Initial investigation Within minutes of the discoveries at Castle Drive, military police were instructed to check the occupants of all vehicles in and around Fort Bragg, seeking two white men, one black man, and a white woman with blonde hair and a floppy hat in an effort to apprehend the four intruders MacDonald alleged had attacked him and his family. Despite these efforts, military police failed to locate the four intruders, and the initiative was abandoned by 6:00 a.m. Shortly after daylight on February 17, investigators recovered the murder weapons just outside the back door. These instruments were an Old Hickory kitchen knife, an ice pick, and a 31-inch long piece of lumber with two blue threads attached with blood; all three were quickly determined to have come from the MacDonald house, and all had been wiped clean of fingerprints. MacDonald later claimed to have never seen these items before. Scrutiny As Army investigators studied the physical evidence, the Army CID quickly came to disbelieve MacDonald's account, as they found very little evidence to support his version of events. Although MacDonald was trained in unarmed combat, the living room where he had supposedly fought for his life against three armed assailants showed few signs of a struggle apart from a coffee table that had been knocked onto its side with a pile of magazines beneath the edge, and a flower plant that had fallen to the floor. Questioning of the MacDonalds' neighbors revealed they had heard no sounds of a struggle or disturbance within the household in the early hours, but had heard Colette shouting in a loud and angry voice. The 16-year-old daughter of these neighbors—who occasionally babysat for the family—informed investigators the two had seemed taciturn and indifferent to each other in the month prior to the murders. By February 23, Colonel Robert Kriwanek, the Fort Bragg provost marshal, had advised the FBI to discontinue their search for the four intruders. In addition to the lack of damage to the inside of the house, no fibers from MacDonald's torn pajama top were found in the living room, where he claimed the garment had been when torn in his struggle with the intruders. However, fibers from the pajama top were found beneath Colette's body and in the bedrooms of both of his daughters, and one fiber from this garment was also found under Kristen's fingernail. A single fragment of