Triptych image: Illustration from A Wilderness of Error
Credit: Pentagram 2012

THE INCIDENT REPORT is dated “17 Feb 70.” The report states that upon the MP’s arrival “the number of deaths had not been determined.” The report states: “Upon arrival it was noted that it was raining lightly and the ground was wet. The exterior of the building was appeared to be a two story brick dwelling with a wing on each side. The apartment in question …”

The apartment, whose very brick façade seems to have been in question from the story’s beginning, is 544 Castle Drive, once home to a man who is or appears to be guilty of murdering his wife and two children in the small hours of that winter morning in 1970. Although a facsimile of this report turns up in the first chapter of A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, cover-ups, compromised confessions, and ways of both erring and knowing are at the heart of Errol Morris’s book-length investigation. Of the contents of the house, Morris writes, “Everything that wasn’t already locked up in a lab was incinerated [in 1984]” — “the walls, doors, windowsills, ledges, hardwood floors.” All was destroyed and buried at Fort Bragg. “Could the house itself be interrogated?” he asks. “Could it have been forced to give up an answer?” 

Though I had not previously followed the MacDonald case, had not read any of the character-damaging books or TV spinoffs surrounding it, I have — since I was maybe 12 — followed Errol Morris’s film career. I knew that the case would hold the kind of dread-inspiring indeterminacy that has drawn me to his documentaries over the years. The nausea began, for me, with an animal rendering plant in Morris’s first film, Gates of Heaven (advertised as “Not a film about pet cemeteries”) and then worked its way into Vernon, Florida via the haze of an insecticide truck. In Vernon, Florida we trail a single-minded turkey hunter as he becomes lost in the forest, afraid of being shot at by other hunters. And then there’s McNamara’s orange fog in the Oscar-winning The Fog of War, a candy-colored apparition rolling from beneath crop dusters over Vietnam … 

But depending on where you fall on the Venn diagram of Errol Morris followers and followers of the case of Jeffrey Macdonald, you may be most compelled to draw comparisons between A Wilderness of Error and The Thin Blue Line, his 1988 documentary that elicited, through filmed interviews, a confession from a cop-killer. Morris is a documentarian and a true detective; through hours of diligent work, and maybe luck, he was able to exonerate a man on death row. Okay, you might think. We’ve seen this one before — it can’t happen again. And you’d be right — except that’s not the point. Let lightning strike where it may, A Wilderness of Error is Morris at his best: his most personal, his most urgent. It’s Errol as the private investigator (or as Lawrence Weschler calls him, the forensic epistemologist) who has been for decades knee-deep in boxes and boxes of evidence, each in varying degrees of contamination. And the apparition, if you will, or fog, or haze this time around is erosion, loss. Helena...