Catch-up following seasonal break: Jeffrey MacDonald: He is asking a federal judge to review new evidence - while prosecutors maintain that DNA tests on hairs from the crime scene are irrelevant. Fayette Observer

STORY: "Judge is asked to review new evidence in Jeffrey MacDonald case," by reporter Paul Woolverton, published by the Fayette Observer, on August 24, 2013.

 "The lawyer for former Fort Bragg Army doctor Jeffrey MacDonald asked a federal judge this week to look at new evidence from the murder of MacDonald's family and overturn his 34-year-old conviction. "Viewed dispassionately, the new evidence, coupled with the evidence developed since the trial in 1979, shows abundant 'reasonable doubt,' which means no reasonable juror, following her oath and the jury instructions, would have voted to convict," wrote lawyer M. Gordon Widenhouse Jr. in a memo dated Wednesday. The memo was in response to prosecutor arguments that most of the new evidence can't be trusted and DNA test results on hairs from the crime scene are irrelevant.

MacDonald, 69, is serving three life sentences for the February 1970 stabbing deaths of his pregnant wife, Colette, and daughters Kimberley, 5, and Kristen, 2, in their home on Fort Bragg. He has always contended that he and his family were the victims of a home invasion. He said he was sleeping on his living room couch and woke to find three men and a woman. He said he fought with two of the men and was knocked unconscious. When MacDonald came to, he said, he found the bodies and called authorities.........Investigators concluded that MacDonald killed his family and made up the home invasion story. They believe that MacDonald knocked over furniture and stabbed himself to give his story credence. In federal court last year, Widenhouse presented evidence that Helena Stoeckley, a deceased drug abuser from Fayetteville, told her lawyer during MacDonald's trial in 1979 and later told her mother that she was the woman in the MacDonald house during the murders. He had evidence that a former U.S. Marshal who worked at the trial, who died in 2008, said he heard Stoeckley admit she was in the MacDonald house and also heard a prosecutor threaten to charge her with murder if she said that to MacDonald's jury. DNA testing of evidence at the crime scene included three hairs that could not be matched to anyone. One of these was from fingernail scrapings from Kristen, and Widenhouse thinks it came from her killer, and shows that MacDonald is innocent.
In court and in a memo filed this summer, prosecutors contended: Two of the unidentified hairs could have been in the house long before the murders and could have come from anyone who had been in there. The hair from Kristen's fingernail scrapings may be from someone who handled the evidence and accidentally contaminated it. It wasn't listed among the evidence until five months after the murders. Further, Kristen's fingernails were bloody, but no blood was found on the hair. MacDonald had a stab wound, evidently from an ice pick, that punctured his lung. His wife had 37 stab wounds, some from an ice pick, some from a knife, and was beaten. She had two broken arms and a fractured skull. His older daughter had a fractured skull and eight to 10 stab wounds. His younger daughter had 27 stab wounds.........U.S. District Judge James C. Fox conducted the evidentiary hearing last fall and is reviewing the case. No date is set for him to rule."

The entire story can be found at:

http://www.stripes.com/news/us/judge-is-asked-to-review-new-evidence-in-jeffrey-macdonald-case-1.237073

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