![]() First edition | |
Author | Errol Morris |
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Illustrator | Niko Skourtis, Pentagram (design studio) |
Language | English |
Genre | True crime, Journalism |
Publisher | Penguin Press (U.S.) |
Publication date | September 4, 2012 (U.S.) |
Pages | 544 |
A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald is a book by Errol Morris, published in September 2012. It reexamines the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret physician accused of killing his wife and two daughters in their home in Fort Bragg on February 17, 1970, and convicted of the crime on August 29, 1979. MacDonald has been in federal prison since 1982.
On September 25, 2020, FX premiered A Wilderness of Error , a five-part television series based on the book.
Morris became preoccupied with the case in the early 1990s, after becoming friends with Harvey Silverglate, then MacDonald's lead appellate attorney. Morris has family in St. Pauls, North Carolina, and visited 544 Castle Drive—the site of the murders—with his wife on trips to the area. [1]
Morris's original intention was to direct a film based on the MacDonald case that would challenge the story presented by government prosecutors at the 1979 trial, and by Joe McGinniss in his 1983 book on the case, Fatal Vision , which proposed that MacDonald was a psychopath who had overdosed on the diet pill Eskatrol and tried to cover up the crime. However, no studios were willing to finance the film, and Morris wrote a book instead.
The book's title comes from the beginning of "William Wilson", the 1839 short story by Edgar Allan Poe. In it, Wilson begs the reader for understanding:
What chance—what one event brought this evil thing to pass, bear with me while I relate... I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control. I would wish them to seek out for me, in the details I am about to give, some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error.
A Wilderness of Error covers the entire history of the case, arguing that mistakes made by investigators in the first hours after the call were compounded over the years by prosecutors, judges, and journalists, and revealing the problems in the public perception of the case. It includes revelations about Helena Stoeckley, a young drug addict who repeatedly confessed to committing the crime with several associates (although at other times claimed no memory of the events).
Morris's is the fourth major work to be written on the case, after Fatal Vision, The Journalist and the Murderer , a 1990 book by Janet Malcolm that argued that McGinniss's treatment of MacDonald was "a grotesquely magnified version of the ordinary journalistic encounter." [2] In conversation with David Carr of The New York Times , Morris argued that his book aimed to correct the earlier versions of the story. McGinniss's relationship with MacDonald, he argued, was opportunistic and deceptive, and "Malcolm wrote about Joe McGinniss as if he were representative of journalism per se, and I respectfully disagree... There was something very pathological in the relationship between McGinniss and his subject.” [3]
The book was designed by Michael Bierut and Yve Ludwig of Pentagram, with illustrations by Niko Skourtis, Lee Cerre, and Matt Delbridge. [4] Morris and the designers worked together, deciding to leave out photographs in favor of documents, diagrams, and "simple line drawings in stark black and white to convey the in-depth analysis of Morris’s arguments as well as the horror and notoriety of the case." [5]
Pentagram also designed a website for the book, where photographs, documents, and other resources used in the making of the book could be displayed.
A Wilderness of Error has received positive reviews from critics. In The Wall Street Journal , the investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein strongly recommended the book and wrote, "Mr. Morris's tone is temperate and fair-minded. He is not an angry polemicist but, we cannot help feeling, someone trying to get at the truth." [6] Laura Miller at Salon wrote that "A Wilderness of Error is a beautifully produced book, with chapters set off by line drawings of crucial objects in the case: a toppled coffee table, a flower pot, a rocking horse. It’s reminiscent of the recurring images in The Thin Blue Line , iconic and mysterious, always on the verge of revealing the secrets they stand for but never quite yielding them. Morris may geek out on minutiae and hypotheticals, but he is enough of an artist to convey that every crime scene is a dialogue between time, as it sweeps away the irrecoverable past, and the material world.." [7] And Michael Schaub, a book reviewer for NPR, wrote: "A Wilderness of Error is both great and important—it's a beautifully written book, and it has the potential to change the way the country thinks about a justice system that has obviously lost its way." [8]
The book has also been favorably compared to McGinniss's book. At The Awl , Evan Hughes wrote: "On the proving ground of careful reasoning and impartiality, Morris bests Joe McGinniss by a comfortable margin... It is possible that McGinniss arrived at the correct verdict. But forgive me if I lose a little of my own judicious restraint for a moment. Fatal Vision is a dishonest and unserious book." [9] Michael H. Miller at The New York Observer wrote: "Both Fatal Vision and A Wilderness of Error are equally confident in their antithetical theories, but Mr. Morris is less insidious than Mr. McGinniss, at least allowing for the possibility that Stoeckley was simply overly suggestible—as the prosecutors claimed—and that the presence of a woman matching her description near the MacDonald house in the early-morning hours of February 17 was a coincidence, albeit a highly unlikely one." [10]
However, several prominent reviewers have found fault with A Wilderness of Error, issuing point-by-point rebuttals of the book's core claims, evidence, and analysis. For example, in a long-form report in The Washington Post , two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning staff reporter Gene Weingarten not only alleges that A Wilderness of Error omits and distorts case evidence, but also claims that Morris has acknowledged these irregularities in a series of personal communications with Weingarten that Weingarten quotes directly. [11] Similarly, lawyer and former The New York Times journalist Raymond Bonner argues in The Daily Beast that Morris' refusal to engage fully with the "plentiful" evidence of MacDonald's guilt—even if only to debunk it—conspires with Morris's "shaky" grasp of legal procedure and case law to make A Wilderness of Error a polemic that "cherry picks" data in service of a "narrative unfolding from the belief that MacDonald is innocent." [12]
Finally, in the Columbia Journalism Review —a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism publication openly critical of the questionable journalistic ethics McGinniss exercised by 'befriending' MacDonald while researching Fatal Vision [13] —Brooklyn, NY-based freelance journalist and podcaster Lindsay Beyerstein says of A Wilderness of Error: "As far as the probative value of the 'withheld' evidence, it’s pretty much a bust," as "the results of DNA testing released in 2006 as 'new evidence' of MacDonald’s innocence … matched [neither] Helena Stoeckley [n]or her boyfriend Greg Mitchell, whom she named as an accomplice,” and since "[a]ny occupied home will contain hairs and fibers that can’t readily be sourced, especially transient housing like the MacDonalds’ apartment.” [14] Comparing A Wilderness of Error to Fatal Vision, Beyerstein concludes:
Morris tries to blame McGinniss for poisoning the well against MacDonald, but Fatal Vision mostly reported the facts as they were presented at trial. The disappointing truth is that MacDonald was proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in 1979 and his lawyers have been grasping at straws ever since.
FX premiered a five-part television series titled A Wilderness of Error , based on the book, on September 25, 2020. [16] The series was directed by Academy Award-nominated film producer Marc Smerling. [17]
Errol Mark Morris is an American film director known for documentaries that interrogate the epistemology of its subjects. In 2003, his documentary film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. His film The Thin Blue Line placed fifth on a Sight & Sound poll of the greatest documentaries ever made. Morris is known for making films about unusual subjects; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control interweaves the stories of a wild animal trainer, a topiary gardener, a robot scientist and a naked mole rat specialist.
Janet Clara Malcolm was an American writer, staff journalist at The New Yorker magazine, and collagist who fled antisemitic persecution in Nazi-occupied Prague just before it became impossible to escape. She was the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984), and The Journalist and the Murderer (1990). Malcolm wrote frequently about psychoanalysis and explored the relationship between journalist and subject. She was known for her prose style and for polarizing criticism of her profession, especially in her most contentious work, The Journalist and the Murderer, which has become a staple of journalism-school curricula.
The controversy over Fatal Vision, journalist and author Joe McGinniss's best-selling 1983 true crime book, is a decades-long dispute spanning several court cases and discussed in several other published works.
Jeffrey Robert MacDonald is an American former medical doctor and United States Army captain who was convicted in August 1979 of murdering his pregnant wife and two daughters in February 1970 while serving as an Army Special Forces physician.
Gene Norman Weingarten is an American journalist, and former syndicated humor columnist for The Washington Post. He is the only two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Weingarten is known for both his serious and humorous work. Through September 2021, Weingarten's column, "Below the Beltway," was published weekly in The Washington Post magazine and syndicated nationally by The Washington Post Writers Group, which also syndicates Barney & Clyde, a comic strip he co-authors with his son, Dan Weingarten, with illustrations by David Clark.
Jeffrey Ross Toobin is an American lawyer, author, blogger, and legal analyst for CNN.
Joseph Ralph McGinniss Sr. was an American non-fiction writer and novelist.
Blind Faith is a 1989 true crime book by Joe McGinniss, based on the 1984 case in which American businessman Robert O. Marshall was charged with the contract killing of his wife, Maria. The book was adapted into a television miniseries of the same name in 1990.
Robert Oakley Marshall was an American businessman who in 1984 was charged with the contract killing of his wife Maria.
Theodore L. Gunderson was a Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent In Charge, head of the Los Angeles FBI, and an American author. Some of his FBI case work included the Death of Marilyn Monroe and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. He was the author of the best-selling book How to Locate Anyone Anywhere Without Leaving Home. In later life, he researched a number of topics, notably including satanic ritual abuse.
The Journalist and the Murderer is a study by Janet Malcolm about the ethics of journalism, published by Alfred A. Knopf/Random House in 1990. It is an examination of the professional choices that shape a work of non-fiction, as well as a rumination on the morality that underpins the journalistic enterprise. The journalist in question is Joe McGinniss; the murderer is the former Special Forces captain Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald, who became the subject of McGinniss's 1983 book Fatal Vision.
Fuquay-Varina Independent was a weekly newspaper based in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina. It closed in 2013.
Fatal Vision is a 1984 American true crime drama television miniseries directed by David Greene from a teleplay by John Gay, based on the 1983 novel of the same name by Joe McGinniss. The miniseries stars Karl Malden, Eva Marie Saint, Barry Newman, Gary Cole, and Andy Griffith. It recounts the celebrated case of Jeffrey R. MacDonald, the former Green Beret physician who was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and their two small children.
Fatal Vision is the 1983 true crime book by Joe McGinniss which lies at the center of the Fatal Vision controversy.
Shanna Hogan was an American non-fiction author and journalist. She was best known for writing the book Picture Perfect about convicted murderer Jodi Arias.
Marc Smerling is an American film producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, and director. He was nominated for an Oscar for Capturing the Friedmans in 2003, and co-wrote and produced The Jinx, a six-part HBO documentary on suspected murderer Robert Durst. He directed the FX docuseries A Wilderness of Error based on the book of the same name.
Rebecca Morris is a New York Times bestselling true-crime author and a TV, radio and print journalist who lives in Seattle, Washington.
Trump Tower is a work of fiction by Jeffrey Robinson, originally credited to Donald Trump, and billed as Trump's "debut novel" by the publisher. It was first published in 2011 by Vanguard Press. Trump had previously attempted to create a television series titled Trump Tower, modeled after Dallas, Dynasty, and Upstairs, Downstairs. He worked with MVP Entertainment, contracted a writer in Los Angeles, and successfully had Showtime Networks develop a television pilot. After receiving a payment for television rights to Trump Tower, he marketed the idea to Lifetime. The book by this title was developed in 2011 listing Trump, but when released in 2012 credited Robinson as sole author.
City Bureau is an American non-profit organization based in South Side of Chicago, Illinois. It is a non-profit newsroom that aims to produce civic journalism that brings journalists and communities together in a collaborative spirit. It was founded in 2015, and soon after won the March 2016 Sidney Award. City Bureau has since won awards from the Online Journalism Awards for their Documenters.org project, a $1M grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and trained over 80 journalists, held numerous public meetings, and co-published articles with numerous outlets.
A Wilderness of Error is an FX documentary true crime five-part series premiered on September 25, 2020, directed by Academy Award-nominated film producer Marc Smerling. It is based on the book A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald by Errol Morris.