The Journalist and the Murderer Read Online Free Page B

Carolina. The next day, he wrote a letter to McGinniss—the first letter in a correspondence that was to last almost four years. “I’ve got to write to you so I won’t go crazy,” he began. His letter ended with this emotional paragraph:
    I want to see Bernie [Segal], because I love him & he is probably hurting beyond belief & wants to know he is not to blame. I want to see my Mom, because no matter how I look, by seeing me she will be better (and I probably will be, too). I would also love to see my best friends—including (I hope) you. But in all honesty, I’m crying too much today, and do cry whenever I think of my close friends. I feel dirty & soiled by the decision & can’t tell you why, and am ashamed. I somehow don’t feel that way with Bernie & Mom but think today it would be difficult to look at you or shake your hand—I know I’ll cry and want to hug you—and yet the verdict stands there, screaming, “You are guilty of the murder of your family!!” And I don’t know what to say to you except it is not true, and I hope you know that and feel it and that you are my friend.
    McGinniss did not “know that.” In the course of the trial, he had become persuaded of MacDonald’s guilt and had found himself once again in the position—the one hehad held with the Nixon advertising group—of enemy infiltrator. In July 1983, two months before the publication of
Fatal Vision
, Bob Keeler, a reporter from
Newsday
, who had also attended the criminal trial, interviewed McGinniss for an article he was writing for
The Newsday Magazine
and questioned him closely about the uncomfortableness of his situation in Raleigh. “There was nobody to talk to,” McGinniss told Keeler. “I couldn’t react. I couldn’t say to someone sitting next to me in the courtroom, ‘Hey, this doesn’t sound good.’ ”
    “What was your anticipation of the result when the jury went out to deliberate?” Keeler asked.
    “I was not convinced they were going to convict him. At the same time, I said to myself, ‘If I were a juror I would vote to convict.’ But I didn’t think that those twelve people were all going to come to the same conclusion I had come to. I didn’t know if it was going to be a hung jury or an acquittal. But I think I would have predicted either of those two results ahead of the conviction.”
    “O.K. So the day after the conviction you went down to Butner, and Jeff hugs you and says he hopes you’re going to be his friend forever. What were your feelings at the moment? Obviously, by that time you must have known the book was going to come out showing him to be a guilty guy. How did you feel at that moment?”
    “I felt terribly conflicted. I knew he had done it—no question—but I had just spent the summer with the guy, who on one level is a terribly easy person to like. But how can you like a guy who has killed his wife and kids? It was a very complex set of emotions I felt, and I was very happy to leave him behind in prison.”
    Later in the interview, Keeler asked McGinniss this blunt question: “One of the theories among the reportersat the trial was that you were going to write this Jeffrey MacDonald-the-tortured-innocent book. Another theory was that you were going to do to Jeffrey MacDonald what you’d done to Richard M. Nixon—that is to say, to be in his presence and in his confidence for a number of months and then run it up his butt sideways. And I’m wondering, since the latter has turned out to be the case, whether that’s going to provide a problem for you in the future. That is to say, is anybody ever going to trust you again?”
    “Well, they can trust me if they’re innocent,” McGinniss retorted.
    “You don’t feel that you in any sense betrayed Jeffrey or did him dirt or anything?”
    “My only obligation from the beginning was to the truth.”
    “How would you describe your feelings about Jeffrey MacDonald now? This is a complex question, obviously, but obviously