CASE STUDY

IN
PERSONAL
IDENTIFICATION
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Submitted by: Yayen, Angel P.

2-Bravo

Submitted on:

January 30, 2023

The Jeffrey MacDonald Murder Case

February 17, 1970

Fort Bragg, North Carolina, US

Description of the case.

Jeffrey Robert MacDonald (born October 12, 1943) is an American former

medical doctor and United States Army captain who was convicted in August
1979 of murdering his pregnant wife and two daughters in February 1970 while
serving as an Army Special Forces physician.

Jeffrey MacDonald was a U.S. Army officer who was born on October 12,
1943. He met his wife, Colette Stevenson, while they were in college
together.They got married in September of 1963, after she became pregnant with
his first child, and shortly after, on April 18, 1964, their daughter Kimberley was
born.After having Kimberley, Colette dropped out of college to become a stay at
home mother. At this time, Jeffrey was a medical student. He also held down a
part-time job to support his small family.

On May 8, 1967, the family welcomed their second daughter, Kristen, into the
world; however, due to Jeffrey going to school and working, he hardly had time to
interact with his family.Looking for a better life, Jeffrey joined the United States
Army on July 1, 1979. After only six weeks, he was posted to Fort Benning, where
he learned that it was unlikely that he’d be transferred overseas to Vietnam due
to him being a Green Beret physician.

He actually ended up getting transferred to Fort Bragg, where he was assigned to

be a group surgeon in the 3rd Special Forces Group. At Fort Bragg, he was finally
joined by his wife and children, where they resided in a section of the base
reserved for married officers, and quickly became a popular family with their
neighbors, and his two daughters started developing their own personalities.
Kimberley was known as being feminine, intelligent, and shy, whereas Kristen was
known as a tomboy who would “run over and crack someone” if they were
bullying her older sister.At this point in life, Colette wrote a letter to her old
friends and acquaintances, stating that she’s never had a life so “normal and
happy.” She was also three months pregnant at this time with a baby boy, who
was due in July of 1970, and Jeffrey MacDonald had just earned the title of
Captain, and was planning to go to Yale for additional medical training after his
tour of duty as a Green Beret doctor.February 16, 1970, was a pretty normal day
for the family. Jeffrey took his daughters to feed the Shetland pony he bought
them for Christmas almost two months earlier. They returned at 5:45, then got
washed up to have dinner as a family.After their family dinner, Colette left home
to attend an evening teaching class, and Jeffrey stayed home, playing with his
young daughters. He put Kristen, his now two year old, in bed around 7PM, and
then took a one hour nap while Kimberley, his five year old, watched TV. When
Jeffrey woke up from his nap, he watched an episode of Kimberley’s favorite TV
show with her before putting her in bed.

Colette returned home to her family at 9:40PM and watched TV with her husband
before heading to bed herself. Jeffrey stayed up and continued watching TV until
he fell asleep on the couch in the early morning hours.

At exactly 3:42AM on February 17, 1970, Fort Bragg dispatchers received an

emergency call from the MacDonald residence. On the other end of the line was
Jeffrey.These are the words he said when they answered the call, and within ten
minutes, Military Police had arrived at the house.They had to go in through the
back door, and they went to the master bedroom, where they saw a horrific
scene. Colette was lying on her back on the floor with one eye open and one
breast exposed. The word “PIG” was written in her blood on their headboard. She
had been repeatedly clubbed, both of her forearms were later found to be
broken, and a pathologist determined they had been broken when she put her
arms up to defend herself. She had been stabbed twenty-one times in the chest
with an ice pick, stabbed sixteen times in the neck and chest with a knife, her
trachea had been severed in two separate areas, and there was nothing but a
bloody, torn pajama top covering her chest. Beside her body was a small paring
knife.On her opposite side lay Jeffrey, face down with his head on her chest and
one arm thrown around her. He was wounded, but he was alive. They checked
five year old Kimberley’s room, where she was found laying on her left side in her
bed. Her head and body had been repeatedly bludgeoned. She had been stabbed
in the neck with a knife, somewhere between eight and ten times. Her skull had
been fractured from two hits to the right side of her head, and one wound caused
her cheekbone to protrude through her skin. Her wounds were so bad, it was
determined that they had caused bruising to the brain, a coma, and then death
shortly after. They then went to Kristen’s room, where they found her in her bed
laying on her left side with a baby bottle near her mouth. The small two year old
was found with thirty-three stab wounds from a knife to her chest, neck, hands
and back, and she had fifteen shallow wounds from an ice pick. Two of the knife
wounds had penetrated the small child’s heart, and the wounds on her hands
were later determined to be defense wounds. The ambulance took Jeffrey
MacDonald to the nearby Womack Hospital, where medical staff noted that his
wounds were much less extensive than the wounds the rest of his family suffered.
He had some cuts, bruises, and fingernail scratches, but none of those wounds
were life-threatening. They didn’t even require stitches. He also had a mild
concussion, and one stab wound between two ribs on his right side, about five
eighths of an inch in depth, which partially collapsed his lung. The stab wound
was described by the staff surgeon as a “clean, small, sharp” incision. Jeffrey was
released from the hospital after only nine days of care, and then questioned by
the Criminal Investigation Division, or CID. When asked to recount the events of
that night, he claimed he had washed dishes at around 2AM before deciding to go
to bed. He told investigators that Kristen had wet his side of the bed, so he put
her in her own bed. He said he didn’t want to wake his wife so they could change
the sheets, so he grabbed a blanket and slept on the couch instead. He claimed he
awoke later, hearing his wife Colette, and his daughter Kimberley screaming. Jeff
told investigators that he got up to help when he was ambushed by three men:
one black man and two white men. He described the shorter white male and said
the man was wearing medical gloves. Jeffrey then stated that there was a fourth
intruder: a white female with long, blonde hair. He described her as wearing high-
heeled, knee-high boots and a large, white hat that partially covered her face.
MacDonald then claimed that he was attacked by the three men with a club and
an ice pick. Jeff claimed he used his pajama top to defend the blows from the ice
pick, but he was eventually overpowered, and knocked unconscious in the
hallway near the living room, and when he regained consciousness, the intruders
were gone. Jeffrey MacDonald then claimed that he went room to room,
attempting to resuscitate his daughters with mouth-to-mouth, unsuccessfully,
before finding his wife in the bedroom, with the paring knife in her chest. He
allegedly pulled the knife from her and then laid his pajama top over her body
before calling for help. After hearing this, the Military Police were ordered to
search every vehicle in and around Fort Bragg, looking for the suspects; however,
when they couldn’t find them, they called off the search at around 6AM.

Investigators searched the house, and found the murder weapons thrown outside
near the back door. They recovered an Old Hickory knife, an ice pick, and a thirty-
one inch piece of lumber; however, they had all been wiped clean of fingerprints,
and while the investigators discovered that the weapons all came from the home,
Jeffrey claimed he had never seen any of them before.

Investigators also noted that there was a serious lack of damage in a house,
considering the struggle that was said to have occurred. They also had recovered
no fibers from Jeffrey’s pajama top in the living room, where he claimed to be
attacked; but there were fibers from his pajama top in the bedrooms of all three
victims, along with fibers from the top being found under Kristen’s fingernails.
Other evidence they found was bloodstained splinters from the lumber, which
they also found in all three bedrooms, but again, not the living room.

Jeffrey was starting to look suspicious when they found no fingerprints on either
phone he claimed to have used to call for help. He became even more suspicious
when they found a bloodstained tip of a surgical glove under the headboard —
the same kind of glove that the MacDonald family kept inside their home.

CID obtained the forensic evidence results from blood, hair, and fiber samples in
mid-March. And those results contradicted everything Jeffrey had told them. The
MacDonald family was a statistical anomaly — each family member had a different
blood type. This greatly helped investigators as they pieced together the real
events of the night along with the movements of each family member during that
time. Investigators determined that Jeffrey and Colette had gotten into an
argument in the middle of the night — possibly about Jeff being an adulterer — 
and things had turned fatal. Jeffrey MacDonald had murdered his entire family
and attempted to cover it up using details from the Manson Family murders,
which he had recently read an article about. After wiping down and disposing of
the weapons, Jeffrey moved to the bathroom, where he grabbed a surgical scalpel
and stabbed himself with it before calling the emergency number. He then laid
himself next to his deceased wife’s body. He did admit to cheating on his wife,
though he claimed they did not argue about that because his wife had never
found out that he cheated on her.
Then, on October 13, 1970, the Colonel overseeing the Army hearing dismissed
the charges due to insufficient evidence, and in December, Jeffrey MacDonald
was given an honorable discharge from the Army. Within days of his discharge, he
was granting television interviews and complaining about the Army’s focus on
him as a suspect. He then claimed to have had twenty-three wounds, some of
which, he called “potentially fatal”. While his deceased wife Colette’s mother and
stepfather initially believed that Jeffrey was innocent, they became suspicious of
him by November 1970. His stepfather-in-law then spent years reviewing the
case, evidence, and facts. His stepfather-in-law filed a formal citizen’s complaint
by the year 1972, and on August 12, 1974, a grand jury finally convened to hear
the legal proceedings, where seventy-five witnesses were called on. Jeffrey’s
testimony lasted for five days and he again refused a polygraph test, and then the
other witnesses testified.

Jeffrey was called on to testify again on January 21, 1975, though at this hearing,
he was said to be arrogant and sarcastic when answering questions, and on
January 24, 1975, the grand jury indicted him on three counts of murder. He was
arrested within the hour; however, he was let go on January 31, after his friends
and family paid his $100,000 bail.

He was arraigned on May 23, where he pleaded not guilty, and on May 29,
the judge overseeing the case denied the double jeopardy and speedy trial
arguements filed by MacDonald’s lawyers; however, on January 23, 1976, his
indictment was dismissed by the court panel due to the right of the defendant to
have a speedy trial.
A government appeal was granted by an 8-0 margin in the United States Supreme
Court to reinstate his indictment on May 1, 1978.

He was brought to trial on July 16, 1979, charged with three counts of
murder, and finally, on August 29, the jury reached their verdict after deliberating
for over six hours.

Jeffrey MacDonald was charged with one count of first degree murder for
his daughter Kristen, and two counts of second degree murder for his wife Colette
and his daughter Kimberley. He was sentenced to three life sentences, and is still
serving his time today.

Conclusion
References
https://medium.com/@HistoryOfMurder/the-jeffrey-macdonald-murder-case-
d53747b1ad59

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_R._MacDonald