Petit is not conversant in the language of emotional recovery, and in fact it is his emotional reticence that saw him through this ordeal. Silence was a habit, in a way, a habit he kept up because it seemed to help him get through anything. On the surface he might appear to embody many features of the American male stereotype: silent, stoic, hardworking, uncomplaining, emotionally limited. But these qualities were evident in his boyhood, when he could be left to manage in his father’s corner grocery store even before he could drive; in high school, when he worked hard enough to get accepted to an Ivy League college; and years later, when he established his own medical practice with his name over the door, working eighteen hours a day to build it and build his own career as an endocrinologist whose reputation was known well beyond his small town.
Before the tragedy, he was a stressed-out doctor with little time for friends or hobbies but was lucky enough to have a family life that restored him. And even now, in their absence, they restore him still. The memories of his daughters and his wife, and his confidence in what they would want him to do, proved to be a mighty and essential source of clarity and strength. He leaned on their memories, asked them questions in his mind, and knew their answers with absolute certainty.
—
To witness the resurrection of Bill Petit is also to understand the power of community, especially in small-town America. “You’ve got to understand this place. It was a good place,” his friend Ron Bucchi says of Plainville, Connecticut, the town they grew up in together in the early 1960s, which is only about fifteen minutes from Cheshire. “It was a safe place. Ride your bike to the park. Play. You just had a sense of community.” In some ways, that place and those people saved Petit. His parents had always been involved in their town, teaching Bill and his siblings that it was important to volunteer. Later, when he established the Petit Family Foundation, hundreds of volunteers gave thousands of hours to the early work of setting it up, and then the even more demanding work of sustaining it.
“People are kind,” Petit says. It has become a pattern in Petit’s life, this simple belief that if you give, people will give back. It was an article of faith with him and his wife, Jennifer. They instilled it in their daughters, and he speaks about it today when he makes appearances as the public face of his foundation. His reflex to help, and the townspeople’s reflex to help him, is rooted deeply in the community that raised him.
—
People who know what happened to Petit often seem awestruck when they see him in person. If they have the courage to go up to him in public, strangers sometimes shake his hand. Or they just stare or they whisper to the person next to them, filled with wonder about what it’s like to be him. Petit used to live what was in many ways an ordinary life: demanding job, devoted family, three-bedroom house in the suburbs, golf on Saturdays, church on Sundays. Nice. Well-off, but not rich and not extravagant. Many people who heard about the murders look for themselves in the lives of Bill and Jennifer. They wonder what they would have done that night, God forbid, and what they would have done if, like Bill, they had emerged from those horrors alive.
And yet, for Bill Petit, life was not ruined. Instead, Petit rather miraculously looked depravity in the face and came away from the experience with an essential piece of wisdom: that people are basically good.
What kind of man survives what he survived and believes that?
Where did he come from?
EDUCATION
1957–1980
WHEN BILLY Petit was still in diapers, he went missing one morning. He couldn’t have been more than two years old. His brother Glenn, just a baby, lay sleeping in his crib. His mother, Barbara, looked all over the house, calling Billy’s name as calmly as she could, trying not to let the panic rise in her voice. Barbara is as even-keeled as they come, gets everything done without a fuss. And organized. She keeps her linen tablecloths pressed and hanging in a closet like vestments.
Oh Lord, Billy. Where the heck was he? Barbara pushed through the screen door out into the yard, saying her boy’s name again and again. He couldn’t have got far, and anyway someone would have seen him toddling along. Billy’s uncle Charlie—his dad’s brother—lived down the street. Barbara’s aunt and uncle were across the street. Everybody had a lot of kids, everybody knew everybody, and everybody knew the Petits. This was around 1959, when there was a comforting sameness to everyday life in Plainville, the small-town assurance that each day would be pretty much like the day before, even if the day before wasn’t anything special. There was gossip, like anywhere, but it was a hardworking town, a tough little place, proud that the rest of Connecticut seemed indifferent to its very existence.
Finally, Barbara found her son. He was next door. The neighbors grew strawberries behind their house, and little Billy had somehow crawled out of the house and was sitting on the grass, easy as you please, eating the berries, his tiny hands covered in sticky, sweet juice.
Bill Sr., Billy’s dad, grew up on Broad Street, too, during the Depression. His family didn’t have much money, and a few of the neighborhood boys used to work at the corner store, near where Main Street cut across the railroad tracks, sacking potatoes for a nickel a bag—their candy money. One day years later, after he graduated from Plainville High School, and after he served in the Marines, and after he worked, saved, planned, and worked some more, Bill Petit Sr. would own that corner store where he used to sack potatoes as a boy. He would work so hard that he’d own a lot of other businesses around Plainville, too. After he rose from a life of nothing to become a prominent local businessman, people would joke that the Petits owned the whole damn town.
When Billy got older, he and his three brothers and a sister who came along later roamed the Broad Street neighborhood with baseball bats and Whiffle balls and basketballs, collecting other kids for epic games on Hemingway Street—there was no traffic on Hemingway then, and hardly any on Broad Street even—until everyone’s mothers called them all home for dinner. Or they would run through the woods to Norton Park. In the winter they ice-skated there, and in the summer they took swimming lessons. The park had once been the backyard of a wealthy local man named Charles Norton. The sprawling field sloped down from the mighty Georgian brick house he built in 1923, the biggest house in town.
One day, after Billy grew up and had a family of his own, Bill Petit Sr. would own that, too, and his grandchildren would run through its halls and across its lawn.
People had lived in Plainville straight through since the 1650s, and you got the feeling that the folks here now—there were twelve thousand or so around the time Billy was born—were not all that different from the first few souls who settled the place. When you talk to people who lived there when Bill was growing up, they talk about helping one another out. That, they say, is how everyone gets by. Hanna, Bill’s sister, says the times seemed different then. Everyone wasn’t so caught up in their own separate lives, and the mere fact that you came from the same town as someone else mattered. Neighbors lent and borrowed and swapped and came over to watch the kids if you needed it. Billy observed all of this—the grown-ups counting on one another, coming and going from one another’s houses. Plainville people knew right from wrong, put God and country first, didn’t spit into the wind, and all the rest. When locals talk about the way the place used to be around 1960, they use words like wholesome.
Bill Sr. loved the town. He served it in one way or another for the better part of forty years—town council, board of education, chamber of commerce, Downtown Merchants Association. Barbara, too. She helped found the Plainville Historical Society and served on the library board, the Republican Town Committee, the Plainville Art League, the Athletic Backers Club, the Ladies Guild at Our Lady of Mercy, Little League, the Visiting Nurses. They both did a lot for the community, and the community would return the favor one day. There always seemed to be people at the Petit house, dropping something off, holding meetings, chatting about this issue or that. Local politics was a big thing. Hanna remembers
being upstairs as a kid, listening to the grown-ups as they talked downstairs. “It was always about community,” she says. “I think people fight more now. It’s more left versus right, and back then it was, What can we do to make this a better place to live?”
Barbara Petit wasn’t strict, but she ran an orderly house. The days were stitched together with routine. She always posted a chore chart on the refrigerator. With five kids, you had to. She liked structure, organization, predictability—Billy would end up like her in those ways. Bill Sr. went into business with his brother Charlie, starting with that corner grocery store. They bought a flower shop, a liquor store, a video store, and a chain of convenience stores. When Billy was fourteen, his father used to leave him in the grocery by himself—the one where the older Petit had sacked potatoes as a boy—to run the store. He’s so mature, Barbara’s friends would tell her. He was trustworthy, but it was more than that. He watched his father at work, and he used to try to be like him. Bill Sr.’s voice was deep as a gravel pit and he never raised it. He was pragmatic and equable and friendly, and his son tried to be the same way. By that time Billy was at least six foot two. A rawboned teenager, he already had the presence of a man, not only because of his height but also because he was quiet and respectful and could crack a dry joke, and if there was some problem, he tried to solve it. Standing at the till, selling milk to the ladies running their errands and cigarettes to the men after their lunches at the Main Street Diner, Billy never flinched. He had wisdom, which seemed impossible for a fourteen-year-old kid from Plainville, and yet there it was, in the set of his eyes.
Even at ten or eleven, Billy’d had a way about him—smarts, the old-timers called it. Bill Sr. says it was nothing he and Barbara taught him, or any of their other kids. But, for example, when they went on family vacations, the seven of them jammed into the car up to Vermont or someplace, they wouldn’t always have reservations for a place to stay. So they winged it. Bill Sr. would pull into the parking lot of whatever decent-looking motel they could find when the sun was starting to set, and it was Billy he would send in to the office to ask about the rooms and what kind of price they could work out. Billy would stride inside and negotiate a good rate while Pops kept the car idling.
From the adults in his life, Billy picked up the value of keeping your feelings inside and just doing. Later this would make him seem opaque, almost unknowable, to some people, but as a boy and a young man it translated into a work ethic that surprised even his parents. “Definitely a self-starter,” Big Bill says. “And I don’t know where that came from. People see how well he does and they say, ‘Well, you raised him right, you must have done this and that.’ And I say, ‘We raised him, sure—you know, he lived in our house.’ But I didn’t go to college and didn’t have that education. I didn’t say to him, ‘Bill, you’ve got to do this, that, and that.’ ” Bill and Barbara were plenty proud of all of their children, and they were all pretty smart, but Billy just went after his goals with a cool ferocity that his father didn’t recognize even in himself. And when Billy got what he wanted, he would spread his mouth into a handsome, thin-lipped grin—not smug, but pleased, a grin that said, “Nothin’ to it.”
Once—that’s how many times Hanna recalls Billy getting in trouble at home: “Mom says the only time was when he decided to light matches—he went behind the hutch in the dining room. My mother was pretty in tune with everything that went on in the house. She had the ears, she had the eyes, and she never would have suspected it was Billy. But she caught him, and he confessed, and that was the end of that.”
There was mischief here and there as he got older. He and Glenn, his brother a year younger, shared a room, and Billy figured out how to lock Glenn out. Sometimes he would even lock the younger kids in the room.
Billy liked all of this—liked being the best. He didn’t show that he liked it, but he liked it. Liked doing well, liked winning. It wasn’t that he was competitive, exactly—there’s a difference between being competitive and wanting to win. A competitive man craves competition for its own sake, relishes looking down on whoever came in second. Billy’s desire to win had nothing to do with that. He never looked down on a kid left in his dust. That wasn’t kind, gave him no satisfaction. No, Billy liked to win because winning wasn’t easy, even for a big, smart, good-looking kid like him. If you won, it meant you had worked hard. And if you worked hard and you won, then the world made sense.
One day, years later, after his world had fallen apart, winning would take on a different meaning. The victories he would work for would have nothing to do with studying or basketball or being a doctor. A few minutes’ peace, an hour’s rest without a nightmare—these would become his small but essential aspirations.
—
Billy met Ron Bucchi when he was ten and Ron was eleven. Ron was another Plainville kid, tall like Billy, Catholic like Billy, a good kid like Billy. They played Little League—Billy was on the Owls, who were managed by his friend Mike Chambrello’s dad. Mike played for the Cubs, and Ron and his twin brother, Rick, were on the Seals. Billy would play sports all day long if you let him. There was scarcely a blade of grass in the Petits’ backyard on Broad Street because of all the ball that was played back there—the bare feet and worn-smooth soles of sneakers pounding the dirt every day after school, the basketballs and hardballs and footballs bouncing around the yard where the lawn had once been.
Billy was not only the oldest Petit child but one of the oldest kids in the neighborhood, so he had a built-in authority that made kids follow him. He was a leader in these games. He had a quick smile that told any kid he was welcome to play, but he liked to have his way, too. Billy was afflicted with the bursts of impatience that you sometimes see in precocious kids. He wasn’t cruel. He was intense.
His little sister, Johanna—everyone called her Hanna—loved gymnastics in elementary school. But Billy had other ideas for her. He figured she would be tall, like her four older brothers, so he took to having sit-downs with her, the way a father might do with his daughter. Drill some common sense into her. You’ve got to give up the gymnastics, he’d tell her. You’re not going to be a dancer. You should be playing more ball. He was methodical, pragmatic. “Goal-oriented,” Hanna says today. “Always make a list, set your goals, and if you don’t achieve them, reset your list and aim for things that you can achieve. Yeah, we followed him.”
In junior high, Billy and Ron Bucchi played on a local basketball team sponsored by the Columbian Squires, the youth arm of the Knights of Columbus. Billy lived for basketball. Just as he loved to spend hours behind his house dribbling in the grass until it was dirt, he loved being out on a gym floor. He was a pure shooter. Used to shoot the lights out, Big Bill says. On the basketball court, Billy’s competitive drive showed itself more than anywhere else, even with his own teammates. “Oh, we used to get on each other’s ass all the time,” Ron says. They were regional champs for a couple of years, went to the tournament in Glens Falls, New York, up past Saratoga Springs, a good three-hour drive from Plainville. Ron and Bill would ride up with their families, watching the towns slip past out the windows.
—
At Plainville High, Billy was the same quiet leader he was in the neighborhood growing up. Maybe he was too much the boss sometimes, maybe too quick with a sardonic remark, but when he went too far, he knew how to laugh it off in a way that told you he didn’t mean it. He didn’t have trouble making friends. He looked serious one minute but might throw his arm around your shoulders the next. It had a charming effect, this odd mix of introversion and playfulness, and after college and medical school, it would morph into a uniquely comforting bedside manner. Dozens of his patients would say he was a doctor any patient would want.
“He had a real fun-loving personality, an outgoing personality. Playful,” Ron says. “It’s just pretty amazing. And this is coming from a guy who’s known him since I was eleven. Think about the kids you’ve known since you were eleven years old. A bunch of them might be doing
well, but you wouldn’t sit back and say, ‘He’s amazing.’ And he’s the only one of them I could say that about.”
Billy had a steady girlfriend for at least a couple of years, a pretty girl named Wendy—the children in her family were named for the siblings in the Darling family in Peter Pan. Billy lettered in cross-country, basketball, and track. As captain of the basketball team, he led the Blue Devils to the CIAC tournament his senior year, 1974. He was class president. National Honor Society. Won the Boys’ State Award and the D.A.R. History Award—the day they took pictures for that one, he wore a pair of loud, Mad Hatter checkered pants, held a five-inch-thick book as a prop, and grinned his grin, a grin that told you life was fun.
Not that Billy talked much about these accomplishments. In a reserved, New England family like the Petits, you didn’t brag. It was, Go about your business, don’t cause a fuss. When you want something, work for it.
His senior year, his dad drove him around the Northeast to look at colleges. At one place in upstate New York, some tiny school, the basketball coach said to the tall, affable high-school senior, “You can start for me.” On the long car ride back to Plainville, Bill Sr. could tell that his son was excited. But beneath the thrill was a pronounced agitation—common sense fighting for air. Behind the wheel of the family car, Bill Sr. asked, matter-of-fact, in that deep drawl that seemed to rise from somewhere down under the floorboards, whether Billy thought basketball was going to be his future. He was good, sure. He made Plainville proud, made his father proud. But what, did he think he was going to be in the NBA? Play for the Celtics? Was that really in the cards?
The Rising Page 2