Jeffrey MacDonald: Time For Truth

Convicted Murderer Says New Evidence Will Exonerate Him

(CBS) 
Twenty-five years later, former federal assistant D.A. Jim Blackburn is still asked to talk about the most important trial of his career. He admits that the prosecution didn’t think it could win the case. “I thought it would be almost impossible.”

But Blackburn and his co-consul Brian Murtagh achieved the impossible, convincing the jury that there was no one in that apartment that morning except MacDonald.

Since all the evidence was found in the MacDonald home, the prosecution brought the jury to the crime scene, which remained untouched nine years later.

“The strength of our case always was very simple. The physical evidence, the scientific evidence, his statements. That was our case,” says Blackburn.

It was a considerable amount of information that seemed to be overwhelming the jury. But the prosecution did something with one piece of evidence that made every juror sit up and take notice.

It had to do with the pajama top that MacDonald was wearing that night. MacDonald had told investigators he was asleep on the couch when he was attacked. During the struggle, he says, the pajama top was pulled over his head and that it somehow became entangled in his hands and that he held it up to fend off the deadly blows of the ice pick. But the prosecution maintained all along that the pajama top itself told a very different tale.

Blackburn says MacDonald would be dead, if he were telling the truth. “If you fold that pajama top, you will see that there are 48 non-tearing holes in that pajama top. There are 21 ice-pick holes in Colette's chest that form a pattern.”

Blackburn and Murtagh explained to the jury this was clear proof that MacDonald’s story was a lie and that he had covered his wife’s body with the top and then repeatedly stabbed her through it with the ice pick.

For Bernie Segal and Wade Smith, 25 years has done little to ease the frustrations they encountered trying to defend MacDonald, even with something as basic as a request to examine the evidence.

“I was stunned to get the government's response,” says Segal. "The government's response is ‘Dr. MacDonald is not entitled to receive this evidence now because he didn't ask for it in time.’ I didn't know whether to cry or to laugh."

But Blackburn rejects claims that the government wasn’t playing fair as “sour grapes.”

MacDonald’s team also says the Army’s handling of the crime scene was a model of incompetence. “The crime scene handling by the Army CID in 1970 is now taught in military police and investigation schools as a primary example of a crime scene investigation gone mad. This is the worst example they could find,” says Segal.

Witnesses testified that fingerprints were lost, evidence was moved, and the morning of the murders the MacDonald apartment was overrun with military and medical personnel.

“Was the crime scene destroyed? No. Was it bungled? No. Was it done perfectly? Absolutely not,” says Blackburn.

Regardless of the condition of the crime scene, the defense believed they had something that would clear MacDonald once and for all: an eyewitness to the murders, the mysterious blonde woman in the floppy hat.

Her name was Helena Stoeckley, the daughter of a retired Fort Bragg colonel and an unlikely savior for MacDonald.

Just 18 at the time of the murders, Stoeckley lived at the center of the Fayetteville drug community.

Her story was astonishing. She believed she was actually in the MacDonald house that night with a group of friends, all drug users, who killed the MacDonalds.

“I had a floppy hat that I used to wear all the time, I had on boots that night and as a joke I put on the blonde wig,” Stoeckley said.

In fact, an MP, Ken Mica, testified that while responding to MacDonald’s call for help, he saw someone fitting Stoeckley’s description standing on a corner not far from the crime scene.

MacDonald’s defense team hoped that Stoeckley would tell the story to the jury but that is not what happened when she was called to the stand. “Her basic testimony was she didn't know where she was that night,” recalls Blackburn.

“Just a four-hour gap between midnight and 4 a.m., she claimed to have a lapse of memory. It's absurd,” says Segal. “She lied about whether she remembered what was going on, but she lied out of a defensive need to protect herself. She knew the government was looking at her.”

But Blackburn says Stoeckley was not threatened with prosecution.

Following the trial, Ted Gunderson, former chief of the Los Angeles FBI office was hired by MacDonald’s team to search for any evidence that could be used for an appeal.

“Helena said that she was there. She was chanting ‘Acid is groovy, kill the pig,’ ” says Gunderson.

He eventually convinced Stoeckley to go on the record, which she did in a 1982 60 Minutes segment. “I chanted ‘Acid is groovy, kill the pigs,’ ” she said during the segment.

Gunderson says he believes Stoeckley because she talked about trying to ride a rocking horse at the crime scene but that the spring was broken.

Why was that significant? “Because the only people that knew that spring was broken on the rocking horse was the family, the MacDonald family,” says Gunderson.

But once again the courts chose not to believe Stoeckley and MacDonald’s early appeals were denied. In 1983, at the age of 32, Stoeckley died of cirrhosis of the liver but the question of her involvement in the MacDonald murders is still very much alive.

MacDonald is convinced Stoeckley and her friends entered his home and murdered his family.

“And how do you know that she and her friends were the ones?” Lagattuta asked.

“Because they said so. Because I saw them there. Because there is evidence tying them to the crime scene,” says MacDonald.

It was evidence the defense didn’t even know existed, evidence that would give MacDonald one more chance for freedom.