I never read Fatal Vision, though I always thought “ACID IS GROOVY, KILL THE PIGS” sounded unlikely for a Manson-like group to actually scrawl on the wall of the house after killing MacDonald’s wife and children (or that’s how I recall it, anyway). But I know very little about the details. But as for the holes in the PJ top: I’d think forensic scientists could at least judge from what angle the icepick made the holes, and determine something about how likely they were made by someone else while MacDonald was wearing it. —Dan On Mar 16, 2014, at 2:30 PM, Keith F. Lynch <kfl@KeithLynch.net> wrote:

The recent death of Joe McGinniss, best known as the author of _Fatal Vision_, has led me to re-read books on both sides of that controversy. The question is whether Jeffrey MacDonald murdered his wife and children, as a jury concluded, or whether someone else did.

One of the most crucial pieces of evidence is a man's pajama top with 48 icepick holes. The prosecution managed to get them to line up in an allegedly incriminating way. The defense said you can get them to line up in any way you like, but didn't demonstrate this. There's a chart of this pajama top in one of the books. I've been thinking about scanning it in and writing a computer program to test this and see who is right.

As some of you know, for personal reasons I've long been very interested in the issue of wrongful convictions. This presents a rare opportunity for me to do something other than compare narratives.

What is known about this kind of puzzle? There's a flat, or I suppose in this case cylindrical or conical, piece of cloth with holes in it, and the task is to figure out how it was folded when those holes were made. Very likely there are multiple solutions, in which case the ones with the fewest number of folds are presumably to be preferred.

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