‘Fatal Vision’ Trial Could Be Lethal to Nonfiction, Wambaugh Protests

Author Joseph Wambaugh, testifying in the trial of convicted triple-murderer Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald’s lawsuit against the writer who chronicled the killings, said Tuesday the outcome of the case is “crucial to the continuance of nonfiction writing as we know it.”

“If I can’t rely on a legal release, I’m not going to write nonfiction. That’s all there is to it. I don’t want to go through trials like this,” said Wambaugh, a former Los Angeles police officer who was once approached by MacDonald to write the book that would eventually become Joe McGinniss’ best-seller, “Fatal Vision.”

The book concluded that MacDonald, who has steadfastly maintained innocence, was guilty of the crimes.

MacDonald is a former Army Green Beret captain who has maintained his innocence in the brutal slayings of his pregnant wife and two daughters at Ft. Bragg, N.C., in 1970. He has claimed that McGinniss breached two legal releases the physician signed, pledging not to sue, by failing to preserve the “essential integrity” of his story and falsely portraying himself as a friend.

Concerned Over Verdict

After his testimony, in a trial that has entered its fifth week before U.S. District Judge William J. Rea, Wambaugh said the possibility that a jury could award damages to MacDonald, in spite of the legal releases he signed over to McGinniss, is dangerous for the publishing world.

“I’m watching the case very closely, and so is every nonfiction writer in the country,” Wambaugh said. “This would be a test case that would put an end to ‘Fatal Vision,’ ‘In Cold Blood,’ ‘Onion Field,’ all those kinds of books . . . . It would end my career.”

Wambaugh, author of “The Onion Field,” a best-seller that told the story of the 1963 murder of a Los Angeles police officer in an onion field near Bakersfield, said he talked with MacDonald about doing a book in a brief meeting in 1979 at a restaurant in Long Beach.

“It was a monologue delivered by Dr. MacDonald,” Wambaugh recalled. “I had never met anyone quite as glib, I don’t think, and I was astonished by the story; the manner in which it was delivered.

“He was describing events, of course, of consummate horror in a very detached manner. Not that he didn’t show emotion. But he would always show emotion when he was describing the badgering and harassment he suffered at the hands of the government, and then would go into the graphic details of the murders with no emotion . . . .

“I had interviewed dozens and dozens of people who were survivors of horrific crimes--some immediately after the event, some many years later. I had never, in all my experience, seen anyone describe an event like that in the almost cavalier manner that Dr. MacDonald described it . . . . He spoke in sentences with periods and colons and commas. I thought it was extraordinary.”

Later in 1979, Wambaugh said, McGinniss stopped by his home in San Marino to go over the book that he had now agreed to write. The trial, by this time, was over. MacDonald was facing three consecutive life sentences for the murders, which he claimed were committed by a band of hippies.

“He (McGinniss) seemed distressed and confused,” Wambaugh testified. “On the one hand, he either had a totally innocent man, a good man who had been unjustly convicted, or ‘I have on the other hand,’ he said, ‘the most evil person I have ever heard of since Hitler.’ ”

Wambaugh said he raised “a third alternative,” the possibility that MacDonald was a sociopath, who had no concept of good or evil.

“It was a waste of time to call Gregory Powell, the ‘Onion Field’ killer, evil, because he didn’t have the discriminatory device to feel whether something was bad or evil,” Wambaugh said.

“I remember an admonition I gave him (McGinniss) as he was walking out the door. I said, when you’re dealing with a sociopath, do not expect the son of a bitch to fall down on his knees and confess to you.”

As in earlier testimony by conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr., a key part of Wambaugh’s testimony involved the issue of a writer’s obligation to his subject.

MacDonald claims that McGinniss was a false friend, who led him to believe he still believed in his innocence, long after he had decided otherwise, in order to maintain MacDonald’s cooperation.

“I would tell an untruth if I had to,” Wambaugh said, recalling the time when one of the Onion Field killers asked if he believed him when he told him he had not shot Officer Ian Campbell.

“I did not believe him, but I said that I did, because I wanted him to continue talking; because my ultimate responsibility was to the book. The book was much bigger than this person, or even I am . . . It was becoming a living thing.

“I would always allow a subject to think that he is manipulating me, even though I had all sorts of information to cast doubt on what he is saying. With Gregory Powell, for example, whenever I interviewed him, I would go out of my way to make him think I was being conned.”