The Journalist and the Murderer Read Online Free PDF Page A

you’re going to be asked this on talk shows, and you’re going to have thirty seconds or ten seconds to think about it. How would you describe it?”
    “Right now, I have a strange absence of feeling toward him. He has occupied so much of my consciousness and subconscious for so long that, with the book finally done, I find myself kind of numb in regard to him. I don’t have a feeling except the feeling that has been with me, which isn’t focussed so specifically on him but on the whole thing—a sadness that just doesn’t go away. It’s just sadness, sadness, sadness. Such a tragic, terrible waste, and such a dark and internally persecuted human being he is. He is so different from what he appears to be. I feel very sad that he didn’t turn out to be who he wanted me to think he was. Because that would have been a lot easier to handle.”
    •   •   •
    M AC D ONALD was transferred from the Butner prison to the Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution, near Long Beach, California—after a bus trip that spread over several weeks, during which he was kept in shackles—and in November McGinniss flew out to see him there and to continue his research for the book. Although he had glued himself to MacDonald in North Carolina, McGinniss had put off interviewing him about his life before the murders until the trial was over; now he would do this work. But at the prison McGinniss was prevented from bringing a tape recorder, or even a notebook and pencil, into the visiting room. So the men devised a scheme that would take the place of interviews: MacDonald would recollect his past into a tape recorder and mail the tapes (via his mother) to McGinniss. Over the next two years, MacDonald sent McGinniss a total of thirty tapes, which he made under somewhat mysterious circumstances (How did he get a tape recorder into his cell? Why was he never caught recording? Why was the tape recorder never found by guards? Why was his mother never caught smuggling the tapes out?), and from which McGinniss quoted excerpts in his book in chapters entitled “The Voice of Jeffrey MacDonald,” alternating with the narrative proper. McGinniss stayed in California a week, and during his stay MacDonald put his empty condominium—a half hour’s drive from the prison—at McGinniss’s disposal. McGinniss slept in a guest room-office, and during the day (he visited MacDonald in the late afternoon) he would read in the massive files on the case that MacDonald kept there and had given him carte blanche to rifle. McGinniss found so much of interest inthe files that he asked MacDonald if he might take some of the material back home with him; the ever-obliging MacDonald agreed, and even lent him a suitcase in which to cart the stuff. Among the documents McGinniss found in the apartment, the most exciting to him was an account MacDonald had handwritten for his attorneys at the Army hearing in 1970. In it (the document was later made public), he listed all his activities on the evening of the murders and mentioned a diet pill, Eskatrol—an amphetamine combined with a sedative—that he had been taking. McGinniss, baffled, like everyone else, as to what could have prompted MacDonald to kill his family, and in such a savage way, consulted various pharmaceutical texts and found that Eskatrol could induce psychosis when taken in high enough doses. (It was removed from the market in 1980.) MacDonald had written:
    We ate dinner together at 5:45 p.m. (all four). It is possible I had one diet pill at this time. I do not remember, and do not think I had one, but it is possible. I had been running a weight-control program for my unit, and I put my name at the top of the program to encourage participation. I had lost 12–15 lbs. in the prior 3–4 weeks, in the process using 3–5 capsules of Eskatrol Spansule. [Quoting this passage in
Fatal Vision
, McGinniss dropped the clause “and do not think I had one.”]
    Not implausibly, McGinniss