Surgeon will ‘keep fighting’ to prove he did not kill kin

RICHMOND: A former army surgeon who has always insisted he was wrongly convicted of slaughtering his pregnant wife and their two young daughters nearly 50 years ago, won’t give up, even if his latest appeal fails to clear his name, his lawyer says.

Jeffrey MacDonald is “going to keep fighting and will continue to maintain his innocence until the end of his days”, attorney Hart Miles said after a hearing at the 4th US District Court of Appeals on Thursday. After decades of failed appeals, MacDonald now hopes the same court that briefly reversed his convictions in 1980 will side with him again. His attorneys say evidence uncovered since then proves he wasn’t the killer.

The 73- year- old man has maintained that a group of drug- fuelled hippies slaughtered 26- year- old Colette McDonald and their daughters, Kimberley, 5, and Kristen, 2, on February 17, 1970, and that his own wounds resulted from his failed attempt to protect his family. MacDonald told the police he called to their home in Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina that he was awakened by the screams of his wife and daughters, then was attacked by three men and a woman with long blonde hair and a floppy hat who carried a candle and chanted “acid is groovy; kill the pigs”.

Prosecutors still contend that the evidence shows MacDonald used a knife and an ice pick to kill them before stabbing himself with a scalpel. MacDonald is challenging a judge’s refusal in 2014 to grant him a new trial based on new evidence. – ANA-AP

Jeffrey MacDonald