Books: Dr. Death

FATAL VISION by Joe McGinniss

Putnam; 663 pages; $17.95

In Macbeth, the "fatal vision" of a dagger leads on to murder and blood-soaked revenge. Author Joe McGinniss (The Selling of the President 1968, Going to Extremes), uses the image for his chilling investigation of three atrocious deaths that occurred more than a decade ago. But the use of the quote is a bit askew. The Thane of Glamis killed for ambition; Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, outwardly an all-American winner, brutally murdered his wife and small daughters for reasons that remain elusive.

MacDonald was handsome, ambitious, athletic. After breezing through Princeton, medical school and a surgical residency, he joined the Green Berets at the age of 25. He hoped to ship out to Viet Nam, but never got there. At about 3 a.m. on Feb. 17, 1970, in the MacDonalds" apartment at Fort Bragg, N.C., his wife Colette, 26, pregnant with their third child, was killed; she was stabbed 37 times in the chest and neck. The MacDonald daughters, Kimberly, 5, and Kristen, 2 were murdered so savagely that the Army crime photographer became ill. MacDonald, who was superficially wounded, mumbled of an attack by four hippies chanting "Acid is groovy. Acid and rain." But military investigators concluded that MacDonald had murdered his own family and to cover up had aped the Manson gang's recent grisly slayings of Actress Sharon Tate and some of her friends. At a pre-court-martial hearing half a year later, MacDonald's hustling lawyer, Bernard Segal of Philadelphia, shredded the Army's circumstantial hypothesis and the doctor was set free.

Afterward, MacDonald found himself in demand as a talk-show and party guest, the quintessential victim of military bureaucracy. Moving to Huntington Beach, Calif., he became a respected community do-gooder and an authority on emergency-room procedures. He lived in a mirror-lined condominium and sailed a yacht, The Recovery Room. Meanwhile, Colette's salesman stepfather, Freddy Kassab, a former Canadian army intelligence operative, and her mother Mildred were obsessed with grief and vengeance.

They petitioned Congress to find the killers. In 1971, when he finally obtained a transcript of the Army hearing, Kassab became convinced of his stepson-in-law's guilt. "If the courts won't administer justice," he said grim ly, "I will."

The vigilante never had to act on his vow. In 1975 a grand jury in North Carolina indicted MacDonald for the murders. When MacDonald finally took the stand, his wounded-victim posture collapsed. This time the prosecution's reconstruction of the murders, based on blood types, a footprint, and threads from the doctor's pajama top, horrified grand jurors. Mac-Donald apparently had bludgeoned Colette and Kimberly and held two-year-old Kristen across his lap to stab her. At his rial delayed almost five years by appeals, he was found guilty of first-and second-degree murder. MacDonald is now serving three consecutive life terms in a Texas federal prison, where he furiously maintains his innocence.