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In Episode 1, we noted a widely held view about the MacDonald murders: namely, that MacDonald’s story is too implausible to be taken seriously. In Episode 2, we ask why. Why does Jeffrey MacDonald’s account of the murders strike so many people as simply not believable?
One answer is that these people have a background understanding of another set of murders that happened six months earlier: namely, the Manson murders. And that understanding is that the Manson murders were a singular, unrepeatable, one-of-a-kind occurrence –– not the kind of thing that happens twice in six months, three thousand miles apart.
On this understanding of the Manson murders, the MacDonald murders become self-explanatory. Jeffrey MacDonald clearly killed his own family and then reached for the lowest hanging fruit in the garden of American popular culture: he tried to peddle the idea that the Mansons –– or people like them –– had murdered his family. Hence the talk of pigs, acid, and the word written in blood.
The question for the historian, then, is obvious: how singular were the Manson murders? Were they, in reality, the product of one madman’s dark vision, or did they emerge from countercultural currents that ran deeper than Charles Manson –– that had, indeed, brought Manson himself screaming to the surface of the popular American imagination?
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