Joseph McGuinniss And The Jeffrey MacDonald Murder Case

     Joe McGuinniss was born in Manhattan, New York on December 9, 1942. Raised by well-to-do parents in New York City and Los Angeles, he graduated in 1964 from Holly Cross University in Worcester, Massachusetts. After failing to get into Columbia University's graduate school of journalism he became a staff reporter for the Worcester Telegram. 

     Following stints at The Philadelphia Bulletin and The Philadelphia Inquirer, Mr. McGuinniss published his first book in 1968. The Selling of the President, a nonfiction account of the marketing of presidential candidate Richard Nixon became a bestseller and remained on The New York Times bestseller list for six months. That book established the 26-year-old author's reputation as a serious investigative journalist and landed him a job as writer-in-residence at the Los Angeles Harold Examiner.

The Jeffrey MacDonald Murder Case

     On February 17, 1970 Green Beret Captain and Army surgeon Jeffrey MacDonald reported a deadly invasion of his home at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. At the scene Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) officers found MacDonald's wife Colette and his two daughters, Kimberly and Kristen, stabbed to death. Jeffrey MacDonald himself had superficial puncture wounds. According to him, he struggled with the hippie intruders who murdered his family.

     Following an internal military review of the case Captain MacDonald was cleared of wrongdoing. But in January 1975 a federal grand jury indicted him on three counts of first-degree murder. He vigorously maintained his innocence and stuck to his original version of the mass murder.

     At some point after MacDonald's indictment Joe McGuinniss entered the case as a journalist who intended to write a book exonerating the Green Beret officer. The writer acquired access into the inner circle of the MacDonald defense team by gaining MacDonald's trust as a loyal friend. In reality, the more McGuinniss learned about the case the more convinced he became of MacDonald's guilt. The true crime writer believed that MacDonald, a sociopath who wanted to be free of  his family, murdered his wife and daughters in a homicidal frenzy aided by his abuse of diet pills.

     In 1979 when the jury found MacDonald guilty as charged, Mr. McGuinniss, to maintain his position within the MacDonald defense team, feigned shock and outrage. But when McGuinniss' book on the case, Fatal Vision, came out in 1983 it was Jeffery MacDonald and his supporters who were shocked and outraged by the author's duplicity. In the book the author made a strong case for MacDonald's guilt.

     Shortly after the publication of Fatal Vision, a book that quickly became a runaway bestseller, Jeffery MacDonald sued the true crime writer for beach of contract.

     When the first of its kind lawsuit went to trial several well-known true crime authors such as Joseph Wambaugh and Norman Mailer testified on McGuinniss' behalf as expert witnesses. According to Wambaugh and Mailer, McGinniss had done what any serious investigative journalist would do to get to the bottom of a case. In other words, a true crime writer has no duty to be honest with the person he's writing about. At the conclusion of the trial some jurors bought McGuinniss' defense but others did not. This led to a hung jury.

    The insurance company for the publisher of Fatal Vision, shocked and concerned that some of the jurors had sided with a man who had killed his wife and two children over the journalist who had written the book about the mass murder, settled the suit out of court for $325,000. In the court of public opinion Joseph McGuinniss did not come off as a likable person. Ordinary people did not approve of his journalistic trickery.

     In 1989 journalist Janet Malcolm wrote a long piece about the MacDonald-McGuinniss suit in The New Yorker. A year later the article came out as a book called The Journalist and the Murderer. Malcolm's defining of the journalist/subject relationship as inherently exploitive itself became a source of debate. Regarding the MacDonald/McGuinniss relationship Janet Malcolm famously wrote: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."

     Jerry Allen Potter and Fred Bott published a book called Fatal Justice that argued for MacDonald's innocence. According to these authors, McGuinniss's book is full of substantive errors and groundless speculation.

     Regardless of one's take on the MacDonald's guilt or innocence, Fatal Vision is an exceptionally well written account of a fascinating murder case. It also popularized the concept of the sociopathic killer who appears normal on the outside but in reality is a pathologically narcissistic liar without feelings of guilt.

     Joe McGuinniss followed Fatal Vision with two bestselling true crime books. Blind Faith, published in 1989 is about a New Jersey man who hired a hit man to murder his wife, and Cruel Doubt, published in 1991, features teenage murderers inspired by the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons.

     The method McGuinniss used to research his 2011 book The Rogue, a biography of Sarah Palin, also stirred controversy. In 2010 he rented a house in Wasilla, Alaska next door to the former vice presidential candidate. Critics called McGuinniss a peeping Tom, and Palin accused him of stalking her and her family. The book, failing to break new ground about a person the public had lost interest in, did not make the bestseller list.

     On March 10, 2014 Joe McGuinniss died in a Worcester, Massachusetts hospital from prostate cancer. At his death at age 71 he was living in Pelham with his second wife Nancy Doherty. He was survived by three children.

     Fatal Vision is considered by many to be a true crime classic equal to Joseph Wambaugh's Onion Field, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song.

     In December 2018 the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals denied the 75-year-old Jeffrey MacDonald his latest bid for a new trial.

     Jeffery MacDonald remains in prison and continues to maintain his innocence. 

A Biographer's Quest For Truth

While I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is. And finding facts--through reading documents or through interviewing and re-interviewing--can't be rushed; it takes time. Truth takes time.

Robert A. Caro, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, 2019. Cara is best known for his multi-volume biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Team Journalism

It has become a cliche of our business/profession/craft that journalists are supposed to build themselves as individual "brands." But journalism--especially the hardest stuff, like investigative journalism--benefits immensely from institutional support, including a technical staff that knows how to make the most of a database, editors and fact-checkers who fortify the stories, graphic designers who help make complicated subjects comprehensible and, not least, lawyers who are steeped in freedom-of-information and First Amendment law.

Bill Kerr, The New York Times, October 27, 2013 

The Interviewer/Interviewee Relationship

     Journalist Janet Malcolm wrote a book called The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) about how true crime writer Joe McGinnis, in writing his book Fatal Vision (1983) lived with the Jeffrey MacDonald defense team as they prepared for the Green Beret doctor's murder trial. MacDonald was being tried for the 1970 murder of his pregnant wife and two daughters. The defendant and his legal team had every reason to expect that McGinnis' book would be sympathetic to MacDonald's claim of innocence. The jury found the doctor guilty, and when Fatal Vision came out, the insiders who had invited the journalist into the inner circle of the defense were shocked. McGinnis portrayed MacDonald as a sociopathic, narcissistic, cold-blooded killer who had murdered his family to free himself of the constraints of family life. (Fatal Vision is ranked 97th in Modern Library's 100 Best Works of Nonfiction.)

     In The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm's first sentence reveals an ugly truth about the relationship between the journalist and the people he interviews: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

     The following quotes are from other journalists about the art of the interview and the relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee:

It is a very strange way to make a living, to go into other people's lives and scrape those lives for what you can use for your stories and then go out and display those scrapings in front of others.
Bob Greene

Many reporters, especially in the era of celebrity journalism, far from betraying the subjects in their pieces, praise them and cater rather slavishly to them--so that the reporter's fortunes and his subject's rise together.
Renata Adler

The secret to the art of interviewing--and it is an art--is to let the other person think he's interviewing you. You tell him about yourself, and slowly you spin your web so that he tells you everything. (In his infamous article, "Answered Prayers," Truman Capote betrayed members of high-society who had befriended him.)
Truman Capote

I don't even like interviewing people, because I feel once I've interviewed someone, it's much harder to write critically about them unless you bring up every critical feeling you have in the course of the interview.
Norman Mailer

Walking up to a rank stranger who probably doesn't want to talk to you, introducing yourself cold, then making certain that you're the one in charge and what you're conducting is not a friendly conversation but an interview--these are not natural, or even particularly friendly, ways to behave and not a piece of cake to perform.
Beverly Lowry

The Journalistic Legacy of Watergate

     Investigative reporting has taken on every aspect of American society--from government, politics, business and finance to education, social welfare, culture and sports--and has won the lion's share of each year's journalism prizes. No matter how unpopular the news media may sometimes be, there has been, ever since Watergate, an expectation that the press would hold accountable those with power and influence over the rest of us. As Jon Marshal wrote in 2011, Watergate "shaped the way investigative reporting is perceived and practiced and how political leaders and the public respond to journalists."

     Woodward and Bernstein's techniques were hardly original. But they became central to the ethos of investigative reporting: Become an expert on your subject. Knock on doors and talk to sources in person. Protect the confidentiality of sources when necessary. Never rely on a single source. Find documents. Follow the money. Pile one hard-won detail on top of another until a pattern becomes discernible. [For the most part, investigative journalism no longer exists. With few exceptions, an independent press has been replaced by lapdog print journalism, social media, and cable news sucking up to governmental power.] 

Leonard Downie Jr., Washington Post, June 7, 2012 

Revisionist True Crime Books: The Nonsense Genre

     There are  a number of reasons why historic, celebrated crimes are vulnerable to revision by true crime writers. For one thing, a new angle on an old case, particularly a famous one, comprises an attractive publishing opportunity. Since Americans tend to be more interested in injustice than justice, it's hard for hack writers to resist turning cold-blooded killers into victims of heavy-handed prosecutors and cops. Since complicated, intrigue-filled mysteries are more fascinating than cases involving more straight-forward, obvious explanations, revisionist true crime writers prefer conspiracies over cases that feature lone-wolf criminals.

     Putting together a phony conspiracy theory requires a certain kind of journalistic tunnel vision. The author must carefully avoid the evidence that does not fit into his narrative, and the more outrageous the theory, the more facts the writer has to sweep under the rug or explain away.

     Sometimes in their eagerness to plug a new conspiracy into a historic case, revisionist writers, by ignoring the truth, deprive themselves of a more fascinating, truthful account. The Lindbergh kidnapping case is a good example of replacing a dramatic true story with a lot of conspiracy nonsense including the assertion that Charles and Anne Lindbergh murdered their baby then covered it up by framing an innocent man who was executed for kidnapping their son. 

Investigative Journalism: A Dying Profession

     With the weak economy, and competition from cable TV, news bloggers and other forms of online reporting, only a handful of newspapers can afford the costly services of highly trained and experienced investigative reporters. Investigative journalism has been in decline since the Watergate days of Woodward and Bernstein. Today, some of the biggest news scoops (EG John Edward's love child) are scored by reporters with the grocery store tabloids. In terms of political reporting, the fourth estate, as a journalistic check on governmental power, is not holding up its end of the bargain. This is particularly true with regard to the print media. In the world of cable TV investigative reporting, the U. S. Department of Justice recently charged Fox News reporter James Rosen with being an accomplice to espionage for merely talking to a government leaker.

     Today, what passes for investigative reporting is often hack journalism that reflects the reality that just because a story is based on facts doesn't make it true. For example, it may be a fact that some drunken yahoo filed a police report claiming that space aliens gave him a saucer ride from Parkersburg, West Virginia to Washington, D. C. But just because the story involves a first-hand account backed up by a police document, doesn't make it true.

     The following are quotes by investigative reporters on the stature and nature of this fading profession:

We really didn't define reporting as investigative until 1964. That's when the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting went to the old Philadelphia Bulletin for an expose on how police officers were running a numbers racket out of the station house. Before then, that category had been called "Local Reporting."

Mike McQueen

General reporters [as opposed to investigative reporters] usually lack detailed knowledge of the subject they are reporting on. They are in a hurry. They work on stories chosen by their news desks from an agenda set by major news sources and media (local or national). They seek quotes from spokesmen: managing directors, police superintendents, public relations officers, secretaries of organizations and pressure groups.

David Spark

One good reason many good reporters stay away from [investigative reporting] is they don't like hassling people nor do they want to be hassled. That's part of the job I don't like either, but I'm willing to put up with it because I believe such work is important. I don't like confronting government figures with the fact they have lied about something or that they have done something irregular or illegal. It's an unpleasant experience. I don't particularly like the sneers I get back from such people.

Jack Nelson


An investigative reporter must have brass, for once it is discovered what he is up to, he is bound to be confronted with solid opposition. Furthermore, even after having developed a substantial product, he must be willing to fight to have it published....Then he's got to defend it when it's attacked by those who may suffer by the exposures contained in the story or series.

Peter Bridge


I think investigative journalism has become a lot rarer because it takes time and it takes a lot of resources and it's just harder to do. It's a lot easier to do these quick easy stories.

Russ Kirk


Investigative reporting is a money-loser for journalistic corporations. It's expensive, stories my not pan out, and you make a lot of enemies.

Burt Glass


You might start a story thinking you are going to look at how the city health department administers vaccines but...find that the story's really about the city's mismanagement in general.

Bob Woodward


I tell them [story sources] how I work. I tell them they have to go on record. I tell them I am going to be asking other people about them, that even though I find them really nice people, I am going to have to check them out....I say to them, "Once you agree to talk to me, that's it. You don't really have control, but you do have control to the degree you want to participate. And once you are on the record, if there's something you don't want me to know, then don't tell me because its going to be on the record."

Susan Kelleher

Secondary sources are most useful when they lead to primary documents. The legislative hearing transcript would be a primary document, as would be a real estate deed, political candidate's campaign finance report, lawsuit, insurance policy, discharge certificate from the military. Documents can be just like human sources can be, because, after all, documents are prepared by humans. However, unlike humans, documents do not talk back, do not claim to have been misquoted.

Steve Weinberg

Those Lying Bastards

     The art of politics is the art of lying. Only extremely stupid people believe what politicians say. To get elected, a candidate has to lie his or her way into office. Abama, in talking his way into the White House, told more than a few whoppers. Promising Americans that under his rule there would be more governmental transparency was, pardon the expression, a load of crap.

     The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), passed in 1966, was intended to give citizens access to documents generated by the federal government. There were, ofcourse, exceptions or exclusions such as papers related to national security and other "sensitive" governmental matters. In 1987, U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese established an informal Department of Justice policy that directed his bureaucrats to withhold, as "sensitive," the release of documents that could either expose criminal informants or alert subjects that they were under federal investigation. Under this informal policy, a FOIA requestor denied documents on these grounds can attempt to get the Department of Justice determination overruled in court.

     The Department of Justice under Obama wants to allow DOJ bureaucrats, in situations outlined by Edwin Meese, to simply deny the existance of requested documents, papers that do in fact exist. And they want to make this policy either a formal regulation or elevate it to federal law. In other words, the Obama people want the legal authority to lie to the American people. Under this new rule or law, a denied FOIA requester has no recourse in a court of law.

     If government officials aren't controlled, this is what they do. The last thing elected officials and their bureaucrats want is transparency. If we knew what they were doing, or not doing, we would vote them out, and maybe even stop paying our taxes. If members of congress do not kill this proposal, many of them will end up spending more time with their families, or applying for lobbying jobs.