New Wife Sustains Hope For ‘Fatal Vision’ Inmate

Sun, Jan. 23, 2005

CUMBERLAND, Md. – Kathryn MacDonald knows the visitors’ drill at the Federal Correctional Institution in the hills of Western Maryland: Relinquish driver’s license, take off black pumps for the metal detector, get ultraviolet stamp on top of the hand. Accompanied by a guard, she walks into the large, noisy visiting room, and there waiting for her, smiling and waving, is her husband, Jeffrey MacDonald – the former Green Beret doctor who continues to insist he did not kill his young family around 35 years ago.

When Kathryn Kurichh, who owns a children’s drama school in Howard County, Md., married MacDonald, now federal Inmate No. 0131-177, she also took on a stubbornly enduring legal case.

The marriage permitted one of America’s best-known federal convicts – the subject of three books and a TV miniseries – to transfer 18 months ago from a California prison to the Maryland facility, to be closer to his new home of record. It also gave Kathryn MacDonald a new role as her husband’s chief supporter, spokeswoman and backup expert on the case.

“I certainly didn’t see myself married to someone in prison,” said Kathryn MacDonald, 44, who has operated the Young Artists Theatre in West Laurel for the past 10 years. “There’s no glamour in it. It’s not fun at all. I hate it. But I love the person.”

And she believes, with an intensity that equals her husband’s, that he has been wrongly accused and convicted and will be freed someday.

Jeffrey MacDonald – who is serving three life sentences for the February 1970 murders of his pregnant wife, Colette, 26, and two daughters, Kimberley, 5, and Kristen, 2 – recently applied for parole for the first time since he became eligible in 1991. A parole hearing is scheduled for March 2.

They say that DNA tests currently being conducted on some long-ago hair and blood samples will confirm what MacDonald has claimed all along: that a group of intruders wounded him and killed his family.

He is “devastated,” he said, that much of the unflattering image of him derives from Joe McGinniss’ best-selling 1983 book, “Fatal Vision.” (MacDonald sued McGinniss for breach of contract and fraud and received a $325,000 settlement from the author.) Another book, 1995’s “Fatal Justice,” by Jerry Allen Potter and Fred Bost, portrayed the MacDonald trial as a travesty.

On his Web site, titled “A Wrongly Convicted Man – An Egregious Miscarriage of Justice,” MacDonald’s supporters contend he never received a fair trial: From the beginning, the crime scene was trampled by more than 200 people, they say, and the federal government ignored evidence that supported MacDonald’s account of intruders. Helena Stoeckley, a young woman who told police she had gone with friends to the MacDonald apartment that night, was never heard in court. MacDonald said documents and reports released to him through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed, among other things, unexplained candle wax, black wool fibers and a long strand of synthetic blond hair.

Now 61, MacDonald has spent more than half his life declaring his innocence. He is fit in his khaki prison uniform – he works out an hour each day, but the young man in his 20s in the green Army beret, the oft-described “golden boy,” is gone.

Weekdays, he works as a prison orderly, mopping floors and cleaning toilets. He reads avidly, subscribing to 26 publications, including medical journals. After nearly 24 years in prison, he concentrates, he said, on “the next achievable goal.”

“I try to compartmentalize and stick to that,” he said in a recent interview at the prison. “I’m really not very good at answering philosophical questions like ‘Why?’ and ‘Why you?’ I’m just not good at it, and I find that, mentally and emotionally, I do a lot better if I don’t answer those questions.”

The difference in his life now is his wife, he said, “because I can talk to someone that I trust.” They were married in August 2002, at a federal prison in California. They had met briefly many years ago in Baltimore, but it was not until Kathryn wrote Jeffrey a letter in 1997 to ask what she could do to help his case that a friendship developed.

As much as the circumstances allow, they try to make their marriage a partnership: When Kathryn needed a new vehicle, Jeffrey did the consumer research and produced a 14-page report on the pros and cons of each model. When her drama students put on a play, he receives photographs of the costumes and the script so he can imagine the performances. She is “the creative one,” he said, while he is “the fact guy.”

“Several years into this, we realized we had become basically a couple,” he said, “despite me being in prison and Kathy being in the real world, working for a living. … When we realized that we were the single most important person to each other, then it seemed like a no-brainer. We wrestled with this for a long time, and it finally came down to, what are two decent, sane, normal, loving people going to do in a bad situation?”

A matter of timing

In its time, the MacDonald case was big news, unfolding on the Fort Bragg Army base in North Carolina at the height of the Vietnam War, coming six months after Charles Manson and his followers had left a trail of blood in California.

Kathryn MacDonald, then a young girl in Baltimore, remembers seeing Jeffrey’s photograph on a magazine cover. The case had staying power; even today, Internet chatters continue to debate MacDonald’s guilt or innocence. Why would a young doctor with no history of violence slaughter his family? Why would a group of hippies do it?

As other families mill about, Jeffrey and Kathryn MacDonald sit, side by side, in the prison visiting room of the medium-security facility in Western Maryland. They greet each other with brief hugs and kisses and often hold hands – the extent of the contact permitted.

Kathryn MacDonald drives there from her Howard County home as often as three times a week, putting more than 1,000 miles on her car each week, joking that the vehicle can find the facility automatically.

Known as “Miss Kathy” to the hundreds of young students who have attended her drama school, she is a small woman with a ladylike demeanor and a self-deprecating sense of humor.

A performer since childhood, Kathryn MacDonald worked on USO tours and a master’s degree in video and film from American University. After her marriage to MacDonald – her first marriage ended in divorce – she added a paralegal degree to better assist her husband.

At her drama school and theater, in a small shopping center on Route 29, she holds acting seminars, stages pajama parties and writes all of the plays her students perform; the recent Christmas production involved confused Halloween characters who wandered into the wrong holiday.

Early in her correspondence with MacDonald, she was touched, she said, by the kindness and advice he offered as her mother struggled with a terminal illness. And she found “that we could talk to each other about everything.”

“As time went on, we were completely committed to each other,” she said. “He said, ‘I want to get married, I want to have that lifelong commitment and I want that with you, but I don’t ever want to put you in a situation where your life is not as good as it could be because of my situation.’ ”

Despite the hardships

It was hard for others to understand. When she decided to marry MacDonald, a lawyer friend of her deceased parents whom she calls “the dad figure in my life” was concerned.

“Once a week, he would bring it up – ‘Have you reconsidered this?’ He said: ‘All I want is what is best for you. I know you love him. I know he’s a good man, … but why can’t you just wait until he’s exonerated?’ And I said I didn’t want to be telling Jeff, ‘When everything is perfect – and it’s never going to be perfect – then I’ll marry you. Until that day, I’m keeping my options open.’ That’s not total commitment.”

She said the friend, as well as her sister, who had expressed similar concerns, have come around. “Those are the first people who say now, ‘You know, I’ve never seen you happier, despite the hardships.’ They were just worried, that’s all.”

The wedding took place in another prison visiting room in California. It took nine months of red tape to pull off, she said, including finding a minister willing to perform the ceremony and to stand in for Jeffrey as they applied for a marriage license.

Although several of Kathryn’s girlfriends offered to accompany her on the trip, “I wanted to go alone,” she said.

The couple wrote their vows, she in the rental car on the drive to the prison, while her husband-to-be labored over his words for days. Another inmate, who was authorized to take photographs, snapped the couple’s picture as they embraced, then tossed a few kernels of rice he had managed to sneak in.

Later, Kathryn MacDonald returned to her hotel room. There was a gift basket waiting from her friends. She decided to save the bottle of wine, she said, “for when Jeff comes home.”

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