It would be three months before the army would convene an “Article 32” hearing – this is the military equivalent of a grand jury. MacDonald’s mother hired a civilian attorney, a former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer from Philadelphia named Bernard L. Segal, to defend her son. Like the CID investigators, Segal was struck by his client’s almost total lack of emotion when describing the night of the murder. It was only when MacDonald talked of discovering Kristen’s mutilated body that he betrayed a flicker of feeling. Segal figured that doctors were trained to deal with horror, so had him evaluated by a Dr Robert Sadoff, founder of the American Board of Forensic Psychiatry. He found “possibly some latent homosexual conflicts”, as well as “some narcissistic need to be famous or infamous”. However, Dr Sadoff said that, overall, he was “fairly certain” that MacDonald had not killed his wife and children. His conclusion was one of the centrepieces of the defence.
Segal was then approached by twenty-two-year-old delivery-man William Posey who, while living in the hippie district of nearby Fayetteville, had a neighbour he knew only as “Helen”. During a trip to the bathroom at around 4 a.m. on the night of the murders, Posey said he had looked out of the window and had seen a Ford Mustang pull in next door. In it was Helen and two or three males. About two weeks later, Helen told him that she was going to have to leave town because the police had been hassling her about her possible involvement in the MacDonald killings. She confided that she had been so high on mescaline and LSD that night that she could not remember what she had done. Posey also told Segal that Helen used to wear a blonde wig and a floppy hat, but after 17 February he never saw her wear them again.
At the Article 32 hearing, Segal seized the opportunity to question the CID’s William Ivory about his cursory investigation of Helen, who had reportedly hung funeral wreaths outside her apartment and dressed in black on the day of the victims’ funerals. It turned out that the CID knew all about Helen, whose full name was Helena Stoeckley. She was the daughter of a lieutenant colonel who had thrown her out of his house at the age of sixteen for using drugs. A heroin addict from the age of fifteen, she first bartered syringes stolen from the hospital where she worked as a volunteer, then traded sexual favours for the drug. Her name had come up in the investigation before. It was the name the CID put to the description of the woman MacDonald said he had seen.
The civil authorities also knew about Helena Stoeckley. Fayetteville narcotics agent Prince Beasley had been running her as an informant. When Beasley was told of the murders the following morning, he also identified Stoeckley.
“She was dressed that way last night, wearing a blonde wig. I saw her,” he told his boss, Captain J. E. Melvin of the Fayetteville Police Department. “And one of the guys she was with last night was black, wearing a field jacket with stripes. That’s not a combination you see just everywhere.”
What’s more, they had been in a blue Mustang fastback.
The owner of a grocery store and a customer testified that they had seen Stoeckley that morning. She appeared drugged and was with a black man in an army field jacket. The customer, Dorothy Averitt, had already had an encounter with the man. At nearby Hickory Trailer Court, he had swung a baseball bat and deliberately hit a baseball at her.
At 9 a.m., Joan Sonderson, the car hop at the Chute Drive Inn restaurant on Fort Bragg, found a woman answering Stoeckley’s description asleep in one of the cars in the parking lot. When she asked her if she wanted coffee, the woman, who appeared drugged, declined. Then she said: “The MacDonalds were murdered last night. Did you know that?” Sonderson said she didn’t. “And that MacDonald is in the hospital and his wife and children are dead?” A black man wearing an army fatigue jacket got out of the rear of the car. There was white man in the front of the car that Sonderson did not see well. After the woman and the black man used the lavatory, they drove off.
Stoeckley had given Beasley a tip off about a trailer in Hickory Trailer Court, near the grocery store in the vicinity of where the black and white couple had been seen. That afternoon, the trailer was raided and drugs were found. It had been rented by two white men and a black man wearing an army fatigue jacket with sergeant’s stripes, who lived there. A neighbour recalled seeing the men coming to the trailer at about 5.30 a.m. that morning with a woman. One of the men had a small, foreign two-seater sports car – a rare sight in Fayetteville in those days. Cumberland County Sheriff’s Detective John DeCarter saw a small foreign sports car crammed with people on Bragg Boulevard. MacDonald’s defence team discovered that Raymond Cazares, another alleged member of the Stoeckley group, owned a small foreign sports car at the time of the murders.
MacDonald’s defence team later compiled a list of sightings of Stoeckley and her cohorts. In the early evening before the murders, Colette MacDonald had attended her child-psychology class at the North Carolina University Extension Campus. As she left, teacher Edith Boushey saw Colette backed up against a wall by a young man she identified as Stoeckley’s boyfriend, Greg Mitchell.
Around midnight, a group of people answering the description MacDonald gave of the intruders were seen in the Dunkin’ Donuts on Bragg Boulevard in Fayetteville. The young woman appeared high on drugs. At 1.30 a.m., Marion L. Campbell saw a young, blonde woman with a floppy hat and a white man. He appeared to be “in another world”. They were with a black man who wore an “olive drab or fatigue jacket”. He did not appear to be drugged and seemed to be in charge. Some of them left in a van similar to one later seen in the vicinity of the MacDonalds’ home. And sometime before dawn, the night man at Dunkin’ Donuts saw a white woman and a black man come in. They had something on them that he thought was blood.
That night, First Lieutenant Edwin Casper II and his wife heard one female and at least two males moving through the yard behind their building from Bragg Boulevard towards the building where the MacDonalds lived. Two houses along from the Caspers, Captain James Shortill and his wife Rita noted that the time was 2.10 p.m. A few hundred yards from the MacDonalds’ home, Captain Kenneth Lamb, a Green Beret, and his wife were woken by someone fumbling at their back door. By the time Lamb got there, they had disappeared.
Then at 308 Castle Drive – just half a block from the MacDonalds’ – Jan Snyder was awoken by a car with a loud exhaust. Later it returned. It parked next to a jeep and the occupants got out and got into a Mustang. Two days after the murders, Greg Mitchell was stopped by a Fayetteville police officer for having a loud exhaust on his 1964 Plymouth. Mrs Snyder told a CID investigator about what she had seen. She was told that someone would come back and take a statement. No one did.
Between 1.30 and 2.30 that morning, Martha Evans was driving down Bragg Boulevard near the MacDonald residence when she saw a parked blue Mustang. Standing by the car was a woman with a broad-brimmed hat. There were at least two men with her.
After the raid on the trailer park, Beasley was warned off investigating the MacDonald murder case. “Cooperate with the army,”he was told by Cuyler Windham, boss of the Inter-Agency Narcotics Bureau. Beasley knew that Stoeckley’s apartment was full of candles. When he had first visited, he found a soldier lying naked with two nude women in a circle of lit candles. More candles were stacked in a wicker basket against a wall painted with the circle of the zodiac. He had also been told that Stoeckley carried an ice pick in her handbag.
As Stoeckley was his informant, it seemed quite reasonable to talk to her. That evening he headed to her apartment on Clark Street. No one was in. So he parked in a dark spot up the street and kept watch. At 2.30 a.m., he heard the blaring exhaust of Greg Mitchell’s car approach. Stoeckley and five males got out. Mitchell was among them, but there was no sign of the black man with the fatigue jacket.
Beasley then blocked their car in the driveway and insisted on talking to Stoeckley. She was high on drugs.
“I know what you’re looking for, Mister Beasley,” she said. “You want to see my ice pick.”
He told her that he had seen her with a black guy the previous night.
“You were wearing boots last night, and your wig and hat,” he said. “The descriptions fit you and your black friend to a tee.”
Stoeckley was tearful. Beasley got the impression that she had witnessed the murders, but could not talk because the others were there. He called the CID at Fort Bragg.
“Bad trip, bad trip,” said Stoeckley.
“Don’t say anymore now,” said Beasley. “Wait until the army guys come. It’s a Federal case. I don’t have any jurisdiction.” Nevertheless, he took the names of the men with her.
The CID did not turn up and he had to let them go, though privately he urged Stoeckley to call the CID the following morning.
Ivory had interviewed Stoeckley a few days after the killings, then again after hearing Posey’s story come to light. Neither time did she say anything useful and she struck Ivory as a “space cadet”. However, she said she was sure that she had not been inside the MacDonalds’ house; she did not even know the address. It was 1970 and a lot of women wore blonde wigs and floppy hats – including Colette MacDonald. So inconsequential was the interview that Ivory did not take notes. Nor did he inform Beasley about the interview. Later, the FBI used Stoeckley as an informant in their search for the woman with the wig and hat that MacDonald had said he had seen. She was also interviewed and tape-recorded saying: “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.” But her photograph was not shown to MacDonald. Nor was he asked to listen to the tape.
“Is there any reason why you didn’t make notes?” Segal asked Ivory.
“No particular reason,” Ivory replied.
“Isn’t it standard operating procedure when you are conducting an interview that’s related to an enquiry into a triple homicide to make notes of interviews?” said Segal.
Ivory did not answer. As Segal cross-examined Ivory, it became clear that there had been no effective investigation of Stoeckley and her companions, who were also drug addicts. The CID had concentrated on finding evidence against MacDonald and ignored every other possible suspect.
“Has anybody checked the electric bill, gas bill and telephone bill for the particular apartment in which this lady lived?” asked Segal.
Ivory said that he did not know.
“Mr Ivory, you really can’t say to us that Miss Stoeckley was being frank, open, and candid,” said Segal. “She was following her rules, which are not to tell outsiders who her friends and associates are.”
“She said to me she only knew them by their first names,” Ivory replied
“Of course, the telephone company, gas company, and electric company and landlords don’t generally function on the basis of just first names, do they?” said Segal, pressing the point.
“That’s correct,” said Ivory.
“That avenue of investigation might produce last names, might it not?” said Segal.
“That’s correct.”
“Is it fair to say that on the basis of what has been done up to now, it could not be considered that the investigation of Miss Stoeckley’s whereabouts on 17 February is complete?”
“It is not complete.”
Ivory had months to complete an investigation and, by the time of his hearings, Helena Stoeckley had disappeared. It also came out that MP Kenneth Mica, who had first seen the woman in the floppy hat on his way to the crime and had tried to get Lieutenant Paulk to have her picked up, had been ordered not to mention the incident during the hearings.
Segal pointed out that no signs of drugs or intoxication had been found when MacDonald was taken to the hospital. The very low level of alcohol in his system was consistent with the glass of orange liqueur that he had drunk with Colette earlier that evening.
Regarding his emotional and mental state, Dr Sadoff, who had examined MacDonald earlier, testified: “I feel that Captain MacDonald does not possess the type of personality or emotional configuration that would be capable of this type of killing with the resultant behaviour that we now see. In other words, I don’t think he could have done this . . . He is a very warm person, and very gracious, and one whom, I must admit, I like.”
Colonel Warren V. Rock, the head of the 4th Psychological Operations Battalion at the John F. Kennedy Institute of Military Assistance and thirty-year veteran who headed the Article 32 hearings, also ordered psychiatric testing at Walter Reed Army Hospital. The chief psychiatrist, Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Bailey, examined MacDonald, along with head of psychiatric consultation Major Henry Edwards and director of research psychiatry Lieutenant Colonel Donald Morgan. They found no sign of mental illness or derangement. MacDonald, they said, was a personable and engaging young man and they did not believe that he had lied about what had happened on the night of the murders.
The hearing was closed so the public did not hear of the incompetence of the crime scene investigation, though Segal made it his business to leak it to the press. He called a series of witnesses who testified that MacDonald was an “all-American boy”. These were led by Colette’s devoted stepfather, New Jersey egg salesman Freddy Kassab, who said what a wonderful husband and father MacDonald had been. With tears running down his face, he said: “If I ever had another daughter, I’d still want the same son-in-law.”
Speaking for himself and his wife Mildred, he said: “We know full well that Jeffrey MacDonald is innocent beyond any shadow of doubt, as does everyone who ever knew him. I charge that the army has never made an effort to look for the real murderers and that they know Captain MacDonald is innocent of any crime.”
Kassab then announced a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the real killers and began a campaign to have MacDonald freed.
“My wife and I have a right to show the whole country that the charges against Captain MacDonald are false,” he said. Syndicated columnist Jack Anderson then took up the cause and wrote a column criticizing the army for closing the hearing to the public and press.