Fatal Vision Read online

  He was raised by his great-grandmother in Gardner, Massachusetts. His own mother had gotten married at fifteen, just like her mother had done, and just like her mother had had to leave her behind to go off and find a way to earn a living, she had had to do the same thing when her husband left her. She moved to New York when my father was very young, leaving him with this great-grandmother who spoke French and who was, apparently, a very tough woman and very dominating.

  He became an electrical designer. He had gone to technical school, and essentially he was a draftsman. He worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and even though he never finalized his engineering degree, he never really forgave the intellectually elite community for not recognizing him as an engineer. He always resented that he was being paid less to do full engineer's work, just because he was a designer and did not have a degree.

  There's no question that he was the leader and ruler of our family. His presence—it's almost beyond comprehension how important he was to the family. His presence was huge, wherever he was and in whatever setting he was in. He was a very magnetic person, not a shy person, a lot of charm and grace, always a gentleman and chivalrous—he treated women in a chivalrous fashion which now, of course, would be considered chauvinistic—but his hold on the family, even to this day, is staggering.

  My Dad was the family, and that's the truth. He was a phenomenal person with an incredible presence. I think no matter how strong my Mom got—and this is a little unfair but it's simply a fact from my viewpoint—no matter how strong my Mom is and was, my Dad was still the main mug. He was a dominating force in all of our lives. There's no question that he was the most important force in my brother's and sister's psyches—my brother, incidentally, was clearly favored by my father, simply because he was firstborn— and, I suspect, also in mine.

  He was not a peaceful man by any means. He terrified us when he was angry, and a mere look, or the thought of him being angry would completely silence us and stop any problem. Also, he constantly railed against the domination by women that he saw in the world, and his background, of course, is very consistent with that. Never to his dying day did he forgive the women of this world for attempting to rule and take over, and many was the time—especially when he'd had a little too much to drink—I heard him say that a domineering woman was the most dangerous creature on God's earth.

  In keeping with that, he was not a warm, loving father. He was a little distant, especially physically. My father was super-masculine and he never really touched us or hugged us or kissed us, because that was unmanly. He could never express his love for us. We all knew it was there, but we never heard it spoken and never felt a physical embrace.

  What he demanded most were two things: absolute obedience, and achievement. In my family, any indication that you couldn't keep up or couldn't be superior in every field—or try harder and overcome whatever adversity it was—was a sign of weakness.

  And what I remember most clearly about him, I suppose, were the trips we would take on Sundays to visit my grandmother—his mother—in Malverne, where she had finally wound up living. It was a harrowing experience to go forty-five miles along the old 1950s back roads between Patchogue and Malverne with an impatient, angry father driving the car, bitching constantly about the inadequacies of every other driver on the road.

  He was always very tense and angry on these trips, and he was extremely vituperative toward other drivers. His frequent expression was he wished he had a Sherman tank, or he wished he was driving a big cement truck and he could just squash the other cars.

  But anyway, at Princeton, we had this big weekend all set up, and one of the highlights of these weekends was bringing your parents to the club for dinner. And I remember that my father was already sick and was having difficulty walking long distances, and the day was a trial for him because we had done so much and walked so much and we had to walk from the club at lunchtime to go down to Palmer Stadium, which was a pretty good walk for him, being short of breath, and then walk back and have dinner.

  And I'll never forget how incensed he got that we had black waiters in little white, short jackets serving us in the club. He became furious, and as a matter of fact we got into an argument at the club over that, the particulars of which elude me, but I was embarrassed about his anger.

  The black help and the short white jackets were uncomfortable to him at best, and snobby and pseudo-intellectual and effete at worst, and we had a little, sort of, scene that day together, and I'm kind of sorry, of course, that it occurred. We didn't have that much time together from then on, and I remember with some sadness that this occurred.

  From time to time I brought Colette to the club, the Tiger Inn, and, um, she was funny, she was a little ambivalent. She didn't like the idea of clubs at Princeton because they seemed a little, um, white-glovish, too much like something Mildred would like, but she also kind of enjoyed the status, and also the fact that the Tiger Inn was considered a really good club—one of the top five for sure, and it was the jock club—and she was proud of me being in there. We went over and had lunch and dinner many times, especially on football weekends, and she was kind of proud of that. And, um, there were no other relationships going on at all during this year. There was—I wasn't seeing anyone or doing anything. I was coming home. You know, we had a good year.

  Kimmy's birth was, of course, traumatic, no question about it. Colette, you know, does not—did not—like pain. We had joked for a long time about natural childbirth and she had even made a little pretense at beginning classes for natural childbirth but she was advised not to by her physician and advised not to by me. I knew Colette very well and I felt that as soon as the first pain came the plans for natural childbirth would go out the window. And indeed they did.

  Colette is a feminine, gentle person. She was not a sturdy frontier woman. She, you know—she was very motherly. Especially later on, with two kids, she was an incredibly good mother. But at this point, you know, she was reasonably frail.

  Like, for instance, she's left-handed, you know, and so she was—she had this funny-looking shot on the basketball court, and she could dribble only intermittently well, sometimes with both hands. But very feminine and pretty and it's distressing to see her with the hair, you know, a little scraggly, and sweating and grunting and complaining about the pain.

  So I'd hold her hand and talk her through it, and we were doing the breathing—the breathing things. And she was very reassured that I was there, there's no question about that. I'm not just saying that. I really have a—always have felt very strongly that she did trust me implicitly, and the fact that I was there holding her hand was very important to her.

  I did leave at one point for about an hour. It was something to do with canceling classes or something like that. I may have had to run over to a chemistry lab to hand in a paper or tell my lab partner that I wasn't going to be there, or something like that, and came right back.

  But the doctor arrived shortly thereafter, checked her, and what happened was he examined her a couple of times, and he clearly had a frown on his face after the second or third examination. Then they took X rays and another OB man was there also, and it turned out the baby was too large for Colette's pelvis type, so basically the doctor and I told her together.

  We came in together and said, "It's not progressing well, and we think that we're probably gonna have to do a Cesarean section." The doctor and I then had a discussion about whether I would be in the Cesarean section room. I didn't particularly want to, not because I was squeamish, I just—I didn't see any reason to be there. And I always felt that it would sort of impede the doctor. I still believe that to this day, by the way, about other couples when they ask me. But he was not at all in favor of me being in there, so as we mutually discussed it, it became clear that it was clearly better that I wasn't in there.

  So I sat outside the operating room in a little, you know, sort of waiting area, and read a Reader's Digest and a Look magazine, then reread the Look ma
gazine and paced a little and had a cup of coffee and, I guess, the usual parent routine, new to me but not new to anyone else.

  Finally, you know, he came out from the operating room—it seemed like an eternity, by the way—and said that everyone was fine and that we had a—ah, a girl, and that the baby was happy and healthy and Colette seemed to be doing fine but she was exhausted from the long, sort of nonproductive labor.

  I saw the baby, oh, it wasn't immediately. It was more like half an hour, an hour later, and the baby, quite honestly, to me she did not look that pretty. Everyone kept saying what a pretty baby Kimmy was. She was cute, but she wasn't, you know, an elegant-looking baby.

  Anyway, she was healthy and appeared happy. And Colette was certainly healthy and seemed to do fine. But she was sort of knocked out from the surgery, and she was very wan in the recovery room but happy that everything came out okay.

  Mildred had come to help out at the house, and she and I were hitting it off better at this time than ever before or since. We had a good time. We went to dinner together, I showed her around Princeton a little bit, she met our friends. She was staying at the house, in one of the bedrooms. Didn't, of course, like the house. Felt it was, you know, not clean enough. Felt that it was not nearly up to the standards that her daughter should be kept in. But I handled myself well, you know, through all of this, and she liked that. I was clearly in charge of the family, and it was working out well for Colette.

  Anyway, our friends had a nice, joyous reaction. We did the pass-out-the-cigar routine, and all my friends stopped by. Cosmo Iacavazzi, who was the All-American football player, stopped by. He was a good friend at the time. We were in Tiger Inn together.

  And his wife, whose name I forget, who was a great cook. She cooked her spaghetti sauce, by the way, with the pork chops and chicken in the sauce and then they scooped out the pork chop and chicken and didn't serve that, and just used sausage and meat balls left in the sauce for the meat. But the flavoring was with the pork chops and chicken, and it was a great spaghetti sauce. It was a true, great real Italian homemade spaghetti sauce, and it would take her a whole day and she made it once a week. And she wasn't even really Italian. Cosmo Iacavazzi's mother had to teach her how to cook that. She always recalled that as one of her traumatic events of getting married to Cosmo.

  Anyway, they came over and we had planned this big thing for when Colette came home from the hospital. But she—she was very worn out. She had lost some blood at surgery and it took a little while to get her back on her feet, so she wanted it a little more quiet. Two or three weeks later, though, we had all our friends over and / cooked spaghetti one night. It was a positive time in our lives, and I remember sort of how proud it was to be, you know, a father.

  7

  Freddy and Mildred Kassab visited the cemetery every day in March, bringing fresh flowers each time. Other than that, they went nowhere and spoke to no one. No one called; no one visited; letters of sympathy piled up unanswered.

  Though neither she nor her husband felt the desire to eat, Mildred suddenly found herself with an inexplicable but irresistible compulsion to bake. She baked pies, cakes, cookies, and bread, at all hours of the day and night. The aroma of her baking filled the air. Soon, the refrigerator was full, then the freezer. Still, she baked, stacking loaves of bread on kitchen counters.

  Mildred seldom spoke to her husband; he very seldom spoke to her. There was, they both felt, nothing to say: nothing would ever be worth saying again. Words could neither soothe nor heal, nor undo death, so the Kassabs existed, side by side, in a silent darkness beyond words.

  A shipment of clothing arrived from 544 Castle Drive: the contents of Colette's and the children's drawers and closets. Items that had been deemed of no evidentiary importance.

  Mildred sat alone in her bedroom, sorting the clothes, suffering new stabs of agony every time she came across a little dress or coat she recognized. Worst of all was handling Colette's nursing bras and maternity girdles. The new baby would have been born in July.

  On routine errands, Mildred would see a pregnant woman and start to cry. She would see a bearded, long-haired hippie and feel an almost uncontrollable surge of hate. She could not understand why the killers had not yet been apprehended. Mildred was not a strong woman, physically—only five feet one inch tall and very

  thin—but her grief and rage were immense. At Womack Hospital, that first afternoon, she had said to Jeffrey MacDonald: "If I ever found her [the blonde in the floppy hat] I would tear out her eyes and her tongue and turn her loose." Her desire for vengeance was undiminished. It was the only feeling left to her, other than pain.

  Eventually, she had to stop her baking. The kitchen could no longer contain what she produced. Yet not a single piece of cake nor slice of bread was ever eaten. She and her husband were utterly without appetite.

  At the cemetery, she would whisper to Colette, "Help us . . . help us . . ." Then she and Freddy would return home.

  At seventeen, Mildred Kassab had married a man ten years older than she was. His name was Cowles Stevenson and he had owned a luncheonette in downtown Patchogue: an undistinguished, working-class town on the south shore of Long Island, physically quite near but socially worlds removed from such fashionable resort communities as the Hamptons and Amagansett.

  Mildred had wanted a baby right away: a girl whom she could dress up in fine and fancy clothes. When she became pregnant she and her husband transformed one room of their small rented house into a nursery. They pasted silver stars on a pale blue ceiling and nursery rhyme characters on peach pastel walls. They painted yellow and white ducks on the floor. In a closet, they hung a little fur coat and a row of tiny, frilly dresses. Mildred decided that if the baby were female she would name it Colette, after its father.

  The baby was female, but stillborn. That had been the first Colette.

  A second pregnancy resulted in another female infant—the second Colette—also stillborn.

  A year later, the third Colette was born. The baby died within weeks, however, following surgery to relieve an intestinal obstruction.

  Mildred did have a healthy male child, and then, four years later, on May 10, 1943, she gave birth to the fourth Colette—the one who would live—the one who would marry Jeffrey MacDonald.

  One Friday evening in the spring of 1955 Mildred was returning home from having picked up her son at a friend's house. As she opened the door to her garage, the car headlights illuminated the interior and she could see her husband's bathrobe hanging from the rafters. In the same instant, she realized he was in it.

  Cowles Stevenson had left no note. He had not seemed depressed. There had been no sudden trauma in their life. Mildred told friends she had no idea what had driven her husband to suicide.

  Colette, who was twelve at the time, had been spending the night at a friend's house. Her Aunt Helen had broken the news to her because Mildred could not bring herself to do so. Her father's death was the one thing, in later years, that Colette would never talk about: not to her mother, not to her friends, not to her eventual husband, Jeffrey MacDonald. When she met Freddy Kassab a year later, she told her mother right away that she hoped the two of them would marry, "so that everything can be the way it used to be again." After the marriage, Colette began immediately to refer to Freddy as her father; never did she call him her stepfather, nor would she permit her friends to do so.

  Mildred had arrived at.the Princeton Medical Center in April of 1964, the day after Kimberly was born. Colette had been holding the baby at her breast when her mother had walked into the room. Looking up from her bed, Colette had reached out and had handed the infant to Mildred.

  "Here, Mom," Colette had said, her eyes moist. "Here is one of your lost little girls."

  Now they were lost forever, all of them, and—immersed in her pain and surrounded by late-winter gloom—Mildred Kassab felt that she did not want to lay eyes upon or speak to another human being ever again.

  The Kassabs' solitude was i
nterrupted only once: On March 19, when CID agent William Ivory arrived at their home to ask questions about Colette's relationship with Jeffrey MacDonald.

  Ivory had been on Long Island for a week, interviewing residents of Patchogue who had known MacDonald since childhood. He had compiled a summary of their comments in a notebook.

  —"The best student I ever had," said a former English teacher.,

  —"Possibly the finest kid ever to come through the Patchogue High School," said another. "I am still waiting to see his equal."

  —"He is absolutely not capable of doing this."

  —"He is incapable of any such action."

  —"Jeff and Colette got along beautifully. I was especially

  impressed by how proud they seemed to be of their kids, with the way Jeffrey exhibited his affection for the babies."

  —"The kid I knew could not possibly have been involved in this."

  —"The Jeffrey MacDonald I knew would not have done this."

  —"Not Jeff. Absolutely, not Jeff."

  An agent who accompanied Ivory to Patchogue remarked that MacDonald seemed to be "Li'l Abner with straight-A marks," and even the Fort Bragg provost marshal was prompted to comment that from all outward appearances, "It was as if the all-American girl had married the all-American boy."

  Freddy and Mildred Kassab, in their grief and isolation, sang his praises with special fervor.