DATE: Monday, April 28, 1997                TAG: 9704260014

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B7   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: OPINION 

SOURCE: ANN SJOERDSMA

                                            LENGTH:   88 lines

MACDONALD MURDER CASE - STILL HELTER-SKELTER AFTER 27 YEARS

It's the murder case that won't go away.

A young and oh-so-handsome ex-Green Beret surgeon . . . a pregnant wife and two small daughters brutally slaughtered . . . four drugged-out hippies wielding knives and a club . . . a blonde in a floppy hat chanting, ``Acid is groovy. Kill the pigs.'' . . . helter-skelter.

It's been 27 years since Jeffrey MacDonald first explained how he was asleep on the couch that February night at Fort Bragg, N.C., when intruders burst in and killed his family in a Charles Manson-style rampage. But MacDonald and the Fatal Vision murders have never been far from our consciousness.

They've been the subject of two books, a TV miniseries, countless newspaper analyses, dozens of judicial opinions and a court record of more than 4,000 pages. And guess what? They're back.

Yes, that really was Jeffrey MacDonald, now 53, on Larry King's show last Wednesday, recalling the murders as if they happened yesterday.

Originally, the Army cleared MacDonald, but his father-in-law, Alfred Kassab, wouldn't let go of his slain 26-year-old stepdaughter, Colette, and granddaughters Kimberly, 5, and Kristen, 2, without a fight. Kassab persuaded the Justice Department to reopen the case. MacDonald was indicted in 1975, convicted in '79.

On appeal, the conviction was overturned - speedy-trial grounds - but the U.S. Supreme Court, no stranger to MacDonald's continuous appeals, reinstated it in 1982. MacDonald is serving three consecutive life sentences in Oregon.

Last week, MacDonald's pro bono legal team, headed by well-heeled Boston lawyer Harvey Silverglate, an early-'60s Princeton contemporary of MacDonald's, filed a 1,500-page motion for a new trial.

Why? Because of the sins of the FBI crime lab - bias, inaccuracy, bad science, outrageous hubris. MacDonald now has an ever-so-slight hope of a retrial - even though his story of struggle that night didn't jibe with the condition of the house; his wounds were superficial and consistent with self-infliction; his testimony about bloodstains and footprints contradictory.

In Fatal Vision, Joe McGinniss theorized that MacDonald abused diet pills, suffered a violent amphetamine psychosis and, in a rage brought on by the baby wetting her bed, killed his family.

Silverglate took over MacDonald's defense in 1989 and, according to The Wall Street Journal, was soon intrigued by a former Army investigator's lab notes about a 22-inch blonde synthetic fiber found in a hairbrush at the MacDonald home. The notes, not known to defense lawyers at trial, were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Dark fibers were also uncovered.

Could the blonde fiber be a hair from the wig of the ``kill-the-pigs'' hippie? Could the dark fibers have come from an assailant's clothing?

In their 1995 book, Fatal Justice, Jerry Allen Potter and Fred Bost contend that both the Army and the U.S. government suppressed key physical evidence.

The blonde, allegedly one Helena Stoeckley of Fayetteville, N.C., was in 1970 a 19-year-old heavy drug user who wore a wig. She confessed to involvement in the murders, then recanted, repeatedly, vexed by drug-induced memory gaps. Stoeckley died in 1983.

Silverglate used the new fiber evidence for a 1990 new-trial motion.

Enter former FBI hair-and-fiber examiner Michael Malone, known for his unequivocal pro-government opinions. He discovered two more blonde strands of 24 inches and 9 inches and concluded emphatically that the hair, made of saran, could not have come from a cosmetic wig. He insisted it came from dolls owned by Kimberly and Kristen.

The late U.S. District Judge Franklin Dupree, who tried the MacDonald case, considered Malone's testimony key in denying Silverglate's request. To reopen a case on ``newly discovered'' evidence, it must be substantial, determinative. Might a jury have acquitted if it had known about the blonde hairs?

Reviewing Dupree's decision, a three-judge appellate panel in Richmond ruled unanimously that the new evidence neither ``supports'' MacDonald nor ``discredits'' the government's theory.

Subsequently Silverglate learned that Malone was wrong about saran wigs. He also learned that Malone and U.S. prosecutors had unsuccessfully pressured a Mattel Inc. doll specialist to bolster his opinion. She refused to lie. Meanwhile, Malone's reputation had been unraveling, his evidence being exposed as insufficient, misleading, false.

In 1994 Malone was transferred from Washington to the FBI's Norfolk field office.

So where does all this - and there's much more - leave us?

Back where we started, with many questions.

If there was a blonde in a hat, why would she stop to brush her wig? Who besides the blonde might have used the brush? Did Colette MacDonald own a blonde wig? What happened to Stoeckley's wig? And to the girls' dolls?

It just won't go away. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma, an attorney, is an editorial columnist and book

editor for The Virginian-Pilot.

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