On the early morning of Feb. 17, 1970, one of two sequences unfolded at 544 Castle Drive, the Fort Bragg residence of Army surgeon Jeffrey R. MacDonald. In the first scenario, drug-addled hippies burst into the house, chanting, “Acid is groovy,” and, “Kill the pigs,” before stabbing to death MacDonald’s wife, Colette, and daughters, Kimberly and Kristen. In the second, the doctor himself committed the crimes and invented the Charles Manson-inspired fantasy to cast suspicion elsewhere. Though A Wilderness of Error, FX’s new investigative series based on the book by documentarian Errol Morris (The Fog of War), isn’t sure which story to believe, its examination of the famous case is necessary viewing for true-crime enthusiasts.
Unlike Making a Murderer, the 2015 Netflix megahit that reinvigorated the genre, A Wilderness of Error makes no effort to hide its subject’s fate. Cleared of wrongdoing by a military tribunal, MacDonald was nevertheless indicted by a North Carolina grand jury in 1975. There, despite the confidence of his defense team, the doctor was convicted of three counts of murder and ordered to serve consecutive life sentences in prison. By revealing the trial’s outcome in the opening credits, director Marc Smerling (The Jinx, Capturing the Friedmans) sacrifices the element of suspense but gains the more interesting proposition that an injustice may have been done.
For much of its five-episode run, A Wilderness of Error spends its time weighing the competing narratives of MacDonald and his accusers. The case against the doctor consists of the inconsistencies of his account and the data collected by forensic technicians. Why, for example, were MacDonald’s daughters found on their sides if, as their father claimed, he attempted to resuscitate them? Why were the defendant’s wounds entirely superficial while his family’s were vicious, copious, and more than sufficient to kill? Accompanying these questions is the irrebuttable evidence gathered at the crime scene. Though MacDonald’s court testimony suggested that his daughters were murdered in their rooms, Kimberly’s blood was discovered in the master suite, causing prosecutors to surmise that the girl had interrupted a fight between her parents. Similarly damning was the fact that the 5-year-old’s blood was found in the pages of her father’s Esquire magazine. Among the issue’s features was an article on the Manson Family slayings.
For the defendant and his attorneys, the trial strategy rested largely on the existence of Helena Stoeckley, a local woman who wore a “floppy hat” of the sort described by MacDonald and who confessed on numerous occasions to having been present for the murders. Easily the case’s most intriguing participant, Stoeckley is the subject of well-deserved attention from the show’s creators, who make compelling use of a 1982 video in which the young woman not only described the crimes but supplied a motive. (MacDonald had led an anti-drug crackdown on the base. The hippies weren’t having it.) But whatever the content of Stoeckley’s claims, the series makes no secret of the fact that she was an extraordinarily unreliable figure. Drug-addicted, attention-seeking, and at least somewhat lost to reality, Stoeckley was an investigative dead end and a walking red herring. Unless, that is, she was telling the truth.
That A Wilderness of Error is equivocal on this point is due in part to the incompleteness of the historical record. Because U.S. District Court Judge Franklin Dupree barred the men and women to whom Stoeckley allegedly confessed from taking the stand, no testimony supporting her guilt was ever given under oath. (When called, Stoeckley herself denied any culpability.) Yet it is also true that Smerling’s narrative strategy depends heavily on his show’s ability to change the viewer’s mind again and again. This is not to say that the director would have omitted proof of Stoeckley’s involvement had it been available. It is to note, however, that the production benefits mightily from the did-she-or-didn’t-she pendulum swings that her preposterous inconsistencies produce.
A Wilderness of Error is not, it should by now be clear, a work of advocacy journalism. Instead, Smerling and company have created a documentary that challenges the very notion that the truth can be known. For every marker indicating MacDonald’s innocence, another proclaims his guilt, and back and forth we go. As Morris notes in the series’s closing moments, “People are endlessly suggestible.” That includes audiences.
Whether every viewer will be satisfied with such indeterminacy is, of course, an open question. And A Wilderness of Error is not without its modest blemishes. As other critics have noted, its use of dramatic reenactments is occasionally ham-fisted and consistently old-fashioned. Elsewhere, directorial choices seem designed to mislead, as when “recreated audio” segments are paired with shots of decibel meters and spinning reels — the same visual cues that accompany actual recordings.
Perhaps the worst that can be said of the series, however, is that it finds no way to avoid the flaw that makes the entire genre so guilty a pleasure: its tendency, in the words of Colette MacDonald’s brother, to “throw a rope around [survivors’] legs and drag [them] through the family pool of blood.” To so irrefutable a charge, it can be difficult to find an answer. The rope may belong to FX and Marc Smerling, but we’re the ones pulling.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
