The Case For Christ

direction of the jury room. "Them?" he chortled. "They'll never
convict me!"
Then, apparently realizing how cynical those words sounded, he
quickly added, "I'm innocent, you know."
That was the last time I ever heard him laugh. Within days the
former Green Beret and emergency room physician was found guilty
of stabbing to death his wife, Colette, and his daughters,
Kimberly, age five, and Kristen, age two. He was promptly
sentenced to life in prison and carted off in handcuffs.
MacDonald, whose story was masterfully recounted by Joe
McGinniss in the best-seller and TV movie Fatal Vision, was cocky
enough to think that his alibi would help him get away with
murder. He had told investigators that he was asleep on the couch
when drug-crazed hippies awakened him in the middle of the night.
He said he fought them off, getting stabbed and knocked
unconscious in the process. When he awakened, he found his family
slaughtered. Detectives were skeptical from the start. The living
room showed few signs of a life-and-death struggle. MacDonald's
wounds were superficial. Though he had poor eyesight, he was
somehow able to provide detailed descriptions of his attackers
even though he had not been wearing his glasses.
However, skepticism alone doesn't win convictions; that requires
hard evidence. In MacDonald's case detectives relied on
scientific proof to untangle his web of lies and convict him of
the slayings. There's a wide variety of scientific evidence
that's commonly used in trials, ranging from DNA typing to
forensic anthropology to toxicology. In MacDonald's case it was
serology (blood evidence) and
trace evidence that dispatched him to the penitentiary.
In an extraordinary-and for prosecutors, fortuitous coincidence,
each member of MacDonald's family had a different blood
type. By analyzing where bloodstains were found, investigators
were able to reconstruct the sequence of events that deadly
evening-and it directly contradicted MacDonald's version of what
happened. Scientific study of tiny blue pajama threads, which
were found scattered in various locations, also refuted his
alibi. And microscopic analysis demonstrated that holes in his
pajamas could not have been made, as he claimed, by an ice pick
wielded by the home invaders. In short, it was FBI technicians in
white lab coats who were really behind MacDonald's conviction.
Scientific evidence can also make important contributions to the