questioning before abruptly accusing Grebner of having "run out of ideas" and attempting to frame him to maintain a 100% solved homicide rate. In response, Grebner stated: "We have all this business here that would tend to indicate that you were involved in this rather than people who came in from the outside and picked 544 Castle Drive and went up there and were lucky enough to find your door open." When investigators asked MacDonald to submit to a polygraph test to verify his accounts, he readily agreed, although within ten minutes of the conclusion of the interview, he called investigators to state he had changed his mind, and would not submit to any polygraph testing. Formal charges On the evening of April 6, MacDonald was relieved of his duties and placed under restriction, pending further inquiries. The following day, he was assigned an army lawyer. At the recommendation of his mother, on April 10, he instead hired a flamboyant civilian defense attorney, Bernard Segal, to defend him. Less than a month later, on May 1, the Army formally charged MacDonald with three counts of murder. That same day, MacDonald penned a letter to Colette's mother and stepfather professing his innocence, emphasizing the Army would "never admit" their error, and speculating his wife's soul may hold "infinite patience and understanding" of his current legal predicament. Army hearing An initial Army Article 32 hearing into MacDonald's possible guilt, overseen by Colonel Warren Rock, convened on July 6, 1970. This hearing lasted until September. MacDonald's lawyer, Bernard Segal, adopted an offensive strategy on behalf of his client at this hearing, citing numerous examples of incompetence on behalf of the Army CID, stating that they had clumsily and unprofessionally "trampled all over" the crime scene during their examination of the house, obliterating any traces of evidence the perpetrators might have left and losing vital pieces of evidence including a single thread found beneath Kimberley's nail, MacDonald's pajama trousers, four torn tips of rubber surgical gloves found in the master bedroom, and a single layer of skin found beneath one of Colette's fingernails. Segal elicited several examples of incompetence from military police and responding personnel, including testimony revealing that an ambulance driver had stolen MacDonald's wallet from the living room, and a pathologist who testified to having failed to obtain the children's fingerprints for comparison at the crime scene. The first witness to testify