The Journalist and the Murderer Read Online Free PDF

interpreted “3–5 capsules” to mean three to five capsules a
day
, which is an overdose, and he went on to propose in
Fatal Vision
that MacDonald killed his wife and daughters in a fit of rage—a rage against the female sex that he had been repressing since early childhood and that the drug (in combination with stress,fatigue, and Colette MacDonald’s threatening “new insights into personality structure and behavioral patterns,” picked up at the psychology course she was taking and had just come home from) finally permitted him to vent. McGinniss based his theory of the crime on an uncritical reading of three moral tracts—Otto Kernberg’s
Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism
, Christopher Lasch’s
The Culture of Narcissism
, and Hervey Cleckley’s
The Mask of Sanity
—in which the terms “psychopath” and “pathological narcissist” are confidently offered as the answer to the problem of evil (as if labelling were ever anything more than the restatement of a problem). In the MacDonald-McGinniss trial, to lend credence to McGinniss’s labelling of MacDonald as a pathological narcissist, Kornstein invited Kernberg himself to appear as an expert witness and apply to MacDonald the adjectives he applies to the patients in his book—“grandiose,” “cold,” “shallow,” “ruthless,” “exploitative,” “parasitic,” “haughty,” “envious,” “self-centered,” “lacking in emotional depth,” “deficient in genuine feelings of sadness”—who suffer from the malady he has invented. Kernberg prudently declined, and suggested a colleague of his, Michael Stone, for the role of moralist-in-shrink’s-clothing, which Stone accepted and played to the hilt.
    Another arresting find of McGinniss’s at the MacDonald apartment was a letter from Joseph Wambaugh, dated March 28, 1975, spelling out the conditions under which he would consider writing a book about MacDonald. The letter’s tone is more like that of the charmless writing in small print on a baggage-claim check than like the communication of an author to a prospective subject. As he read, McGinniss must have marvelled at, and possibly envied, Wambaugh’s
je m’en foutisme
. But then Wambaughwas an ex-cop (he was once a detective on the Los Angeles police force), and, maybe even more to the point, he was one of America’s most successful popular writers, who apparently could afford to be blunt (as McGinniss, strapped for cash, apparently could not). “You should understand that I would not think of writing
your
story,” Wambaugh wrote, and he went on:
    It would be
my
story. Just as
The Onion Field
was
my
story and
In Cold Blood
was Capote’s story. We both had the living persons sign legal releases which authorized us to interpret, portray, and characterize them as we saw fit, trusting us implicitly to be honest and faithful to the truth as
we
saw it, not as
they
saw it.
    With this release you can readily see that you would have no recourse at law if you didn’t like my portrayal of you. Let’s face another ugly possibility: what if I, after spending months of research and interviewing dozens of people and listening to hours of court trials, did not believe you innocent?
    I suspect that you may want a writer who would tell
your
story, and indeed your version may very well be the truth as I would see it. But you’d have
no
guarantee, not with me. You’d have absolutely
no
editorial prerogative. You would not even see the book until publication.
    McGinniss quotes this letter in
Fatal Vision
, and also quotes from a note that MacDonald sent to Segal about the letter: “What do you think? He sounds awfully arrogant to me, but it will be an obvious best-seller if he writes the book.” McGinniss goes on, “Wambaugh, of course, had not written the book.… Now I was writing it.” He adds, assuming some of Wambaugh’s toughness, “As would have been the case with Wambaugh, MacDonaldhad absolutely no editorial