Victor Woerheide invites the doctor to take a polygraph or sodium amytal, and instead gets a lawyer-drafted statement read through sobs.

Most of this episode isn't about the book. Billy spends the first half on his sister's triplets, who just graduated eighth grade, and on the ceremony speeches he sat through. He's sure the principal's remarks were written by ChatGPT. He can't prove it, and he admits the problem might be his own head. The after-party was at a bar called Fogarty's, where the DJ played too loud to talk over, until the principal got on the dance floor and the kids went wild. James counters with a twenty-year-old AllMusic review that called a Springsteen disc the music he "churns out endlessly and effortlessly," a line that still bugs him. From there it's polygraphs. The true-crime internet calls them junk science. Both hosts decide they like the polygraph anyway. Then the show falls apart. Billy asks whether James looks blurry. James does. The chat piles on. James nearly quits, then reads the book instead. The passage is the 1974 grand jury, with Billy as prosecutor Woerheide and James as MacDonald. Woerheide wants the notes MacDonald scribbled on a yellow legal pad after the murders. MacDonald hides behind attorney-client privilege. He recasts his long Newsday statement as loose talk to a reporter, not sworn fact. Shown the diagram of 544 Castle Drive with his own stick figures on it, he insists the Provost Marshal drew it. He drew it himself. He claims he can't recall going on national TV with Bob Schieffer for Walter Cronkite, which the hosts find hilarious. He walks back his old "fifty destroyed fingerprints" line and softens the desk-lamp "Mutt and Jeff" interrogation story. They quit early and blame the internet. On the way out they trade theories about Helena Stokely. The last words are good luck to the US for its soccer game that night.

Asked what became of the "real killers" he'd sworn to hunt since 1970, Jeffrey MacDonald produces some Fayetteville bars and a chair he once kicked out from under a man.Pressed to name his actual crimes, he counts three: he became a doctor, he rebuilt his life, he moved to California.

Part Four. The Days of Affliction. What Jeff was up to between February 1970 and the grand jury subpoena was: working "sixty or seventy or eighty hours a week" (not hard by his standards), becoming a well-known instructor in cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, somehow finding eight uninterrupted hours to walk around the LA Auto Show three separate times before ordering a Citroen SM Maserati with JRM-MD vanity plates, taking delivery of a 28-foot yacht (later traded up for a bigger one), and falling in love with a gorgeous receptionist named Joy.They went to Las Vegas one time and "made love at least five times" before they ever made it to the casino. He wanted to "experience everything, like, as fast as we could… the highest flight and the longest trip and the deepest dive." Then, halfway through the chapter, he tells Joy that there's now "a background investigation on a triple homicide" by "the civilian people" and he can't expect her to stand by him. Her unsaid feelings come tumbling out, of course.

Freddy stops asking. On the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Army's original accusation, Freddy and Mildred Kassab walk into the Raleigh chambers of Chief Judge Algernon Butler and file a citizens' complaint charging their former son-in-law with three counts of murder.There is no breaking MacDonald news. There is, however, a release date. It's LIFE.

Jeffrey MacDonald was living in an exclusive area of Huntington Beach, working through the local talent pool, and was a conservatively mod dresser...not a real swinger. Fred Kassab was now threatening to swear out a murder complaint if the government wouldn't. Plus: Marky Jack's four-star review that ruined our week. James's six-month-stalled FOIA appeal against the FBI for the April 6 tape (suit incoming). Billy at Springsteen on Long Island and the dawning of his second fanbase.

Freddie Kassab writes Jeff, signing off "we can't and won't until whoever did this is punished." Jeff writes back with a vigilante fantasy: he's been flying all over the country hunting the hippies he says killed his family, broke his hand on the last trip, and just needs a publishing advance to finish the job. Then Jeff's mother Dorothy turns up at the Kassabs' door, sits silent for two hours while Freddie lays out the evidence against her son, finishes her drink, and goes home. Plus: Pruitt's CID team closing the re-investigation (32 states, 699 interviews, polygraphs for everyone relevant except Jeff), Bob Keeler's new substack on Daniel Berrigan, and our take on the Errol Morris doc. First time live on Facebook.

Jeff embarks on luxury vacations before relocating to the West Coast, the last move he would ever make before hitting the FCI Freeway. Live call in from Christine Dana of My True Crime Obsession. James and Billy discuss Thomas Merton, Bob Keeler and Billy's robust work ethic.

"It was no single thing. It was everything."This episode works through the forensic audit Freddy conducts in private before anyone else will take the case seriously. Years before the grand jury, years before the 1979 trial, Freddy Kassab quietly assembles the spine of the case against his son-in-law, using only Jeff's own words

Colette MacDonald was writing in her notebook the night she died. Notes from a child-psychology class on defense mechanisms, psychosexual development, megalomania, compulsion, and the denial of reality. The last clinical term she recorded before buying milk and driving home was a profile of a personality type defined by grandiosity, hyperactivity, and the unshakeable belief that everyone loves them.Hours later, she was dead. James and Billy read the pages where Joe McGinniss made the whole case fit in your hand. Between the March 31st rearrest and the April 6th anniversary, this is the week for truth.