Question: Name the American medical doctor who was convicted in 1979 of murdering his pregnant wife and two daughters and whose story is ruminated over in a study by Janet Malcolm titled 'The Journalist and the Murderer'?
Context: Thomas Flanagan (November 5, 1923 – March 21, 2002) was born in Greenwich, Connecticut.  His father was a dentist, his mother a homemaker.  All four of his grandparents had come to the United States from County Fermanagh, Ireland.  He served in the United States Army during World War II.  He graduated from Amherst College in 1945.  He married Jean Parker, a nurse, in 1949.  They had two daughters, Caitlin and Ellen.  He received his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Columbia University.  From 1960 to 1978 he was Professor of English Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, specializing in Irish literature.  He was a tenured Full Professor in the English Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook until his retirement.  He was married and had two daughters.  He and his wife spent much of their time in Ireland.  They lived in East Setauket, Long Island.  Flanagan was also a successful novelist.  His first novel, "The year of the French", won the National Book Critics Award for fiction in 1979.  He died in 2002 at the age of 78 in Berkeley. Kate Breckenridge Karpeles (October 1887 — August 15, 1941) was an American medical doctor.  She was the first woman to be appointed a contract surgeon by the United States Army, during World War I, and she served as president of the American Medical Women's Association. James J. Rahal (October 14, 1933, Boston – June 11, 2011, Manhattan) was an American medical doctor who specialized in the study and treatment of infectious diseases.  He was educated at Harvard University and the medical school at Tufts University.  Rahal was one of the first doctors to raise concerns about drug-resistant bacteria and was a leading expert on the treatment of West Nile virus.  He was a professor of medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University, and Director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the affiliated New York Hospital Queens in Flushing. Janet Malcolm (born 1934 as "Jana Wienerova") is an American writer, journalist on staff at "The New Yorker" magazine, and collagist.  She is the author of "" (1981), "In the Freud Archives" (1984) and "The Journalist and the Murderer" (1990). Alexa Irene Canady (born November 7, 1950) is a retired American medical doctor specializing in neurosurgery.  She was born in Lansing, Michigan and earned both her bachelors and medical degree from the University of Michigan.  After completing her residency at the University of Minnesota in 1981, she became the first black person to become a neurosurgeon.  This came after the first American woman was board certified in Neurosurgery in 1960.  Canady specialized in pediatric neurosurgery and was the chief of neurosurgery at the Children's Hospital in Michigan from 1987 until her retirement in 2001.  In addition to surgery she also conducted research and was a professor of neurosurgery at Wayne State University.  After her retirement, she moved to Florida and maintained part-time practice at Pensacola's Sacred Heart Hospital.  In 1989, Canady was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame, and in 1993 she also received the American Medical Women's Association President's Award. Jeffrey Robert MacDonald (born October 12, 1943) is an American medical doctor who was convicted in 1979 of murdering his pregnant wife and two daughters in February 1970. Stefan Svitek (chesh.  Štefan Svitek) (January 23, 1960, Podbrezová, Banská Bystrica Region, Czechoslovakia – June 8, 1989, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia) was a Czechoslovak murderer who killed his pregnant wife and two daughters in 1987.  For this crime, Svitek was sentenced to death.  He was the last person executed in Czechoslovakia and Slovakia.  Vladimír Lulek was the last person executed in the Czech Republic with his death on February 2, 1989. Jean Lanfray (1873/74 – February 26, 1906), a laborer who was French by birth but living in Switzerland was convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and two children in a drunken rage on the afternoon of August 28, 1905, in Commugny, Switzerland.  It was later revealed by police that he had drunk an excessive amount of wine and hard liquors that morning, along with two ounces of absinthe.  However, due to the moral panic against absinthe in Europe at that time, his murders were blamed solely on the influence of absinthe, leading to a petition to ban absinthe in Switzerland shortly after the murders.  The petition received 82,000 signatures and absinthe was banned in Vaud shortly thereafter.  A 1908 constitutional referendum led to absinthe being banned in all of Switzerland, and absinthe was banned in most European countries (and the United States) before the outbreak of World War I. The Journalist and the Murderer is a study by Janet Malcolm about the ethics of journalism, published by Alfred A. Knopf/Random House in 1990.  It is an examination of the professional choices that shape a work of non-fiction, as well as a rumination on the morality that underpins the journalistic enterprise.  The journalist in question is Joe McGinniss; the murderer is the former Special Forces captain Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald, who became the subject of McGinniss' 1983 book "Fatal Vision". Janet Graeme Travell (December 17, 1901 – August 1, 1997) was an American physician and medical researcher.  She was born in 1901 to John Willard and Janet Eliza (Davidson) Travell.  Heavily influenced by her father's profession of physician, Travell made the decision to pursue a career in the medical field.  In June 1929, in New York City, Janet married John William Gordon Powell, who was an investment counselor.  They had two daughters—Janet and Virginia.  At the age of 95, Travell died of heart failure at her home in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Answer: Jeffrey R. MacDonald