by Linda Wolfe
The evidence that Robin was dead, and that she had been hammered to death, was now quite conclusive. And it certainly appeared that her killer was the esteemed professor, William Douglas.
On October 28, 1983—nearly eight months after the killing—Douglas was arrested while driving into Cambridge, informed that he was being indicted for the murder of Robin Benedict, and taken to the police station in Sharon. He asked to make two calls. One was to his wife, who seemed not to believe him when he told her where he was, for he kept saying, “Honest, honest,” and “Really, I’m not kidding.” The other was to his current employer, an automobile rental agency where he was working as a car jockey. In an orderly fashion, he gave his boss a long list of the whereabouts of the various cars he had been supposed to pick up that day. Interestingly, he called his boss before he called his wife.
Family Units
“This is a case of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts versus William Douglas. The charge against Mr. Douglas is murder.” Over and over the words droned on as Judge Roger Donahue of the Massachusetts Superior Court began examining prospective jurors in the graceful, nineteenth-century county courthouse in Dedham, Massachusetts, the last week in April 1984. Donahue had recorded the questions he wanted to ask the jurors, and a clerk kept rewinding the cassette as each sober-faced citizen was led into the austere, paneled room. “Would your judgment be affected by the fact that there was a close relationship between the defendant, a married man, and Robin Benedict, a single person?” the tape recorder eerily kept demanding. “Would your judgment be affected by the fact that Robin Benedict, or any witness in this case, was a prostitute?”
I settled down in the courtroom, feeling lucky to have a seat, for the rows reserved for the press were jammed. Years before, Sacco and Vanzetti had been tried in this same tranquil courthouse, and virtually every newspaper in the country had sent reporters to cover the trial. It looked as if the story of the professor and the prostitute was going to run Sacco and Vanzetti a close second. Indeed, the case had received so much publicity already that Donahue was having a difficult time finding jurors who could answer no to the recorded question “Have you heard or learned anything about this case from the news media or any other source?”
Because of this problem, one afternoon Donahue began taking a more aggressive tack with prospective jurors who thought they already knew whether or not Douglas had killed Robin. Trying to explain to them that despite whatever they had heard or read, they ought nevertheless to be able to render a fair and impartial verdict, he lectured them: “In our system, cases are decided on the basis of evidence.” Then he asked whether those jurors who were already familiar with the case thought they could put their preconceptions out of their minds and arrive at a conclusion based on the evidence that would be presented in court.
Many doubted that they could.
My eyes wandered toward Douglas. He was seated at the defendant’s table between his counsel, Thomas C. Troy, and Troy’s assistant, William J. Doyle, and all week, extremely agitated, he had been tapping his fingers on the table or playing with a pen, resting it in one hand while repeatedly rubbing his fingers along its length with the other. Now, I noticed, he was scribbling a note to himself.
What had Douglas written? I asked Doyle during a break. Doyle smiled perplexedly and said, “It’s the same thing he writes whenever he makes notes. He keeps on writing, ‘There must be a way.’”
Douglas was the only person who believed it. Troy and Doyle were familiar with the impressive case the prosecution was planning to present. Delahunt’s office had given the defense its witness list, a scroll that contained more than 150 names. Among them were the names of telephone company supervisors, who would assert that their records indicated that Douglas had not been asleep in bed during the hours after Robin had been to see him, and those of serological specialists, who would testify that a bit of Robin’s brain had been found in Douglas’s windbreaker. Delahunt had picked, to argue the State’s case, John Kivlan, one of his most meticulous assistants, a man known to be so relentless at cross-examination that he had earned from his fellow prosecutors the nickname “the Aggressor.” Troy and Doyle had little optimism about being able to win the case for Douglas.
They were the sixth team of lawyers to attempt to defend him. The others had either been dismissed by Douglas for a variety of reasons, ranging from incompetence to lack of rapport, or had themselves relinquished the case because, or so the courthouse gossip went, the professor couldn’t pay their high fees. Troy had been appointed by the court.
It was rumored that he had accepted largely because the case would bring him vast publicity. He is, like so many defense attorneys, an outgoing, histrionic man who thoroughly enjoys the theater—and the attendant notices—of murder trials. The son of a Boston police detective who had been killed while making an arrest, Troy had followed in his father’s footsteps, become a cop, and only much later, as a result of an on-the-job injury that limited his ability to perform a policeman’s active work, decided to go to law school. By the time he graduated, his fondness for attracting media attention was clear. On the day he passed his bar examination, he hired a helicopter and had it land smack in the middle of Boston’s District Court area.
There was no question but that Troy had been looking forward to the publicity that the trial of William Douglas was going to command. But by the week of jury selection, he had begun hoping that Douglas wouldn’t insist on letting the trial run its course. The colorful attorney had an astonishingly unblemished record as a defense lawyer, having won each one of the fifty-five murder cases he had tried prior to that week. And it wasn’t just his own record he wanted to protect. It was Douglas’s future. If Douglas was tried and convicted of premeditated murder, he could be sentenced to life in prison. If he pleaded guilty, he could conceivably get off with as few as five years. Throughout the long week of jury selection, Troy kept reasoning with his client that it would be best if he pleaded guilty. But Douglas, arguing with his attorney, writing notes to himself about how there must be a way, refused to take a plea.
What finally made him change his mind? I suspect it was studying the faces of the men and women who were, ever so slowly, being selected as jurors. They were, for the most part, married and the parents of several, generally teenaged, children. By Thursday afternoon, April 26, 1984, they had all been chosen, and Donahue announced that the trial would commence the next morning. I suspect that Douglas had been feeling an impending sense of doom as each middle-aged family man or woman was sworn in. Although by legal definition they were people equal to him in rank and standing, he must have realized that they were nothing like him at all. He had always been estranged from ordinary men and women. In any event, that afternoon, as soon as the court had adjourned for the day, he asked Troy to indicate to the district attorney’s office that he was at long last willing to confess, provided the charge against him could be reduced from murder to manslaughter.
I didn’t know about these behind-the-scenes negotiations, nor did any of the journalists covering the Douglas case. We had all been taking bets about whether the trial was going to be a four-week affair or a six-week marathon, and most of us, convinced that one way or the other this would be our last free afternoon for a long time, left Dedham in a hurry, eager to attend to other things.
I went to see some of the sites that would be mentioned in the trial: Robin’s home in Malden, Douglas’s home in Sharon. Both houses looked deserted, their windows shut, their shades and curtains drawn. On the Douglas lawn, a rusty bicycle was lying on its side, one wheel jutting upward, as if it had been abruptly abandoned by someone hastily called from play and never again interested in returning to it. I have no idea to whom the bicycle belonged or how long it had been lying there, but at that moment William Douglas’s children suddenly became real to me, and I found myself shivering in the warm spring sunshine. Until then, I’d thought of the story as a tragedy for Douglas. I’d forgotten that a father’s tragedy is never his alone.
/> The following morning, I arrived in Dedham a good hour before the trial was due to start, but the courtroom was already packed. Spectators and press people jostled one another, hurrying toward seats as if down the aisles of a movie that had already begun. But nothing happened for what seemed like hours. The judge had instructed everyone to arrive by 9:30 A.M. so that the trial could start promptly, but now there was no sign of him nor of the carefully chosen jurors. The spectators fidgeted. Reporters scribbled notes about the fidgety spectators. Finally, there was a noise at a side door to the courtroom, and at last the principals in the trial hurried to their places. Judge Donahue took the bench. John Kivlan strode to the prosecutor’s table. William Douglas, accompanied by defense attorney Troy, moved lumberingly to the defense side of the room.
But no jurors appeared. And now, filing into the courtroom in place of the jury, were some of the people who were to have been witnesses at the trial as well as Robin Benedict’s parents, her four siblings, Richard, Rhonda, Robert and Ronald, and Clarence (“J.R.”) Rogers. Incredibly, since after all it was supposedly J.R. who had introduced their daughter to prostitution and thus, indirectly, to her killer, the Benedicts had formed a close attachment to J.R. during the course of the investigation. Now they chatted with him as they maneuvered into a row and put him between them. But, once seated, J.R. no longer spoke to them. He just kept staring icily at Douglas’s back. Something was clearly afoot.
A few seconds later, without further ado, John Kivlan began speaking: “Your Honor, I wish to advise you that Mr. Troy has advised me this morning that the defendant Douglas wishes to change his plea from not guilty to guilty to so much of the indictment that alleges he did assault and beat Robin Benedict and did kill Robin Benedict, that is, to so much of the indictment as alleges manslaughter.”
Whispers of astonishment, whoops of amazement, even quickly muffled applause, spread through the courtroom, and a few minutes later Judge Donahue began addressing Douglas. Did he understand that by pleading guilty, he might receive not a short sentence but as much as eighteen to twenty years?
He did.
Did he understand what manslaughter was? That it referred to a killing committed either through reckless conduct or in the heat of passion—whether anger, fear, fright, or nervous excitement?
He did.
“And did you kill Robin Benedict?” Judge Donahue asked.
“Yes,” William Douglas said.
I was even more startled by what transpired next. Kivlan was reviewing for the assemblage the evidence the State would have presented when suddenly Douglas asked permission to speak.
It was granted. He stood. His voice quavery, he began to apologize. He said how sorry he was for having taken up the time of the judge: “I understand and I know that you are a very, very busy person and I have misused a lot of your time.” But, he went on to say, it wasn’t just to the judge that he really wished to apologize. It was to Robin’s parents. “I would like, with your permission, to address the Benedict family,” he requested of Donahue. And then he added, humbly, “Although I don’t really have the right.”
Suddenly a terrifying sound erupted from the back of the courtroom. It was a snarl, a sound of rage so loud it could be heard in every corner. J.R. had started to his feet and was shouting, “Fuck you!”
Douglas turned pale and seemed to shake. But clearly he wanted his moment of penitence desperately, for he went on, almost without missing a beat: “I know Mr. and Mrs. Benedict and they are fine people. They have raised a wonderful family unit.”
I felt that in Douglas’s very choice of words there was something peculiar, disconnected, the sound of the observer and the stranger. Robin’s parents had raised, not a family, but a “unit.” J.R. and the Benedicts must have felt a chill like my own, for J.R. screamed, “Shut up,” and Mrs. Benedict burst into tears.
It was to be a long while before I understood all that had happened between Douglas and Robin, all that had characterized the professor’s emotional life. But when I did, it occurred to me that his mea culpa in the courtroom was something to which all the other apologies in his life had been leading up—the apologies to his parents for not being a good enough boy, the apologies to Nancy for not being a good enough husband, the apologies to Robin for not being able to stop being a pest and a nag. Surely that was why he spun out his apology to the judge and the Benedicts, repeating the same words, talking on and on, refusing to be done with it.
When he finished apologizing to the judge and the Benedicts, Douglas apologized to his wife and children.
Ten days later, on May 7, 1984, fourteen months after the killing, William Douglas was sentenced. During the days that intervened, he made his two-day confession and, at the request of the district attorney’s office, gave elaborate details about the location of the dumpster into which he had thrown Robin’s body. Attorney Troy, pointing out how cooperative he’d been, asked the court to impose a minimum sentence—five to fifteen years in prison. Bill Douglas, he said, was a “gentle, sensitive, educated man” who had “left the Alice-in-Wonderland world of academia” only to be ensnared by “the world of sex, extortion, violence, larceny, the world of prostitutes and pimps [who] reached out and consumed him.”
Kivlan asked for the maximum sentence—eighteen to twenty years. He had read Douglas’s confession and found in it evidence that Douglas had calculated Robin’s death, not merely killed her in a moment of sudden passion. “This is not a kind man,” he said. “This is not a gentle man easily led astray by beautiful young women. This is a devious, mature man, an intelligent, calculating man who knew what he was doing.”
Judge Donahue seemed to concur. He sentenced Douglas to eighteen to twenty years, and moments later the professor, his expression astonishingly youthful and vulnerable, his hands manacled, his arms clutching his worn, overstuffed scholar’s briefcase, was led away.
That afternoon, Robin’s parents held a press conference in Methuen. Nancy Douglas had given a statement to the press the previous day, saying, “Bill was everything I ever wanted as a husband and father … I still love him,” and now, not to be outdone, the Benedicts talked of their love. “No matter what has been learned about our daughter’s secret life,” they said, “we’ll always love her.” But I left the conference thinking that the crime, and the investigation, had—whatever they said—reduced that love. How could it not? Robin’s parents had had to accommodate to a new vision of their daughter. They’d known she had sex for money, but—or so they said—they’d been privy to none of the details of her days, her drug habit, her extremely active hustling, her alleged extortionism. To them, Robin had still been a promising, talented girl, and they’d assumed that prostitution was, for her, a phase, a stage, a rebellion, something she’d soon grow out of.
I felt, as I rode back to Boston that afternoon, that one of the sad things about murder is that, inevitably, not just the perpetrator but the victim is probed, revealed, exposed. Murder takes away not only life but reputation, thereby doubly robbing a victim’s family.
Douglas was sent to the Massachusetts state correctional facility at Walpole. J.R. left town. And Tom Troy and William Delahunt, no longer antagonists, arranged to get together for a couple of beers.
Interestingly, Robin’s body never turned up. Trooper Brian Howe went down to Providence to talk with trash collectors there. He learned that the garbage in the dumpsters in the shopping mall where Douglas had discarded Robin’s body was routinely compacted and used for landfill in a large land reclamation site in Jamestown, Rhode Island. But no one connected with the site could tell him exactly where, or how deep, in the hundred-acre area the garbage collected on Sunday, March 6, 1983, might be. Moreover, Howe learned that the garbage would have been routinely crushed by a trash compactor, which would most likely have eliminated much of the body’s bone matter, and that even if some of Robin’s bones had—miraculously—emerged intact from the compactor, they would have been exposed to ground shifting and animal activity in t
he landfill. These actions would have caused separation of the skeletal remains.
Howe came back to Dedham recommending that no further search be undertaken, for it would surely prove futile. It had turned out that Douglas’s choice of a method for getting rid of a body had, indeed, been a choice worthy of a professor.
A year later I was still doing research, still tying up loose ends, and I went back to New England for a few days. I stayed in a dreary hotel where Robin used to pick up traveling businessmen, did some last-minute interviews, visited the Combat Zone again, and one afternoon went to Dedham to talk with the police and lawyers at the district attorney’s office there about what they thought, finally, about the case and the sort of man Douglas really was.
I met that day with Lieutenant Sharkey, Trooper Howe, District Attorney Delahunt, Assistant District Attorney Kivlan, and another assistant district attorney whom I’d never seen before, Matt Connolly. Sharkey said he’d believed Douglas about the hammer’s having been brought into his house by Robin and that he still believed it. Kivlan said he hadn’t believed it at the time of the confession and still didn’t.
Sharkey said, “You want to know what kind of a guy Douglas was? He’s the wimp everyone went to school with, the little fat kid who couldn’t tie his own shoes, the one who, if you threw him a basketball, he dropped it, the one with his arms sewed on backward.” Connolly said, “No, he was smarter than that. Wilier. He wanted us to think he was just a wimp, but I think he planned her killing, and that he planned it cleverly.” Someone murmured, “Except for the credit cards. That wasn’t smart.”
What about the two unsolved murders that they’d been worried about when Douglas was on the loose? I asked them.
“You read his confession,” Sharkey said. “We probed him about those deaths, but he denied knowing anything about them.” Connolly spoke up: “I don’t believe him. I think he could have been connected to them.” He was working on the Sharon case, but so far he’d failed to find anything to link the professor to it.