The Journalist and the Murder

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

What Bismarck said of legislation and sausages, one must also admit of the more titillating varieties of journalism: those who love the product would do well not to examine the process too closely. That is especially so with the faddish nonfiction genre of factual crime reconstructions, in which, for tactical reasons of getting the inside story, authors generally ally themselves either with careerist police detectives and prosecutors, or with pathetic victims cooperating in a further invasion of their privacy, or with criminals. Each bond can be unseemly, its results distorting.

Consider Joe McGinniss. When writing about subjects other than crime, he led a charmed professional life. The Selling of the President, 1968, a savage back-room report on the manipulative TV advertising in Richard Nixon's campaign, made him, at 26, the youngest U.S. nonfiction writer to top the New York Times best-seller list. Other triumphs followed. If McGinniss did not quite rank with David Halberstam or John McPhee as a chronicler, he stood not too far behind.

Then came Fatal Vision, the biggest hit of his career, with an NBC mini- series to boot. The devil's bargain to make it happen was that McGinniss had to befriend, become the business partner of and even, for technical legal reasons, join the defense team of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, a man eventually convicted of beating to death his pregnant wife and two children. Well before the jury spoke, McGinniss had come to believe his man was guilty. But to protect the book contract he had to keep his subject happy, and he did so, not just by concealing opinions but also by telling overt lies. MacDonald sued, and after a hung jury, McGinniss and his publisher settled, reportedly for $350,000. More humiliation came when Janet Malcolm of the New Yorker detailed McGinniss's indiscretions in a 1989 article, quoting liberally from his letters to MacDonald, including gushing affirmations of belief in his innocence, sleazy attempts to muscle out competing writers, and financial and sexual confessions meant to induce the convicted man to respond in kind.

With his latest venture into fact crime, Cruel Doubt (Simon & Schuster; 460 pages; $25), McGinniss has swung to the opposite pole. Eleven months after Malcolm's devastating piece, he began to write the story of Bonnie Von Stein, a North Carolina woman who was unquestionably a victim rather than a villain. Her husband was bludgeoned and stabbed to death beside her as they lay in bed at home; she too was battered and nearly died. Despite her injuries, she was unjustly treated as a suspect for many months, as was her daughter. She suffered a mother's worst nightmare when her son confessed to devising the crime because he wanted his parents' money more than their company.

In telling the mother's story, McGinniss cannot be accused of glorifying a neurotic criminal. Nor, he is at pains to emphasize, can he be charged with exploitation. He did not seek out his subject. Rather, she came to him -- because, he gloats, she so admired Fatal Vision.

The basic problem with the resulting book is that, for all the drama in its central character's situation, there is not much in the woman herself. She comes across as drab, passive and emotionally blocked. Her best quality, stubborn persistence, does not lend itself to glamour or theatrics. Besides, she was not present -- victims rarely are -- for the key moments in solving the case and preparing for trial. Thus, in bringing the story back to her, McGinniss keeps having to disrupt its momentum.

There is a subtler, graver flaw, one that readers may not recognize unless they pick up another current book about Von Stein's case, Jerry Bledsoe's Blood Games (Dutton; 451 pages; $22.95). In telling Bonnie Von Stein's story, McGinniss adopts, consciously or not, her view that her son was mostly a pawn manipulated by dangerous friends. McGinniss stresses the young man's weakness of character and instability; he quotes defense and prosecution attorneys describing the youth as a "wimp," and attempts to establish his two co- conspirators as evil geniuses. Even the photograph McGinniss uses shows Von Stein's son as a weak-chinned, wide-eyed boy. Bledsoe, whose emphasis is on the perpetrators rather than the victims, convincingly evokes in words and pictures a much harsher figure, quite capable of conniving at murder for gain.

On the whole, Bledsoe's book is livelier, clearer and better reported, although it lacks an organizing theme to compete with McGinniss's haunting image of a woman being victimized over and over. Both books, for example, report that the three plotters were enmeshed in Dungeons & Dragons; Bledsoe does a far better job of explaining that game. Both books are freighted with pointless multigenerational background for the main characters, but Bledsoe's is less tedious. Not only are the co-conspirators almost ciphers in McGinniss's book, but so is the murdered husband Lieth Von Stein, while Bledsoe brings him alive.

Mostly, however, the divergence of the books demonstrates the journalistic axiom that access is everything. Bonnie Von Stein felt abused by the police and prosecutors and didn't like the final verdict; she was convinced the wrong youth had been named as principal assailant. So McGinniss takes an artificially long 200 pages to get anyone arrested and even then keeps casting doubt on the official story, to the point of raising last-minute doubts about the complete innocence of Von Stein's daughter. Bledsoe, however, seemingly had help from the police and builds the latter half of his book around the trial. So he accepts as valid the very evidence that McGinniss convincingly challenges. To read either book is to feel one knows all about the Von Stein case. To read both is to know more and be sure of much less.