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Title details for A Wilderness of Error by Errol Morris - Available

A Wilderness of Error

The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald

by Errol Morris
John Pruden
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
Early on the morning of February 17, 1970, in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a Green Beret doctor named Jeffrey MacDonald called the police for help. When the officers arrived at his home they found the bloody and battered bodies of MacDonald's pregnant wife and two young daughters. The word "pig" was written in blood on the headboard in the master bedroom. As MacDonald was being loaded into the ambulance, he accused a band of drug-crazed hippies of the crime.
So began one of the most notorious and mysterious murder cases of the twentieth century. Jeffrey MacDonald was finally convicted in 1979 and remains in prison today. Since then a number of bestselling books—including Joe McGinniss's Fatal Vision and Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer, along with a blockbuster television miniseries—have attempted to solve the MacDonald case and explain what it all means.
In A Wilderness of Error, Errol Morris, who has been investigating the case for nearly two decades, reveals that almost everything we know about that case is ultimately flawed, and an innocent man may be behind bars. In a masterful reinvention of the true-crime thriller, Morris looks behind the haze of myth that still surrounds these murders. Drawing on court transcripts, lab reports, and original interviews, Morris brings a complete forty-year history back to life and demonstrates how our often desperate attempts to understand and explain an ambiguous reality can overwhelm the facts.
A Wilderness of Error allows the listener to explore the case as a detective might, by confronting the evidence as if for the first time. Along the way Morris poses bracing questions about the nature of proof, criminal justice, and the media, and argues that MacDonald has been condemned not only to prison, but also to the stories that have been created around him. In this profoundly original meditation on truth and justice, Errol Morris reopens a famous closed case and reveals that, forty years after the murder of MacDonald's family, we still have no proof of his guilt.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 28, 2012

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781452629377
      • File size: 418456 KB
      • Duration: 14:31:46

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from September 24, 2012
      Even readers who begin this mesmerizing and disturbing book convinced of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald's guilt in the 1970 murders of his wife and young daughters in Fort Bragg, North Carolina will emerge with serious doubts about his culpability and the fairness of his trial. Award-winning documentary filmmaker Morris, whose 1988 film The Thin Blue Line led to the freedom of a man wrongfully accused of murder, is well-equipped to sort through the reams of evidence amassed over the years; yet despite the volume of testimony and physical evidence, he makes crystal-clear how mistakes made by the responding military officers contaminated the crime scene, and how fact-finders were repeatedly misled about the circumstances of the killings. While the brutality of the murders is disturbing, what is even more troublingâand what Morris makes distressingly evidentâis the possibility that MacDonald "had been made to witness the savage deaths of his family and then was wrongfully convicted for their murders." Morris has been researching the case for over two decades, and the result of his inquiries is a thorough and compelling argument for the incarcerated doctor's innocence, a sobering look at the labyrinthine justice system, and a feat of investigative perseverance. Illus.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 28, 2013
      Morris provides an exhaustive study of the infamous murder case involving Jeffrey MacDonald, a military doctor who was convicted, perhaps wrongly, of the brutal 1970 murders of his pregnant wife and two small children. From the beginning, MacDonald claimed that “four hippies” broke into his home, attacked him, and killed his family. Morris examines everything related to the MacDonald case, from the vicious murders and the initial—some say sloppy and biased—investigation that lead to MacDonald’s 1979 conviction, to MacDonald’s present-day claims of innocence from his prison cell. This audiobook clocks in at over 14 hours, and it’s easy to imagine it coming across as a dry recitation of facts and statistics in the hands of another narrator, or being presented with an over-the-top sensational reading, but John Pruden keeps his narration simply and believable while delivering a mountain of trial evidence, testimonies, and interviews. And this ultimately makes for a more compelling listen. A Penguin hardcover.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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