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    A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald
    A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald
    A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald
    Audiobook14 hours

    A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald

    Written by Errol Morris

    Narrated by John Pruden

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Early on the morning of February 17, 1970, in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a Green Beret doctor named Jeffrey MacDonald called the police for help. When the officers arrived at his home they found the bloody and battered bodies of MacDonald's pregnant wife and two young daughters. The word "pig" was written in blood on the headboard in the master bedroom. As MacDonald was being loaded into the ambulance, he accused a band of drug-crazed hippies of the crime.So began one of the most notorious and mysterious murder cases of the twentieth century. Jeffrey MacDonald was finally convicted in 1979 and remains in prison today. Since then a number of bestselling books-including Joe McGinniss's Fatal Vision and Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer, along with a blockbuster television miniseries-have attempted to solve the MacDonald case and explain what it all means.In A Wilderness of Error, Errol Morris, who has been investigating the case for nearly two decades, reveals that almost everything we know about that case is ultimately flawed, and an innocent man may be behind bars. In a masterful reinvention of the true-crime thriller, Morris looks behind the haze of myth that still surrounds these murders. Drawing on court transcripts, lab reports, and original interviews, Morris brings a complete forty-year history back to life and demonstrates how our often desperate attempts to understand and explain an ambiguous reality can overwhelm the facts.A Wilderness of Error allows the listener to explore the case as a detective might, by confronting the evidence as if for the first time. Along the way Morris poses bracing questions about the nature of proof, criminal justice, and the media, and argues that MacDonald has been condemned not only to prison, but also to the stories that have been created around him. In this profoundly original meditation on truth and justice, Errol Morris reopens a famous closed case and reveals that, forty years after the murder of MacDonald's family, we still have no proof of his guilt.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 28, 2012
    ISBN9781452679372
    A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald
    Author

    Errol Morris

    Errol Morris has directed documentary films including The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2004.

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    Reviews for A Wilderness of Error

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      This is exactly the kind of thing I enjoy, and what I want most out of my true crime: a relentless chronicle of all the things we don't know, can't know, could have known but don't because somebody screwed up; an analysis of how a crime turns into a story turns into a trial, and how disconnected that can sometimes be from the truth. This case in particular is one where the truth hasn't seemed to matter much to a lot of people, but it's by far the only one. Morris does a respectable job of turning the documentary format into a book, and he's clear about what he does and what he doesn't think we can know about this case, and what could and should have been done differently, and who screwed it up beyond salvaging.
    • 5/5
      Outstanding work from Errol Morris, digging through mountains of evidence to try and figure out what the hell really happened in this case. Morris' task is complicated throughout by missteps by the military police, prosecution, and even the defense—contaminating the crime scene, influencing witnesses, and even hiding evidence outright.

      The psychological story presented by the prosecution (and McGinniss's Fatal Vision) should have been recognized as absurd from the start, and Morris does an especially good job of pointing out how such an accusation distorts every piece of evidence around it, reshaping it to support it. No motive or personality just goes to show how much of a calculated, manipulative killer at heart he was! Lack of guilt over the murders is no longer exculpatory, but only goes to show how much of a psychopath MacDonald was! This is all preposterous, and exactly the type of diagnosis designed to cover up the giant blank spots in the prosecution's case. (Also, Freddy Kassab comes off as far more predisposed to violence and mental illness; what's his alibi on the night of the killings?)

      More troubling is the exclusion of evidence from both the trial and the defense's purview. a decision that is AT BEST willful ignorance, and more likely misconduct on the part of the prosecution. Some of the problem was simple incompetence from a department not really set up to handle complicated murder scenes—allowing dozens of people to trample all over the crime scene, and botching simple tasks like collecting fingerprints. Yet others were from a total lack of motivation in following-up other leads. (For example, lending so little credence to Helena Stokely's interrogation that the detective didn't even bother to take notes!)

      But worst of all is the decisions during the trial to distort and withhold evidence so that it pointed to MacDonald's guilt. Pre-trial discovery for the defense was so limited as to be almost nominal, leading to their strategy to focus on MacDonald's personality simply because those were the facts they had access to! Lab notes and other working products were similarly withheld and distorted from the defense, discrepancies that came out years after the fact. And all of this is underpinned by a judge who undercut any attempt by the defense to present their case, throwing out psychiatric testimony and preventing evidence of Stokely's confessions from reaching the jury.

      In sum, Morris presents an airtight case that MacDonald did NOT receive a fair trial (or preceding investigation) in any way, shape or form. More clouded is the question of his actual innocence, both by the shards of hard-to-reconcile evidence as well as the outright botching of the investigation. So much of what would be needed has been lost to time, but the evidence that remains—and that which Morris was able to gather—points to Stokely's confessions being accurate, even if we don't know the full story or other involved parties. Here is a woman who confessed repeatedly and to almost anyone who would hear her, regardless of consequences or anything to gain. And the worst part of all is that her testimony was contaminated (and nakedly discarded) by the media furor and probable threats from the prosecution.

      While not as concrete as his documentary The Thin Blue Line, Morris is very convincing that MacDonald was screwed (and continues to be screwed) by the justice system. It's troubling to see the myriad Goodreads reviews concluding otherwise, rejecting Morris simply because it isn't a tidy and neat case. Real life is often more complicated than we'd like, and the simple story told by Fatal Vision—of a cold calculating killer who was eventually brought to justice by Freddy Kassab—is reductive, misleading, and most likely wrong.
    • 5/5
      I saw this referred to as "an epistomological crime story", which is a pretty accurate description. Film maker Errol Morris investigated the trial and conviction of Jeffrey MacDonald, a Greeen Beret accused of murdering his wife and children, and attempting to cover it up with a cockamamie story about crazed hippies. What Morris discovered was that the crime scene was ruined by incompetent investigators, evidence was ignored or destroyed, and a woman who repeatedly confessed to being part of the crime was never considered a suspect.
      Can we ever know what happened? Morris waded through reams of court documents , and interviewed dozens of participants in the case to find answers. Whether or not you believe in MacDonald's innocence, it 's certain that he didn't get a fair trial. Morris holds particular scorn for Joe McGinnis, the author of "Fatal Vision", who gained MacDonalds' confidence then betrayed him by writing a factually bereft book imlpicating MacDonald's guilt.
      How do we know what we know? How do we arrive at conclusions? Great book.
      It's also a graphically interesting book. Every 4-5 pages is a black page with a clean white drawing of a piece of evidence from the case (hat, typewriter, rocking horse). It almost felt like watching an Errol Morris film.
    • 4/5
      While it doesn't convince that MacDonald is innocent, it is moderately more successful presenting a case for an unfair trial. I enjoyed the book; it was well-written and organized, lucid and researched. But it's conclusion, I believe, is wrong.
    • 5/5
      First, I have to start by saying, what a beautiful book. The layout, design, text, cover, are all very well done. There was the occasional page that was printed crooked, or was smudged with transfer, but that may have been just a one off with my book.I reacquainted myself with the Jeffrey MacDonald case by reading Fatal Vision, and followed up with this one. In a way I am glad I did, since there really was so much detail. Would I have understood this book as well if I hadn't had some basic knowledge, probably not. What that did was give me a clear idea about what was, in hindsight, so odd, about Fatal Vision. Joe McGinnis did not really do the best job going back to the beginning of the book to rewrite as his opinion of Jeffrey MacDonald changed. It almost seemed like he finished that book and forced it to go in the opposite direction it was originally headed in.This book on the other hand, is a masterful work of scholarship. The information is comprehensive and organized in a way that really helps to see how this crime was every kind of complicated, and became a twisting mess of skullduggery by those intent on prosecuting Jeff MacDonald. It became an even bigger story for me when I could see how within the context of the murders, his life went from well-earned charm to possibly the cruelest kind of fate. And then to realize that he has been living this nightmare, not for the week or so it takes to read the book, but for the last 42 years. -KA
    • 4/5
      A terrific read. Besides the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, she sheer volume of material Errol Morris had to wade through is mind boggling. He tells a really great story. We know how it ends. Jeffrey MacDonald is still in prison after all. But this reads like a thriller. For fans of Morris, true crime, and great writing,