The Rising

by Ryan D'Agostino

  There’s another metal detector at the entrance to the courtroom itself. A marshal sits at a table searching everyone’s bag by hand. If anyone makes the metal detector beep, a second marshal waves an electronic wand over his or her body. Bill was already seated inside the courtroom but stepped out to go to the men’s room. When he walks up to reenter, he doesn’t walk through the metal detector like everyone else. The marshal gestures for him to step around, and he hand-frisks him—Bill Petit, pillar of the community, being felt up for a weapon. The marshal looks almost apologetic. But if Bill minds the indignity, he doesn’t show it. He knows they have to do this. He is about to enter a courtroom in which he will be seated ten feet from one of the men who killed his family, and they need to make sure Bill doesn’t have any ideas. People try things.

  Bill thanks the marshal and walks inside.

  The courtroom is paneled almost entirely with wood the color of honey: the jury box, the bench, the witness stand, the clerk’s box, the stenographer’s station, the shelves that hold volumes of Connecticut statute along one wall, the uncomfortable Catholic-school benches that spectators must endure. A judicial marshal stands at each of the five doors—one that leads to the judge’s chambers; one used by lawyers, court personnel, the jury, and the defendant; one to the jury-deliberation room; one to a small office; and one to the hall, for the public. The carpeting is blue-flecked industrial. The room is shaped something like a stop sign. Half of it is devoted to gallery seating, six rows with an aisle down the middle, the rows getting shorter as they reach the back of the room. The white ceiling is dotted with round recessed lights, like a planetarium. Next to the jury box, an oil portrait of a distinguished-looking gray-haired judge hangs on the wall.

  Reporters fill the first two rows behind the defense table, the on-air talent dressed up and made up, the newspaper writers taking shorthand notes in skinny notepads or tapping at the keys of laptops. Producers from the national morning shows work their smartphones and scan the room for possible interview subjects.

  The first two rows behind the prosecutor’s table are reserved for the Petit and Hawke families, but the extended clan is so big it spills into the whole section. Barbara and Bill, Glenn, Hanna and Dennis, Dick and Marybelle Hawke, Cindy, the aunts and uncles and cousins, good friends, neighbors from Sorghum Mill Drive, colleagues of Jen’s from Cheshire Academy, members of the church—everyone is here. Bill sits in the first seat of the first row. He wears a blazer and slacks and chews gum in quick turns of the jaw, as if mincing it. He wears his wedding ring, a band of yellow gold, as he has for more than twenty-five years. He has combed his hair back—it has grown more gray than black in the three years since his family was murdered. It just about covers the white scar running down the back of his scalp.

  Bill does not once look at Steven Hayes as two marshals lead Hayes to his seat at the defense table. This is not the first time since the murders Bill has seen in person the man who raped his wife and crushed her larynx with his bare hands, the man who appeared to Bill as only a dim shape in the darkness that night. Hayes was present for the jury-selection process, which Bill attended regularly. But this is the trial, and the room is charged with a kind of humming undercurrent now. Everyone seems hushed, on alert.

  Hayes looks small. On July 23, 2007, he was a burly man with a shaved head, thick arms, and a snarl. But he must have lost eighty pounds since then. He’s meek. His face sags, and his bird-backed, slope-shouldered frame drops like a sack of corn flakes into his blue upholstered office chair. He wears baggy pants with no belt and a too-big oxford shirt whose collar gives a wide berth for his pencil neck. He swivels almost imperceptibly in the comfortable-looking chair, flanked by his two public defenders, the bald, methodical Patrick Culligan and the more charismatic lead man, Tom Ullmann, who has a neck beard and whose ties, the courtroom will soon learn, are always exactly four inches too long. The lawyers’ chairs are about a foot taller than Hayes’s.

  Off to the side, in the spectator section, sits Jeremiah Donovan, the lawyer who will represent Joshua Komisarjevsky, the other man caught fleeing the Petit house in Jennifer’s minivan, at his trial next year. He’s a charmer, Donovan, and the reporters who know him keep an eye on him and try to chat him up when he walks by. (It’s never difficult to chat up Jeremiah Donovan.) He’s tall with bristly white hair. His suit pants are stained.

  —

  Every woman in the state of Connecticut has thought about what she would have done had she found herself in Jennifer Petit’s impossible situation that morning: standing in the safe confines of a bank, her captor circling in her own minivan outside, waiting for her to emerge with the money he and his friend are stealing from her and her husband, all while her two children remain tied to their beds with pillowcases over their heads and she doesn’t even know where her husband is. The two men have told her that if she just gives them the money, they’ll leave the house and no one will get hurt. They are polite to her, even when they tell her that if she tries to get the police involved, they will kill her family.

  Jennifer had options. She could get the money, tell the bank manager to send the police to her house immediately, and leave. She could stay inside the bank and call the police, which would keep Hayes circling while the cops rush to the house to ambush the other man. Or she could do exactly what the men have told her: Get the money, don’t call the police, and let the man drive her home, in the hope that the criminals will do exactly what they say they will do, which is to end the nightmare and leave her family in peace.

  From the testimony of a junior teller and the bank manager who were on duty on the morning of Monday, July 23, 2007, the 117 people in the courtroom learn that this is what Jennifer did:

  She walked into the Bank of America branch in Cheshire, trying to appear calm. It is a freestanding building in a suburban shopping area, one-story brick with cupolas on top like a little schoolhouse, with a parking lot out front. She waited for the next available teller, a young woman named Kristin. She gave Kristin an account number and requested a withdrawal of $15,000. Kristin checked one account and saw that there wasn’t enough money in it. They checked another account, a home-equity line of credit, the one of which Hayes and Komisarjevsky had found a record at the house. Kristin asked Jennifer for identification. Jennifer said she didn’t have any on her but that she needed the money. Kristin told her that wasn’t possible—not only did she need ID, her husband would need to be present to cosign for the withdrawal. So Jennifer told Kristin there were two men holding her family hostage in her home, and that she had to bring them the money right away or they would kill her daughters and her husband. She said they were being polite and she just needed the money. Please. Right now.

  The teller excused herself and quickly walked over to get the manager, Mary Lyons, a friendly woman who had worked for Bank of America for more than thirty years. Kristin whispered the situation to Mary, showed her the piece of paper with Jennifer’s account number written on it. The protocol in this situation, Kristin says, was that the bank employees try to determine as quickly as possible if it’s a real crisis or some kind of scam. Mary walked over to Kristin’s teller station and calmly asked Jennifer for identification. Jennifer held open her wallet to show that she didn’t have any, because the people in her house had taken it. What she did show Mary in her wallet were two photographs of her daughters. Mary looked up at this woman, and she could see the whole terrifying story of the last six hours in Jennifer’s eyes. Right then, Mary Lyons knew the woman was telling the truth.

  Now Mary Lyons sits nervously on the witness stand, re-creating this ungodly scene. She is being questioned by Gary Nicholson, the senior assistant state’s attorney.

  “Can you describe for the jury, if you would please, what Mrs. Petit’s demeanor was like during this period of time when she was attempting to get the $15,000 from the bank?” Nicholson asks.

  “Yes, she was—she seemed quite calm. She seemed very, to me, brave.”

  “Di
d you look at her eyes?”

  “Yes, we did—after I saw the pictures, we looked at each other and I knew right then that she was—what she was telling me was the truth, and I needed to help her and let her get out of the bank….”

  “During the time that Mrs. Petit was at the teller counter, was there any discussion concerning whether or not she wanted the police to become aware of the fact that she was withdrawing this money?”

  “I think she said something to the effect that, ‘Nobody can know about this because I have to get back with the money.’ ”

  At the bank, Mary authorized an immediate $15,000 cash withdrawal. Jennifer took the money and calmly walked out of the bank, hoping that Mary Lyons wouldn’t call the police.

  Given her options, Jennifer Petit decided that the only thing she needed to do was get back to her children. Maybe it was not even a decision. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe it’s what any mother would do if she found herself standing in that bank.

  “At this time, Your Honor, the state would like to offer state’s exhibit number 6,” says Nicholson. State’s exhibit number 6 is a 911 call that Mary Lyons made as Jennifer was leaving the bank. A marshal dims the lights in the courtroom. On a large white screen facing the jury, Nicholson projects a series of grainy black-and-white images from the bank’s surveillance cameras. One shows Jennifer in a white blouse, jewelry neatly in place, glasses on a chain around her neck as she often wore them, standing at the teller’s counter, waiting. Doing everything right. She looks calm and brave, like Mary Lyons said. She looks as if she understands that these are the most important few moments in the entire forty-eight years of her life.

  The recording of Lyons’s voice fuzzes through the courtroom speakers: “We have a lady who is in our bank right now who says that her husband and children are being held at their house. The people are in a car outside the bank. She is getting $15,000 to bring out to them. If the police are told, they will kill the children and the husband. They have their faces covered. She is petrified. They told her they wouldn’t hurt anybody if she got back there with the money. She believes them.”

  Bill’s left arm rests on the edge of the bench, his hand to his cheek as if it’s holding up his head. Both his legs bounce up and down. He looks up at the picture now being projected on the screen: the last picture taken of his wife. The white rectangle of the screen reflects on each lens of his glasses. He has seen these photos before, but not like this, in this room, and he stares up at them again now. The last picture was captured by the security camera inside the ATM in the lobby of the bank. It shows his wife, his good, good wife, walking out the front door of the bank at 9:23 a.m., clutching her bag with the bands of cash inside it, very much believing that she was about to go home and save her family’s lives.

  —

  And then the state calls Dr. William Petit Jr. as its witness.

  It’s strange. The worst, most haunting parts of Bill Petit’s testimony at the trial of the man who killed his family are not those in which he describes his own torture but rather the parts of the ordeal when he didn’t know what was going on. His being beaten in the head, his being blindfolded and dragged into the basement and tied up for hours—he reports these chronologically and without emotion. The questions that sound so innocuous are the ones that give you chills. This is the prosecutorial talent of Michael Dearington, the state’s attorney who looks like a white-haired Irish priest out of a John Ford movie. He has this way about him that makes you wonder sometimes if he’s all there—he fumbles, he withdraws a question, he gets the exhibit number wrong. But as his questioning goes on, you see that what he lacks in finesse he makes up for in the methodical, metronomic way he is building this case, question by question, exhibit by exhibit, fact by fact. His direct examination of Bill is constructed of dry exchanges that contain details both horrible and banal:

  PETIT: Yeah, I called home on the cell and asked if we had any plans for dinner and they said, Yes, we’ll throw something together here. Stop by a farm stand and see if you could find any corn or fresh vegetables.

  DEARINGTON: And did you, indeed, look around for a stand?

  PETIT: I did, but at 6:30 or so, everybody had locked up for the weekend….

  DEARINGTON: Did you hear anything that would suggest to you that someone was going into the refrigerator?

  PETIT: Twice when I was down there [in the basement], somebody came downstairs, down the stairs and walked directly in front of me over to the refrigerator, took something out—I’m assuming a can because it sounded like a pop top—and went back upstairs. That happened twice. They didn’t say anything either time. I could just vaguely make out the outline of somebody going by through whatever was over my head at that time.

  DEARINGTON: And what was in the refrigerator, as best you could recall?

  PETIT: Mostly soda, a little bit of beer that was left over from the graduation party a month before….

  DEARINGTON: At some point, did you hear any thumping-type noise?

  PETIT: I did hear, right around that same time, three loud noises that I couldn’t understand what they were, as if someone were throwing twenty- or fifty-pound sacks on the living-room floor, it sounded like….

  DEARINGTON: You referred to those as zip ties or some such thing?

  PETIT: I am not sure exactly.

  DEARINGTON: The material, what type of material was it generally?

  PETIT: Hard but flexible plastic.

  DEARINGTON: And did you keep any of those in your house?

  PETIT: No…

  PETIT: Well, unfortunately, it was nonfunctional because sometime—perhaps a month earlier when I was getting ready to go to work early in the morning, I came down into the kitchen and Jennifer had come down and I didn’t see her. I called, she was down in the basement, I went down in the basement, and she said she was having a hard time opening this lock, which is a deadbolt. And she had essentially disassembled, disassembled the lock to open the door so that she would be able to get things from the basement to the patio.

  DEARINGTON: And so on that particular day, neither locking mechanism was working, is that correct?

  PETIT: That—the deadbolt was not functional, no….

  DEARINGTON: With respect to exhibit 125, do you recognize that wallet as looking familiar?

  PETIT: That looks like the wallet that Hayley didn’t carry on a regular basis. And after graduation, she had received a number of gift cards, we had just obtained that Bank of America ATM card and a credit card for her to use when she went to college….

  PETIT: Jen kept her jewelry in the bedroom in a jewelry box. I don’t—I think she accepted the black pearls at Christmas and wasn’t as, wasn’t especially—didn’t think my taste was that great that year, and I think it stayed in the jewelry box for the most part….

  DEARINGTON: I’m going to show you what is marked as exhibit 37 for identification, I believe. I’ll ask if you recognize that, Dr. Petit?

  PETIT: It’s a Louisville Slugger baseball bat that we had for a long time in the garage and in the basement. I think I received it from my—via my brothers and father, who some time back had several package stores. It has the Ronrico Rum name on there, probably was a giveaway with some marketing that they were doing….

  Bill’s testimony ends without ceremony or drama, and there is no cross-examination.

  Juries are made up of people, and people do unexpected things, and after lunch on the second day of the trial, the first really weird thing in the case of State v. Hayes happens.

  The judge in the case is Jon C. Blue, twenty-one years on the bench, more than a dozen as a trial lawyer before that, midwesterner, towering helmet of white hair, enunciates every syllable. Grandfatherly. Stern if he needs to be. And firmly in control of his courtroom. He announces after the daily one-hour lunch break that one of the jurors, a Mr. Lively, would like to address the court. In Blue’s tone you can hear that he’s anxious to learn what this is about. And so he calls Mr. Lively to sit in the witne
ss box and tell the court what’s on his mind. Mr. Lively unfolds a piece of paper and reads:

  “As a juror in this case, I am confused by the presentation of the state’s case, and bewildered by what seems to me a lack of preparation on their part. The physical evidence is poorly organized and the order of its introduction seems to be arbitrary and casual. But for me, what’s worse, the evidence being presented to us has no explanation with it and no contextualization. It’s as though…”

  Jesus. Who is this guy? Mucking up the works. The problem with people doing weird things in a jury trial is that it creates the possibility of a mistrial. And one could argue that Jon C. Blue’s most important job here, for however many days this trial goes on, is to avoid a mistrial. That, and to try to avoid handing the defense any reason to appeal. It’s all very tenuous—every objection, every motion, and every weird thing like this is a test for Judge Blue.

  Blue glowers at Mr. Lively.

  Tom Ullmann, meanwhile, is probably thrilled with Mr. Lively. For one thing, Mr. Lively is not impressed with the state’s presentation so far, which could bias him in favor of the defense. But also, a loose cannon on the jury is not such a bad thing for a defense team looking for any reason to move for a mistrial.

  Blue responds to Mr. Lively’s announcement first by effusively praising all of the attorneys on both sides, saying they are four of the best in the state. Ullmann and Judge Blue, neither of whom have ever seen anything quite like this in their long careers in the courtroom, take turns questioning Mr. Lively. They cajole him for ten minutes, affording him multiple opportunities to say that he can continue to be faithful to his oath as a juror—those are the magic words that would mean he could possibly remain as a member of this jury.