Army physician Jeffrey MacDonald nearly got away with killing his family more than 50 years ago, including his pregnant wife, who was slain in their North Carolina home in a Charles Manson-style manner.
Jeffery, 78, has maintained his innocence in the 1970 murders of his 26-year-old pregnant wife Colette and his two kids, Kimberley, 5, and Kristen, 2 years old.
Jeffery stated that his family had been murdered at the time by drugged-up hippies akin to the Manson Family, who had been murdering people mercilessly in California the year before.
Prosecutors claim that after repeatedly stabbing the three victims with a knife and ice pick, Jeffery stabbed himself in the lungs and other locations to make it seem as if he had been assaulted while defending his family.
On the evening of February 17, 1970, Jeffery reported to the police that he was assaulted by intruders that comprised three men and a lady with long blond hair after being awakened on a couch by the cries of his wife and kids while working a 24-hour shift.
According to reports, the lady yelled, “Acid is wonderful, murder the pigs.”
Later, when Sharon Tate was pregnant and a victim of the Manson family, the word “pig” was again inscribed in blood on the door of her Los Angeles home.
The ‘hippies’ had left when police came, and Jeffery, who was 26 at the time, was discovered by officers close to his wife’s corpse with the murder weapons hidden from view, according to the Sun.
Investigators eventually located the weapons, a piece of wood, and fibres from his pyjamas in his daughter’s room and beneath his wife’s bleeding corpse in the garden of the crime scene.
In May 1970, Jeffery was first detained on suspicion of murder; however, the allegations against him were later dismissed, and he relocated to California. Helena Stoeckley, a problematic resident of the area, admitted to the murders to the authorities at the time.
Additionally, Stoeckley claimed to have admitted to the killings to a number of other people, but the district court ruled that her supposed admissions are untrustworthy due to her extensive drug use.
At the age of 30, she passed away in 1883 from liver illness.
However, Collette’s family was aware that the account Jeffery gave the authorities was not the whole picture.
According to The Sun, her stepfather, Alfred Kassab, was so sure that his daughter had been killed that he even returned to the crime site and examined police interviews to assist fill in the blanks.
When Jeffery’s claims that a hippie gang murdered his family were refuted by evidence, he was subsequently found guilty of murder in 1979.
tests that were performed and a lie detector test Jeffery’s refusal to provide assistance undermined his innocence.
He invited novelist Joe McGinniss to write a book on the case since he thought he would be exonerated during the trial; but, when Jeffery was found guilty, the book’s title was changed to Fatal Invasion.
The image of Jeffery as a murderer who had no regrets for murdering his family was presented.
He worked for years to cleanse his record, and in 1998 he admitted to feeling bad for not being able to “defend his family.”
In 2002, while in incarcerated, Jefferey wedded Kathryn Kurichh, the proprietor of his old children’s theatre school.
Filmmaker Errol Morris, who thought Jeffery was innocent, even published the book A Wilderness of Error in 2012 to assist lay out the case for the convicted murderer.
The convicted killer gave up on his appeal in 2020 after making multiple unsuccessful efforts.
He’ll probably die in federal jail after serving his three life terms.