In 1979, an Army doctor named Jeffrey MacDonald was tried in federal court for the murder, nine years earlier, of his pregnant wife and two daughters. The case attracted national attention, partly because of MacDonald’s sensational defense, which was finely tuned to the American paranoid hangover of the 1970s. MacDonald claimed that his wife and daughters had been killed by a band of marauding, Manson Family–style hippies, and that he, of Princeton University and the United States Army, had been injured while fighting them off.
