Final Vision Offers One More Look at the Jeffrey MacDonald Case: New at Reason

Television critic Glenn Garvin reviews a final, rather lackluster look at the famous 1969 murder of the MacDonald family and the prosecution of Jeffrey MacDonald in Final Vision:

In 1969, when MacDonald was the sole survivor of a savage attack on his family by what he reported as a band of kids chanting “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs,” barely a year after the Manson Family murders, the case seemed like the second chapter of Helter Skelter, further evidence that the 1960s counterculture was coming unhinged. (The fact that MacDonald was a Green Beret doctor who lived on a military base at a time when anti-war feelings were peaking only reinforced the political framework.)

Then, when first military police and then civilian cops changed their minds and charged MacDonald with the murder of his pregnant wife and two little daughters, the case turned into an episode of Perry Mason, with melodramatic twists upending the plot.

Not only did the accuser become the accused, but a journalist named Joe McGinniss—who was given full access to MacDonald’s defense team—switched sides, declaring the doctor a drug-addled sociopath who slaughtered his entire family because one of the kids wet the bed. (And enhanced the television metaphor when his book became a wildly popular TV miniseries.)

View this article.