doesn't sound convincing to me. It should have been checked out.

Judge Dupree later said publicly that Greg Mitchell and Helena Stoeckley were probably courting on a bridge somewhere! Mazerolle has never really been investigated, even though he went on the run after the MacDonald murders.
 
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There is some background to this from a 2003 Larry King show:

KING: You were convicted, a seven-week trial in 1979, but the U.S. Court Of appeals a year later reverses and frees you.

MACDONALD: Yes.

KING: Reversed on what count?

MACDONALD: Speedy trial. I won two different speedy trial appeals. Both were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Until my case came up, the U.S. Supreme Court had...

KING: The prosecution appealed the court of appeals ruling in your favor...

MACDONALD: Correct.

KING: ... to the Supreme Court.

MACDONALD: Yes. And the Supreme Court reinstated the conviction. They said that the years 1970 to 1975 didn't count towards speedy trial because I wasn't indictment from a federal grand jury.

KING: What did you do that year you were out?

MACDONALD: I practiced medicine in Long Beach. I was -- I'm an emergency physician. I had a circle of friends and my family and I practiced medicine at St. Mary Medical Center.

KING: They just came and rearrested you and brought you back to prison.

MACDONALD: March 31, 1982.

KING: Were you shocked at the Supreme Court?

MACDONALD: Shocked is beyond words. I had been out for about 18 months. I was back in practice. Again, I had a circle of friends. I was planning a life. I had moved my mother to the Long Beach area. She was very ill. And I was awakened at 7:00 AM in the morning with a call from the hospital, saying the FBI is here.

KING: The prosecution's contention, then, is that you harmed yourself in order to pull this crime off. As a surgeon, you would know where to inflict yourself...

MACDONALD: Well, they changed their story. Sometimes they say Colette must have injured me. Colette never injured me. We never had a fight. We never had a struggle.

KING: What was the motive?

MACDONALD: There is no motive, Larry.

KING: They never showed a motive?

MACDONALD: There never has been a motive.

KING: Did they not introduce testimony from people that you tended to be raged, that you could quickly react with a bad temper? Was that introduced?

MACDONALD: It's an excellent...

KING: I'm working from memory here.

MACDONALD: It's an excellent question. It was not introduced. It never happened. What you're referring to is what I've been facing for 33 years, and that's the legends of the case. What you're referring to is what Joe McGinniss said. Joe McGinniss made up some hypotheticals involving rage, put them in a book, and I've been paying for it ever since.

KING: He made it as hypothetical...

MACDONALD: Hypothetical.

KING: You mean to find a reason, then, for why you killed them.

MACDONALD: What if? What if?

KING: I see.

MACDONALD: OK? Everyone who's ever been to our house at Fort Bragg, every person who's ever known us has testified. I have seen every statement. There are no people who say that Jeffrey MacDonald has rages. I was practicing emergency medicine in a traumatic environment for 12 years. I've been in prison for 23.
 
Child Killer

Getting back to reality, the CID's original investigation lasted over 6 weeks, the CID's reinvestigation lasted almost 3 years, and the FBI has done several investigations with the most recent being in 2009. The conclusions drawn from these investigations were uniform and pointed to Jeffrey MacDonald as the lone perp.

http://www.macdonaldcasefacts.com
 
Next Several Months

The government filed the last post-evidentiary hearing reply/memo on 9/23/13. In the past, Judge Fox took about 18 months to respond to significant issues in this case. Considering that this is the last major decision he makes in this case, I believe he will proceed with caution and care. IMO, his decision will be rendered sometime between April and September of this year.

http://www.macdonaldcasefacts.com
 
trialwatcher said:
When is Judge Fox's decision likely to be?
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Welcome to the forum, Trialwatcher. I, too, love watching trials. You can find a few interesting trial related discussions here, such as Pistorius' trial, Shiren Dewani's case and Nyki Kish's case. If you feel really brave, wander into the Knox thread :jaw-dropp

This MacDonald case is a much easier one about which to form an opinion of guilt (or not), at least IMHO.
 
JTF - interesting, thanks. I wonder how JM has the mental energy to continue this for so long! You'd think he'd eventually lose all energy and just want to hide away in his prison cell...evidently not!

Thanks for the welcome Ampulla! The Shrien Dewani case is certainly going to be interesting...if there is indeed a trial!
 
trialwatcher said:
JTF - interesting, thanks. I wonder how JM has the mental energy to continue this for so long! You'd think he'd eventually lose all energy and just want to hide away in his prison cell...evidently not!
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That's easy to answer. Somebody sitting in a prison cell doesn't have anything to do but plot a way out one way or another. All he needs is to have one idiot judge swallow one lame argument, and he might get a new trial. Then it would be anybody's guess whether enough of the original evidence, witnesses etc. would still be around to guarantee a conviction.

It also wouldn't surprise me if after 40 years MacDonald has convinced himself that he really didn't do it. The mind is funny like that.
 
Burden Is On Inmate

After 18 months of freedom, MacDonald returned to prison in 1982, and his rotating band of lawyers have had their collective asses kicked in the appellate system. In terms of how Judge Fox has factored into this ass kicking, he denied MacDonald a new trial in 1995 and 2006.

There is little chance that he will do a 180 in 2014, especially when you consider how the government took apart the defense at the 2012 evidentiary hearing. The government proved that Jimmy Britt was a serial fabricator and that the DNA test results were more indicative of guilt than innocence.

At this point in the case, the burden of proof is on MacDonald, and that burden is "extraordinarily high." The defense has to prove actual innocence which equates to no reasonable juror voting to convict MacDonald of murder. The defense has not come close to meeting that burden.

http://www.macdonaldcasefacts.com
 
Bob001 said:
It also wouldn't surprise me if after 40 years MacDonald has convinced himself that he really didn't do it. The mind is funny like that.
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I think MacDonald has rationalized what he did - - i.e., it was Colette's fault because she started an argument or Kimmy's fault because she wet the bed and caused him to explode - - but I think he knows and remembers full well what went down that night.

I do think MacDonald has convinced himself he's the victim in all of this.
 
JTF said:
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At this point in the case, the burden of proof is on MacDonald, and that burden is "extraordinarily high." The defense has to prove actual innocence which equates to no reasonable juror voting to convict MacDonald of murder. The defense has not come close to meeting that burden.

http://www.macdonaldcasefacts.com
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Just a question here. I note from your website that MacDonald applied for parole in 2005. Accepting responsibility is usually a key condition for parole consideration. Did MacDonald admit to anything during the parole proceedings? If not, was that a basis for denying parole?
 
2020 Or Bust

BOB: The 2005 parole hearing was a disaster for MacDonald. His deceased wife's brother, Robert Stevenson, was able to look MacDonald in the eye and tell him that his "sociopathic tendencies" will keep him in prison for the rest of his life. Brian Murtagh provided a verbal presentation to the parole board and argued that since MacDonald showed no remorse (e.g., MacDonald argued that he was a model prisoner and factually innocent) for his crimes, he was seeking a pardon, not parole.

Murtagh responded to a list of evidentiary arguments put forth by an unnamed party and basically asked the parole board to demand that the author show him or herself. That didn't happen. Murtagh responded in writing to each evidentiary claim, and as usual, his responses were extremely thorough. Murtagh also refuted the claim that MacDonald had been a model prisoner and produced records of MacDonald's multiple visits to the hole to prove it.

Murtagh also produced a videotape of the late Freddy Kassab asking a perspective parole board to deny his incarcerated son in-law parole. The
parole board denied MacDonald parole and ruled that he would not be eligible again for parole until the year 2020.
 
Bob001 said:
That's easy to answer. Somebody sitting in a prison cell doesn't have anything to do but plot a way out one way or another. All he needs is to have one idiot judge swallow one lame argument, and he might get a new trial. Then it would be anybody's guess whether enough of the original evidence, witnesses etc. would still be around to guarantee a conviction.

It also wouldn't surprise me if after 40 years MacDonald has convinced himself that he really didn't do it. The mind is funny like that.
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I do agree that in his mind he feels like a victim. He is after all a sociopath, and it often is, in their minds, everyone elses fault. As to his believing he is innocent of the crimes is more difficult to understand. I don't know that much about how minds work, but for him to have completely blocked out that night and really feels he is innocent, is a hard stretch for me to believe.
 
The parole hearing in 2005 was a farce. It was about that time that Colette's brother, Bob Stevenson, appeared on American radio to say that Kassab had always thought there had been child molestation, without presenting any supporting evidence, or medical evidence. Murtagh presented his usual legal waffle that Colette had murdered the two little girls and Kim had wet the bed and the pajama cuff impressions nonsense and pajama -like hairs on the murder weapon, and other splitting hairs waffle.

I think Dr. MacDonald was in between lawyers at the time and the whole thing was biased as usual. Dr. MacDonald was fearfully aggrieved and he perhaps unfairly blamed his lawyers for what had happened. He parted company with many of his lawyers rather like tennis players part with their coaches. He was pinning his hopes in the 1985 appeal on the Californian lawyer O'Neill, but Murtagh and Judge Dupree soon put a stop to all that.

Dr. MacDonald was accused of illegally providing medical assistance to an injured fellow prisoner and having an argument with a prison guard who had destroyed his personal documentation about the MacDonald case. It's like Egyptian or Saudi Arabian justice. Judge Dupree and Judge Fox had never liked MacDonald's lawyer Segal because he was a member of the Jewish race and Blackburn has made the remark in the past that Segal considered the prosecutors to be country bumpkins, which they are. Perhaps Dr. MacDonald needed some London experts?

When Dr. MacDonald was first imprisoned he seems to have had a row with Segal for allowing Judge Dupree to call for a couple of CIA psychiatrists, I think called Silverman and Brussell in order to declare Dr. MacDonald psychotic at the 1979 trial. That seems to be a common legal trick around the world. Murdoch once paid for some psychiatrists to declare the left-wing politician Tony Benn to be declared semi-lunatic in his newspapers. Soviet Russia used the Serbsky psychiatric institute in order to to lock up dissidents. German doctors murdered people in concentration camps. Nearly all of those doctors went unpunished, as far as I can judge.

Judge Dupree never allowed Dr. Sadoff to testify that he was fairly certain Dr. MacDonald didn't do it. That's corrupt bias. The judges are tools of Wall Street.

Judges need to learn how to be fair and just and the police need to learn how to deal with difficult murders, and journalists need to stop concentrating on celebrity gossip and the Super Bowl and to try to understand miscarriages of justice, and to study the history of far away countries like Iraq and Ukraine.

Bill Ivory disregarded suspects in the MacDonald case. Greg Mitchell and Helena Stoeckley, and others, were never properly investigated. It was a rush to judgement. The Department of Justice wrote to MacDonald lawyer Silverglate in 1992 that they were still clinging on to their belief that Mazerolle was in jail without presenting any documentation about Mazerolle's trial which never happened, or his subsequent fleeing criminal behavior.

If you are arrested and charged you later appear in court unless you are in Saudi Arabia and have your head chopped off. Murtagh has some explaining to do about Mazerolle instead of just producing a scrap of paper about supposedly being in jail and then losing all the rest of the documentation. Mazerolle is a clever criminal and a hard cookie as Detective Beasley described him. Mazerolle skipped bail and he was involved in the MacDonald murders. I think he is still alive and prospering in the north-east of America somewhere.
 
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I have just recently read Fatal Vision for the first time. I then read much of Wilderness of Error and also read Final Vision. In addition, there is a web site with most of the official documents from the case. I feel like I should respond to this.
Henri McPhee said:
[...]Murtagh presented his usual legal waffle that Colette had murdered the two little girls [...]
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This is completely false. He never even hinted that anyone other than Jeffrey MacDonald killed his family. As evidence, here is Murtagh's oral presentation from the parole hearing in 2005: http://www.thejeffreymacdonaldcase.com/html/murtagh-oral_2005-05-10.html. On the first page he notes that MacDonald was convicted of all three murders. He later mentions "conviction for these three murders are a sufficient basis to deny him parole." Nothing about Colette killing anyone.



Here is a more detailed submission from Murtagh to the parole committee, where he details his response to every point raised in MacDonald's submission to the parole committee: http://www.thejeffreymacdonaldcase.com/html/parole-murtagh_2005-05-09.html. He lays out detailed arguments about various procedural matters, legal matters, and matters of fact. Whenever the issue arises, he points to MacDonald as the murderer.



Further, there is no way a prosecutor would go to the parole committee and say, "He needs to stay in prison for killing three people because he only killed one person." There is no way that would happen, and the record shows it did not. I have no idea where this whole idea came from, but it was not from Murtagh.

Dr. MacDonald was accused of illegally providing medical assistance to an injured fellow prisoner and having an argument with a prison guard who had destroyed his personal documentation about the MacDonald case. [...]
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I don't know where this comes from either. In MacDonald's request for parole, the fact that he had provided medical assistance while in prison was listed as a reason to grant him parole. The parole committee apparently didn't think this made up for killing three people, but it was never an accusation. How could it be?

[...] I think called Silverman and Brussell in order to declare Dr. MacDonald psychotic at the 1979 trial.

[...]

Judge Dupree never allowed Dr. Sadoff to testify that he was fairly certain Dr. MacDonald didn't do it. That's corrupt bias. The judges are tools of Wall Street.
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Judge Dupree also did not allow the government's psychiatrists to testify that MacDonald was a psychopath. It was not a biased exclusion of just the defense psych evaluation, it was a ruling that competing psych evaluations would not help. Would it have helped the defense to have one guy say MacDonald was fine, and two to say he was a homicidal psychopath with no remorse?

Bill Ivory disregarded suspects in the MacDonald case. Greg Mitchell and Helena Stoeckley, and others, were never properly investigated. It was a rush to judgement.[...]
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Stoeckley was investigated to death (perhaps literally). So was Mitchell (probably not literally). They gave statement after statement to dozens of investigators and lawyers. They were given multiple polygraph tests. Their fingerprints and DNA were compared to items from the apartment. Their acquaintances were questioned. It just turns out that a drug addict who can't remember where she was on the night of the murders is not enough to overturn all the real evidence of the case.



Basically, everything in the post is wrong.
 
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