‘Fatal Vision’ Jurors Told MacDonald Failed Lie Test

The final defense witness in the suit by convicted triple killer Jeffrey MacDonald’s against author Joe McGinniss revealed Tuesday that the ex-Green Beret doctor failed a lie-detector test about the murder of his family.

MacDonald claims in his $15-million suit that McGinniss, 44, lured him into cooperating in the writing of the book “Fatal Vision” by posing as his friend and advocate and hiding his belief that MacDonald was guilty of killing his pregnant wife and two young daughters in 1970.

Closing arguments in the 6-week-old Los Angeles federal court trial were tentatively scheduled for today.

Polygraph Expert

The final defense witness Tuesday was polygraph expert Cleve Backster, who testified that MacDonald lied during an April, 1970, polygraph examination when he denied a role in the killings. MacDonald’s lawyers had hired Backster to perform the test.

Backster said his testimony marked the first time that the results of the polygraph had been revealed publicly.

MacDonald, 43, was convicted in 1979 of slaying his family in their Ft. Bragg, N.C., Army base home in February, 1970. He still claims the murders were committed by a group of hippies on drugs.

Lie-detector test results are often not admitted as evidence in federal court, but U.S. Dist. Judge William Rea instructed jurors to consider the test only as a tool to assess MacDonald’s credibility.

Backster, who runs a polygraph institute in San Diego and conducts seminars on the subject for the Department of Defense and the FBI, admitted under cross-examination by MacDonald’s attorney, Gary Bostwick, that lie-detector tests can be inaccurate.

But he told McGinniss’ lawyer, Daniel Kornstein, that the results of MacDonald’s test were “very unambiguous.”

“I told him that in my opinion, he was being deceptive on that--questions relating to the crime,” Backster said. “I told him I could not be of help to him because he had failed his polygraph.”

But Backster testified that MacDonald reacted calmly, and the discussion drifted to Backster’s interest in Eastern philosophy.

“I told him that if there was something to the idea of karma, if you have to pay for your crimes in another lifetime, it would be better for him to clear this up in this lifetime rather than waiting till the next,” Backster said.

Backster said McGinniss wrote to him in 1983 seeking the results of the polygraph test, but he refused to release them without MacDonald’s authorization. Backster said McGinniss wrote back later, saying MacDonald had refused to grant such authorization.

“Fatal Vision,” published in 1983 and later made into a television movie, concluded that MacDonald was guilty of the slayings.

Defense witnesses at the trial have included writers William F. Buckley and Joseph Wambaugh.