Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss. Jeffrey MacDonald used to be a household word in the US in the 1970s. He was an MD, an army captain whose wife and two children were murdered. He was in the house when the murders took place and he had minor injuries whereas the attacks on the others were brutal. This is about all that everybody involved can agree on.
MacDonald claimed three hippies did the murder; the initial US Army investigation concluded that MacDonald had killed his own family. He was found not guilty in an army hearing but after an extensive civilian investigation he was found guilty. He's been in and out of jail since then, mostly in since he lost his last appeal. But the controversy has not gone away.
McGinnis' book has been just as controversial. He befriended MacDonald and his team of supporters and lawyers and led everyone to believe he was convinced MacDonald was not guilty. Indeed, he probably did think so until late in the appeal when he changed his mind. Meanwhile he had gathered an enormous amount of information with the help of the team. The issue of journalistic ethics was widely discussed.
MacDonald is probably guilty, but there is a window of doubt through which one might glimpse innocence. In any case, the book is very well written and the whole case is fascinating even four decades later.
2011 No 185
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm. Janet Malcolm's book about the MacDonald murders is an examination of the ethical issues of journalists lying to subjects to get them to share information they otherwise would not want the journalist to know. She sees the conduct of Joe McGinniss as he was writing his book about the case, Fatal Vision, as unethical.
2011 No 186
Fatal Justice: Reinvestigating the MacDonald Murders by Jerry Allen Potter and Fred Bost. From the book jacket: ...a well-documented argument for the other side of the Jeffrey MacDonald case--an argument that the prosecution mishandled key crime-scene evidence, withheld potentially exculpatory material, and even discounted confessions from other suspects. Whether you change your mind about MacDonald's role in the murder of his family, you will learn much about the case that puts it in a new light. For example, the army narrowed in on MacDonald as their prime suspect very early in the investigation, and discouraged the FBI from developing alternate theories. And the judge in the case, Franklin Dupree Jr., appeared to have been biased in favor of the prosecution. Janet Malcolm, the New Yorker writer who wrote The Journalist and the Murderer (about MacDonald's relationship with McGinniss), called this book "quietly convincing."
2011 No 187
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