But as wily as [Errol] Morris is, I was worried when he told me about his latest obsession: the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case. ‘Oh my God, no,’ was my measured reaction, ‘Not that!’
For the past four decades the MacDonald affair has been a toxic swamp that has drawn in some of journalism’s best and brightest writers.
‘Yes, that,’ Morris replied, telling me that MacDonald is the subject of his next book, titled A Wilderness of Error. In fact, he said, the book is the culmination of 20 years of fascination with the case, going back to a time in the early ’90s when Morris and his wife visited wig shops in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to investigate the wig-fiber evidence at the MacDonald crime scene. He is not a MacDonald partisan in that he doesn’t necessarily believe prosecutorial errors are proof of innocence, rather evidence of uncertainty.
If Errol Morris is that excited about the MacDonald case, it’s a sign we can’t say ‘Case closed.’
-from “Errol Morris: The Thinking Man’s Detective,” by Ron Rosenbaum. In the March 2012 issue of Smithsonian magazine. As a documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has focused his camera on former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, physicist Stephen Hawking and Texas death row inmate Randall Adams. His book on Jeffrey MacDonald is slated for publication in August.