Word: mcginniss
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Then came Fatal Vision, the biggest hit of his career, with an NBC mini- series to boot. The devil's bargain to make it happen was that McGinniss had to befriend, become the business partner of and even, for technical legal reasons, join the defense team of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, a man eventually convicted of beating to death his pregnant wife and two children. Well before the jury spoke, McGinniss had come to believe his man was guilty. But to protect the book contract he had to keep his subject happy, and he did so, not just by concealing opinions...
With his latest venture into fact crime, Cruel Doubt (Simon & Schuster; 460 pages; $25), McGinniss has swung to the opposite pole. Eleven months after Malcolm's devastating piece, he began to write the story of Bonnie Von Stein, a North Carolina woman who was unquestionably a victim rather than a villain. Her husband was bludgeoned and stabbed to death beside her as they lay in bed at home; she too was battered and nearly died. Despite her injuries, she was unjustly treated as a suspect for many months, as was her daughter. She suffered a mother's worst nightmare when...
...telling the mother's story, McGinniss cannot be accused of glorifying a neurotic criminal. Nor, he is at pains to emphasize, can he be charged with exploitation. He did not seek out his subject. Rather, she came to him -- because, he gloats, she so admired Fatal Vision...
...comes across as drab, passive and emotionally blocked. Her best quality, stubborn persistence, does not lend itself to glamour or theatrics. Besides, she was not present -- victims rarely are -- for the key moments in solving the case and preparing for trial. Thus, in bringing the story back to her, McGinniss keeps having to disrupt its momentum...
There is a subtler, graver flaw, one that readers may not recognize unless they pick up another current book about Von Stein's case, Jerry Bledsoe's Blood Games (Dutton; 451 pages; $22.95). In telling Bonnie Von Stein's story, McGinniss adopts, consciously or not, her view that her son was mostly a pawn manipulated by dangerous friends. McGinniss stresses the young man's weakness of character and instability; he quotes defense and prosecution attorneys describing the youth as a "wimp," and attempts to establish his two co- conspirators as evil geniuses. Even the photograph McGinniss uses shows Von Stein...