Adversaries

Gene Weingarten: WILMINGTON, N.C. — They are old men now, the doctor and the lawyer, ancient adversaries confronting each other one last time.

The doctor shuffles into the courtroom, his feet in socks and slippers, his ankles in chains. Once a swaggering bon vivant with a Maserati, a yacht and a playboy lifestyle, he is now dreadfully diminished, drained of color and of dignity, with a prison pallor and hair gone white, insulted by a prison haircut. He wears a washed-out dun prison-issue jumpsuit with big black letters: INMATE NEW HANOVER COUNTY. The only daub of color is the maroon accordion file he holds. It glistens. It has been so often repaired over the years that it's more Scotch tape than cardboard. Inside are papers that document a lost life. For nearly half that life, the doctor, 68, has been in federal custody, largely because of the efforts of the government lawyer who sits across the room, at whom he will not look, not even once, in the seven days they will spend together here.

Forty-two years ago, Green Beret Army doctor Jeffrey MacDonald stabbed and bludgeoned to death his pregnant wife, Colette, and his two little girls … or he didn't.