Kathryn MacDonald, via Associated Press Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald in 1970, the year his wife and daughters were killed — murders he was ultimately convicted of carrying out.
Kathryn MacDonald, via Associated Press Dr. McDonald in 2007 at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Md.
2:47 p.m. | Updated True crime fans, here comes another round in the literary battle over the guilt or innocence of Jeffrey MacDonald.
The author Joe McGinniss has announced that he is releasing “Final Vision: The Last Word on Jeffrey MacDonald” on the digital site Byliner for $2.99.
Dr. MacDonald, an Army doctor and a Green Beret, was convicted in 1979 of stabbing and clubbing to death his pregnant wife and two young daughters. He is serving three consecutive life sentences.
Mr. McGinniss, who wrote “The Selling of the President” about the marketing of Richard M. Nixon during the 1968 campaign, was given access to Dr. MacDonald’s defense team. He ended up writing an account indicting him in the 1983 best-seller “Fatal Vision.” The book then became the basis of an NBC miniseries.
Dr. MacDonald sued Mr. McGinniss, saying he had been duped. He received some sympathy from the New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, whose articles were published as the book “The Journalist and the Murderer” in 1990. The book begins, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”
In it, she argues that Mr. McGinniss morally compromised himself by pretending he thought Dr. MacDonald was innocent long after he believed him to be guilty. Mr. McGinniss wrote a rebuttal to her that was published in 2011.
This year, Dr. MacDonald also gained the support of the filmmaker and writer Errol Morris, who recently wrote “A Wilderness of Error,” which argues that the MacDonald case was a gross miscarriage of justice. Mr. Morris, who exonerated an accused murderer with his film “The Thin Blue Line,” blamed both the courts and Mr. McGinniss for the unfair imprisonment of a man he deemed innocent.
The pugnacious Mr. McGinniss did not take the criticism sitting down. He fired off an angry message via Twitter to a New York Times critic, Dwight Garner, who praised Mr. Morris’s book.
Now Mr. McGinniss’s latest publication, released on Wednesday through Byliner, promises to respond to criticisms of his work and to prove that the doctor’s guilt is “undeniable.”
On Thursday, The New York Times announced an agreement to co-publish e-book-length articles on Byliner.
Leslie Kaufman writes about the publishing industry. Follow @leslieNYT on Twitter.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/for-a-new-generation-a-new-literary-battle-over-jeffrey-macdonalds-guilt/?partner=rss&emc=rss