Photograph: The News & ObserverĪt around 3.30am MacDonald called the emergency services, while apparently drifting in and out of consciousness. MacDonald himself received relatively minor injuries except for a single stab wound that punctured his lung.ĭaughter Kimberley. Two-year-old Kristen was stabbed over 30 times in the back, chest and neck with a knife and an ice pick. The couple's five-year-old daughter Kimberley was beaten across the head with a club and stabbed multiple times in the neck. MacDonald's 26-year-old pregnant wife, Colette, had both her arms broken and was stabbed repeatedly in the chest and neck with a paring knife and an ice pick. At some time before 3.30am someone brutally attacked the MacDonald family in their home at 544 Castle Drive on what was then the open military base of Fort Bragg. Here are some basic facts on which all sides agree. In turn, all the media attention produced a seminal debate on the nature of journalistic ethics.
Dishonesty was employed to establish truth, and justice often appeared less than impartial. A small library of books, a TV mini-series, countless documentaries and a forest of newsprint have all tried to explain what happened 43 years ago inside the home of Captain Jeffrey MacDonald, then 26 and a promising surgeon in the Special Forces.Īt the heart of the crime and its coverage were capital letter concepts like Truth, Justice, Impartiality and Honesty but each one of these high ideals seemed to be in conflict with the others.
The killings that took place in the early hours of that morning and their protracted aftermath have cast an ever-lengthening shadow over not just America's criminal justice system – it is the longest-running criminal case in US history – but also its national media. That prize goes to one committed on 17 February 1970 at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
But although he spent several years working on that investigation, it's not this crime that has maintained the most insistent hold on his intellect and imagination. T he Oscar-winning film-maker Errol Morris made his name in 1988 with The Thin Blue Line, a bravura piece of documentary-making that gained the release from prison of an innocent man who had been on death row.
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