RALEIGH, N.C. — The notorious Jeffrey MacDonald murder case gained a new layer of intrigue Monday with the court filing of yet another alleged confession by a hippie who MacDonald claims witnessed his family's killing 37 years ago.
This time Helena Stoeckley's own mother — in frail health at a Fayetteville, N.C., nursing home — says her troubled daughter confessed to her twice, including shortly before she died in 1983.
"She wanted to set the record straight with her mother about the MacDonald murders, and that she wished she had not been present in the house and knew that Dr. MacDonald was innocent," her mother, also named Helena Stoeckley, wrote in a March 31 affidavit. MacDonald's lawyers filed it Monday as part of a pending federal appeal to overturn his 1979 murder convictions.
The younger Stoeckley said Greg Mitchell, her boyfriend then, and two other men went to the MacDonald family's apartment the night of Feb. 17, 1970, to harass MacDonald, an Army doctor, for being hard on drug users like them around Fayetteville, according to her mother's statement.
Mitchell and one of the other men killed MacDonald's wife, Colette, and two daughters, Kimberly, 5, and Kristen, 2, Mrs. Stoeckley said her daughter told her.
"On the second occasion during which she confided in me, she told me she could no longer live with the guilt of knowing she had been in the house but lied about it at the trial," the elder Stoeckley wrote. "She told me she was afraid to tell the truth because she was afraid of the prosecutor."
MacDonald, 63, is serving three life sentences at a federal prison in Maryland. He is married.
Mrs. Stoeckley, now 86, said in her affidavit that she believed her late daughter's confession.
"She stated to me that she wanted to 'set things straight' before she died. I've decided to give my statement now because of my advanced age, and because I don't believe he should be in prison."
The younger Stoeckley is a central figure in the lore of MacDonald's case, dramatized in the book and TV movie "Fatal Vision."
At MacDonald's trial, Stoeckley testified that she wasn't involved in the murders and didn't know who had committed them.
Many times over the years, she confessed, only to change her story later.
Federal judges who have ruled on MacDonald's past appeals repeatedly discounted Stoeckley's alleged confessions as unreliable. Some judges characterized them as false fantasies resulting from her mental illness or past heavy drug use.
"She confessed before, so what difference does that make?" asked Jim Blackburn of Raleigh, MacDonald's lead prosecutor. "I'm not surprised that she made another confession. Every time the FBI interviewed her, she recanted. She's a tragic situation."
Blackburn, who later lost his law license for misconduct in private practice, said he and fellow trial prosecutor Brian Murtagh never intimidated Stoeckley.
"Neither Brian nor I threatened her or intimidated her or suggested to her what she should say or not say," Blackburn said Monday. "She told us she was not there, was not involved, and had nothing to do with it."
Decades ago, the elder Mrs. Stoeckley shared a similarly skeptical view with "Fatal Vision" author Joe McGinniss.
"You find her now, sure she'll talk," McGinniss quoted her as saying. "She'll always talk. But I'm telling you, she's gonna talk all kinds of nonsense."
MacDonald's lawyers, however, say the elder Stoeckley's assertion corroborates a retired federal marshal's story that the younger Stoeckley confessed to him as he drove her to the trial.
That man, Jimmy Britt of Apex, N.C., also says Blackburn pressured Stoeckley to change her story at trial, and then lied to the judge — which the prosecutors deny.
Britt's claims are the basis of MacDonald's pending appeal.
MacDonald's defense lawyers say the elder Stoeckley and her son Gene, who prompted her to come forward, have nothing to gain but public criticism.
"They had no reason to get involved in this other than they felt it was the right thing to do," said one of them, Hart Miles of Raleigh.
That doesn't resolve the eternal question whether the daughter had confessed truthfully.
For more than a year, both sides have awaited a ruling from the federal trial judge handling MacDonald's fourth appeal, Senior Judge James Fox.