The family claims his body has never been found. We decided we needed Freddie and Mildred Kassab on our sides, lead investigator Peter Kearns said in a December 1986 lecture on the case, according to the docuseries. In other words, an FBI lab technician trusted exculpatory evidence to a member of the prosecution team. Of all places! This was about 31% of all the recorded Kassab's in USA. WebIn 1971, his father-in-law, Freddy Kassab, became progressively suspicious of MacDonald and sought formal reopening of the case. In 1905, Wadea married Sara Hajjar, who had been educated at an English boarding school and was teaching at a mission school for Jewish children in Damascus prior to her marriage. By the end of 1969, everything seemed in order. Stories about the innocent caught in a machine that perverts every possibility of justice. After Mica performed mouth-to-mouth, MacDonald came to. In October 1970, following an investigation and hearing, the military dropped its case against MacDonald, and he was honorably discharged from the army. "More senior criminal figures are exploiting the vulnerabilities of younger or less sophisticated offenders," he said. The bedroom of Kristen and Kimberly MacDonald, mere hours after they were murdered. Also last year, Osman, 32, one of the middle brothers, was released from prison. Others relate to significant organised crime figures, and their businesses, such as tattoo parlours. There are only two possible pictures, both nightmares. When Victor Worheide, who was a federal prosecutor, later became interested in the case at the urging of the parents of Colette MacDonald, the case was gone. Kassab filed a citizens criminal complaint in April 1974, petitioning a federal court to convene a grand jury and determine if MacDonald could be charged. WS: They were a very normal-looking mama and daddy. Of those in prison, one was jailed for having guns that so troubled a judge she described them as "the sort of weapons that were used down in Tasmania", a reference to the Port Arthur massacre. Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, Collection description written by Linda Jacobs. Shes haunting this case. There may be hope that MacDonald will eventually gain his freedom and at least be able to live the last few years of his life outside of a prison cell. After 3 a.m. on Feb. 17, 1970, dispatchers at Fort Bragg received an emergency call from the MacDonalds 544 Castle Drive address. That kind of story never ends. He claimed that he had been asleep on the couch when at least four drug-crazed hippies broke into the home and savagely killed the family. The Tibas are the only clan in the five families that can boast three generations of serious offenders from murderers to drug traffickers. He explained his lie initially by attributing it to drug addiction-induced paranoia and then said he believed that once he told his family the lies, he had to keep lying.. The second is "Kassab Family History by Aelyas Kassab; it is 125 pages and was composed circa 1958. In a 2011 press release, the Innocence Project stated:. These were the families police identified in 2011 as causing most of the trouble in the band, which stretches roughly from Coburg North to Campbellfield, then in an arc around to Altona in the west. Not only had the word pig been scrawled on the bedroom headboard in his wifes blood but she and her unborn baby were dead. Waters rubbished that explanation. That, in turn, drives a burgeoning black market for firearms, and has made the north-west the centre of the gun trade in this state. He read the papers at a little square table and he sat there and he chain smoked three packs a day, day after day after day going over and over everything, Bob Stevenson recalled in the docuseries. Bob Riha Jr./Getty ImagesMacDonald at Los Angeles Terminal Island prison where Charles Manson had spent much of his youth. This collection is a part of a larger collection that has been divided into more specific collections. Bettmann/Getty ImagesMacDonald in late 1970 after the Army acquitted him of all charges. Remember the perceptual illusion where you look at a picture and youre certain that you see the bust of a young woman? A finger squeezes a trigger until the chamber empties. In the hearing we just had in Wilmington she played an important role, decades after her death. The chanting blonde, meanwhile, had not been found. I held out to the last ditch. MacDonald claimed that his daughter Kimberly wet his side of the bed, prompting him to go to sleep on the couch. Since adapted into a documentary series of the same name directed by Marc Smirling, the project aims to detail how much evidence Morris believes was lost, mismanaged or glaringly unreliable from the start. Picture #2. Another page in another chapter in the new gangland war. Nonexclusive right to authorize all uses of these materials for non-commercial research, scholarly, or other educational purposes are granted to Khayrallah Center pursuant to Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA). Eventually, he turned on the man he had once so ardently defended. Some said he should never have taken the case because his former son-in-law was the prosecutor in the original army hearing. I accused the Army of every blunder that they made in the original investigation, he once said, according to the docuseries. The persistence paid off and in 1974, a grand jury indicted Jeffrey MacDonald on three counts of murder after seven months of testimony and evidence, according to Vanity Fair. The simple acts of coming and going as I please and caring for my own basic needs have been denied him. His wife Colette and his children have also been forever denied these things -- but not, I have come to believe, by the man who is currently serving three consecutive life sentences. He wanted his son-in-law to stay on the east coast and pursue the killers. Most notably, the holes in the shirt MacDonald had been wearing appeared too smooth and clear cut to indicate self-defense. He was more interested in working with people on hallucinogenic and things like that. For his part, MacDonald called Kassab and made a grandiose claim that he and some Green Beret buddies had gone out on the streets to look for the hippies responsible and found and killed one of them. Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe bedroom of Kristen and Kimberly MacDonald, mere hours after they were murdered. A lengthy trial heard Moustafa and Kassab had gone to the Brunswick panel beating shop to confront Moustafa over $50,000 in cash and $10,000 in aftershave they believe he had stolen. All rights reserved. He was a true gentleman, even though there were things in the trial and there were decisions he made that I disagree with. Is it possible that Jeffrey MacDonald will get justice under these circumstances? Freddy Kassab had inserted himself into the 1970 military hearing and made himself the center of a media circus, holding news conferences and firing off letters to members of Congress. In 1978, MacDonalds case went to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, who rejected it. The strength of the families now almost a decade after the launch of Santiago are largely determined by how many of them have been killed or locked up. Enough somethings to fill the long, solitary chapters of a mans life unfolding behind prison walls. In 1982, she sat down with Gunderson and Beasley in a taped interview, claiming that she had been part of a satanic cult that had killed the family because MacDonald was not cooperative in helping heroin addicts during his time at Fort Bragg. Family members of radio personality Casey Kasem have settled a lawsuit against his widow that alleged her neglect and physical abuse led to his death in 2014. Helena Stoeckley confessed many times that MacDonalds willingness to turn heroin addicts in to the police infuriated local drug dealers. Even back then, if you polled Fayetteville folks, you might have found that a lot of people did not believe that he did it. Desperate to save his family, he said he fought back until they stabbed him and beat him unconscious. Carl Williams was a boy from Broady, whose fat fingers spread across the state, but we know little about the boys from Broady who are ordering murders and peddling drugs now. Aside from being the Wall Street of Victoria's firearms and drugs market, and the enormous consequences this trafficking has on the state, and the impact on the medical system of record numbers of people being maimed, there are the people who die completely innocently because the rules of these markets means shooting first has become an unwritten rule. Eventually, after pressure from Colettes family, MacDonald was indicted and found guilty of the three murders on August 29, 1979. The list of misfortunes goes on: exculpatory evidence withheld; possible prosecutorial misconduct; and fallible humans who twisted the MacDonald story to fit their own agendas. Thank you. Maybe more than I would have thought as a teen. Jeffrey MacDonald was arraigned in May 1975 and pleaded not guilty. The cost to Melbourne's north-west is huge. What follows is the transcript of our conversation. His relentless persistence prompted the government to open a second investigation. The social justice movement is now involved; the Innocence Project, a prestigious nationwide network dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully convicted, has worked strenuously to overturn MacDonalds conviction. He remained haunted by the horrific way his stepdaughter and grandchildren had lost their lives. Two members of the Tiba family have been charged in relation to the shooting. The Kassab brothers both raised their families in Chester, where they also practiced dentistry. WebWadea Kassab was born in Damascus in 1872 to an Orthodox family that had long and deep connections to British and American Protestant missionaries in Damascus and Beirut. The prosecution, led by James Blackburn and Brian Murtagh, argued that MacDonald staged the crime scene to blame hippies. And absolutely nothing fit, Kassab told the Orlando Sentinel in 1989. He adamantly denied all charges but was at a loss for words during cross-examination by the prosecution. However, instead of the firm defense MacDonald expected, the 1983 bestseller A Fatal Vision described him as a narcissistic psychopath.. And absolutely nothing fit, Kassab told the, To realize he had done it, and Colette loved him, and when you sit back and picture in your minds eye what happened that night, with him attacking, and I know from the autopsy reports what was done to the two children, you cant help but visualize in your mind, though we dont talk about it, Freddy Kassab told, Stevenson told reporters in 2005 that he had promised Freddy Kassab on his death bed that he would continue the familys quest to keep MacDonald behind bars, according to. Soon I was reading Morris A Wilderness of Error, feeling skeptical and wondering why this reputable man would involve himself in a case that everyone and their mother (including mine) knew the truth about. The families have been involved in drug trafficking since at least the turn of the century, or, in the case of Macchour Chaouk, the patriarch of that family, since 1983. The family moved to Chicago after MacDonald was accepted into Northwestern University Medical School. When the show was over, I retired to the security of my bed, safe from unpredictable evils. That huge standard protects us from miscarriages of justice. Despite a lack of motive and no history of violence, MacDonald was convicted of the second-degree murders of Colette and Kimberly, and the first-degree murder of Kristen. Stories about the innocent caught in a machine that perverts every possibility of justice of younger or less sophisticated,! 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