The name Kimberly MacDonald attaches to two very different lawsuits. One is a recent employment discrimination case, McDonald v. Renown Health, filed in Louisiana federal court in 2025 by a plaintiff named Kimberly McDonald and dismissed in February 2026 after an apparent settlement. The other, far better known, grows out of the 1970 murder of a five-year-old girl named Kimberly MacDonald at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and includes both her father Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald’s decades of criminal appeals and his civil suit against the author of Fatal Vision.
The Renown Health Employment Case
Kimberly McDonald sued Renown Health and Renown ROW, LLC on June 23, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. The complaint was filed as a civil rights employment action under 42 U.S.C. § 2000e, the federal statute that prohibits workplace discrimination. The public docket does not identify which protected category — race, sex, disability, retaliation, or something else — the claim rested on.
McDonald was represented by Amanda Jeanne Butler and Megan Wiggins Kelley. Renown was represented by Taylor M. LeDuff and Elizabeth A. Roussel. A September 2025 scheduling order set discovery to close on March 16, 2026, with a jury trial slated for May 26, 2026.
The case never reached trial. On February 18, 2026, Magistrate Judge Donna Phillips Currault dismissed the action without costs and without prejudice, giving either side sixty days to reopen if a settlement was not finalized. A settlement conference set for March 24, 2026, was cancelled. Neither party disclosed the terms or any dollar figure, and no public statement followed.
The 1970 Fort Bragg Murders
The Kimberly MacDonald most people are searching for was a child. On February 17, 1970, Colette MacDonald and her daughters Kimberly, age five, and Kristen, age two, were stabbed and beaten to death inside their home at 544 Castle Drive on the Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina. Colette’s husband, Army physician Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, was the only survivor.
MacDonald told investigators he had been asleep on the living room couch when four intruders attacked the family: a Black man in a fatigue jacket, two white men, and a woman in a floppy hat and blond wig who chanted “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.” He said he used his pajama top to fend off knife thrusts before losing consciousness.
Forensic evidence collected at the scene did not line up with that account. Only a single pajama-top fiber was found in the living room where MacDonald placed the fight, while dozens of fibers turned up in the bedrooms, including beneath Colette, beneath Kimberly, and under one of Kristen’s fingernails. Extensive blood was found in the bedrooms and none on the living room floor. A bloody footprint matching MacDonald led out of Kristen’s room. The ice pick and knife identified as murder weapons were recovered outside the back door but traced back to inside the apartment. Surgical glove fragments found behind the headboard where “PIG” had been written in blood matched a supply from the family’s kitchen.
Charges, Dismissal, and Federal Indictment
The Army charged MacDonald with three counts of murder on May 1, 1970. At the Article 32 hearing that followed, presiding officer Colonel Warren Rock concluded there was “insufficient evidence to proceed to a court martial” and that “the matters set forth in all charges and specifications are not true.” Rock also recommended investigators look at Helena Stoeckley, a local police informant seen near the scene. The commanding general dismissed all charges on October 23, 1970, and MacDonald received an honorable discharge that December.
The Justice Department kept the case alive by asking the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division to keep working. CID delivered a 13-volume report in June 1972 with supplemental reports through 1973. Colette MacDonald’s parents petitioned for a federal grand jury investigation in April 1974. The grand jury indicted MacDonald on three counts of murder on January 24, 1975.
Trial ran from July 19 to August 29, 1979, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. The prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial and worked by dismantling MacDonald’s account through blood-type analysis, fiber placement, weapon origins, and the absence of any physical trace of intruders. Prosecutors also pointed to a copy of Esquire magazine featuring Charles Manson that was found in the apartment. The jury convicted MacDonald of first-degree murder for Colette and second-degree murder for Kimberly and Kristen. He was sentenced to three consecutive life terms.
Helena Stoeckley and the Intruder Defense
Stoeckley became the center of MacDonald’s defense. A drug user and police informant, she alternately confessed to and denied involvement over more than a decade. She acknowledged at trial that she owned a blond wig and floppy hat matching MacDonald’s description of one of the intruders but said she had no memory of the hours around the murders. Judge Franklin Dupree barred the defense from putting on hearsay testimony about her out-of-court confessions, calling them “inherently untrustworthy.”
MacDonald’s later filings argued the government had suppressed lab notes identifying synthetic blond wig hairs in a brush at the scene, evidence that his lawyers said would have forced the trial judge to admit the Stoeckley confessions. DNA testing in 2006 found no match between crime scene hair samples and Stoeckley or Greg Mitchell, another person MacDonald pointed to. No fingerprints tied Stoeckley to the scene.
Four Decades of Appeals
MacDonald’s post-conviction record is one of the longest in federal criminal law. In July 1980, the Fourth Circuit overturned his convictions on speedy-trial grounds, citing the nearly five-year gap between the Army’s dismissal and the civilian indictment, and he was released. In March 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that ruling and sent him back to prison.
He filed his first habeas corpus petition in 1984; the Fourth Circuit denied it in 1985 and the Supreme Court declined review in 1986. A second petition followed in 1990 and was reopened in 1997. A third came in 2005. Each raised claims of prosecutorial misconduct, suppressed evidence, and new forensic material.
In 2011, the Fourth Circuit found the lower court had been “too restrictive” in refusing to consider new DNA evidence and witness statements and ordered a broader evidentiary hearing. The Innocence Project, the New England Innocence Project, and the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support. Judge James C. Fox held the hearing in Wilmington, North Carolina, in September 2012. Evidence included a hair from beneath one daughter’s fingernails that matched no family member, and an affidavit from a retired deputy U.S. marshal alleging that the lead prosecutor had coerced a witness into changing her testimony.
In July 2014, Judge Fox issued a 169-page order denying a new trial. He found MacDonald had not shown “by clear and convincing evidence” that a reasonable juror would have reached a different verdict and that MacDonald “failed to adequately establish the merits of any of his claims.” The Fourth Circuit affirmed in December 2018. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in October 2019.
The Fatal Vision Lawsuit
MacDonald also brought a civil suit that became a landmark in journalism ethics. In the 1980s he sued Joe McGinniss for $15 million, alleging that McGinniss used fraudulent methods to gather material for the 1983 bestseller Fatal Vision. MacDonald said the author had embedded with the defense team during the trial and feigned belief in his innocence to secure intimate access, only to portray him as guilty in the finished book.
McGinniss said he had begun the project hoping to exonerate MacDonald but became convinced of his guilt over four years of research, and pointed to waivers MacDonald had signed pledging not to sue over the book’s contents. A Los Angeles federal jury voted 5-to-1 for MacDonald in 1987 but could not reach unanimity, and the judge declared a mistrial. The case settled in November 1987 for $325,000, with neither McGinniss nor his publisher, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, admitting liability. Janet Malcolm later used the episode as the spine of The Journalist and the Murderer, her examination of whether McGinniss crossed ethical lines by maintaining a false friendship with his subject.
Where Jeffrey MacDonald Stands Now
After the Supreme Court’s 2019 refusal, MacDonald filed a motion for compassionate release in November 2020. He was 77, held at a federal prison in Maryland, and reported chronic kidney disease, skin cancer, and high blood pressure. Judge Terrence W. Boyle denied the motion in April 2021, ruling that the court lacked authority to reduce sentences for “old-law” defendants whose crimes predated 1987. MacDonald appealed, then asked the Fourth Circuit to dismiss the appeal, which it did in September 2021. He also waived parole opportunities twice in 2020. Born in 1943, he would be roughly 82 in 2026 and, based on the most recent available information, remains incarcerated.