Jeffrey R. MacDonald - Fatal Vision

Fatal Vision

In June 1979, MacDonald chose Joe McGinniss to write a book about the case. He was given full access to MacDonald and the defense during the trial. MacDonald expected that the book would be about his innocence in the murders of his family. However, McGinniss' book, Fatal Vision, first published in the spring of 1983, portrayed MacDonald as a sociopath who was indeed guilty of killing his family. The book contains excerpts from court transcripts and sections entitled, "The Voice of Jeffrey MacDonald," which were based on tape recordings made by MacDonald following his conviction.

MacDonald subsequently sued McGinniss in 1987 for fraud, claiming that McGinniss pretended to believe MacDonald innocent after he came to the conclusion that MacDonald was guilty, in order to continue MacDonald's cooperation with him. After a trial, which resulted in a mistrial on August 21, 1987, McGinniss and MacDonald settled out of court for $325,000 on November 23, 1987.

The Journalist and the Murderer, written by Janet Malcolm and published in 1990, is about the relationship between journalists and their subjects, and explores the relationship between McGinniss and MacDonald as the subject of the author's thesis that, "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."

Malcolm maintained that McGinniss tricked MacDonald—a claim that McGinniss subsequently responded to in the epilogue of a later edition of Fatal Vision. In a 2012 book, A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, filmmaker and writer Errol Morris argued that many of McGinniss's claims about MacDonald are untrue and irresponsible.