Fatal Vision or Fatal Justice - The Case of Jeffrey MacDonald

Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan

CrimeOnline and iHeartPodcasts

True Crime

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

At 3:42 a.m. on February 17, 1970, Green Beret Doctor Jeffrey MacDonald makes an emergency phone call from his base housing at 544 Castle Drive at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The dispatcher hears the faint message, a call for help, "Stabbing! Hurry!" Inside the residence, MacDonald's wife, Colette, 26, and five months pregnant, lies dead on the floor of the master bedroom, their daughters, Kimberley, 5, and Kristen, 2, are found dead in their respective beds. Jeffrey MacDonald suffered minor injuries, compared to his wife and daughters. MacDonald claims 4 hippies, 3 men and a woman, came into his home, killed his family and knocked him unconscious. MacDonald says the woman with long blond hair was wearing a white floppy hat and holding a candle while chanting "Acid is groovy, kill the pigs." The case has been turned into books, movies, articles, and lawsuits. MacDonald was convicted for the murder of his wife and daughters and sentenced to life in prison. Jeffrey MacDonald claims he was wrongly convicted and has never wavered from his claims that hippies murdered his wife and daughters. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the case and the injuries suffered by Colette, Kimberley, Kristen, and Jeffrey Macdonald, and compare the forensic facts to the story told by the one person who survived.

Transcribe Highlights

00:00:01.45 Introduction

00:00:17.91 Killer on the loose in LA

00:03:06.24 Jeffrey MacDonald story

00:05:26.19 Victim recounting traumatic event

00:09:10.74 MacDonald tells his version of events

00:14:09.09 Four Hippies get on military base housing

00:19:10.31 Tearing down location of homicide

00:24:07.38 Officers explaining crime scene

00:29:36.21 Motive doesn't matter at a crime scene

00:33:55.42 MacDonald was the ONLY threat, he survives

00:38:43.83 Wounds on Colette

00:43:09.00 Comparing injuries suffered by girls and MacDonald

00:48:13.19 Injuries suffered by Kimberly, 5-years-old

00:52:21.98 Conclusion

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an I-Heart podcast.
0:05.3	Bodybacks with Joseph Scott Moore.
0:10.0	August 8 through August 9th, 1969, the city of Los Angeles was in fear because they knew that there was a killer on the loose.
0:26.4	They had evidence of it.
0:29.4	Someone had gone into a home in a very upscale area in L.A.
0:35.3	And had butchered five people.
0:40.3	It was terrifying.
0:42.3	But, you know, that case resonated not just in LA, but all over the U.S.
0:50.3	There were stories that were written.
0:52.3	There were fears that were expressed in the news.
0:58.0	Who was this? Who would do this?
1:02.0	But all the way over on the other side of the United States in North Carolina, Fort Bragg, to be very specific, there was another mass homicide that had been committed.
1:19.1	And it had eerie connections, at least seemingly on the surface, to those nights back in August of 69.
1:30.3	Six months later, terror would revisit the country
1:34.3	and people had questions.
1:36.3	And still to this day, those questions still linger.
1:40.3	I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks.
1:46.5	Dave, you and I were kids when the case, cases that we're going to discuss today went down.
1:57.0	I really have no memory of the so-called Jeffrey McDonald case from a real-time perspective.
2:09.4	Jeffrey McDonald has, to this day, claimed that a group of hippies came into his house at 2 o'clock in the morning and attacked him and killed his wife and children and left him for debt.
2:20.8	I mean, his, and this is Jeffrey McDonald's a green beret doctor.
2:24.7	Green beret doctor at the height of the Vietnam War stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina,
	...

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