Serpents in The Garden State

By R.Z. Sheppard

BLIND FAITH

by Joe McGinniss; Putnam

381 pages; $21.95

Toms River, N.J., is fertile ground for what the publishing business calls a "true crime" book. Such a product should feature a victim and killer, preferably related to each other, who share the same demographics and conventions as the middle-class readership. The appeal of this sort of thing is obvious, as Joe McGinniss proved in Fatal Vision (1983), the best seller about U.S. Army Captain Jeffrey MacDonald, a physician convicted in 1979 of murdering his wife and children.

McGinniss now moves from the heinous to the despicable. Blind Faith is a highly stylized account of an upscale murder case in a small town on the edge of the Pine Barrens that, like so many New Jersey backwaters, has gone from quiet ruburb to bustling suburb in the past two decades. On the night of Sept. 7, 1984, Maria Marshall, 42, was shot to death while sitting in the family Cadillac. Husband Robert O. Marshall claimed he had parked the vehicle in a dark picnic area off the Garden State Parkway to inspect a tire. He further maintained that as he bent over someone struck him on the head and when he regained consciousness his wife was stretched across the front seat with two bullet holes in her back.

Marshall, a flashy Toms River insurance broker and chairman of the Ocean County chapter of the United Way fund, suggested robbery as the motive for the attack. He and Maria had been returning from an evening at the Atlantic City blackjack tables and, as his story went, their car may have been tampered with and then followed by bandits. Marshall said a wad of bills amounting to more than $2,000 was missing from his pocket. He displayed a superficial head wound.

The community was numbed and horrified. Maria had been widely admired for her beauty, grooming, three teenage sons and her reputation for familial and civic probity. But even as Toms River mourned the loss, the police grew suspicious. Why would Robert Marshall pull into a deserted and officially closed picnic area to examine a tire when he could have used a safe, well- lighted toll plaza a few miles away? How come he was only tapped on the head while his wife was shot? More puzzling was the damaged tire. It had been slashed so severely that driving from Atlantic City would have been impossible.

Further investigation quickly unraveled Marshall's story. He was planning to leave his wife for one of the town's more flamboyant matrons, and he was deeply in debt to local banks. There were also gambling losses in Atlantic City. Two other items piqued police interest. Marshall had recently increased his wife's life insurance to $1.5 million and had made elaborate arrangements with two unappetizing characters from Louisiana to be in New Jersey on the night of the murder. The case was broken when one of these gents was persuaded, in exchange for promises of a light sentence, to testify that his friend had pulled the trigger and that Marshall had paid for the deed. Readers looking for simple justice will not find it here. Although Marshall was convicted and is currently appealing a death sentence, the accused killer was acquitted and his cooperative accomplice placed in the Witness Protection Program.

It is hard to imagine more odious citizens than some of those portrayed in Blind Faith. The villain of Fatal Vision had a perverse stature and a demonic intelligence that are totally lacking in McGinniss's Robert Marshall. His fabrications and the entreaties recorded on love cassettes to his mistress suggest a ludicrous absence of self-awareness. Marshall's low animal cunning hits bottom when he exploits his sons' conflict between filial loyalty and the truth about their mother's death. McGinniss makes the Marshall boys' loss of innocence the emotional center of an otherwise lurid and coldhearted book.

Aside from feeling superior to a number of vile and foolish characters, what is to be gained from reading an overheated version of this "true crime"? Not much. In fact, a few things are lost. For example, the real names of some people who were central to the case. Even though these names are matters of public record and appeared often in newspapers, McGinniss changes them to, as he says, "preserve privacy." A more probable reason for fictitious identifications is to prevent libel suits. Because the impact of true crime depends on melodrama, the scenes and dialogue are liberally re-created by the author. Some of the dialogue seems too good to be true -- unless it appeared in a George Higgins novel. To readers this may seem like New Journalism, but to publishing-house lawyers it is safe storytelling. Blind Faith belongs to a subliterary genre designed for a litigious age. Unfortunately, these are the measures that are taken to ensure that true crime pays for the author, not his subjects.