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''A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald'' is a book by Errol Morris, published in September 2012. It reexamines the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret physician accused of killing his wife and two daughters on February 17, 1970 in their home on Fort Bragg, and convicted of the crime on August 29, 1979. MacDonald has been in federal prison since 1982. ==History== Morris became preoccupied with the case in the early 1990s, after becoming friends with Harvey Silverglate, then MacDonald's lead appellate attorney. Morris has family in St. Pauls, North Carolina, and visited 544 Castle Drive—the site of the murders—with his wife on trips to the area. Morris's original intention was to direct a film based on the MacDonald case that would challenge the story presented by government prosecutors at the 1979 trial, and by Joe McGinniss in his 1983 book on the case, ''Fatal Vision'', which proposed that MacDonald was a psychopath who had overdosed on the diet pill Eskatrol and tried to cover up the crime. However, no studios were willing to finance the film, and Morris wrote a book instead. The book's title comes from the beginning of "William Wilson", the 1839 short story by Edgar Allan Poe. In it, Wilson begs the reader for understanding: ''A Wilderness of Error'' covers the entire history of the case, arguing that mistakes made by investigators in the first hours after the call were compounded over the years by prosecutors, judges, and journalists, and revealing the problems in the public perception of the case. It includes revelations about Helena Stoeckley, a young drug addict who repeatedly confessed to committing the crime with several associates (although at other times claimed no memory of the events). Morris's is the fourth major work to be written on the case, after ''Fatal Vision'', ''The Journalist and the Murderer'', a 1990 book by Janet Malcolm that argued that McGinniss's treatment of MacDonald was "a grotesquely magnified version of the ordinary journalistic encounter." In conversation with David Carr of ''The New York Times'', Morris argued that his book aimed to correct the earlier versions of the story. McGinniss's relationship with MacDonald, he argued, was opportunistic and deceptive, and "Malcolm wrote about Joe McGinniss as if he were representative of journalism per se, and I respectfully disagree... There was something very pathological in the relationship between McGinniss and his subject.” The third major work on the MacDonald case was ''Fatal Justice: Reinvestigating the MacDonald Murders'' by Jerry Allen Potter and Fred Bost, published by W. W. Norton & Company (April 17, 1997). It, too, was a well-documented argument for the innocence of MacDonald in the murders. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「A Wilderness of Error」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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