Jeffrey MacDonald was a well-educated and popular person in high school, college and during med school, who married his high school sweetheart, Collette.

Collette quickly gave birth to two children shortly after the couple married and found herself pregnant with their third, around the same time that Jeffrey joined the Army and was to be deployed to Vietnam.

The family got the best Christmas present that year when it was determined that Jeffrey wasn’t going to be deployed, but in February 1970 everything came crashing down for the MacDonald family, after a one fateful night.