The Rising

by Ryan D'Agostino

  —

  Monday morning. That’s when the knock comes. The fourth day of deliberations. Tom Ullmann whispers to one of the reporters, a woman from the Hartford Courant, that this isn’t a question about procedure and they don’t want pizza. It’s time. Everyone gets into position. Bill sits at the far end of the bench, as he did for the verdict in the guilt phase. Long minutes fall off the clock on the wall as the parties are assembled—the judge, the clerk, the court reporter, the attorneys, Hayes. Bill sits without expression. The jury finally enters, looking serious to a person.

  For each of the six capital counts—the counts for which Hayes could be sentenced to death—there may be aggravating or mitigating factors. Aggravating factors mean Hayes will get death—unless the jury finds that there were mitigating factors that outweigh the aggravating factors. There are three possible aggravating factors here: that Hayes committed these crimes “in an especially cruel, heinous, or depraved manner,” that in committing any one of the crimes he knowingly caused grave danger to another person, and that he committed these crimes while in the act of committing a crime for which he had previously been convicted, in his case third-degree burglary. The state made an easy case for all three of these during the penalty phase. Mitigating factors include the defense’s offerings about Hayes’s character and his troubled background of abuse and addiction.

  In the first of the capital counts, the murder of two or more persons, the clerk asks the jury whether they found the aggravating factors.

  Yes.

  She asks them whether they found any mitigating factors.

  Yes.

  She asks them whether the aggravating factors outweigh the mitigating factors.

  Yes.

  That’s it. Death.

  Hayes turns around, looks at the courtroom for a few seconds, then swivels back around. The reporter from the Associated Press, here since day one, thumbs a news update into his BlackBerry, his hands shaking. One of the jurors wipes tears from her eyes with a quick brush of the back of her hand. A sketch artist in the front row of the media section, at the opposite end of the courtroom from Bill, starts hurriedly scratching out a beautiful pastel portrait of Bill with a single tear running down his cheek, even though he is all the way across the courtroom and doesn’t appear to be crying. Jennifer’s mother, Marybelle, gently chews gum. Dennis, Hanna’s husband, holds his head in his hands. Big Bill turns his head just enough to look down the row at his son, who isn’t moving a muscle. The older man looks flushed and drawn, and his mouth hangs open a little. Hanna dabs her nose with a tissue.

  The procedure is repeated for every count. Every juror is asked, again and again, whether he or she believes beyond a reasonable doubt that death is the appropriate punishment.

  “…on the fifth count, murder of a person under sixteen, Michaela Petit…that death is the appropriate punishment…”

  Yes, yes, yes…

  “…on the tenth count, murder of a kidnapped person, Jennifer Hawke-Petit…”

  Yes, yes, I do, yes…

  It goes on for an hour. Six capital felonies, each carrying the penalty of death.

  At the end, when it’s all over, Bill leans back, slings his arm over the back of the bench, and tucks in his lips like an affirmation. The judge asks the marshals to escort the jurors, whose job is now done, from the building for their safety. Bill stands, hugs Dearington, hugs his mom, and hugs Hanna for a long time. An old friend squeezes Bill’s shoulders and whispers something that makes him chuckle. Big Bill shakes his son’s hand, but they don’t smile. Bill has been unburdened for the moment, but somehow he doesn’t feel any lighter. This isn’t happiness. Maybe it isn’t even relief. The best you can say is that it’s better than the alternative. In the little windowless waiting room, Bill takes in a deep breath of air and lets it out slowly. And he puts on his coat.

  —

  Outside, the TV cameramen wearing parkas check their microphones with fast hands, breathing hard. Newspaper reporters stand in front of the cameras, inadvertently blocking the shot, and the TV guys ask them to move—“No, no, no, you gotta get lower!” This is the moment. This is when Dr. Petit might finally speak, after months of sitting there, stolid and mannequinned, wondering and remembering and probably stewing and raging inside—this is when he might interpret it all, and answer questions even. And everyone is going live with it, so you have to siddown in front! Reporters genuflect before the cluster of microphones, flip to clean notebook pages, check pens for ink, pull digital recorders from their bags and hold them close to where the doctor will be standing. The guy from NECN, tall with blow-dried hair, shouts into his cell phone to someone back at the station, “Are you fucking kidding me?” The two middle-aged guys who are making a documentary about the case for HBO huddle with their cameraman. The veteran New York Times reporter looks serene and ready.

  A gale screams out of the blue sky down Church Street in front of the courthouse, whipping the U.S. and Connecticut flags on the pole. One of the TV stations has set up a small white tent in case of rain, but the wind blows it down like the flame on a birthday candle. Then, through the glass doors, the TV guys see the Petit family members and friends emerge from the elevators, and they scramble behind their cameras. The newspaper guys click on their recorders. The radio guys switch on their wireless mikes.

  Everyone is in place.

  Bill is wearing a white turtleneck, a maroon V-neck sweater, and a blue overcoat. The moment he steps through the sliding doors, his salt-and-pepper hair is shellacked over to one side of his head by the wind. It’s long, but not as long as he has let it grow at other times since the murders. Sometimes it has been way down over his collar.

  He speaks without written notes. He talks about justice being done, about the jury’s admirable commitment, about the fact that he was fortunate to have had insurance and been relatively affluent, because the funds for victims’ aid in Connecticut are paltry. He says it wasn’t his decision to reject Hayes’s plea bargain at the outset of the case—guilty in exchange for life in prison—but rather Dearington’s, although he agreed with it from day one. His voice is sure and clear.

  As soon as he stops speaking, the questions begin. The first is, What was he thinking when the jury announced its verdict? “What was going through your heart, what was going through your mind?” is how the reporter phrases it.

  Rev. Hawke, standing behind his son-in-law, bites his cheek. Bill Sr., at Billy’s left, puts a hand on his boy’s back. Bill’s hair blows forward on his head, and he looks down.

  “I was really, ah—”

  He raises his eyebrows, licks his lips a little. Fighting.

  “I was really, ah, crying, crying for loss.”

  He shakes his head a little, as if to shake away a bad thought. He shrugs, trying to shrug away the emotion that is overwhelming him.

  “You know—”

  His voice comes off its hinges.

  “Probably many of you have kids, ah…”

  More than ten seconds pass. He is trying to get the words out. He hates this, every second of it. Dick Hawke looks up at Bill. Bill Sr. looks down at the sidewalk. Hanna squints through the bitter wind.

  “Michaela was an eleven-year-old little girl,” Bill says, shaking his head, raising his eyebrows, attempting to explain the inexplicable one more time. “You know, ah, tortured and killed…in her own bedroom…you know? Surrounded by stuffed animals. And…Hayley had a great future. And was a strong and courageous person. And Jennifer helped so many kids. At Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh and at Strong Memorial in Rochester and at the Yale Children’s Hospital and Cheshire Academy, and she cannot do that. So I was really thinking of the tremendous loss….I was glad for the girls that there was justice, because I think it’s a just verdict, but mostly I was sad for the loss that we had all suffered.”

  Robert Goulston, CBS Channel 3, upbeat guy, always respectful, asks if there was ever a moment when Bill didn’t think he could do it—didn’t think he cou
ld come here every day and sit through it. Bill bobs his head and almost chuckles.

  “There was, ah—every day when I basically didn’t want to get out of bed, and—nothing against you guys, but I didn’t want to park the car and walk across the street. I didn’t want to get my picture taken for the hundred-and-fifty-thousandth time. I didn’t want to sit here and listen to the things that were being said in the courtroom. There were a thousand times I wanted to jump up and scream out.”

  Somebody asks about closure—“the healing process”—now that the verdict is in. It sounds like a morning-show question, the kind designed to get someone to either cry or become angry.

  “I don’t think there’s ever closure,” Bill says. He has thought about this. “I think whoever came up with that concept’s an imbecile.”

  This is what happens when you take everything from a man—from this man. He’s left standing on a sidewalk, talking through the wind, feeding the five-o’clock broadcast. There’s a jagged hole in his heart, a heart that was once filled with happiness and God and ambition and joy and the everyday love and pain of being a father and a husband. Raising those girls—he tried so hard to get it right, or at least more right than wrong. Every day, he tried to live up to their admiration of him. He tried to make Jen know that she was an even better person than she made him feel he was. Now, every night and every day of his changed life, he stands as if in a burning house, holding a bat stained with scab-black blood, swinging it with those oxen shoulders and the force of his strong, fifty-year-old frame, screaming—screaming for his girls, for his life. And then, when the fire is out, when his blackened house hisses under wet smoke, he whispers that he is not okay. Now he is trying to fill the hole again. He hasn’t had a good day yet—he might never have a good day again. But he is trying to fill the hole.

  That African prayer from church the day before they died:

  Will we stop building a better future because of evil?

  No! Our God will deliver us from evil.

  Will we concede our dreams for our world, your Creation, because of evil?

  No, God will judge all evildoers.

  When a man loses everything the way Bill has, there is a danger of falling to a place where his heart will be rendered dark and useless. Where he won’t care much about the future. Where he won’t trust love, won’t bother to hope. Bill has felt sometimes as if he is dangling over that place, has felt like he might fall in—has felt, even, like he might want to fall in.

  But maybe Bill could trust again. Maybe he could love again. Maybe if he keeps telling people about the good these three women brought to the world, and if he has the faith that people will listen to him and will go out and do one kind thing, maybe the hole will start to fill in. Maybe faith is enough.

  —

  His next chance to tell the world about the girls comes a month after the day the jury condemns Steven Hayes to death. Judge Blue must formally sentence Hayes, and a date had been set: December 2, 2010. On sentencing day, the state allows the victims of a capital crime—the surviving family members are considered victims—to make a statement just before the sentence is officially handed down by the judge.

  Court begins at ten, as usual. But last night, Bill decided the family would get up early and make a stop. December 2 also happens to be the day that the Hospital of Central Connecticut, where Bill used to spend most of his waking hours, is bestowing the inaugural William A. Petit, M.D., Physician Service Award, a prize the hospital created in Bill’s honor. Steve Hanks, Bill’s friend who stood by his side as he spoke at the memorial service five days after the murders, would be giving it out on behalf of the hospital. Bill was supposed to be there. But yesterday Bill asked his dad to call Hanks’s assistant, Doreen, and let her know that unfortunately Bill wouldn’t be able to make it to the small ceremony because of the sentencing.

  Of course Hanks understood.

  But it didn’t feel right, not going, because it would allow Hayes to rob the world of yet another piece of joy, this time a proud moment for a doctor who had done good work. The award was established to recognize a doctor’s “spirit of altruism, commitment, and excellence.” The first recipient, a doctor from Southington named Anthony Ciardella, had organized a medical mission to Haiti last year in which he and other doctors from the hospital helped victims of the massive earthquake. This was supposed to be a special morning for Ciardella, and Bill decided at the last minute that he wouldn’t let the sentencing ruin it.

  Just after 8:00 a.m., Bill walks into a beige, fluorescent-lit hospital meeting room with floor-to-ceiling window blinds and a patterned carpet. Hanks is there, and Ciardella, and some other doctors. Bill speaks for a few minutes, praising Ciardella, and poses for a few unsmiling photographs. At 8:30, he shakes hands all around and walks back out to the car.

  The nausea chews at his stomach more than usual as the Petits’ caravan rolls south on the cold pavement toward New Haven. Courtroom 6A is filled to capacity again. Familiar faces surround Bill. Even Ron Bucchi, who attended the trial only sporadically because of work, is here today. Several members of the jury are here, too, having waited in line with the reporters to get in, seated among the general public. A reporter asks one of the female jurors what made her come today. “I just wanted to see it through,” the woman says as she takes her seat. Tom Ullmann, the lead public defender, strokes his beard. Today he has managed to tuck his tie right into his pants. Next to him, Hayes sits in his swivel chair, his neck sticking out of a blousy orange prison jumpsuit. He whips around to look at the big elementary-school clock in the back of the room. His shoulders sag, his eyes are small and black, his cheeks wilted like deflating balloons.

  As the state officially disposes of Hayes, impact is what Bill chooses for his first word, because that’s what the law calls these things: “impact statements.” And the impact just pours out of him: how Jen tried to hide her MS from the girls when she was first diagnosed; how Michaela loved to spy on Hayley so she could learn to be like the big girls; how he and Hayley used to stay up working in their little home office until after midnight sometimes. How she would be a senior in college by now. The details are his, but the story is the story of every family, ordinary and beautiful.

  “I grieve because she never got to love someone—”

  Here he just stops. He rubs the place on his forehead where you can barely see the scar anymore, rubs it over and over. His hulking shoulders shake in silence as the tears escape from under his glasses. Judge Blue looks around the room—there is nothing to do but wait. No protocol. And as Bill cries, Hayes stares over from the defense table without blinking—long minutes of unbearable silence pass, and the man who poured gasoline on the girl while she was still alive just keeps staring at the man who raised her.

  The pause seems as if it might never end.

  But then, finally, Bill picks up again.

  “—because she never got to love someone for a long time. She had a friend who was a boy and who still thinks about her. He is now a senior and a basketball player. If he called on a Sunday night at seven o’clock, and she had been studying for six hours and looked washed out, she jumped up and got her basketball clothes on, because that is what they did—they played basketball together and chatted. She loved it and probably loved him.”

  Otis.

  Bill goes on for pages about each girl. Of Michaela he says, “I learned many things from her teachers after she died that I wish they had told me before. One teacher said she always made an effort to go over to someone who was ignored by others in the class. Other children told me she stood up to the older kids on the bus when they tried to make the smaller and younger kids give up their seats.” He never knew any of this when she was alive.

  Toward the end of his statement, Bill says, “I am not sure what my own hopes and dreams are, if any.”

  Bill stands and walks back to his seat. There are no affirming nods from his family, no squeezes of his hand to say, “Good job.” That is not their way. The
row of faces points straight ahead, and Bill sits. It’s done. He is done.

  Ullmann makes a last statement, declaring that anyone who supports the death penalty is as bad as his client. “We are all Steven Hayes today,” he ventures to say. Then Hayes himself stands and mumbles through an apology. And that’s it.

  Judge Blue announces loudly that he “will make no apology for being the instrument of the law” and sentences Hayes to death on each of the six capital felonies of which the jury found him guilty. When he says to Hayes, “May God have mercy on your soul,” a weird silence seizes the room. Hayes actually has to sign a form, an odd piece of bureaucracy. The marshals step into their positions behind Hayes and at every door. And eventually, everyone stands, the judge exits without ceremony, and it is over. The state of Connecticut will kill Hayes, it is now official, but the ritual makes for a strange anticlimax to a grueling trial. If in the age of therapy and confession we expect or demand closure from these proceedings, there is no closure to be found here even now, certainly not for Bill Petit.

  People begin to drift out of the room, taking one last glance to see whether something else might happen. Five or six of Bill’s family and friends huddle around him as he sits in the front row with his head in his hands. Mike Dearington sits nearby, and the marshals stand guard, waiting, looking as if they will wait forever if they have to—the courtroom is closing down, but they’ve been in the room and heard every detail, and they aren’t about to ask Dr. Petit to leave. Bill is off somewhere else. He is in his bedroom, alone, or on a beach somewhere, or standing on the rubble of his house. He closes his eyes, and he is nowhere.

  HELP A NEIGHBOR, FIGHT FOR A CAUSE, LOVE YOUR FAMILY

  Spring–Fall 2011

  THE OPRAH WINFREY SHOW had been sending a producer to the Petit Family Foundation 5K Road Race for a couple of years running, and to the Hayes trial, too. Winfrey wanted Bill’s story for her show. All the big TV shows did—Today, Good Morning America, 60 Minutes. Bill had asked his friend Rick Healey, the lawyer, to help handle the media requests that began immediately after the murders, when Bill was still lying in a daze at St. Mary’s Hospital. Rick has been a solid buffer, respectful to every reporter, from the local newspapers to the national TV shows, even as he offers them very little—no special access to Bill, no one-on-one interview, the prize they all want. The core of decision makers on interview requests is Bill, Rick, Hanna, and Ron. Rick usually presents the options, without offering much in the way of opinion. Bill, Hanna, and Ron each have a vote. ABC has been making a strong case to do a prime-time special, but the Oprah request has made sense from the beginning.