Copyright © 2015 by Ryan H. D’Agostino
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Parts of this book were adapted from pieces that originally appeared in Esquire, and selected photographs were previously published in Esquire.
The publisher and author are grateful to the Petit family for the use of their personal photographs, which appear on this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, and this page.
Photographs on this page, this page, this page, and this page by João Canziani.
Photograph on this page by John Woike Photography.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
D’Agostino, Ryan.
The rising / Ryan D’Agostino.
pages cm
1. Murder—Connecticut—Cheshire. 2. Petit, William Arthur. 3. Loss (Psychology). 4. Grief. I. Title.
HV6534.C44D34 2015
364.152'3092—dc23
[B]
2015009403
ISBN 9780804140164
eBook ISBN 9780804140171
Cover photograph by Keith Hayes
v4.1_r1
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
December 2012
July 23, 2007
What a Life Means
Education
Jennifer
Home
Sunday
Monday
Aftermath
Remembrance
Existence
The First Trial
Help a Neighbor, Fight for a Cause, Love Your Family
The Second Trial
Marriage
A New Kind of Dawn
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
FOR MY PARENTS,
JOHN AND SHEILA D’AGOSTINO
What is your life?
It is even a vapor that appears for a little time
and then vanishes away.
—James 4:14, tweeted by Bill Petit, 2013
December 2012
JUST LOOK at this garden. Bill Petit raised these vibrant plants from when they were seedlings. Raised them with help from his daughters, Hayley and Michaela. The kids actually did pull a weed now and then.
The base of the memorial garden is behind the sunporch at the old brick mansion where Bill’s parents live, Barbara and Bill Sr. They’re in their eighties now, but they keep the big house clean and orderly, and they encouraged Bill to plant this garden while he was living here in those years after the tragedy. He designed it so the flowers, bushes, and small trees would form the rough shape of a heart—they curve up and around symmetrically before meeting at the center of the heart, where Bill built a…what’s the word?
“I wanna say trellis,” Bill says, and shakes his head. “Not called a trellis. What’s it called?”
Bill is walking through the garden with his new wife, Christine, a woman as vibrant as an acre of flowers. She’s a photographer, and that’s how they met. Well, kind of. They first met at the country club—she worked there, he played golf there. Christine was the club’s marketing director and, to earn extra money, also tended bar in the Founders Room, a cellar hangout where portraits of past club presidents lined the dark walls. She didn’t know who Bill Petit was when he would come in, which is to say that she didn’t know he was “Bill Petit.” She didn’t know that his wife and two daughters had been murdered in their home after being tortured for hours while Bill, who’d been bludgeoned in the head, was tied up in the basement. Christine was living out of the country when it happened and had missed the headlines and the incessant local news coverage on television. She knew only that this guy Bill was a member of the country club, and she knew she thought he was handsome.
He would come in with his friend Ron after a round of golf, and they would talk a little at the bar. Bill would order a Diet Coke with three cherries. He and Christine might have flirted, the best he knew how after all these years. Some of the other women who worked at the club, Christine’s friends, noticed and smiled, but they didn’t say anything to Christine.
Ron noticed, too.
“How about her?” Ron said to Bill one Sunday afternoon after eighteen holes, with a little smile. “The girl behind the bar.”
Bill shrugged. He and Ron had known each other for forty years. A lot went unsaid.
—
“Not called a trellis. What’s it called?”
“Arbor?” offers Christine.
They are arm in arm. Bill is still searching for the word.
“Arch,” he says at last. “The heart meets at an arch. Oh, and there are some big lights up on that tree. There were big lights on those trees over there, too, but they came down in the last storm. And over there, that’s a—I was gonna say ambrosia, but it’s not that.”
Christine says, “Rhododendron?”
“No, no. Mountain laurels? No.” Bill is scratching his chin, staring at the plants. He doesn’t like not being able to call up the name. He likes knowing every name. In Latin. It’s not that he has any lingering head injuries from the attack, he just can’t think of the name.
“That’s a mountain laurel or a rhodie, isn’t it?” says Christine, ever helpful.
“No, you’re 0 for 2,” Bill ribs her. “It’s a…crap. It’s not crap, it’s—well, anyway, those are Scabiosa over there. Button flowers.”
“It’s not a mountain laurel?”
“No, not even close, dear.”
“Get a book out.”
This is their banter. It’s old-married-couple talk. They poke each other playfully, constantly trying to make the other one laugh or at least to tease out a smile. Around her, Bill’s own laughter surprises him. He had thought that all of that—quick jokes, laughter, happiness itself—was lost to him for good.
“Artemisia? No. Arte…andromeda.”
Christine was nervous that day a few years ago when she came over to take pictures of this garden. It was her first assignment as volunteer photographer for the Petit Family Foundation, the charity Bill established in memory of his wife and daughters. She liked Bill, but she didn’t know he liked her, too. She thought maybe, but…then, as they were walking through the garden the day she photographed it—Bill pointing out the different species, Christine taking pictures—he stopped at one point, looked at her, and reached up and touched her earring. Her heart jumped. She walked away, started taking pictures again.
“I was like, whoa! I gotta go!” she says today.
Bill rolls his eyes and smiles when he hears her retell the story.
“I just asked you where you got ’em or something,” he says.
“I know,” she says. “But—you were closer than normal.”
“Okay.”
“It was one of my favorite moments.”
He looks right at her, smiles, says softly, “Okay.”
They get in the car after their stroll and Bill scans the radio, nixing songs, playing deejay. “Nope…nope…nope!” The road follows the meanderings of the Farmington River, and he’s on a stretch with no stoplights, speed limit fifty, cruising along. “Colin Hay!” Bill has a near-photographic memory and knows Hay was the lead singer of Men at Work, and the car fills with his acoustic rendition of “Who Can It Be Now?” Bill lets it play. Dense, leafless trees fan out in triangles from either side of the road
like a bow tie. Thin horizontal white and gray clouds lash the baby-blue midwinter sky.
“Nice blue,” says Bill.
“Look at the layers,” says Christine.
They drive on for a minute without talking.
Then Bill says, “Farmington tiramisu.”
Down Unionville Avenue, getting closer to Plainville, roads he could drive blindfolded.
“My dad and my uncle Charlie used to run this package store here,” he says. “And that’s where I used to work when I was sixteen, that shop. Making sandwiches for the workers at Atlantic Pipe.”
Christine smiles and says he sure doesn’t make sandwiches anymore.
“I got paid for it,” he replies. “You pay me, I’ll make you a sandwich.”
“I’ll keep washing your socks.”
“I’ll just buy new socks.”
This joking around with his new wife, the everyday back and forth, is often what helps Bill get through the day. Talking to the radio, saying whatever comes to mind, trading quips. It’s so normal, banal even, and yet it’s essential. He never thought he would get this part back.
Unionville turns into North Washington, and there’s a cemetery on the left, across from a gas station.
“This is the cemetery the girls are buried in,” Christine says, a note of sweet helpfulness in her voice. “We could probably drive by there on the way back.”
Bill is impassive and doesn’t say anything at first.
He is often silent. In fact, silence is the thing you notice first about Bill Petit, because for him silence is almost a character trait. His ability to keep his feelings silent is the hardest thing to understand about him, and it is the source of his great strength. Five years ago, two strangers broke into his home and destroyed everything that mattered to him. Raped and strangled his wife, Jennifer. Set a fire that took the lives of both his children and engulfed his home, to which he never returned. They beat him almost to death. Today, it is the very depth of his silence that has sustained him, that has helped him to go on living. That and the people around him, the people in this community, the people who have known him for the whole of his fifty-six years and who would do just about anything for him.
He drives on, the cemetery disappearing in the rearview mirror.
Look at his face: unchanged, showing nothing. His head, held together by scars gone pale, faces straight ahead at the road, always straight ahead.
“If it’s still light out,” Christine says. Bill slows down for a light, flicks his eyes up into the mirror at the traffic behind him, at the graveyard.
“Yeah,” he says, in almost a whisper.
July 23, 2007
IT’S ALMOST ten o’clock in the morning, but the sun has never quite come out. A warm rain falls, soaking the midsummer-green grass and bobbing the heads of the orange flowers in the front yard.
Bill is tied to the steel support pole in the basement of his home. Plastic zip ties slice into his wrists, which are bound behind his back, around the pole. He has been trying for hours to free himself, sliding up and down. Blood flows steadily from the gashes in his head, pooling on the concrete floor around him, and he is hoping the up-and-down motion will keep the blood pressure steady throughout his body. He is a doctor, so he knows that he is losing a dangerous amount of blood.
His body feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. His ankles are bound together tight, first with plastic zip ties and then clothesline. There is some kind of cloth over his head, fuzzing his view of his own basement so that it hovers around him as a nightmarish otherworld. In a strange gesture he can’t make sense of, the two men who have broken into his home shoved a couple of pillows under him on the hard floor. The cushions are now stained a deep red.
He works his tired legs underneath him so he’s in a squat position, then he pushes, pushes, pushes until his six-foot-four, fifty-year-old frame begins to slide slowly up the pole, sweat and blood stinging his eyes, his head throbbing. The plastic ties cut into his ankles until the flesh is raw. He contorts his wrists in an attempt to leverage the weight of the pushing motion to loosen the bindings so that he might free himself. If he can break free, he might be able to save the girls.
Then he hears the thumping.
Coming from upstairs—the living room, as best he can tell. He decides it must be the men ransacking the house, gathering the things they plan to steal. But then…did he just hear someone moan? He thinks he did. The wounds and the fatigue have left him unsure of anything, anything at all. He might even be dead—being pounded in the head with a bat has left him without much blood and no clear thoughts. But he desperately tries to hold it together. He sits, opens his eyes wide, trying to summon cognition.
He hears it again.
“Hey!” he yells. Something like “hey”—he has so little strength, it comes out as a garbled cry, something other than language.
A man’s voice responds from upstairs.
“Don’t worry,” the voice says. “It’s all going to be over in a couple of minutes.”
Bill is working furiously now. He knows this is the moment. These men are going to shoot him and his family—or something. It’s going to end badly, he knows that. He knows he is too weak to take on two men who have at least one gun and a baseball bat. He can barely see through the blood clouding his eyes. His body doesn’t feel like his own. There’s no way he can break the ankle ties—the more he twists and tries to free himself, the more they constrict. But if he can break the rope and the ties around his hands, he will be off the pole and he could go next door for help. Dave Simcik’s house. He’ll somehow get over to Dave’s and call the police.
He rubs his wrists together. The ties dig deeper into the skin, but still he rubs, desperately twisting his hands to try to pull the clothesline off while trying to bend and weaken the plastic.
Finally the plastic breaks and the ties burst off. He is free.
He climbs up out of the basement bulkhead door into the yard and rolls his body across the grass to his neighbor’s driveway, fifty feet that feel like a mile right now. His ankles are still bound, but his hands are free, and when he reaches the driveway, he bangs on the garage door with all the force of his whole life. After a minute, the door opens and Dave appears. Thank God. But Dave, his neighbor for eighteen years, looks down at Bill, a beaten, soaking-wet man lying in his driveway covered with blood, and doesn’t recognize him. Asks, “Can I help you, sir?”
Bill says, “Dave! It’s Bill. Call 911! Quick. Quick.”
It seems like only a few seconds before a cop appears out of the rain and is standing over Bill, ordering him to stay down. Then another.
The first one, his gun still drawn, his arms bolt stiff, his eyes pivoting between Bill and Bill’s home, shouts, “Who’s in the house?”
“The girls,” Bill gasps through the rain.
The officer repeats himself, as if needing more information, or as if he had expected a different answer. His voice is urgent and impatient, the voice of an officer in an emergency: “Who’s in the house?”
Bill yells up at him, “The girls! The girls are in the house!”
WHAT A LIFE MEANS
THREE YEARS later, in the summer of 2010, a couple of the morning radio shows in Hartford aired brief interviews with a special guest, Dr. William Petit. He talked about how his life was going, talked about his beloved family, and talked about the upcoming 5K road race that would benefit the Petit Family Foundation, which he and others had established in their memory.
If you lived in the state, you remembered Dr. Petit. That summer of 2007, the headlines had dominated the local news for weeks. The details were too frightening for some people to follow in the newspapers and on the evening news. But everyone knew that what happened to the Petit family was about the worst thing that could happen to a family. And for the father to have survived was astonishing and, at first, confusing. As is characteristic of the Internet—all high velocity and few facts—some people wondered whether Petit himself had someho
w played a role in the attack. But the newspapers added more and more facts to the story each day. The fact, for example, that the two perpetrators were small-time criminals who met at a halfway house. That one of them had seen the mother and younger daughter at a supermarket and followed them home. That the father was beaten in the head repeatedly with a bat, the eleven-year-old raped, she and her sister tied to their beds to suffocate and burn to death, their mother—the man’s wife—strangled on the living-room floor.
And pretty soon the conspiracy theories quieted and the fever dreams went back to their dark corners of the Internet, and the dawning realization of what had happened that Sunday night in Cheshire was perhaps even more frightening: This monstrous crime was a random act. It could have happened to any family. But of all the families in all the houses on all the quiet streets in all the towns in every state across the whole of this country and in the entire world, on that night, it happened to the Petits of Sorghum Mill Drive.
And now here was Bill Petit, sounding pretty upbeat on the radio, spreading the word about the road race for the foundation he had established in his family’s memory, to support the kind of good works they had done.
But how?
How was he not living under a rock somewhere, shut off from the world? (“I did live under a rock, for a long time,” he would say.) How was he not only alive but, apparently, attempting to live a life? From where had he found the strength to drive to the radio studio and talk to the world, in a voice that was as strong as he could make it, about the third annual Petit Family Foundation 5K road race?
How does a man come to be like Bill Petit?
—
William Arthur Petit Jr. is not a particularly easy man to get to know. He does not emote, and isn’t interested in offering elaborate explanations of his psychological state or his emotional makeup. Or perhaps he doesn’t know exactly how to do those things. But to get to know his character and the circumstances that produced him is to understand something of the nature of human fortitude, that quality that enables us, or some of us, to endure the very worst of what’s possible on earth, and to go on living. To understand Bill Petit is, in part, to understand how it is possible to rise up from the deepest reaches of depression and hopelessness under one’s own strength.
The Rising Page 1