Bill watches the jurors open and close the manila folder containing the two photographs of his older girl. Some look away. Some just stare. They try not to look at Bill. One woman’s eyes crinkle up with the unmistakable tears of shock. The only sound in the packed room is the ffftt-fffftt of a courtroom artist’s pastels on paper.
Bill just watches them, unmoving. Then his body starts to flinch and fidget, the energy searching for a way out. He scratches his chin. He rubs his lips with his fingers. He flicks each finger off his thumb, and the gold wedding ring that he has worn for twenty-five years catches the light. He is willing himself to be in control, but then his shoulders start jerking up and down. A little at first, and then more, and then he is biting his lower lip. Throughout the trial—throughout his life—Bill Petit has been Mr. In Control. Now and at all times he has maintained an impossible stoic comportment. The emotional range of statuary. The Petit way is to give up nothing. To charge always and only ahead. If you appear in control, then goddammit you will be in control. Oh, goddammit. In front of all these people, Bill’s composure has abandoned him. He desperately taps his fingers, trying to make it go away, trying to stop. Ffffftt-fffftt. Hanna puts a hand on his back. The manila folder passes from hand to hand. Bill squeezes his eyes shut and lowers his head. No one in the courtroom knows where to look.
—
The white corner of a crumpled tissue pokes out of Bill’s fist. He absently tugs his shirtsleeves so they extend beyond the sleeves of his blazer just so, a small, futile grasp at something like control in a situation that feels, with the passing of each excruciating, airless minute, as if every dehumanizing nightmare he’s ever had is playing endlessly in a loop in his head. And he can’t crawl out of it. Anyone who has heard or read about what happened to Dr. William Petit—and especially any husband or father—can’t help but try to imagine what it was like for this man the night it happened, or the morning after, or in the months that followed. But he is a name in the newspaper, and we read names in newspapers all the time. When we read those stories, the human instinct is to imagine what it was like for this person named Petit, because there but for the grace of God go we. We can force ourselves to picture it for maybe a few seconds: our wife’s body, strangled and burned on the floor of our own living room; ourselves trying to get plastic ties off our wrists in our own basement; our own children, gasping for breath in their beds, wondering where we are; our parents and our brothers and sisters, staring at us in our hospital bed the next day, their eyes red and puffy. And then we can pull ourselves out of it. We can look over at our wife and smile, we can tousle our kids’ hair. We can take a deep breath and go mow the lawn or something. But Bill is enduring the unique and cruel human experience of having lived it and now being forced to live it again—or maybe he is forcing himself to live it again. It is a mounting psychic torture, the only thing worse than the physical torture to which he was subjected, and the expression on his face tells the world that for Bill Petit, this recurring nightmare beggars belief.
Jay Markella, a lieutenant thirteen years now with the Cheshire PD, is not on the witness stand for very long—maybe thirty minutes. He arrived on the scene, he says. He tried to enter the house, he says. It was too hot, he says. “The air was hot when you breathed it—you could feel the burning in your throat.” The fire department sprayed more water inside, he says. Eventually he and four other officers were permitted to enter, their weapons drawn, to make sure no additional suspects were hiding in the house, he says.
The state shows a photograph of the upstairs hallway, a narrow black corridor with flame-scarred walls receding toward the ghost of a dresser sitting at the end of the hall. Markella says he walked down the hall and entered a room on the left.
Mike Dearington, the white-haired state’s attorney, asks him, “And did you go into the bedroom?”
“Yes, I did, sir.”
Bill watches, giving away nothing.
“What did you observe in the bedroom?”
“There was a bed that ran next to the wall there, adjacent to the wall, and that’s where I found Michaela Petit.”
“On the bed?”
“Yes.”
Following procedure when entering a piece of evidence or a photograph into the record, Dearington hands Ullmann a manila folder and says to the judge, “I’m showing counsel exhibits 76 and 77 that are currently marked for identification.” Exhibits 76 and 77 are photographs of Michaela’s body on her bed, her hands still tied. Ullmann, his cocounsel Patrick Culligan, and the defendant, Hayes, study the photos for a moment, their faces pinched as if they’re scanning a note for typos.
Judge Blue asks if there is any objection to these being entered into evidence.
“No, sir.”
Bill watches them looking at the photos, which again are not visible to the courtroom. Bill’s body is tensed up now, as if the coils inside him are tightening. He is not so much watching as trying to brace himself.
Dearington asks, “Did you go in for the purpose of ascertaining whether there was any life left in Michaela?”
“Yes, I did.”
“What did you do?”
Markella looks like a cop: shaved head, squared-off jaw, balls of muscle for shoulders. He answers as flatly, as businesslike, as he can. “Michaela was lying on the bed,” he says. As the police lieutenant soldiers through a bleak description of the scene in the little girl’s bedroom, Bill is crying once more, his shoulders shaking. He runs a hand back through his hair. Bill Sr., sitting next to him, puts an arm around his son, rubs Bill’s back, squeezes his shoulders tight, the old man’s long fingers trying to knead out his boy’s pain.
After the jurors again perform the crushing ritual of passing the manila folder from one to the next, trying not to glance over at the silently weeping man seated a few feet away, Judge Blue announces that he’s going to dismiss them early today. “We understand that this has been a pretty harrowing experience,” he says to them. He saw the photos, too. “It’s one thing to appreciate that, it’s another thing to go through it. Obviously, if we could spare you, we would, but we can’t.” He tells them they can feel free to give each other hugs if they need comfort, but, as usual, “do not discuss the case among yourselves or with anyone else.”
—
One afternoon, Jeremiah Donovan, Joshua Komisarjevsky’s lawyer, sits in the front row of the spectators’ gallery as state’s attorney Dearington questions Paul Makuc, a detective for the state fire marshal. Dearington is asking Makuc about the restraints that were used to tie Hayley and Michaela Petit to their beds. He asks for state’s exhibit 90 to be projected on the screen. It’s a chilling, awful photograph of Hayley’s charred room. If the courtroom was quiet a moment ago, it’s suddenly so quiet that, sitting there, you feel hot and a little sick.
The mattress, what’s left of it, is black. The fabric covering the box spring has been incinerated, exposing the metal coils inside like a tangle of barbed wire. Periwinkle-colored paint blisters off the walls in grotesque blotches, and the pictures that Hayley had taped to the walls above her bed—at perfect angles and evenly spaced, like paintings in a museum—have peeled off like dead skin. Her pillows are two blackened shapes, the pillowcases still pink at the edges. The nylon stockings and rope that Hayes and Komisarjevsky used to tie her hands and feet are melted onto the bedposts like wax around a candlestick.
The spectators, frozen, stare at the photo with a kind of dazed horror.
“You’ve indicated that accelerant”—gasoline—“was poured up on the bed and came down,” Dearington is saying. His voice, dry as wool, sounds somehow muted in the stifling silence of the windowless room. “Can you tell where the pour ended, or perhaps began—that is, the end of the trail where it comes down off the bed?”
Makuc, who is tall and pale and baby-faced, answers, “The pour extended from the edge of the bed along the east wall of the room.”
Suddenly, a blaring cell-phone ringtone cuts through the silent tension, so
loud a couple of people jump. Everyone looks around in shock. The ringtone is the Three Dog Night song “Joy to the World”:
“Jeremiah was a bullfrog! Was a good friend of mine!”
Judge Blue looks as if his head is about to launch off his neck from the anger. “Excuse me!”
Jeremiah Donovan leaps up and jams his hands into his pockets, searching frantically for his phone.
“That’s me, Your Honor. I’m sorry,” he says, and walks quickly out of the room.
—
Outside the claustrophobia of Courtroom 6A, Bill Petit’s world continues to reconstitute itself. He still lives with his parents on Red Stone Hill, still goes for breakfast at Saint’s. Still sits at the head of the long table on the glassed-in porch, doing the work of the Petit Family Foundation. The organization, his organization—it couldn’t exist without him—is three years old now. Requests for grants roll in constantly, and Bill reads them all. The idea is to grow the foundation to a point where it’s self-sustainable—where it can live off its own interest. Five million in the bank is a good goal. That leaves a few million to go. People still send single dollar bills sometimes. And Bill still writes them a note, thanking them.
Basketball season is coming up. This will be the start of the fourth season without Hayley, his UConn buddy. He still goes to the games, of course, still follows the news—reads up on every new recruit, looks at the schedule to see how tough it is. The Huskies aren’t looking too good this year. The men’s team, anyway. They’ve got a freshman coming in, Kemba Walker, out of the Bronx, looks like he might be a star. But all the preseason polls are picking them to finish near the bottom of their conference. They enter the season unranked in the nation, something the team isn’t used to. They are expected to be terrible. The Petits still have season tickets, and they’ll still pile into the car a dozen times this winter to make the haul up to Hartford or Storrs for the home games. But it won’t be the same. It’s a little harder to care about Kemba Walker and the preseason polls right now. (In six months the team will beat the odds and defy all the predictions. UConn will barely survive to play in the postseason tournaments, but when they do Walker will lead them to an improbable eleven consecutive victories and the national title. Bill will be there to watch.)
Still, the perpetual motion of Bill’s brain needs an outlet. He’s not a practicing physician anymore, but the instinct to help people was not killed that morning at his home three years ago. That survived. And so he has found a new outlet, one he believes gives him purpose. A few times now, he has driven the twenty-five minutes from Plainville to Hartford to testify before the Connecticut General Assembly, the state legislature. A bloc of Democrats is trying to abolish the death penalty in Connecticut, and Petit wants to stop that from happening. Last spring, six months before the start of the trial of Steven Hayes, he testified against the repeal. When he goes to Hartford to speak, he is afforded three minutes, like every other member of the public. The first time he went, he and Hanna had to wait nine hours for their turn. But he makes the drives and he sits and he waits, and then he says what he feels he must say. He also speaks out in favor of laws that would mandate harsher punishments for people who commit violent crimes. He has testified in Hartford several times in favor of a three-strikes law for violent offenders.
But for the most part, Bill’s world during these few months at the end of 2010 is small. Each morning, he wakes up—or, more likely, simply rises from his bed after being awake for at least an hour or two, sometimes all night—showers, dresses, combs his hair back over his faded scars, and rides with his family to New Haven. Even before they get into the car, the nausea starts to churn his stomach. Every day, he knows no part of the next eight hours will hold anything good for him. He knows that from the minute he steps out of the car in the special reserved parking lot on Church Street, each following minute will be worse than the last.
The cameras are always waiting for him. That’s a new, weird thing in his life. Reporters, cameramen. The TV people: men wearing suit jackets and ties with jeans or khakis because the camera sees only their torsos. Women with heavy makeup and perfect nails. They look different from the newspaper people, who mostly wear a more workaday version of business attire—rumpled sport coats, lived-in pantsuits. They clutch laptops and reporters’ notebooks (narrow enough to slide into a breast pocket) and palm-sized digital recorders and a handful of extra pens, and they work their butts off all day, not missing a word.
It started when he was in the hospital right after it happened, but he was oblivious to it then. He was protected. In the intervening months and years, reporters and producers have tried coming to the house, calling, showing up at Petit Family Foundation events, sending letters. He doesn’t begrudge them doing their jobs, most of them, as long as they’re not rude and don’t hound him and his family at home. A few of them even covered jury selection back in the spring. But now that the trial is real, now that it’s happening and is hitting the front page of the Connecticut papers most days, not only does the crush of reporters fill up the allotted two rows of seats in the courtroom, but the spillover takes up most of the next four rows, too. Most are local press—the Hartford Courant (a news reporter plus a blogger), the New Haven Register (also a team of two), the local CBS affiliate, the Fox affiliate, and the New Haven channel, WTNH. The New York Times has a man there every day, a seasoned legal reporter with New York swagger, and the Associated Press guy is always present. The national morning shows—Today, Good Morning America—seem to be sending people every day. Inside Edition. CNN. Fox News. Bill says hi to a few he’s come to recognize because they’re respectful and nice and they show up diligently—Robert Goulston from Channel 3, Erin Cox from WTNH, Alaine Griffin from the Courant.
Each morning, twenty tickets are given out—actual pink cardboard tickets on which numbers are written with a Sharpie by the external-affairs person from the Connecticut judicial branch. A ticket guarantees a member of the press a seat for the entire day’s proceedings. If you don’t have a ticket, you become a regular member of the public, hoping for a seat, and at least a couple dozen members of the public are showing up every day, too, sometimes more, so it’s highly competitive. The problem is that there’s an hour break for lunch, during which the courtroom is emptied and locked, and if you don’t have a ticket, you might not get a seat after the break. On the first day, the reporters showed up as early as 7:00 a.m. But back then, nobody knew how competitive things would be. Nobody figured on the documentary filmmakers and the national magazine reporter and the two courtroom sketch artists and the national news producers coming up from New York City and taking hotel rooms across New Haven Green just so they could be there every day with their dreams of landing the big interview with Bill Petit. And so the reporters started arriving earlier and earlier: 6:45, 6:30. Then 5:45, 5:15. Sometimes by 6:00 the line was already at least twenty people long—the day’s tickets were already taken. At 8:00, the exterior courtroom door was unlocked, allowing the reporters to get out of the elements and into a large vestibule outside the lobby, arranging their belongings in order, everyone keeping their place in line. As the trial stretched deep into the fall and the mornings grew colder, the reporters took to dropping their handbags and briefcases in a line as placeholders and returning to the warmth of their cars or seeking refuge in the bagel shop down the street once it opened at 5:30. When the courthouse itself opened at 9:00, the reporters filed in (again in the precise order in which they had arrived), passed through metal detectors, and proceeded to the sixth floor, where once again they arranged themselves in line and awaited the external-affairs person to come around with the tickets. The courtroom was unlocked around 9:30, and the day’s proceedings started at 10:00, five hours after the first reporters had dropped their bags down on Church Street.
The live trucks run their cables along the curb, their telescoping satellite poles extended high above. When the Petits pull their small caravan into the private lot across the street, men wearing
jackets with TV-station logos hoist cameras onto their shoulders and point them at Bill, a ritual by now in which the cameras try desperately to capture him while he practices obliviousness. It’s the same when he enters Courtroom 6A: The reporters, trying to look casual, sneak looks at him and tweet his arrival. Even the judicial marshals, stationed around the room like turrets, follow him with their eyes, curiously. Bill just tries to look like a man walking into a room.
—
Jeremiah Donovan has pulled some stunts in his thirty-one years as a trial lawyer. There was the time in the courtroom he jumped up onto a bale of marijuana that was being used as evidence in a drug case. Or the time he was defending the founder of the Latin Kings gang and recited the nicknames of 124 gang members from memory, an attempt to show that there were so many guys with the same names that the state didn’t even know for sure which one had been killed. Then there was the mob trial in which he drew giant cartoon thought bubbles on photographs of his client, showing his alleged inner motives. But today, he makes a statement—in public, to the press—that tops them all.
The Hayes trial is still going on. Next year, Donovan will stand in the same courtroom and defend Joshua Komisarjevsky, the man who committed the atrocities in the Petit house with his friend Steven Hayes. Donovan shows up at the Hayes trial frequently. He studies the state’s case, the defense, the jury’s demeanor, Judge Blue, the reporters, everything. He takes notes. He is looking for ways to sharpen and adapt his strategy for the next defendant, his client. He makes sure to be there on this particular day, because the medical examiner for the state of Connecticut is testifying. The medical examiner testifies that Komisarjevsky committed an unspeakable violation of Michaela Petit.
Donovan loves a good piece of legal strategy and he is a student of political maneuvering. He and his wife, who is also his law partner, have spent the past few years reading biographies of every United States president, in chronological order, because he felt that American history represented too wide a gap in his general knowledge. Now that he’s done with that, he’s reading the Aeneid in Latin. When Donovan gives a dinner party, he approaches it as a complex series of problems to be solved, an attitude that eventually led to his devising a system for cooking perfect risotto—a delicate dish in which rice cooks slowly on the stove with constant stirring, absorbing liquid a little at a time until it reaches the perfect creamy texture and consistency—in the microwave. He never, ever ends a sentence with a preposition, sometimes smiling as he threshes his way through the syntax, trying to get the words in the right order. (“The rule of cross-examination is, never ask a question [pause, smile] the answer to which you do not know.”) He is a solver of intellectual problems.
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