Word: macdonald
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Jeffrey MacDonald had been schooled to believe that the system treats deserving individuals justly. He was an all-American achiever who had always found his merit rewarded. An honors student at Princeton, he married his high school sweetheart, went on to Northwestern University Medical School and an internship at New York's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. When MacDonald joined the Army as a doctor, he went after and earned a Green Beret...
Then one terrifying night last February, Captain MacDonald awoke to a nightmare. As he tells it, three long-haired young men and a blonde girl invaded his home at Fort Bragg, N.C., while he was sleeping. They left his pregnant wife and two daughters stabbed and beaten to death. MacDonald himself was stabbed 19 times and clubbed on the head. Horrible as that was, it was only the beginning of his ordeal. Agents of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID) soon concluded that the young doctor had made up the hippie story to cover his own guilt...
Flowerpot. It was not that the investigation had been too brief. Local police rounded up scores of young people who might have been the invaders described by MacDonald. When none of them seemed to be the murderers, the CID turned back to the captain. Though the agents apparently found little that was damning in his background, they formed the theory that MacDonald and his wife Colette had had a violent argument over his younger daughter's bed wetting and that the angry words ended in the slaughter. Then MacDonald ripped up the house and, being a doctor, added...
...MacDonald, the major blow was not so much that the CID disbelieved him as that it pursued its investigation so ineptly that it gravely damaged his chances of establishing the truth of his own story. According to an official Army report obtained by TIME reporters, the investigation was all but criminally sloppy. The problem began almost as soon as MacDonald summoned the military police...
...agent interrogated MacDonald in any detail for weeks. He was well enough to leave the hospital in twelve days, but it was not until six weeks after the murders that he was suddenly questioned at length by the CID man in charge. Ordered to return to his quarters, where he was to be confined, he found his phone line cut. He was prevented from reaching an attorney until the following...