MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah, man. We've been listening to a lot of that like German music, like that's later on like in the late 80s. Like (singing in German accent) fut fifty fishes fuck furiously.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fut fifty fishes fuck furiously. I'm sorry, I can't even, I couldn't do it.
MARCUS PARKS
Let me do it, give me one more try. Fut fifty fishes fuck furiously.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(beatboxing)
MARCUS PARKS
Fut fifty fishes fuck furiously. Fut Fifty fishes fuck furiously. Welcome to Last Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Marcus Parks. With me here is Henry Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(German accent) Oof, welcome to Geigel's. I happened to see you've come on line to join us at the club, it's fantastic. I can't see your nipples, unfortunately you can't come in. It's only 3 in the morning, I don't know why you think it's so early for you to be partying.
MARCUS PARKS
And of course with us is Ed Larson.
ED LARSON
(German accent) Ja.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yass.
ED LARSON
Ja. All right.
MARCUS PARKS
Is that the extent of your German?
ED LARSON
Ja. Nein. Nein.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He doesn't do characters.
ED LARSON
No, I don't do... Yeah, they all sound like me. Germans, you know, it's upsetting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're kind of like Harry Dean Stanton.
ED LARSON
Oh well thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But bad.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fun. I want to bring up up top, before we get into the meat of this story is that I started like, you know, obviously we do our normal sort of like set up, you know, we research or go into it. And I finally found, I started watching the entirety of the new... Errol Morris didn't direct it.
MARCUS PARKS
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he is the star of it. It is a new documentary called A Wilderness of Error.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh that's nice. So Errol Morris, he's like me. He went from behind the scenes, behind the camera, to the front.
ED LARSON
Nice!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And honestly for a man who looks like if Stanley Tucci was cursed by a witch, right, he actually is really compelling on camera. And his whole thing is that he talks about the errors within 'Fatal Vision' and the books that all of this is based on. And like why, because I didn't fully appreciate as we're reading-
MARCUS PARKS
Fatal Vision' being the the main source we used for this series.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And I didn't fully appreciate the like center of the labyrinth, like what this was, like how much mystery and weird misconceptions were at play. Because when we were going through the outline of the show, like we try to sum up the story. But then it's like once you get past, you see why people get obsessed with this story.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And why this story has held people's attention for this long.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean it has the amount of twists and turns and fuck ups and all that as like The Staircase.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like I'm very surprised that the Jeffrey MacDonald story really hasn't gotten... Well I guess it has with the Errol Morris-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It did. Young Gary Cole.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh that's right, of course. We'll get to that at the end of the show.
ED LARSON
Yeah, it seems like I had no idea how famous this story was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Especially because it kind of like went away, like after he went to prison everyone was like oh thank god, we don't have to think about that shit anymore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was just like done!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
But it was all over the place in the 70s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a water cooler story.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like one of those where it's like everybody kind of talks about it, everybody's kind of got a side. And then you kind of find out at some point being like is there any such thing as objective truth?
ED LARSON
Yeah. And I think a lot of reasons why it wasn't more popular and have like a lasting power is he's just so boring.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He is boring.
MARCUS PARKS
Himself, yeah. Him as a person, he is boring. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly again, I know you're trying to keep it straight in order to get yourself through the appeals process but change up the story every once in a while. Add some voices. That's what we do here.
ED LARSON
And I have been trying out 'acid is groovy, kill the pigs' like all over town. And Jersey Mike's is the only place that's acceptable. They hated it at the police station.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Get outta here! Wait a second, have I arrested you before?
MARCUS PARKS
So when we last left Jeffrey MacDonald, the Article 32 hearing convened by the army had ruled that no charges would be filed against him concerning the gruesome murder of his wife and two children. It's important to remember however that an Article 32 hearing is not a criminal trial, nor is it even a grand jury.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. No one's got wigs on.
MARCUS PARKS
Nope, they do not. That meant that Jeffrey could still be charged by the state for the murder of his family should a strong enough case be brought against him. But Jeffrey, he wasn't too worried about more legal trouble. Soon after the ruling came down, Jeffrey decided that army life was no longer for him, it was too painful to bear.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I understand.
ED LARSON
They couldn't protect his family.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, god. That is a failure of our armed forces. I wonder why Vietnam went down the goddamn tubes. If we can't save one child from three lazy, tired hippies?
MARCUS PARKS
So he applied for and received an honorable discharge.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will say I did get a good email that I liked that said calling Jeffrey MacDonald a Green Beret is like saying a bat boy plays for the Yankees.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So he was not an actual like karate chop Green Beret, he was not dying of throat cancer style Green Beret who like punches guys.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like I remember Iwo Jima. He's not that guy. But also I did find another correction that we got about military police, about how it's its own role.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like you don't get bumped down in military police. It's a whole thing. It's just a lot of times younger guys do it and a lot of times you have to actually test very highly on your exams to get a position in the military police.
ED LARSON
Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you choose military police. However it is also even though you... I mean we've all tested high on exams at one point in our lives.
ED LARSON
Yeah but I'll choose snitch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, man. If you mean like fucking being high during exams.
MARCUS PARKS
But we've also chosen the path of least resistance. So a lot of these guys, from what the email said, like yes, they do have to score very highly but it is also a position in which the men who may not want to do a lot of work end up performing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again, to our military police listeners, I support you.
ED LARSON
That's very nice.
MARCUS PARKS
That's a good job. Next time you're on a military base, you'll definitely get like the extra heave ho.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I just like the challenge coins.
MARCUS PARKS
But it's at this point that Jeffrey's narcissistic personality tendencies truly began to show. Because the more likely reason behind Jeffrey's exit from the army was the fact that being the only survivor of a triple murder made him very popular. And Jeffrey saw this as a chance to play the victim to as wide of an audience as possible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So he became like the Forrest Gump shrimping boat of family annihilators?
ED LARSON
I mean basically yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Only one left. Acting as his own agent, Jeffrey would write to various magazines and newspapers offering to tell his story.
ED LARSON
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
I mean he is fucked. This guy, shut up. You got away with it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, listen, hey, I got a story. I can show you exactly how my daughter was laying down. They're like oh wow, fascinating. Fascinating.
MARCUS PARKS
But what's important to know is that for the most part Jeffrey's story was not about surviving a brutal triple murder. It was not about his family at all. Rather Jeffrey's story was that he was wrongfully persecuted by the army, he made it all about him.
ED LARSON
You know that's what I didn't like about the Sully movie. You know the movie about Sully?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Half of it was just about the trial and how he got off of the trial and they were like oh isn't it fucked up that there was a trial? It's like he crashed a plane.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
There needs to be a trial.
MARCUS PARKS
But you want it to be more about the geese?
ED LARSON
Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That would be incredible. Like Lee Harvey Oswald goose, who's sitting there writing his manifesto being like these fucking planes, they all think they're fucking birds. And he's sitting up being like, ties the kamikaze headband just being like I'm gonna take these fat fucking sky pigs down.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Jeffrey did contact local papers in North Carolina as well as the Los Angeles Times. But interestingly, he also contacted Esquire, which if you'll remember was the magazine that inspired Jeffery's false claim that a Manson-like cult had invaded his house and murdered his whole family.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I gotta tell you what, Esquire, honestly without you none of this would have been possible. It is just amazing. I just gotta thank god, Esquire Magazine, and these two family murdering hands.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Thank god he didn't contact Better Homes & Gardens.
MARCUS PARKS
How to clean up a crime scene.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly it's not bad.
MARCUS PARKS
But perhaps the most bizarre and visible media appearance occurred on a late night talk show hosted by the highly underrated Dick Cavett. Me and Ed were talking about this the other day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Unbelievable interviewer. It's Forrest Gump.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know. I did watch, I remember one time it was like the night after Woodstock where it was like all the hippies were there and they were like hanging around. He's like so tell me you cats, what was it like to lead a rock and roller lifestyle? See you still got mud on your shoes. And it was like they're all sitting down like smoking cigarettes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're on the floor and stuff. That was back before hippies fucking ruined every single thing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yep. They all turned into shit. But I got a bunch of Dick Cavett DVDs we should watch sometime.
MARCUS PARKS
I'd love to come over and watch a bunch of Dick Cavett DVDs. That sounds incredible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, do you wanna do like rails? And we'll toss on the Dick Cavett DVDs, we'll do some mescaline.
ED LARSON
I'll probably just have tea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the thing.
MARCUS PARKS
I'll join you. I'll join you, I'll bring over my earl grey blend, that's really getting into.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You guys, we are not 65 years old yet. We should go to like a-
ED LARSON
I wanna be ready for when I am.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Earl grey tea, hot. Years later, Cavett would describe being chilled by Jeffrey's glib tone during the interview, saying that specifically his affect was all wrong. That was the word that Dick Cavett used was 'affect'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was making jokes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cavett approached the subject with sympathy and gravity but MacDonald answered his questions with a tone, in Cavett's words, like he was fucking Bob Hope.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like affable, relaxed. He played the tragedy for laughs to the audience, saying that he was watching a late night talk show the night of the murders. You know when you're performing and doing comedy and you give that like signal to the audience, like joke, laugh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. No, I'm not a hack. No. I've never done anything like that. I don't mug.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I never mug. But yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He gave that signal.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And they did laugh.
ED LARSON
Of course, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Uncomfortably but they laughed. But after Cavett asked Jeffrey to describe the night of the murders if it wasn't too painful, this is what Jeffrey said.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"I can skim through it briefly. To get deep into it does produce a lot of like emotion on my part."
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And MacDonald then claimed that he sustained 23 wounds in the attack, saying quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"You know some of which they were potentially fatal. I could have died very easily. I was in an intensive care unit for several days and I had surgery. You know I had chest tubes in my chest." I can't believe how strong I was. Honestly and that's how I knew how weak my family was.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Did you know that I punctured my own lung with a scalpel?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Boing!
MARCUS PARKS
Now what's so foolish about this claim is that it was so easy to disprove. Jeffrey didn't sustain anywhere near 23 wounds during the attack and he didn't come anywhere close to death. I mean it was barely a minor inconvenience. He would have gotten a fucking... He would have gotten worse injuries from getting into a fender bender in his car.
ED LARSON
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
But it was that hubris, that need to be seen as the victim in all of this that would lead to Jeffrey's inevitable downfall. If we look at narcissistic personalities however, we know they're extraordinarily talented at distorting reality. So it is quite possible that Jeffrey came to convince himself that something close to his story actually happened.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well the thing I keep hearing, especially from Errol Morris and other people, like people who talk about this case, which is you hear it a lot in family annihilation stories. Which is being like there's no way that man who loved his kids would have ever killed his children. Like what's the motivation? Always, right? Like in every crime story, you're trying to figure out, when you're doing a police investigation, you're trying to figure out why. Because at the very end that helps you kind of point to who did it, like who could be around the person who did it, blah, blah, blah. But the thing about a lot of family annihilations is that there is no real reason why. Like yes, there are certain factors. But as we talked about last time, be a fucking man and leave.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like get a bus ticket, got to someplace else. Like there's so many ways to not do this thing, obviously. And So now we know a lot more. I'll bring up Chris Watts again.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He has countless videos of him loving on his kids and being super sweet and being engaged and fake smiling in a bunch of Facebook videos and shit. But it's like in the end, he just wanted a new life.
MARCUS PARKS
Well when they say so many times like there's no way that that man ever annihilated his family. They said it about Jeffrey Macdonald, they said it about Watts. What those people don't realize is that they knew a person that did not exist.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They met a fake guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That person was wearing a mask in those videos.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
When they were talking to their in-laws and they were talking to their friends, they were wearing a fucking mask. You had no idea who that person was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Really sometimes that is the ultimate issue with stuff like that, especially if you're close, is that you don't know anybody.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Anytime an entire family is murdered-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eddie, I don't know you! Eddie, I don't fucking know you, man!
ED LARSON
I'm coming for you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well hey, honestly I appreciate the heads up.
ED LARSON
But anytime an entire family is murdered and the father is there and he's fine, he did it. It's like every single time. You're either the worst pussy on earth or you did it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well again, but I also will say motivation is important.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So I understand why like if there is no motivation it is extremely confusing and you can see why he's totally innocent. So I see more of the mud in this this week but I'm still kind of firmly on the Jeffrey MacDonald's guilty side.
ED LARSON
I mean the motivation is he fucking popped his wife too hard and she was like probably convulsing or some shit and he's like oh fuck, now I gotta kill everybody.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Or I'm gonna go to jail.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You never got to though. Again, you don't got to.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just go like 'she fell on my bat'. Just say something else.
MARCUS PARKS
But at the very least, Jeffrey's narcissistic personality disorder guaranteed that he would never take responsibility for his crimes ever. Still to this day saying nope, I didn't do it. Now after the Article 32 hearing concluded Jeffrey Macdonald and his lawyer Bernie Segal launched what can only be described as a publicity campaign maligning the military bureaucracy, saying that they'd put a grieving husband through needless torture while the real killers ran rampant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've never heard that before. I've never heard that. But then he did try to go get them. Right? Isn't that true?
MARCUS PARKS
Well we'll get to that here in a second. Well probably so they could keep the story straight and control the entire narrative themselves, Jeffrey and his lawyer told Jeffrey's father-in-law Freddy Kassab to stay out of it, asking him to not participate in further interviews to assure that Jeffrey's interests were quote unquote "protected".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now this set off a tiny little alarm in Kassab's head, the first of many. He also thought it was suspicious that Jeffrey was so eager to relive such a horrific night over and over again with the press.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And remember this interest is brought on by Jeffrey MacDonald's behavior.
MARCUS PARKS
yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like what he is doing is like... According to that documentary kind of really put the timeline is that Freddy was like, he said... We talked about him in the first episode, was being like honestly if I had another daughter, I'd want her to marry Jeffrey.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He loved Jeffrey and they were there for him. And it was the Dick Cavett interview-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where they sat and he watched him and it was when he was making a laugh, he was making all the laughs, doing all the shit.
ED LARSON
He should have been broken.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
He should have been a puddle of a man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just a thing. It's also again you can't tell someone how they're supposed to react but not in that way.
ED LARSON
Every normal person on earth doesn't talk to another human again as long as they live if their family is murdered by a bunch of hippies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or you just don't go on Dick Cavett and make a bunch of jokes about it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And to that point, it seemed to Freddy that Jeffrey was far more interested in doing interviews than in finding the real killers. Most of all though, Freddy found it strange that the army didn't pick up the investigation concerning his stepdaughter's and granddaughters' murders after charges weren't brought against Jeffrey. But what Freddy didn't know was that the army realized that there was no point in further investigation because they'd taken their shot and they'd fucking missed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And any other attempt to find the real killers would have been a waste of time and resources.
ED LARSON
They'd rather it go away than look like fucking idiots.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean it's a part of it.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But there were two goddamn detectives who wouldn't let it go. But we'll get to them later. And so Freddy Kassab decided that if the army wasn't gonna look into it and Jeffrey wasn't gonna look into it, Freddy was gonna do it himself.
ED LARSON
I love it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He just fucking, this guy got-
ED LARSON
He's got time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
He's retired, his daughter is dead.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
His grandkids are dead. He's got nothing to do.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. To begin with, Kassab went to Washington DC and delivered 500 copies of an 11 page letter to Congress requesting a proper investigation apart from the Article 32 hearing to find and prosecute whoever was behind the murders. Now after Jeffrey recognized that it would be very bad for him if his father-in-law looked into the case himself, he came up with a cinematic story that he hoped would satiate Freddy Kassab's curiosity. MacDonald told his father-in-law that he'd gotten together with a bunch of other Green Berets and they'd tracked down one of the four intruders. After torturing him for information, they then killed him. And as MacDonald put it, that guy is 6 feet under.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It depends on what your theology is actually because some people might say he's 1000 feet above. But honestly we looked into it and the terminology that he used, which I thought he was just like, he's like one down, three to go.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Good god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And him like smoking and pretending. Meanwhile like he was barely a Green Beret.
MARCUS PARKS
Barely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was just in the department. He was a doctor.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Wouldn't it be great if he went to prison for that fake murder?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No! No! It'd be him being like as you can see, this smiling cat was murdered by Jeffrey MacDonald.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And Jeffrey then emphasized that the brave Green Berets were on the trail of the other three and they'd take care of it the Green Beret way, without all that liberal namby pamby due process nonsense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Process nonsense.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now Freddy sort of said, he's like all right. Like he didn't really believe him. But after he saw Jeffrey on the Dick Cavett show, he changed his mind completely about his former son-in- law. See what Freddy noticed most was that Jeffrey made no call to help find the real killers during the interview. No plea to call the authorities if anyone had any information that might lead to their arrest. Even the fucking Ramseys always remembered to do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. And it shows a lot about himself.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because again, it was all just about like this is being done to me, everything's being done to me. Can you believe this tragedy? He didn't bring up the kids, he didn't bring up his wife, he didn't bring up fucking anything.
MARCUS PARKS
No. Yeah. Kassab was also flabbergasted by Jeffrey's claim that he'd suffered 23 stab wounds. Kassab knew this wasn't true because he'd visited MacDonald in the hospital right after the murders. He saw that Jeffrey had barely suffered a scratch. It was at this point that Kassab realized that the real killer had been sitting in front of him the whole time, lying from the word go and saying whatever it was that Freddy Kassab wanted to hear to make Jeffrey MacDonald not the killer.
ED LARSON
You know he fucking puked.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
Immediately.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like they showed in the documentary of him taking all the pictures down in the house, like all the wedding pictures, every single thing with them and just like throwing them in a big fucking trash bag, like cutting him out of everything. And then he did it the old fashioned Henry Zebrowski research way, which I do miss sometimes, I miss smoking and reading.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he'd just sit down with his three packs a day, bottle of fucking scotch, and let the scotch do the reading.
MARCUS PARKS
Well soon Kassab obtained a transcript from the interrogation that MacDonald had flubbed so badly and read all the inconsistencies that the CID investigators had pointed out once Jeffrey gave them enough rope to hang himself with. Kassab then requested and received the full investigation that had been conducted by the army. Again, even with the mistakes, Kassab found that the version of events that he'd been presented by his son-in-law had been a total fabrication and that the story that he'd been wrongfully persecuted had been a bald-faced narcissistic lie. It was at that point that Kassab realized that the person he thought he'd been close with all these years, the person that he'd prized as a son-in-law, the person he defended in court, did not exist at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
At least not in this form because especially when he realized that he was having affairs, he was having multiple affairs.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll talk about all that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll get all that shit. And so Kassab began working directly with the authorities, reviewing reports and making notes where he could provide more accurate information and where he could sharpen certain details. With new blood in the investigation, Jeffrey was brought back in for questioning under the guise of finding the real killers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he was there and definitely it has nothing to do with OJ Simpson. Can you imagine OJ Simpson being right next to him, got done with his Hertz commercial for the first time and then arrives? And being like you need help looking for real killers? I have a feeling.
MARCUS PARKS
Well specifically the cops wanted to ask him about Helena Stoeckley, the burnout hippie that we mentioned at the end of the last episode. Police had obtained a photo of Helena and tried to get Jeffrey to trip up on an identification concerning the floppy-hatted woman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The floppy-hatted woman must leave!
MARCUS PARKS
Jeffrey of course stayed slippery. He said, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"I probably sound like I'm avoiding the issue but not from the photograph, I can't do that. There are a number of reasons. Assuming she was there, the conditions and the shortness of my being there, right? She was least likely for me to be able to identify. I would say that out of the four I saw, the four people, of this she's the least likely, you know. I know I was seeing blonde hair, you know. For instance, it really does, when you look at the face, I would say not from this, right? The nose looks really prominent here. It looks like you would remember the nose right away, you know, if you saw it. I just had the impression that I was looking at a much smaller, narrower nose. It's very bulbous, it looks very prominent, but you know, but I get a weird feeling. I get an uncomfortable feeling looking at her face. I just don't know."
ED LARSON
I feel bad for this woman. Just sitting there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everybody's roasting her.
ED LARSON
Yeah. She has a huge nose, she's obviously crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Also in this documentary Helena Stoeckley is constantly talked as her 'face looked like it had been gathering years five years and a bunch'. You know what I mean? Like Jesus Christ, like she had a lot of miles on her.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
25 going on 80.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Helena Stoeckley had been questioned literally hundreds of times by investigators, just like every other person who even approached hippie appearance in the vicinity of Fayetteville and Fort Bragg. But like everyone else, questioning Helena was just due diligence and she nor any of the others were considered a serious suspect at any point. To highlight that fact, even after Stoeckley told a friend that she remembered being covered in blood the night of the murders and her friend called the FBI saying hey, Helena, my friend Helena said she remember being covered in blood the night of the MacDonald murders. FBI said okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Thanks. They politely thanked her for the tip and didn't follow up because they knew Helena Stoeckley had nothing to do with it.
ED LARSON
She's just looking for attention.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well-
MARCUS PARKS
She's looking for attention and she's looking... She's one of those people pleasers. That's how people... And a lot of times like people who make false confessions, that's how they're always described. Like this is a person that wants to please whoever's in front of them and they will say anything to gain the admiration, the pride of the person sitting in front of them, especially if that person is an authority figure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well she was a known quantity to some of the local police because she was a police informant. So it's like a lot of what she did do is like she sold out all of her best friends, she did a bunch of kind of shady shit. This entire story is about unreliable people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like all of these people you cannot really pin down and especially her because she was already kind of in and out. Like she did tell her best friend and roommate, she did say, her roommate said like she borrowed a blonde wig and a floppy hat. And there was like all this kind of like weird mystery inside of the Helena Stoeckley story. That's kind of really where 'A Wilderness of Error' is really in on.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Errol Morris is really concerned with the Helena Stoeckley story, which I do understand because that's the thing, why does she keep popping up? Why does she confess, recant, confess, recant? I don't know. At the very end she kind of just said I was sort of like kind of already involved in the police so that everyone was kind of being like hey, don't be around this story anymore, you're unreliable. But then again, she's unreliable.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So who fucking knows?
ED LARSON
I just don't believe that she had three friends.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were more like a team. There's a team. But she blamed it all on a guy named Greg Mitchell that was a psychopath Vietnam vet that she said that just couldn't turn it off.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well all that is to say the authorities were still laser focused on Jeffrey MacDonald, as was Freddy Kassab. Freddy soon flew to Fayetteville and met with the CID investigators who still wanted to help take MacDonald down. Two guys named Jack Pruitt and Peter Kearns.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Peter Kearns!
MARCUS PARKS
Mustering up an incredible amount of strength, Kassab went to 544 Castle Drive with the two investigators to recreate MacDonald's steps according to his testimony in the very unit where his stepdaughter and grandchildren had been killed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And imagining a man that is very similar to Mushnik from Little Shop of Horrors.
ED LARSON
Is that what he looks like?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he's a fun guy. He looks like what I hope to be.
MARCUS PARKS
Odd guy.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pinky ring, good amount of change. You know what I mean?
MARCUS PARKS
He's a Long Island guy, he's from Long Island.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. He looks good, he looks good. But imagining this 50 year old Long Island bejeweled man doing a full on Eddie Murphy style act out of the entire scenario must have been kind of fun.
ED LARSON
I hope they filmed it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean that's good content.
ED LARSON
They had to have, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
See we didn't mention it this last episode but Jeffrey made two phone calls that night to emergency services. The first was to 911 but the operator told him that since he was on Fort Bragg, he needed to call those authorities for help. That was just policy. But Jeffrey claimed that inbetween the first call and the second call which occurred two minutes later, there are records, he looked outside for the intruders, checked on his wounds in the bathroom, and washed his hands. Because remember there was no blood on either phone. He said he then checked the pulses on three bodies that were all soaked in blood. He claimed to have attempted mouth to mouth resuscitation on his wife, he claimed to have crawled to the kitchen, washed his hands again, then finally called the MPs with his weak performative message. And this all was supposedly done in two minutes.
ED LARSON
I mean that's ridiculous. If I ever, when I have a heart attack in front of you guys-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay cool, good.
ED LARSON
Mouth to mouth for at least 3-4 minutes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll be there, man.
ED LARSON
Yeah, press it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I know. I'll make sure that your chest is good and crushed by the end of the process just to make sure you're dead. I don't want to do that to you, I don't know how to do it. It's interesting because you could see he left blood all over the sink, right, they know they had blood over the sink. They had blood in the kitchen. Outside where the surgical gloves were, right, he went and found it. But they don't have any like... Inbetween there's no blood. Also when he started doing the... They asked a bunch of weird questions, right? Like the lights were off in the room when the kids were in there lying dead. So you mean to tell me, so he'd go in, like they were like just kind of human things. So he would turn the light on, do mouth to mouth resuscitations on the kids, first of all, then they were still found laying on their sides. Why are they not on their backs? So then he'd leave, he shut the light off to go back and forth between all these things and then turn the light on and turn the light off to go back in. Is that what he's doing? And then with the wife, they said the same thing when he was doing the mouth to mouth, he said I can't do it because the wind is coming out of her chest, blah, blah, blah. She had no chest wounds. So that's another weird ass like why are you saying that then? Because that's not real either.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And there's also the fact that the room was dark when he was supposedly woken up. And they tried it out, it's like okay, let's see what it looks like in here when all the lights are turned off. And there's no way that he could have identified four assailants with the amount of detail that he identified them in a near pitch dark room. And that's the thing is that Kassab and the investigators, they were suspicious about this flurry of activity, especially considering the claims that Jeffrey was making about his own state of health at this time, 23 stab wounds. And so they attempted to run through those steps between the two phone calls several times and found that it was physically impossible to do so in just two minutes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Maybe it's because they're not the fastest man within 10 feet.
MARCUS PARKS
Like you?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can fucking rip through a crime scene.
ED LARSON
You're quick, you're not fast.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the idea. Again, quick ankles. I have good lateral movement. I don't need to do a long haul run, I just need to be as fast as possible to tire a man out until he murders me and then Natalie will complete the actual defending of herself.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because again, that's our roles. Your role is to buy time.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is. We all know the human shield.
MARCUS PARKS
He's the rope-a-dope.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He's the one that gets him tired and then Natalie comes and finishes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm throwing props at him, I'm like hiding. And that's my goal. My goal is to have places with trapdoors, you go underneath in the tunnel, pop out on the other side. They don't know I'm over here. Like Rufio from Hook.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you're more like the fat kid with all the pudding on his face. By the way, how is work in the lollipop guild going?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck you.
MARCUS PARKS
Now concerning the struggle Jeffrey had and the screams he claimed to have heard from his children, here's another kicker. The MacDonalds didn't live in a single occupancy home.
ED LARSON
What?
MARCUS PARKS
They had upstairs neighbors who could hear the murmurs of normal conversations from the MacDonald residence during just everyday conversation. So it would have been impossible for the supposed struggles and screams to have gone unnoticed that night.
ED LARSON
Different entrance though, right? Probably, I imagine.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Different entrance. I would imagine so. I don't know the full layout of the house but I do know that they had upstairs neighbors.
ED LARSON
You can't get away with this shit with upstairs neighbors.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean unless you live in New York City where you are trained to ignore screams.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You hear screams-
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you hear stuff and you just kind of live in your own bubble because we're living in these apartments that have super thin walls, you hear every word that everybody says and you just learn that you have to... It's because of omertà but it's with your neighborhood.
ED LARSON
And it's also just terribly annoying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. You just have to get used to it.
ED LARSON
The people who lived above me in Ridgewood, it was just like a bunch of children.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I never saw an adult. There was like 20 children in that apartment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
20 children legally make up three adults. So if you can get someone in there in a full on apartment, eventually they will get a lease.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the investigators and Freddy Kassab tested a whole host of Jeffrey's claims and found that none of them made sense. And by the end of it, all three were entirely convinced that Jeffrey MacDonald had murdered his family. But since MacDonald was now a civilian, it was now in the hands of the justice department, meaning that CID investigators Pruitt and Kearns couldn't bring the charges back to the military authorities. Bringing this case to the Department of Justice was gonna take time and patience. But Freddy Kassab, using his best detective movie grimace, said quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"I'm only 52 years old. Besides I got the patience of Job." Yeah, dude.
ED LARSON
Whoa! That's a long book in the bible!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, you read this Job book? It's fucking sad!
MARCUS PARKS
Now to strengthen the case, Pruitt and Kearns began investigating MacDonald's background and found he was not the person that he had presented himself to be to those closest to him. See Jeffrey not only cheated on his wife but he actually dated the women that he cheated with.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What a waste of time.
ED LARSON
What's the point?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, what's the point. He just wanted to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It made him feel big. Because that was Jeffrey MacDonald's whole thing is that he had to feel, he had such a need to feel masculine at all times that he had to prove. It's like oh yeah, I can fuck whoever I want. And not only that, these women want to fuck me. I can fuck this girl, I can fuck that girl. My fucking wife, she don't know shit. She's sitting back home, she's making me dinner. That's what a wife is supposed to be fucking doing.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See?
ED LARSON
Meanwhile he looks like he hums when he fucks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(humming)
ED LARSON
(humming)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All done! Ah, completed. Silence now. (snoring) Eddie's got a shirt on that says like all the food wants me to eat it. Yeah, all right. I didn't write shit down. I'll fucking come at your fucking ass.
MARCUS PARKS
Well by the end of it, they'd found relationships with a nurse, a Swedish exchange student, a 16 year old babysitter, a 19 year old daughter of another colleague that he was quote unquote "teaching to learn how to drive".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it was stick shift. Come on, come on!
MARCUS PARKS
Hey, hey, whoa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I didn't murder my family. That's funny. Just having fun here.
MARCUS PARKS
And he was fucking the wife of a special forces sergeant that Jeffrey was supposed to be counseling for marital problems.
ED LARSON
Jesus Christ. He doesn't even look like an attractive man.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a doctor.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he's a doctor.
ED LARSON
He's a doctor. They love doctors.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
People love doctors.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It counts for a lot. Especially for some reason it counted a lot more like in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
ED LARSON
Yeah. He looks like one of the Nazis from The Blues Brothers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He kinda does.
MARCUS PARKS
It was also discovered that immediately after the murders, immediately, Jeffrey began a sexual relationship with a civilian working at Fort Bragg who said they had sex dozens of times before the relationship ended. The investigators also soon discovered the reason why Jeffrey had been taking the diet pills.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And that's the one thing Errol Morris does, he believes that the eskatrol storyline is like too much.
MARCUS PARKS
He thinks it's dubious?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's just one of those where in 'Fatal Vision' he kind of puts it a lot of weight on the medication.
MARCUS PARKS
Well he waits until the end-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
To really talk about the eskatrol. He doesn't talk about it a ton throughout the narrative. But at the end it's like there's this thing of like okay, here's everything that eskatrol can do to a person.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can do to you. Yeah. But he was way more like I don't think it takes... Speed doesn't necessarily make you kill your family.
MARCUS PARKS
It doesn't necessarily.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sometimes it makes you make the musical 'New York, New York' because Martin Scorsese was a misstep and he said he did blame cocaine for the entire process.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean I understand where Errol Morris is coming from because he's very concerned with justice, like the rule of the law.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
He's probably on amphetamines himself. He's like I can't be compared to this guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just edit movies.
MARCUS PARKS
No, this is a guy who him and Werner Herzog like dared each other to go dig up Ed Gein's grave.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God, I love it. I love Errol Morris though. I fucking love him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I love Errol Morris.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like Gates of Heaven, that movie is incredible.
ED LARSON
Yeah, he's unbelievable. Check out everything.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, everything. But he's very much of the opinion of there's right, there's wrong, and there's the law. And we'll get later to the trial but he's also very much a believer in like the constitutional fact that every American is deserving of-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A fair trial.
MARCUS PARKS
A fair trial.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's a baseline.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The baseline is you can walk in there no matter what anybody said you've done, that you could exonerate yourself if the evidence is there.
ED LARSON
That's the mark of a good documentarian.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
True objectivity. And we're not objective here.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
ED LARSON
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're highly subjective.
MARCUS PARKS
No, I'm gonna use the word speculation a lot today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
And I see what he's saying because the amphetamines, the eskatrol, we are speculating when we're talking about that.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
We don't know for sure. We are speculating, we are extrapolating from the facts. But of course that wouldn't necessarily hold up in a court of law.
ED LARSON
Yeah, we're speculating that he put the 'mean' in amphetamine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cute.
ED LARSON
Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS
That's really cute.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's really cute.
ED LARSON
Thank you very much. For this story it's hard to write a cute joke.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it is. It is. It's like how you can't kill a child with kindness.
ED LARSON
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
See Jeffrey had joined the Fort Bragg boxing team and wanted to make weight, so he needed to drop pounds fast. Back before the murders, Jeffrey told his wife that he was doing so well so quickly on this Fort Bragg boxing team that he was going to be sent to Russia to box the communists.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
One by one! I find the toilet paper line, I hit each one because I know they're weak because they gotta shit and they're waiting to get it, right. Then I go over to the canned chicken line and I beat them up one by one because I know that they're hungry.
MARCUS PARKS
And this is years before Rocky IV, by the way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let me in there, Mickey!
MARCUS PARKS
This of course was another lie and was most likely a cover for Jeffrey to spend an extended amount of time away from the family that he was beginning to resent even more after his wife's accidental pregnancy. Never forget she was pregnant when he murdered her.
ED LARSON
That's right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I tried to forget it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. No, I ain't letting you.
ED LARSON
But he wasn't ever charged with that murder.
MARCUS PARKS
No. You know what? People aren't always charged with the murder of a fetus.
ED LARSON
Really? Interesting. Good to know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good to know. Yeah, nice. We're all right.
MARCUS PARKS
Another interesting clue as to why Jeffrey may have decided to annihilate his family came from the child psychology course his wife Colette was taking at the time of the murders. Investigators found her notes and found that she'd paid special attention to classes that focused on the development of narcissistic personalities. Colette wrote notes on how children respond and adapt to their environments, particularly how they can fall into denial and distortions of reality, which are two marks of a narcissistic personality. In other words, it
seems as if puzzle pieces were starting to fall into place for Colette when it came to her husband's behavior over the years.
ED LARSON
He should have burned the house down.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he really should have.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Really good advice. That's really important. Get rid of everything. Very, very good.
MARCUS PARKS
But then of course there's the neighbors upstairs, that's the problem.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're going down too, yeah.
ED LARSON
Honestly, if he wants to get away with it. He's already killed fucking four people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, what does it matter? What's two more?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they're gonna smell the smoke, they're gonna run out.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And if not, in for a penny, in for a pound. If you're gonna stick a fucking ice pick into your toddler's neck nine times, what do you care about the people upstairs?
ED LARSON
Yeah, exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, exactly.
ED LARSON
What is he trying to save the lamps?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he's trying to get his security deposit back.
MARCUS PARKS
Well when you put all this together though, from Jeffrey's obvious lie about boxing in Russia to Colette's newfound understanding of what Jeffrey was really like behind the mask, it's possible that a confrontation may have resulted in a murderous snap reaction.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well she definitely called her parents at some point and said, I guess it was like a couple of weeks before the murder happened, and said can we come up and stay with you?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they said it's not a good time. And so obviously they didn't-
ED LARSON
Oh you know that fucking haunts them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, the rest of their lives. So something was going on but they didn't want anybody to know. You gotta remember this is the height of go along to get along.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is 1970. Like this is before things started like breaking. It was still kind of like a hangover of hippie culture that was mixed in with the 1950s. The hair, everybody looked like a fucking labradoodle.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All of the hair was bad. But that hair helped cover up a lot of crimes.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because I think that people just wanted things to be copacetic and they felt it was embarrassing for people to know their personal issues.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Often. I don't know. It seems like it's one of those things especially within family units.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Colette was a little more open with it, like she would talk to people in her class like hey, there's something... Like they'd asked like hey, are you okay? Because they knew obviously something was going on at home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
She's like my husband's personality is changing, I don't know what to do about it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Or maybe it wasn't that his personality was changing, maybe it was just that she was starting to see him for who he really was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Maybe.
ED LARSON
Just sick of him being an asshole.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But of course, all of this was only useful in building a psychological profile on Jeffrey and that could of course only be used as speculation. Luckily for investigators though, new avenues of forensic evidence were discovered. Inconsistencies were found in the ice pick holes of the pajama top. Those holes were neat where they should have been ragged. If you're fighting somebody and they're stabbing at you with an ice pick, they're not gonna poke little neat holes, it's gonna be rips.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And there's a very famous scene in the movie that comes from the trial where they showed how those things could be made. So they did an act out which again, it must be the funnest part about being a lawyer at all. Like doing those act outs.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Remember when they did it with Gwyneth Paltrow with the ski incident?
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When they would try to get her to get up. All of the other team was trying to get her to come out and be like will you act out this scenario with us? And she's like they pay me $15 million to do that, so she wouldn't do it, like she literally wouldn't get out of her chair. But they wrapped a pajama top around their arms and they had another guy with an ice pick in the middle of the trial stabbing at him with the ice pick and he showed number one are there tears in it. But while he was fucking doing it, he stabbed the dude in the fucking arm during the representation.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So you could see like he would have had some form of attack wound, some sort of defense wound, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Something. Something.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well also they found rips in the victim's clothing that were supposedly made by the dull knife. Those also should have been messy, they should have been ragged but they were clean and they were sharp. Even more damning was Jeffrey's claim that he'd pulled a knife out of his wife's chest, which explained why his fingerprints were on the knife. It was soon proved that the knife had not been used to kill Colette but had rather been used to murder Jeffrey's daughters.
ED LARSON
How did they know?
MARCUS PARKS
Because every single member of the MacDonald household had a different blood type. So they could look and see, they could check and see where every single... So they could map out the crime scene completely by where each piece of blood spatter was.
ED LARSON
This guy did no research.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Always be prepared. Well it's interesting because that was kind of a coincidence too. Because at this time period there's no DNA, there's none of that shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So the fact that they each had their own individual marker was like...
MARCUS PARKS
It was incredibly lucky.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
And on it went, from the fact that Jeffrey's wound had obviously been made by a scalpel to the pajama top that was found to have been spattered with Colette's blood before Jeffrey laid it on top of her blood soaked corpse. Most disturbing however was the statement that came from Jeffrey MacDonald's own sister, Judy. She said that Jeffery became aggressive and angry when he didn't get his way and that Jeffrey was absolutely capable of killing someone if he was provoked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sometimes with sisters, you can't trust them. Because my sister got Risk removed from our home because I was blamed for creating a toxic environment around the board game situation in the Zebrowski household.
ED LARSON
I believe her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will go to family court! And show that I was undermined, all right. Because she didn't understand the rules.
MARCUS PARKS
No?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And she didn't understand like oh, you want to do your stupid thing where you base all your fucking bullshit in Australia and I can't get at you? Well then you better... Oh man.
ED LARSON
We all know that you jerked off with the family computer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I had to.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. As did I.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where was I gonna go? They weren't looking.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we all jerked off at the family computer.
ED LARSON
See I had stuff in my room. I had the Playboy channel.
MARCUS PARKS
See that's the thing though is that-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's privilege.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually I had VHS tapes, multiple VHS tapes, I had magazines. But then that's the thing is there was still like the lure of the internet because there's more.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I was already tired of all the stuff I already had.
ED LARSON
I was terrified.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'd jerk off to the TV Guide.
ED LARSON
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, anything.
MARCUS PARKS
Which issue?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I always remember that Jenny McCarthy issue.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well later Judy MacDonald would even testify against her own brother, adding that he was abnormally judgmental of others, reserving specific disgust for smokers and sloppy eaters.
ED LARSON
Oh well you think I didn't know Holden McNeely back in the 2010s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck you, Holden!
MARCUS PARKS
Got him! Jeffrey MacDonald however didn't know that any further investigation was being done. He'd since moved to the Upper East Side of Manhattan and joined forces with a physician named Dr. Broadway.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) It's me! Hello! You have cancer!
ED LARSON
I hate a doctor with a nickname.
MARCUS PARKS
I know. I don't like it. That's why I always respected Dr. Zizmor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because Dr. Zizmor, he could have gone by Dr. Pimple Popper.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He could have gone by Zit Man, anything like-
ED LARSON
Dr. Z.
MARCUS PARKS
Dr. Z, nope.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Dr. Zizmor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
He's out there. He's gonna fix your fucked up face.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think he went down for like tax evasion or something.
MARCUS PARKS
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I think Dr. Zizmor is like in pimple jail.
ED LARSON
He got popped.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
So he didn't go out in a blaze of glory like Barnes?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm gonna look up Dr. Zizmor. I haven't thought about him in a long time. Continue.
MARCUS PARKS
Well mostly Dr. Broadway treated actors and made house calls to quote "provide tranquilizers for agitated actresses".
ED LARSON
Oh he's terrifying now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll just, here, right now, Jonathan Zizmor, he retired in 2016 in order to study the Talmud full time.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh that's perfect.
ED LARSON
Oh that's great, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's actually really nice.
ED LARSON
That's nice.
MARCUS PARKS
That's really nice. Well MacDonald even became a bit of a socialite, entertaining people like the Countess Christina Paolozzi, who lived off blood money squeezed from the people of South America as an heiress to the United Fruit Company, one of the most evil corporations to ever exist.
ED LARSON
I know nothing about them but I believe you.
MARCUS PARKS
Thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The United Fruit Company, I believe that is the company that basically went and took over all of like inner Mexico and South America.
MARCUS PARKS
It was more like Venezuela.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like more Central America.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Central America.
MARCUS PARKS
Like you know the term Banana Republic?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It comes from the United Fruit Company.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know where you get your knit belts?
ED LARSON
I love my knit belts.
MARCUS PARKS
Well yeah, they basically took over an entire country and enslaved a bunch of people to pick bananas. It's now called Chiquita.
ED LARSON
Cool!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I love bananas.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I know you you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all he heard.
ED LARSON
That's the hard thing, yeah. I'll fucking peel this microphone right Now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't. It's very expensive. All right? Someone already took the headphones outta here, I don't know what happened.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I don't know what happened either. But maybe on a future Side Stories episode we can get you to do your new favorite monkey movie rundown. Because we haven't talked to you about monkey movies in a real long time. I imagine you've got some new favorites.
ED LARSON
I love Skull Island.
MARCUS PARKS
We're not gonna do it right now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We can't do it right now.
ED LARSON
Not one big banana in the whole movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You've got him going.
ED LARSON
Ooga booga!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think it was cut. You know that that was a producer's note. You mean to tell me we got this whole monkey film, not one banana? How is he eating? What is he doing? There's not one monkey bed? We're not gonna see him smoke a cigarette?
MARCUS PARKS
Well it wasn't just evil heiresses that he was inviting over, he had fucking Walter Cronkite come over to his house once.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's really because John Holmes, same thing. A lot of people are really into, I would say the term is transgressive culture. The idea of hanging out with something like that, especially at the time, is super like ooh naughty.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hanging out with... Ooh, did he kill his family? I don't know. Pass the canapés. Ooh yum.
ED LARSON
He probably just wanted to be interviewed again.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean I think he was just angling.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, just liking the attention.
MARCUS PARKS
Angling and angling. Yeah. Well put simply, Jeffrey MacDonald was spending just about as much time searching for the real killers as OJ Simpson spent while he was filming his long forgotten straight to video prank show, Juiced.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, there's a lot down time on set. All right? It is mostly hurry up and wait. There's plenty of time to go look for killers, especially if it's within a 20 ft circle of a trailer.
ED LARSON
Did you see recently OJ said he doesn't come back to Los Angeles because he's scared he'll run into the murderers?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like it's a Three Stooges movie? Like he's gonna like bump into them, like they're gonna be holding a big plate glass thing and moving things in and out?
MARCUS PARKS
Perhaps the most heartbreaking episode though, just before Jeffrey's prosecution began was when Jeffrey's mother Dorothy visited Freddy Kassab and his wife in February of 1972. Over the course of two hours, the Kassabs slowly and patiently explained all the facts that proved her son had murdered his family. And after listening in silence, Jeffrey's mother simply stood up, went home, and never spoke with the Kassabs again.
ED LARSON
It's a good mother.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Shutters up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And soon after, she moved out to California to be close to her Jeffrey.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I think that my mom would literally fake evidence to get me out of a murder.
ED LARSON
Oh for sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I'd be like stop this. And she'd be like don't worry, I got the ketchup. Don't worry.
MARCUS PARKS
But even after investigators Pruitt and Kearns presented a 3000 page report to the DOJ that included the pursuit of leads in 32 states, Vietnam, Okinawa, Germany, and Puerto Rico-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jesus.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's in addition to 34 lab reports, 699 interviews, 151 sworn statements. Even after all that, the DOJ just sat on the case. Possibly the DOJ was reluctant to bring more bad press to the military while new testimonies were coming in at a seemingly constant basis concerning reprehensible behavior perpetrated by a small number of soldiers on the battlefields of Vietnam. This is 1972.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean the troop wind down is still I think a year away when they really started winding down troops and just started bombing the fuck out of Vietnam all the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But it's three years after My Lai. People haven't quite forgotten about that yet. And you've of course got these vets held these press conferences all the time. So the army does not want bad press.
ED LARSON
No.
MARCUS PARKS
At all.
ED LARSON
They're fucking done with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well I mean they're already dealing with it because it's also the first time anyone's seeing televised evidence of war.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And seeing these things. So investigative reporters are showing the actual murders happening, corpses. They never had this type of access before or the ability to show know what really goes on in a wartime. And so on one side you have the kind of jingoistic aspect of like our boys are gonna go out there and deal with it. And then you go actually see the evidence that it's this like extremely horribly complex, macabre horror show that we're all in the middle of.
ED LARSON
It also extremely disorganized.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It wasn't good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean My Lai was filmed.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It is one of the worst war crimes ever perpetrated by the American military. And it was filmed. And the dudes were fine with it. That's how insane that type of shit was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the second one was Avatar II. Coming for you, Cameron!
MARCUS PARKS
Well finding no help in the DOJ, Kassab tried forcing their hand by going public with an extensive interview to Newsweek. After still no action was taken, Kassab leaked information explicitly making Jeffrey complicit in the murders to the New York Daily News. With that, after various court battles batted the case back and forth because nobody wanted to touch it, North Carolina finally agreed to prosecute Jeffrey MacDonald for all three murders after two years of trying to get this thing to trial. And in August of 1974, a grand jury was convened. And that was by the way four years after the crime had occurred.
ED LARSON
Crazy!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It takes that long.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Jeffrey did not do well during his grand jury testimony. While it seemed as if the Article 32 attorneys got knocked off balance by Bernie Segal's stellar defense, the prosecution now had quite a bit more information on MacDonald and they knew what was coming. Trying to show Jeffrey's more temperamental side prosecutorial attorney Victor Woerheide questioned... It's a great name.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Woerheide.
MARCUS PARKS
Woerheide.
ED LARSON
You think they called him War-hiney? Just to like fuck with him.
MARCUS PARKS
Maybe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, then he's just being like you fuck, that's not my name!
ED LARSON
I prosecute you!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I prosecute you!
MARCUS PARKS
But if he was in the army, I bet they called him Warthog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh sure.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. He questioned Jeffrey about his relationship with his in-laws. MacDonald of course said that they were out to get him because he was moving on with his life, calling Mildred Kassab bizarre and Freddy an alcoholic fanatic. But after Jeffrey's tense testimony, 75 more witnesses took the stand who tore MacDonald's story to pieces. The surgical resident at the emergency room where Jeffrey was treated said that he was not in shock at all that night and his wounds were superficial. And the so-called punctured lung was made by a clean, small, sharp incision done in such a way so as to not permanently damage or even seriously harm the lung.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And would you even fucking believe the guy didn't compliment me? Like how nice I had done that. Like because seriously, it's difficult to do. I had just killed my children. I mean...
ED LARSON
Yeah, when's the last time you punctured your own lung?
MARCUS PARKS
A neighbor then testified that she heard Colette and Jeffrey arguing the night of the murder. They said they heard Colette say something to the effect of 'what do you think I'm gonna be doing while you're doing all this, standing around here doing nothing?' Now this is pure speculation on my part but I think the argument was about Jeffrey's lie concerning the non- existent boxing trip to Russia. And Colette, using her newfound knowledge of narcissistic personalities, had finally had enough of his shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unless she found out something about an affair.
MARCUS PARKS
Might have.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yup.
ED LARSON
Because there were several of them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
So many of them. Next the prosecution brought in a Fayetteville newspaper reporter who was apparently an expert on drug terminology, drug culture, and trip behavior.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What's going on, cool cats?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey guys, how low's it hanging? You catching my drift?
ED LARSON
I'm currently on acid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
His eyes are just two hypno spirals.
MARCUS PARKS
He started by saying that he couldn't think of a single 'head' as they were called at the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they call themselves 'heads', these people who do acid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He said they would never be quote "so uncool as to say the sentence 'acid is groovy'."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So you mean to tell me they had a fucking lit expert?
MARCUS PARKS
They did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Literally like a trill expert come in and be like no one says groovy anymore.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's hilarious.
MARCUS PARKS
They really did. Like a guy who knew the youth culture. Furthermore, the reporter said, quote, "four people who were doing acid couldn't organize a trip to the toilet, let alone murder three people."
ED LARSON
Amen. Dude I remember taking acid, going to Disney World. I just gave people my money and hoped I got ice cream back. You can't do anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
How many rides did you make it on?
ED LARSON
Oh all of them, dude. That was the fucking best. I went back with another guy because he heard about how good of a time we had and then he got the fear and then I couldn't go on anything because I had to fucking tripsit him the whole time.
MARCUS PARKS
Ah god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It really does because also acid comes in waves.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like you take it and it goes away. You start tripping for a while and then you're kind of like is it over? And then it comes back. And every time it comes back, the worse you get at things like taxes, planning an alibi.
ED LARSON
You just wanna have fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's it.
ED LARSON
That's all you wanna do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, we've met some mean, we've met some crazy mean people on acid. Like I've seen some people get crazy on acid but it's not an organized crazy.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You don't immediately become The Riddler when you're on acid.
ED LARSON
Yeah. The worst thing I ever did was try to free my roommate's dogs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again, unorganized.
MARCUS PARKS
Free them from what?
ED LARSON
From the constraints of the house!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jesus Christ.
ED LARSON
They're wild! They need to be free! They didn't wanna go anyway, they loved it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they're just looking at you being like you're on acid. You're all fucked up.
MARCUS PARKS
You can't even see your own prison bars anymore, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is where my food is. My daddy's here.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the cool expert closed by saying that LSD does not normally make people violent but a drug that was amphetamine-based could certainly have that effect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And now that I have the attention to the court, I'd like to drop a little scat. (scatting) Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Objection. Request that the scat be stricken from the record.
ED LARSON
Do not bring those bongos in here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can we actually read that back? Start from (scatting). It's a bad scat, he's doing bad scat (scatting).
MARCUS PARKS
But once the grand jury heard from an FBI forensic scientist named Paul Stombaugh, the prosecution laid out what they believed was what really happened that night between Jeffrey MacDonald and his family. The attack, they surmised, most likely began in the master bedroom. There MacDonald struck his wife Colette during an argument, knocking her down and bloodying her nose. During the ensuing struggle, Colette's blood splashed onto Jeffrey's pajama top. The noise then woke up their eldest daughter, 7 year old Kimberley, who tried to help her mother. While Jeffrey's attention was turned to his daughter though, Colette fetched the club from the utility closet and ineffectively struck Jeffrey, producing the aforementioned bump on the noggin. Quite quickly, Jeffrey wrested the club from Colette's grip but struck his daughter Kimberley first, splattering her blood in the doorway and likely killing her instantly. And of course, they knew that blood was Kimberley's because every member of the MacDonald household had a different blood type.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But while Jeffrey was murdering his daughter, Colette went to the kitchen and grabbed the dull knife but was instead beaten temporarily unconscious with the club. Jeff then picked up his daughter's corpse and took her to bed where he beat her with the club even more. Colette at this point may have regained consciousness enough to run to her toddler's room in a last ditch effort to save her last surviving daughter. But it was there that Jeffrey used the club again, breaking Colette's arms as she tried to defend herself. But after beating her most likely to death right then and there in front of her child, Jeffrey carried her back to the master bedroom and went to the kitchen. There he put on the surgical gloves the family used to wash dishes. It's likely at this point that he caught his breath and concocted his backstory. Still wearing surgical gloves, he wrote the word PIG on the headboard, then removed the glove quickly leaving behind the torn finger that we talked about in the last episode.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But in order to sell it, and I mean really sell it, Jeffrey realized that he had to be the only survivor. So he grabbed the ice pick and murdered his toddler last, then took the weapon to the other two corpses for good measure. Finally he took off his pajama top and stabbed that with the ice picks to sell his story without thinking that there would be no wounds to match the holes. I think he just hoped that people would take his word for it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And it would be like see, the holes. There were holes here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. He then hucked most of the weapons out of the back door into the bushes, called 911, called the MPs, and laid down next to his dead wife as he waited to tell his story.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We will say though at some point during this, in 'A Wilderness of Error', there is like a little note that's like, I don't know if they ever corroborated this. But the idea that this is where Helena Stoeckley's story is trying to like getting inserted into this whole thing. Where she's trying to say apparently at some point that there was a phone call to the apartment during the murders and that she picked up the phone. There was a witness who said that he... And again, it wasn't ever entered into the trial but there was a witness that said I called, a woman picked up the phone, giggled while hearing things were on the other line, he was looking for Jeffrey MacDonald. We'll get to what she actually said why she thought that he was involved in this. But it's just this weird thing where it's like we never really got a call record, we never found anybody that was put into place.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then that's probably because there were some errors in the trial. But we'll get there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we'll definitely get there. Well after all that was laid out in court, Jeffrey MacDonald was brought back one more time at the end so all the evidence could be laid out before him. This time MacDonald was hostile and at times sarcastic, defending the life he led after the murders while also making sure that everyone knew that he had a lot of sex all the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"Me? I've slept with a lot of women. And it doesn't mean anything to me, all right. It has never meant anything to me, it's been very easy for me my whole life. I haven't chased one girl in California and I must have slept with 30 since I've been there because I didn't spend the rest of my life, you know, praying on the graves. You tell me I don't love my family? And that means I must have killed them. That's not true! Oh! It is a lot of shit. I didn't kill Colette. Ah! And I didn't kill Kimmy and I didn't kill Kristie, and I didn't move Colette and I didn't move Kimmy and I didn't move Kristie. And I gave them mouth to mouth breathing and I loved them then and I love them now. And you could all just shove your fucking evidence right up your fucking ass."
MARCUS PARKS
That is direct quote. He told them, in his own grand jury hearing, "you can shove all your fucking evidence right up your ass."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the lawyers were like got him.
ED LARSON
It's just like when you're defending yourself from killing your family, don't talk about how much fucking you do.
MARCUS PARKS
I know. Well he can't help it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's like I was a father for a reason.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It's that need, that need to show his masculinity at all times. And when he has a platform to show it... Cause that's the thing, he wanted to work his masculinity into his explanation of why I didn't cry over the graves, I moved on with my life. You wanna know how I moved on with my life? By fucking all these chicks. You wanna hear about all these fucking chicks that I fucked?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No!
MARCUS PARKS
It's pretty fucking awesome.
ED LARSON
If you're so masculine, you should have killed at least one of the murderers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you would have killed the men.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. Go out and kill a hippie, drag him into your home.
ED LARSON
At least have like a bloody knuckle of something.
MARCUS PARKS
Something. Well I think that with that it's like Jeffrey MacDonald's masculinity wasn't tied to physical violence, it was tied to sex.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like it was all tied to how many women he could get and how gay he wasn't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how you know you're straight.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Did they ever find the scalpel?
MARCUS PARKS
No, it was a disposable scalpel. And remember the-
ED LARSON
They threw out all the fucking trash!
MARCUS PARKS
They threw out all the garbage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The garbage came.
ED LARSON
I'm not against the military police but 'splaining to do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well that was more the CID. It was like a lot of things involved in here. It just seems like yeah, it was just too many cooks.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, too many cooks. And I would imagine a lot of looky loos.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Alot of looky loos.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And with that, Jeffrey MacDonald was indicted on three counts of murder. He was soon after arrested by the FBI as he was stepping off his new boat with his new girlfriend, a woman named Joy that MacDonald described as quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"The most sensual woman I've ever seen since."
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Since Rosalynn Carter. Gotta bang her. I gotta bang her!
MARCUS PARKS
But even so, it still took four more years of appeals, reviews, and motions before Jeffrey's trial was set in July of 1979, following almost an entire decade of freedom and slight celebrity. The hardest part now was finding the jury. Out of all the people contacted, 81% had already heard about the case, which was incredible considering how at the time only 80% of Americans could correctly identify the president.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the president right there. That's a potato with a hat on. Oh no! Who did I vote for then?
ED LARSON
Carter was forgettable though. I love him but he's, you know...
MARCUS PARKS
Ford, now that's a forgettable president.
ED LARSON
Who?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Honestly Ed is having problems with memory.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not been good. I'm honestly pretty concerned. He's sundowning in the afternoon.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it's also 1979. There were a lot of presidential shake ups between 1970-1979. You had Nixon who resigned and then you had Ford coming in and then there was an election that was Ford vs Carter and then it was Carter. The 70s were a busy time. A lot of people had a lot of shit on their mind and most people were just trying to stay alive because there was so much violence.
ED LARSON
And lots of diet pills.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A lot of diet pills.
MARCUS PARKS
Many diet pills which led to more violence.
ED LARSON
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But great waists.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's why you can't thrift.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't thrift as a fat man.
ED LARSON
There's nothing that fits you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nothing is built for us men.
ED LARSON
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like before 1995, right, literally it was all like how was everybody so skinny?
ED LARSON
Well you gotta go to like Tennessee and thrift. You can't thrift in LA.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
There's nothing for us.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
You gotta go where the big guys are.
MARCUS PARKS
And also you guys are talking about thrifting in like 2001 for 70s clothing. You go thrifting now, it's all shit that was worn when we were in high school.
ED LARSON
Yeah, it's all Looney Tunes t-shirts.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My god. My god, time is cruel.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now it's like 80 bucks for a t-shirt of like Bugs Bunny and the Tasmanian Devil with backwards hat and backwards pants with their arms crossed.
ED LARSON
Dressed like Kriss Kross, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man. I know a child.
ED LARSON
I'd love to get my hand on some Zubaz though.
MARCUS PARKS
What are Zubaz?
ED LARSON
Zubaz, the zebra striped pants.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. They're back.
ED LARSON
Are they back?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Zubaz are back. Yeah, they are back.
ED LARSON
Thank god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No dude, they are catering to us 40 year olds hard. Look at me, I'm dressed like an evil child.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
No the trial was shaky, not least because the original prosecutor had died of a heart attack. Woerheide.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Woerheide.
MARCUS PARKS
Woerheide, he died of a heart attack.
ED LARSON
That's what happens when you have a 10 year trial.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And he'd been replaced by a 34 year old attorney named James Blackburn who had never tried a murder case.
ED LARSON
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
But as opposed to the Article 32 hearing, Bernie Segal could no longer steamroll the process. And this is kind of where Errol Morris has some problems and I kind of agree with him on this because the judge put his thumb down heavily on the side of the prosecution.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's a lot of issues in the trial. So he basically, so what had had happened was it seemed was that at some point there was an argument between the judge and the defense. And once that happened, he said fuck them and then sandbagged them. Every single time objection against the defense, he let it go. He did everything. He also cut down on their closing statements. He did a bunch of weird shit that like... So now I can see why what Errol Morris is really saying a lot in the documentary is that they left a lot of shit out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And yes, it is still sort of overwhelming, the evidence against Jeffrey MacDonald, but he didn't necessarily get a fair trial.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
They just wanted him in prison.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well yeah because they've been chasing this for a fucking decade.
ED LARSON
It's just like when they threw OJ in jail for the fucking trophies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was a backup.
ED LARSON
They were like we were embarrassed, we look like idiots, fucking lock him up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we're gonna get him now essentially.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And now it's hello, Twitter world.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey there, Twitter world.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And with his actually almost kind of like in the pocket political takes. He's like pro-abortion obviously, you know what I mean?
ED LARSON
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He says kill the whole mother. It's incredible.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Bernie Segal's attempts to discredit FBI examiner Paul Stombaugh failed. Because that's the other thing too is like yeah, he didn't get a fair trial but Bernie kind of biffed it at the same time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It all, it just... You know.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was time.
MARCUS PARKS
And when Bernie tried to have the issue of Esquire with Lee Marvin on the cover stricken from the record, large excerpts from the issue were instead read to the jury. Likewise, a hypnosis session with Jeffrey that had been edited into a 90 minute tape was not allowed in court even though it contained extremely detailed descriptions of each attacker down to the length of the floppy hat's brim.
ED LARSON
The length of the brim?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
15-20 inches across, if you're wondering.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh, what's the girth?
ED LARSON
I mean what is she at a football game?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well because then he's showing look how detailed this is.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Look how detailed my memories are.
ED LARSON
Yeah but that's too big.
MARCUS PARKS
It is too big of a hat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a big hat.
ED LARSON
That's a huge hat!
MARCUS PARKS
A 20 inch brim is incredibly large.
ED LARSON
It's not a hat you wear to a murder.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it's not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it's a hat you wear to Coachella.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. No, no, it's floppy, it's a big dumb stupid floppy hat. Really the only-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Trust no bitch with no floppy hat, man.
MARCUS PARKS
I got my own experiences with floppy hats.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa.
ED LARSON
What happened?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm not gonna say.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
No floppy hats.
ED LARSON
I like floppy hats.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're allowed.
ED LARSON
Bucket hats.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're fine.
MARCUS PARKS
Bucket hats aren't floppy hats.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Technically they're under structured hats.
MARCUS PARKS
They really are.
ED LARSON
Are you talking about the ones that got the string underneath and stuff like that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And they're just too big.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, what they're gonna put on you when you're like the greeter at the nursing home.
ED LARSON
Can't wait.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hi!
ED LARSON
Did you bring fish?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I gotta check your pants.
MARCUS PARKS
Well really the only new thing that the defense was allowed to bring to court was a guy named James Milne, who claimed to have seen the four intruders the night of the murders. Ultimately though that wasn't enough. What finally swayed the jurors were the interrogation tapes in which Jeffrey came off as cocky, arrogant, petulant, and dishonest. And thank Christ for that. Because much like the Casey Anthony case, some of the jurors were leaning towards innocent because they said that most of the prosecution's evidence was quote "too confusing".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah because it's spun out of a bunch of weird lies.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And again it's both a sign of a good lawyer and a sign of a bad lawyer.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the kind of idea is that you have to keep their attention. They were talking about the one thing that the judge was doing too is not taking any breaks.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So the jury was like falling asleep. They were sitting there because he just wanted to get this fucking done.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And of course that's what happened in the Casey Anthony case is like once the jurors came out and they talked to the jurors, like one of them said like the defense told a better story.
ED LARSON
Who cares?
MARCUS PARKS
Exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what it is. That's the whole point of a trial.
ED LARSON
Lies are great stories! Fiction is wonderful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it can be very, truth is boring a lot of the time.
MARCUS PARKS
In the end though, it was Bernie Segal himself who choked when it came to making the case. Instead of a grand performance like Johnnie Cochran's 'if it doesn't fit, you must acquit' closing statement, Bernie rambled for three hours and didn't even discuss the specific points of the defense's argument.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. The other lawyer was pretty salty in the Errol Morris documentary because he was talking basically how he's like I was supposed to close.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like essentially. But then this guy blew the light and then he just said you've already wasted three hours and 10 minutes of your three hour and 15 minutes. And then the prosecution, they said you know what? We'll give them 10 minutes of our time. Which then made the prosecution look even better.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then the last dude had to come out of a hole trying to do a big wrap up. Because he did a thing, he's like you know they say it takes 20 minutes to save a human life. Let's see if I could do it in 10. That was like his opening line.
ED LARSON
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
Jeez. And so after a seven week trial, Jeffrey MacDonald was found guilty of second degree murder in the deaths of Colette and Kimberley, while his youngest daughter's murder was deemed first degree because the jury felt that it was a calculated act designed to support the cover story. Consequently, the judge sentenced MacDonald to three life terms in prison served consecutively, which is the harshest possible sentence under federal law. Now incredibly, Jeffrey MacDonald was released on bail in 1980 after an appeals court decided that his constitutional right to a speedy trial had been violated because of the two year gap between the army CID report in 1972 and the grand jury in 1974. The waters were further muddied by the return of Helena Stoeckley, who was now saying that her friends had murdered the MacDonald family because Jeffrey refused to supply methadone to a sex and drug satanic cult, unimaginatively titled the Black Cult.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh okay.
ED LARSON
When did someone finally shut her up?
MARCUS PARKS
This is like the last... When she fucking died of hepatitis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That was it. That's when they finally stopped bringing her back.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well she had a lot of... It was just weird, right? Because that's again, Errol Morris brings it up. She just keeps coming back and keeps coming back to the story. The way she positions this, she says that apparently Jeffrey MacDonald was a guy that was trying to shut down heroin use on Fort Bragg by making a petition that people that come in and out of Fort Bragg need to be checked for track marks. It was this like whole thing. I don't know if that... Apparently that was a thing.
MARCUS PARKS
Maybe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I don't know. You know what I mean? Again it's just muddy, muddy, muddy, muddy shit.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well and also she said that that cult was still active and they had committed 13 more murders since that night.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. And it was all in the basement of the World Trade Center, September 10th, 2001.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this is during of course when the Satanic Panic was just beginning, this is especially when satanic cults were like a big thing.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
This is the whole like Son of Sam shit, you know, where people were saying that the Process Church of the Final Judgment had been behind the Son of Sam murders. So when people said the word Satanic cult, certain assholes, certain idiots would listen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they were ready to go.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then remember, so between this, so they immediately were gonna file appeal and that's when 'Fatal Vision' dropped, that's when the TV movie came out about his story. And so like that kind of decimated anything that he would do after the fact, which then he would lament and scream about for the rest of his life.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Meanwhile Jeffrey moved to California, bought a $200,000 condo at the Mammoth Mountain ski resort, and traded in his Maserati for a jaguar.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Where did he get all this money?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
Doctor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he's a doctor.
ED LARSON
Ah, I keep forgetting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he's a doctor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Four tongue depressors, you can make $100,000.
MARCUS PARKS
But thankfully 18 months after Jeffrey was released, the Supreme Court ruled that his right to a speedy trial had not been violated. Jeffrey was sent back to jail where he suggested that if a biopic was ever made, he should be played by Robert Redford. However there was no biopic, there was a TV miniseries made and Jeffrey was instead played by the fantastic Gary Cole, probably best known for the role of Bill Lumbergh in Office Space.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah. I'm gonna need you to murder your wife.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let me see, did you get the TPS report in? Cause if not, I'm gonna murder your family.
MARCUS PARKS
I love Gary Cole so much. He was the voice of Harvey Birdman in Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.
ED LARSON
Hell yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He was amazing in VEEP. Gary Cole, incredible.
ED LARSON
He knocks out of the park every time.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I guarantee he lives in this neighborhood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I saw him at Ralph's!
MARCUS PARKS
No shit?
ED LARSON
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh my god!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I didn't say anything though.
MARCUS PARKS
No. Well you can't say-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know you! I know you! Do you know me?
MARCUS PARKS
I'm still on the lookout for Henry Rollins, I know he shops at our Ralph's.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You gotta be careful, all right, because he'll steal your fucking wife.
ED LARSON
Do you think people accidentally call him Gary Coleman?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's just like I'm sick of getting his mail. I'm sick of these threats.
MARCUS PARKS
To this day though, Jeffrey MacDonald, true to the narcissist's nature, refuses to admit any sort of guilt, any sort of responsibility 52 years later. But Jeffrey MacDonald is done. Appeals are no longer possible. So it is absolutely positive that Jeffrey MacDonald will be held responsible for his crimes, whether he believes he deserves it or not. And he will rightfully die alone in prison.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Damn. Wow.
ED LARSON
(applause)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Be careful. Be careful, don't kill your family, you might get punished. This is an example.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right? That's the worst part of this. Honestly I mean in this country you can't even get away with that anymore.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Do you think he's popular in prison?
MARCUS PARKS
I would imagine he's a massive asshole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
They should make him be a doctor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel there's... People are probably still going up to him being like what's this?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I got this lump, what's this?
MARCUS PARKS
I mean he might, like if someone gets shivved he might powder them up or something, bandage them up.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get some good graces in at the end of your life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, just something good.
ED LARSON
How is he still alive? This was all so long ago.
MARCUS PARKS
He's just one of those fucking people, man.
ED LARSON
He's in his 80s or something?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Let me see exactly how old he is. 79.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
ED LARSON
79!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's still talking, I saw he was on Larry King like four years ago.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're gonna do some plugs. We did this, we're at the end.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We got more series coming up, we got fucking spooky season coming up. We're not getting into spooky quite yet.
MARCUS PARKS
Not quite yet but we got a big series coming up next week that you guys are gonna be really excited about. We're gonna be covering a spree killer that you guys have been asking for for a long time.
ED LARSON
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're so excited.
ED LARSON
Spree killers, all right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then if you're in the Atlanta area, all right, I'm gonna be doing this little dinner party that I'm hosting, I don't quite know yet what I am doing-
ED LARSON
You're inviting people to a dinner party?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh it's an event! ATLdonnerparty.com. It's called The Donner Party. We're gonna have cannibal-based food. It's real.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's October 11th at Ammazza in Atlanta. Go check it out.
ED LARSON
So what do you mean by cannibal-based? You're gonna eat people?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. It's gonna be shaped like people.
ED LARSON
Very nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Henry, don't eat anymore eyeballs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was bad for my health.
MARCUS PARKS
They're bad for you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was really bad for my health.
MARCUS PARKS
They're really bad for you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it's gonna be less adventurous, it's more just what it's shaped like.
MARCUS PARKS
Like I know we've talked about like being the organ meat boys.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That we're gonna go out and have fun with organ meats.
ED LARSON
Well that's fun, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But no eyeballs though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it was bad for me. I had like the shit-
ED LARSON
So is it gonna be like a burger shaped like a foot?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a long story.
MARCUS PARKS
It's gonna be a lot of meatloaf.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
A lot of meatloaf.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, it's not a lot-
MARCUS PARKS
Cause you can shape a meatloaf into anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's more than meatloaf.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Check it out, all right. Also come to the LPN Beach Blanket Bingo October 20th, San Diego, The Balboa Theater.
ED LARSON
I'm very excited for that.
MARCUS PARKS
It's gonna be great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's gonna be very nice.
ED LARSON
I'm very excited. Please come. I think there's still some tickets left, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
ED LARSON
I think we were almost sold out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come on, let's go.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we're getting real close. Get your tickets now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're getting close.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Get those tickets, all right? Check it out.
ED LARSON
Check it out, baby!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bye fuckers!
ED LARSON
Bye!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan!
ED LARSON
Whoa. Be good to yourselves.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Hail Gein, everyone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail me. If you got a fucking second. I didn't kill my family!
MARCUS PARKS
Good job.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey.
ED LARSON
Yeah, good job.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Always down the pipe.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. In fact, you gave your dog butt bleeding pills this morning.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I had to.
MARCUS PARKS
So good job.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Was the ass bleeding for how many times it bit me this weekend?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, Carmy's fine.
ED LARSON
Oh okay, good.
MARCUS PARKS
Stay away from that dog.