Two Accounts of a Dark Act Collide at Parole Hearing

There were no greetings, no courtesies extended. Inside a cramped federal prison interview room near the Appalachian border between Maryland and West Virginia, three graying adversaries picked up this week where they left off 25 years ago, sparring over an infamous murder case that haunts them still.

When the two-hour confrontation was over, Jeffrey MacDonald, 61, a former Army Green Beret doctor who is serving three consecutive life terms for the 1970 murders of his wife and two daughters, was no closer to freedom.

MacDonald, an inmate in the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution at Cumberland, for the first time had asked for a parole hearing to seek an early release. But two U.S. Parole Commission hearing examiners informed him Tuesday that they would urge the commission to keep him locked away until he was eligible for parole in 15 years. The commissioners will decide the issue within the next several weeks, spokesman Tom Hutchinson said.

The parole examiners acted after listening to MacDonald’s plea and to statements from Brian M. Murtagh, 57, the veteran Justice Department lawyer who prosecuted him and still handles the case, and Bob Stevenson, 65, the brother of MacDonald’s slain wife, Collette.

The three men last met in a Raleigh, N.C., courtroom in 1979, nine years after the case burst into public consciousness with the Army captain’s lurid account of an attack by hippie killers -- and ended with his conviction as the family’s knife-wielding assailant. Even in prison, MacDonald has fought to keep his case alive, prodding courts with legal challenges while Murtagh and Stevenson kept up the pressure from the other side.

The two said they expected to counter MacDonald for the rest of their lives, convinced he was a dangerous criminal incapable of remorse. “There’s never been a time to walk away from it, and my guess is we’ll still be at it until the day he dies,” Murtagh said.

“My only joy,” said Stevenson, “was to stare into his eyes and call him the murderer that he is. If I had to do that every day for the rest of my life, it would be worth it.”

MacDonald’s lawyers and supporters had little comment after their latest setback. Attorney Tim Junkin, and Kathryn MacDonald, 44, a Maryland woman who married the inmate in 2002, appeared with MacDonald during the parole hearing but did not return phone calls afterward. Kathryn MacDonald expressed disappointment in a statement to Associated Press, thanking examiners for “listening to everything that was presented to them.”

Murtagh, who attended the session as the government’s representative, said MacDonald offered no remorse -- usually standard at parole hearings. Instead, Murtagh said, MacDonald described himself as “factually innocent” despite his conviction.

That account matches similar statements MacDonald made during an interview earlier this year on NBC. “I didn’t injure them [his family] in any way, I didn’t murder them,” MacDonald said. “And for me to ... somehow acknowledge a feeling of remorse is wrong.”

MacDonald has never veered from his original story -- that a band of intruders barged into his officers’ apartment at Ft. Bragg, N.C., and attacked his family, stabbing and bludgeoning his wife and daughters, and leaving him injured but alive. An Army hearing cleared him, but a federal investigation led to the 1979 trial that ended in a jury verdict against him. The case was briefly overturned by a federal appeals court, but after the Supreme Court reinstated the conviction in 1982, MacDonald was sent to federal prison.

In 1997, MacDonald’s lawyers persuaded a federal appeals court to allow testing on hair and other trace evidence found in the MacDonald home, using DNA technology unavailable at the time of the murders. The genetic tests, now being conducted by the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, are not completed. But MacDonald’s attorneys have suggested they could be used to show the presence of other people in the MacDonald home before the killings.

During the parole hearing, MacDonald acknowledged missing his wife and children, Murtagh said, but said he only felt “guilty for not being able to defend his family.” And MacDonald also portrayed himself as a model inmate whose recent marriage would allow him to easily return to society.

Staying on message and never wavering from his attack on the government’s case, Murtagh insisted, is the convict’s “only way of keeping alive the image he has of himself.”

“It’s his story, and he’s sticking to it,” Murtagh said. “He has his faithful, who reinforce the message, and he can’t let up one bit or he loses them all.”

While Murtagh spent much of his portion of the hearing challenging MacDonald’s reasons for parole, Stevenson vented the rage and bitterness that had eaten at him ever since the murder of his sister and nieces, Kimberly and Kristin.

Murtagh said he was surprised by MacDonald’s decision this year to seek parole, assuming he would exhaust his other legal tacks first. But Stevenson, a retired Long Island computer leasing executive, said he has been expecting this moment for 26 years.

“I always knew that this was coming,” Stevenson said. “There’s nothing he won’t do to get out. And when he made his move, I swore I’d be there to stare him in the face and tell everybody what kind of coward he is.”

Dressed in a charcoal pinstripe suit and a feathered fedora, Stevenson gestured angrily at MacDonald as he pleaded with the hearing examiners to reject the parole attempt. Stevenson said MacDonald did not reply to him, but he took “a small amount of pleasure in the fact that he looked old and gray and a little bent over.”

“I told the examiners how he destroyed my family,” Stevenson said. He said he blames MacDonald not only for the 1970 murders, but also for the 1994 death of his elderly stepfather, Alfred Kassab, who had pressed for MacDonald’s conviction.

“I’m sure he’ll be back, by whatever mechanism he comes up with,” Stevenson said. “And as long as I’m around to stand up to him and show him for the murderer he is, I’ll be there too.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

From Green Beret to graying inmate

Feb. 17, 1970: Family of Army Capt. Jeffrey MacDonald found slain in officers’ housing at Ft. Bragg, N.C. Victims are MacDonald’s wife, Colette, 26; and two daughters, Kimberly, 6, and Kristin, 2. MacDonald, 26, who is found alive with several stab wounds, tells investigators his family was killed by a band of hippies.

Oct. 28, 1970: Army concludes there is insufficient evidence to court-martial MacDonald, who later receives an honorable discharge.

Jan. 24, 1975: MacDonald is indicted on three counts of murder by a federal grand jury in Raleigh, N.C.

Aug. 29, 1979: MacDonald is convicted of first-degree murder in the death of his wife and two counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of his daughters. He is sentenced to three consecutive life prison terms.

March 31, 1982: U.S. Supreme Court upholds the jury verdicts after a federal appeals court earlier overturns the convictions on grounds that MacDonald was denied a speedy trial.

March 1991: MacDonald becomes eligible for parole hearing, but despite his yearly eligibility to press for a hearing, does not apply until 2005. Meanwhile, he continues litigation to overturn convictions.

Oct. 17, 1997: Federal appeals court grants MacDonald’s request for new DNA testing to examine hairs found at the murder scene. Examination later assigned to the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Results not yet completed.

May 10, 2005: Three months after MacDonald’s first request for a parole hearing, two U.S. Parole Commission examiners take testimony inside a Maryland prison from MacDonald, federal prosecutors, MacDonald’s new wife and the brother of Colette MacDonald. Examiners say they will recommend to commissioners that MacDonald remain in prison.

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Sources: Times reports and Justice Department

Los Angeles Times