Joe McGinniss Has Had It With Murder

Joe McGinniss--author of the best seller “Fatal Vision,” the story of Jeffrey MacDonald, a Green Beret and Long Beach doctor convicted of killing his pregnant wife and two young daughters--says his newest book, “Blind Faith,” is the last one he will write about a murder.

“I think my capacity for empathy is over,” he explains. “There is nothing worse than a writer not feeling as sorry as he should for the people who are hurting.”

“Blind Faith” examines the case of Robert O. Marshall, a Toms River, N.J., insurance salesman deeply in debt from gambling losses and enamored of the town Jezebel.

He decides to hire a hit man to kill his wife, “the beautiful Maria,” as he called her, collect the $1.5 million in life insurance he bought for her, then persuade his three teen-age sons that they too could learn to love their new mother.

The book, already bought as a miniseries, is a compelling yarn that involves hints of corruption in New Jersey, two hit men from Louisiana, forged insurance policies and a town, which, 24 hours after the murder, turns its back on a pillar of the community, a leader in the country club set, chairman of United Way.

A Legal Nightmare

“It was just the opposite of the MacDonald case,” McGinniss says. “All of MacDonald’s friends rallied around, convinced he was innocent.”

The MacDonald case proved to be a legal nightmare for McGinniss. MacDonald sued and McGinniss agreed to pay $325,000 in an out-of-court settlement.

But after complicated litigation, MacDonald collected only $50,000 for himself, plus $92,000 in legal fees. A judge ordered that some of the money should go to the mother of MacDonald’s murdered wife, as well as MacDonald’s mother.

McGinniss maintains that he, too, believed MacDonald was innocent until he examined the evidence. He then concluded, and let his book reflect that MacDonald was, indeed, the man who killed his family.

Except for the principals, McGinniss uses pseudonyms for other characters in “Blind Faith,” though the real names are all part of the public record.

Considered an ideal couple with three blond sons, the Marshalls were teasingly called Ken and Barbie by their friends.

McGinniss says he stumbled onto the notion for a book when a Toms River woman, a stranger, wrote him a long letter. “She had about 90% of it right two months after the murder,” he says. “The letter was very compelling.”

He says he doesn’t know why he even read the letter. After “Fatal Vision” aired in 1984 as a two-part miniseries, he was deluged with letters from people asking him to write about various cases.

“I got hundreds of letters from people whose second cousin was murdered or from someone who was beaten up in a barroom brawl and they wanted me to write a book about it,” he says. “I was just throwing them away.

A Town Without Pity

“What first interested me about the Marshall case was what kind of a place was this where a guy who had lived there 20 years, this pillar of the community, was automatically presumed guilty by his friends within 24 hours of the murder.

“I was also interested in doing something about the social mores of a town in the ‘80s, particularly a town that didn’t have any kind of distinctive identity. It seemed to be a town transformed by materialism.

“It was also a book about these three boys and how they coped when they learned their mother, truly beloved by them, was dead and then they heard their father is a suspect and then they see him convicted.”

McGinniss’ first book, “The Selling of the President,” became a best seller 20 years ago when he was 26. The book chronicled how Richard Nixon defeated the late Hubert H. Humphrey.

“The difference between illusion and reality has always been a theme of mine,” says McGinniss, whose other works include a novel, “The Dream Team,” and a chronicle of life in Alaska, “Going to Extremes.”

In “Blind Faith,” he says, “the illusion was Good Housekeeping come to life. Maria bought that whole ideal, that she was an ornament attached to the husband, that her job was to give them a happy home. For that, she paid with her life.”

For the children--ages 13, 16 and 17 when the murder occurred--it was a fairy-tale life of Mustangs and Jeeps, swim meets and country-club lunches with Mom and Dad.

How the Kids Cope

“This is not a story about their father,” McGinniss says. “I’m not interested in exploring the recesses of his mind like I was with MacDonald. I’m interested in the story of how these kids grappled with the worst sort of shock.

“There was a monster under their bed and it was their father. And they had to look him in the eye and not blink. It stripped them of every illusion they ever had.”

The youngest boy, John, still does not believe his father is guilty. “When I talked to them, John was still desperately clinging like a little boy lost at sea to the only thing he had left,” says McGinniss, who with his wife, Nancy Doherty, is raising five children, three from a previous marriage.

The other two Marshall sons, Chris and Roby, believe their father had their mother killed, a mother who put notes in their lunches, always kissed them goodby and fixed them pancakes for breakfast even when they got up at 11 a.m. They will not answer their father’s letters nor speak to him.

“They feel their father is already dead,” McGinniss says.

The father is on Death Row in Trenton, N.J., awaiting the outcome of appeals. He still insists he is innocent, clinging to a story that he pulled into a secluded rest stop on the Jersey State Parkway to check a leaking tire. He claimed that someone hit him on the head, then shot Maria, leaving two bullet holes so close you could cover them with a half-dollar. Marshall claims he was robbed of his Atlantic City winnings, then staggered onto the highway to get help.

The tire, slashed after it was parked, showed no evidence of a slow leak; there were brightly lit places within a few miles he could have stopped.

Then there was the mistress he planned to marry. He had bought yet another life insurance policy, this one for $100,000, that very day. Maria’s signature had been forged on documents to raise cash.

Prosecutors presented evidence linking him to the Louisiana hired guns, one of whom was granted immunity to testify. The other, accused of firing the fatal shots, was acquitted by the jury that found Marshall guilty. Another man, who acted as go-between, received a life sentence for conspiracy to commit murder.

Organized Crime

McGinniss hints in the book that the prosecutor’s office could have taken another tack that would have involved more people. But he declines to say more.

“If I wanted to write a book about organized crime in New Jersey, I could have, but I think it would have been less interesting than what these boys are going through,” he says. “Political corruption is everywhere. What is unique is the situation these three kids find themselves in. Their love has kept them very close even though they all viewed the case differently at first.”

The children received some of the insurance money, as the heirs, and will receive more. Roby is moving to California to help with the miniseries based on the book.

McGinniss, who teaches writing at Bennington College and lives in a small town in western Massachusetts, says his next book will be about Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat with whom he is still negotiating.

“I want to do this, because I have no sense of what it must be like to have had this extraordinary life, of being the little brother and having everything handed to you and then become the family spokesman,” McGinniss says. “This will not be a book about Chappaquiddick. It will be about the man and his life.”