Alex Constantine - September 22, 2012
Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2012
WILMINGTON, N.C. – Lawyers for convicted killer and former Army doctor Jeffrey MacDonald continued to offer evidence Tuesday that they say suggests intruders were in his house the night his pregnant wife and two daughters were killed in 1970.
MacDonald, now 68, is serving three life sentences for the killings, but has maintained that four intruders, among them a woman in a floppy hat, knocked him unconscious and committed the brutal murders at Ft. Bragg, N.C. The killings became the basis for a bestselling book, "Fatal Vision,’’ and a hit TV miniseries.
On the second day of a federal hearing on new evidence, the brother of the late Helena Stoeckley, who the defense says was the woman in the floppy hat, testified that she confessed to being at the MacDonald house the night of the murders.
Eugene Stoeckley, who was 11 at the time of the killings, said his sister told her mother in 1982 that she was present during the murders and that MacDonald was innocent. He described how his mother, also named Helena Stoeckley, gave an affidavit in 2007 detailing her daughter’s confession.
Eugene Stoeckley said his mother told him she was warned by the FBI to force her daughter to stop talking about her alleged involvement. The younger Helena Stoeckley was a heroin addict and police informant.
"She should keep her mouth shut and keep her nose out of the business of the case,’’ Stoeckley said, describing his mother’s words to him in 2007. The elder Stoeckley died in 2009.
Stoeckley testified that his mother described his sister’s 1982 confession as an attempt by the younger woman to "set things right’’ before her death. "She could no longer live with the guilt,’’ Stoeckley quoted his mother as saying.
The younger Helena Stoeckley died the following year.
On cross-examination, prosecutor John Bruce suggested that the elder Helena Stoeckley was unduly influenced by MacDonald’s current wife, Kathryn MacDonald. Kathryn McDonald flew to North Carolina to take part in the affidavit, given by Helena Stoeckley while she was ill and in an assisted living center in Fayetteville, N.C., near Ft. Bragg.
Kathryn MacDonald married Jefferey MacDonald in a federal prison in Maryland in 2002.
The younger Helena Stoeckley told several reporters and TV interviewers that she was at the murder scene, and that her boyfriend and another man killed Colette MacDonald and the couple’s daughters, Kimberley, 5, and Kristen, 2. The boyfriend has since died.
But at MacDonald’s 1979 federal murder trial, Stoeckley testified that she could not remember anything about the night of the murders because she was high on heroin, opium, mescaline and marijuana. The defense introduced sworn statements Tuesday by a former federal marshal, now dead, who said he heard a federal prosecutor threaten to charge Stoeckley with murder if she testified that she was at the MacDonald house.
Prosecutors have contended that Stoeckley’s version of events is unreliable because her cognitive processes had been badly damaged by her years of heavy drug abuse.
The hearing continues Tuesday afternoon.
When I read the long DOD financed book on the triple murders that Dr.
Jeffrey McDonald was wrongfully implicated in, I was pretty sure he did it. Now
that I know how the agencies use gangs to do their dirty work, I know he’s innocent
just like I am. I have absolutely no faith in the US court system delivering on its
promised justice. See how they criminalize innocents while exonerating nazi mass
murderers; Leonard Peltier-innocent; Mumia Abu-Jamal-innocent; Chelsea Manning- innocent; punished for doing the right thing about an out of control criminal Nazi
state. Lyle Courtsal. http://www.3mpub.com
2 July 2015
If Helena Stoeckley were so addled and incapable of recognizing realty why was she used by Fayetteville P.D. as an informant?
She also brought up the fact that heroin was being smuggled into the U.S. inside of cadavers — American GIs KIA in Vietnam. MacDonald was aware of this and perhaps delved in a bit too deep in his investigation.