'Fatal Vision' author Joe McGinniss dies at age 71

The Associated Press

Joe McGinniss, the adventurous and news-making author and reporter who skewered the marketing of Richard Nixon in "The Selling of the President 1968" and tracked his personal journey from sympathizer to scourge of convicted killer Jeffrey MacDonald in the blockbuster "Fatal Vision," died yesterday at age 71.

McGinniss, who announced in 2013 that he had been diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer, died from complications related to his disease. His attorney and longtime friend Dennis Holahan said he died at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, Mass.

Few journalists of his time so intrepidly pursued a story, burned so many bridges or more memorably placed themselves in the narrative, whether insisting on the guilt of MacDonald, who grew up in Patchogue, after seemingly befriending him or moving next door to Sarah Palin's house for a most unauthorized biography of the former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential candidate.

The tall, talkative McGinniss had early dreams of becoming a sports reporter and wrote books about soccer, horse racing and travel.

But he was best known for two works that became touchstones in their respective genres -- campaign books ("The Selling of the President 1968") and true crime ("Fatal Vision").

In both cases, he had become fascinated by the difference between public image and private reality. McGinniss was a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1968 when an advertising man told him he was joining Hubert Humphrey's presidential campaign. Intrigued that candidates had advertising teams, McGinniss was inspired to write a book and tried to get access to Humphrey.

The Democrat turned him down, but, according to McGinniss, Nixon aide Leonard Garment allowed him in, one of the last times the ever-suspicious Nixon would permit a journalist so much time around him.

Garment and other Nixon aides were apparently unaware, or unconcerned, that McGinniss' heart was very much with the anti-war agitators the candidate so despised.

In 1979, he was a columnist for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner when an argument without end was born: McGinniss was approached by MacDonald, about a possible book on the 1970 murders for which the physician and former Green Beret was being charged.

In the early hours of Feb. 17, 1970, MacDonald's pregnant wife, Collete, whom he met while in high school in Patchogue, and two children were stabbed and beaten to death at the family's home in Fort Bragg, N.C. The date, location and identities of the victims are virtually the only facts of the case not in dispute.

MacDonald, who sustained a punctured lung and minor injuries, had insisted that the house was overrun by drug-crazed hippies inspired by the then-recent Charles Manson murders.

Investigators suspected otherwise, believing that MacDonald killed his family and arranged the apartment to make it appear others had committed the crime. MacDonald was initially cleared of charges, then indicted, then finally brought to trial in 1979. He was found guilty and sentenced to three consecutive life terms.

"Fatal Vision," published in 1983, became one of the most widely read and contested true crime books in history.

McGinniss wrote not just of the case but of his own conclusions. He had at first found MacDonald charming and sincere but came to believe that he was a sociopath who had committed the killings while in a frenzied state brought on by diet pills.

Robert Keeler, a longtime Newsday reporter and editor, interviewed MacDonald after the convicted killer had spoken to McGinniss.

"He had thought the McGinniss book would portray him as a wronged, innocent man," Keeler wrote of MacDonald in Newsday in 2012. "It didn't."