Word: macdonald
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When he was taken to the staff judge advocate's office, MacDonald was assigned a military attorney who, he remembers, greeted him by saying, "We've got a defense all set for you. We've been working on it for a month." Then one of the two lawyers who had been peripherally involved in the defense consultation was switched over and made a junior member of the prosecution team. Before that happened though, MacDonald had decided to call in civilian lawyers...
Blood Print. Philadelphia Attorneys Bernard Segal and Dennis Eisman found their skills tried in uncommon ways. During closed hearings to determine whether there should be a court-martial, the CID sought to obtain hair samples from MacDonald. One day after a courtroom session, Army agents simply ran MacDonald's car off the road, flipped the protesting Eisman to the ground and took MacDonald off in "protective custody." After one doctor had taken snips of hair from all over MacDonald's body, the agents decided that the captain did not need protective custody any more...
...already bobbled one bit of analysis when it claimed that some hair on MacDonald's coat was his wife's; it turned out to have come from his horse. The new samples taken from MacDonald were to be compared with bits of hair found under his wife's fingernails, but when pressed for a finding during the preliminary hearing, Chief Investigator Franz Grebner said that he had lost the reports. When finally presented to the court, the information revealed that the blonde strands under Colette MacDonald's fingernails did not match the hair of any other...
...defense also belatedly learned that wax droppings had been found at the murder scene and that these also did not match any possible sources of wax in the house. The prosecution did not mention this information before the hearing, though MacDonald had maintained from the beginning that one of the intruders had carried a soft, candlelike light while chanting "Acid is groovy. Kill the pigs. Hit 'em again." Then there were the unidentified fingerprints. Though 46 such prints were found-including one in blood in Mrs. MacDonald's jewelry box-none was ever sent...
During cross-examination of witnesses, the doctor who examined the bodies at the scene contradicted earlier testimony by saying that he had turned Mrs. MacDonald's corpse completely over. Since MacDonald claimed that he had tried to cover Colette's wounds with his torn pajamas, the movement of her body seemed a plausible explanation of why his garment was found beneath her. As for the upright flowerpot, some investigators admitted that they had seen it on its side when they first entered...