“It’s monstrous on either side,” said Bob Keeler, a reporter who worked the MacDonald beat at Newsday from 1973 to 1985, in a phone interview. Nine years later, after Colette’s parents, Freddy and Mildred Kassab, grew convinced of his guilt and pushed for a criminal trial, he was convicted and sentenced to three consecutive life terms. MacDonald told investigators that four drug-crazed hippies had attacked his family - three men and a woman in a blonde wig and a floppy hat who carried a candle and chanted, “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.” Charges against MacDonald were dismissed in an Army hearing.

The word “PIG” was written in blood on the headboard of the couple’s bed. MacDonald was discovered alive next to his wife with non-life-threatening wounds on his face and torso, a collapsed lung and a mild concussion. MacDonald’s pregnant wife, Colette, and their daughters, 5-year-old Kimberly and 2-year-old Kristen, were found brutally murdered in their respective bedrooms. were summoned to a grisly scene at the MacDonald residence at 544 Castle Drive. 17, 1970, military police officers at Fort Bragg, N.C. It has been the subject of countless media treatments, including other major books by high-profile journalists and a hit mini-series starring a young Gary Cole - each of which has helped shape the public’s understanding of a conviction that MacDonald, 76, continues to appeal from prison.Ĭertain facts are agreed upon. From the beginning, the MacDonald case has been a jumble of subplots, twists and meta-narratives. If Smerling and Morris have interpreted the same evidence somewhat differently, they aren’t the first.

“I would be depriving the viewer of the experience of watching it, too.” “I think if I did that, Scott, I would give a lot away,” Smerling said. “Care to detail what some of those things are?” I asked. “We are aligned on certain things, and we’re not aligned on other things.” “We’re not fully aligned,” Smerling had said in an interview two days earlier.

“I believe Marc thinks Jeffrey is guilty,” Morris told me in a phone interview earlier this month. The other is a docu-series that doesn’t seem to arrive at the same place. So now there are two versions of “Wilderness”: One is a book that questions MacDonald’s conviction for having killed his pregnant wife and two young daughters.

Life is strange fatal error fix