I was fortunate to see John Patrick Shanley’s Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Doubt” on Broadway in 2006, with Cherry Jones and Brian F. O’Byrne in the lead roles. The play was adapted into a film in 2008, which Shanley directed, starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, along with Amy Adams and Viola Davis, which I just recently watched again.
For those who haven’t seen it, “Doubt” (subtitled “A Parable” in the stage version) is about a nun, the principal of a Catholic school in the Bronx in the mid-1960s, who comes to suspect the new parish priest of an unspecified, “inappropriate” relationship with a preteen boy, the school’s first and only Black student. The play consists of only four characters: the nun, the priest, a much younger nun who is a teacher at the school, and the boy’s mother; the film, of course, opens things up (as film versions of plays tend to do) and shows us several other characters, including other nuns and school staff, and students, including the boy who is the subject of the conflict.
Without giving too much away, “Doubt” is a play/film that has to be seen (or read) twice in order to be fully appreciated. Almost immediately and with very little prompting, the nun becomes absolutely, utterly certain that the priest is guilty of something and thoroughly resolves to drive him from the parish, and nothing he or anyone else says will change her mind. Yet Shanley provides neither her nor the audience with any direct, actual proof that the priest is guilty of anything, and the dialogue is purposefully ambiguous so as to leave the audience to draw its own conclusions. That’s because “Doubt” is really not about what the priest did or did not do, it’s about … well, doubt.
And that’s why it has to be seen twice. Watch “Doubt” thinking that the priest is guilty, and the pieces will fall neatly into place as the story progresses. But watch “Doubt” thinking that the priest is being wrongfully accused, and the pieces fall into place just as neatly. Either way, whichever assumption you start with is the one you will most likely end with; “Doubt” won’t push you the other way because, ultimately, it doesn’t try to push you either way. Whether the priest is guilty or innocent, a horrible monster or a victim of baseless persecution — and whether the nun is brave and righteous or irrational and vindictive — depends entirely on you.
Which brings me to “A Wilderness of Error.” This Friday, FX is premiering a documentary series based on the 2012 book by Errol Morris of the same name, about one of the most fascinating, horrifying and controversial murder mysteries of modern times.
In February 1970, the pregnant wife and two small daughters of Army Green Beret surgeon CPT Jeffrey R. MacDonald were slaughtered in their home on Fort Bragg, near Fayetteville, NC. Military police, responding to an emergency call from MacDonald, found him unconscious on the floor of the bedroom of his ground-floor apartment next to his wife; he had multiple head contusions, stab wounds, and a collapsed lung, whereas the rest of his family had been savagely stabbed and bludgeoned to death.
Long story short: MacDonald claimed that he and his family had been attacked by four people, three men and a woman, “drug-crazed hippies” by his description (remember, this was 1970), but the Army didn’t believe him. After the longest UCMJ Article 32 investigation in Army history, he was cleared of murder charges by the investigating officer, then left the Army and moved to California to become an emergency physician. At some point thereafter his in-laws, Alfred (“Freddy”) and Mildred Kassab of Long Island, turned against him, came to believe he was guilty, and got the Justice Department to reopen the case, leading to a reinvestigation by the FBI crime lab, a 1975 indictment, a 1979 murder trial, conviction, and three consecutive life sentences which he continues to serve to this day.
Before I go any further, I’d like to respectfully ask everyone, indeed beg everyone, not to engage in any discussion in the comment thread over whether or not Jeffrey MacDonald killed his wife and daughters. Partly because such conversations can and often do, like political discussions, become rather unpleasant (and are highly susceptible to confirmation bias). But mainly because, like “Doubt,” that’s not what this diary is about and, more to the point, is not really anymore what the MacDonald murder case is about. In many respects, it never was.
Around 1991, when I was an undergrad, I took a journalism course in which the professor assigned Fatal Vision, a lengthy, dense and engrossing true-crime novel about the MacDonald murders written by Joe McGinniss, who had embedded himself with the defense team during the trial. Most people who read Fatal Vision or see the TV miniseries that was later made from it, come away thoroughly convinced that MacDonald is guilty. However, after we read and discussed the book the professor showed us a recent 20/20 segment that, in the main, called some of McGinniss’s conclusions — and facts — into question; the prof then assigned The Journalist and the Murderer, an article-turned-book by Janet Malcolm criticizing McGinniss — whom MacDonald, from prison, had sued for fraud and settled out-of-court — for his “indefensible” conduct, without opining as to MacDonald’s actual guilt or innocence.
Around 1995, another book came out called Fatal Justice, in which authors Jerry Allen Potter and Fred Bost attempted to “rebut” Fatal Vision by detailing forensic evidence and original lab notes, obtained by MacDonald’s defense team via the Freedom of Information Act (some of which had been discussed in the 20/20 segment I’d seen), that the trial jury had not seen and that government prosecutors had purportedly withheld from the defense. After reading Fatal Justice I dove into the MacDonald case for a few years, seeking out every book, article, TV segment and website I could find about the case and getting into lengthy discussions about it on the old alt.true-crime USENET group. I even used the case in my English classes at the time, as the backdrop for a unit on persuasive writing.
Eventually, though, my interest waned and I moved on; it’s been a long time since I’ve given much thought to the MacDonald case. In 2012, Morris (a documentary filmmaker best known for “The Thin Blue Line”) published A Wilderness of Error, the first full-length book on the subject I’d read since Fatal Justice, which has now been made into a documentary series (again, premiering this Friday on FX, so I haven’t seen it yet). Morris’s book is more of a trip-down-memory-lane than an investigative report, catching up with some of the major players and compiling their recollections, while in essence drawing the same conclusion that Potter and Bost had drawn nearly 20 years prior: that MacDonald did not receive a fair trial or even a minimally-competent investigation of the crime. The argument is not so much that MacDonald is innocent but that, under these circumstances, one cannot be certain that he is guilty.
But Morris has a larger point to make, which dovetails with Shanley’s “Doubt” as discussed above. MacDonald was convicted on forensic evidence alone, no motive, but as noted above the jury didn’t get to see a lot of the forensic evidence; some of what they did see was incomplete, some of it was junk science, and some of it didn’t mean what the prosecution insisted it meant. Yet it was more than enough for the jury to convict, and for all of MacDonald’s subsequent appeals to fail.
In the aggregate, if you look at the forensic evidence through a prosecutorial lens it will lead you directly and inexorably to MacDonald’s guilt; however, if you want to believe MacDonald’s account (or don’t want to believe that he could have committed such a heinous crime), it will lead you there, just as surely. In the end, the forensic evidence (to the extent it is even reliable given the “wilderness of error” in the initial investigation) is ambiguous at best, even the stuff that seems most damning (of either MacDonald or the prosecution) when viewed through one lens or the other. Anyone who insists that the physical evidence points only one way, whichever way that might be, is, I think, not being honest with him/herself.
Thus, Morris’s point is that when an event becomes a narrative in the way the MacDonald case did, and continues to be, it becomes impossible to know the “truth” because the narrative overwhelms it. The Army, then the Kassabs, then the FBI, then the U.S. Attorneys who prosecuted the case, created and built a narrative about the MacDonald murders, which they presented to the jury in 1979 and won a conviction; Joe McGinniss then solidified and expanded upon that narrative, which became Fatal Vision the book, which became Fatal Vision the miniseries, which became the widely-accepted — and, to many minds, incontrovertible — version of What Happened That Night at 544 Castle Drive on Fort Bragg.
Subsequent publications, like Fatal Justice and A Wilderness of Error, have done little to dispel that narrative. Instead, they created another, equally-compelling narrative: That Jeffrey MacDonald is an innocent man wrongfully convicted and persecuted by his vindictive in-laws, an unscrupulous prosecution, and a biased and corrupt judicial system. That’s what makes the MacDonald case so fascinating; not just the intellectual puzzle of trying to piece together What Happened That Night, but these dueling narratives, each of which takes hold and keeps hold because the alternative is unthinkable. If you believe MacDonald is guilty, the alternative — relentless, deliberate and corrupt persecution by our own government of an innocent man who tragically lost his family, then his freedom — is unthinkable. If you believe he is innocent, the alternative — congenial, clean-cut, Ivy League-educated physician with no history of violence suddenly and brutally slaughters his entire family for no reason at all — is unthinkable.
I don’t have the tape anymore and I can’t find it online, but I remember in that 20/20 segment from 1990, 30 years ago now, one of MacDonald’s lawyers saying (paraphrasing): “Either this is the most horrible, vicious, brutal killer of all time, or one of the most victimized men in American legal history; there’s no in-between.” Indeed, there is no in-between, now, as then. All there is is this massive, unresolvable ambiguity between two equally-compelling narratives with equally-unthinkable alternatives. That, I think, is what draws people to the MacDonald case and what fascinates people about it, and also, ironically, what makes people dig into whichever Side they’re on and invest in whichever narrative they prefer.
In the end, the story of Jeffrey MacDonald, for everyone except the participants at least, is much same as the story of “Doubt;” fifty years after the murders, it’s become a parable. Whether Jeffrey MacDonald is guilty or innocent, a horrible monster or a victim of persecution — and whether the Kassabs and the prosecution were brave and righteous or irrational and vindictive — depends entirely on you.
Watch “A Wilderness of Error,” and draw your own conclusions.
