That’s the Methodist Church, right?
P:
Mm-hm.
M:
Now, what time did you leave the meeting?
P:
I think around nine-thirty or nine-thirty-five.
M:
Returned home, right?
P:
Mm-hm. I dropped off John Sochocki first.
M:
OK, you arrived home. What time was that?
P:
Around nine-fifty to nine-fifty-five. You know, Jim, after what I said, I honestly don’t think I did this.
M:
This is something you’re going to have to make up your mind about.
P:
I really don’t think I did it. Because as I remember, when I turned around after seeing her both times, the clock hadn’t moved.
M:
What clock hadn’t moved?
P:
’Cause the first thing I did was look at the clock when I came in. And when I turned back around after I saw her on the floor it was still the same time.
M:
Well, what time did the clock say when you first looked at it?
P:
It was either ten of or five of. Either one or the other.
M:
Well, it can’t be one or the other.
S:
How you doing, Jim?
P:
I’d say five of ten.
M:
Well let me get this now. You arrived at your house about nine-fifty to nine-fifty-five. Take it from there. What happened?
P:
Well, I shut off the car, and I jiggled the headlight.… No matter what that test says in there, something I just remembered is after I found my mom on the floor I looked at the clock again, and it hadn’t moved.
M:
You shut off the car. Then what?
P:
Then I went inside and the first thing I do is yell, “Hey, mom, I’m home,” and I looked at the clock.
M:
Which door did you go in?
P:
The front door.
M:
And you yelled what?
P:
“Hey, mom, I’m home,” or something to that effect.
M:
All right. Go on.
P:
There was no answer, so I looked in and saw her by the bed.
M:
To the left or to the right?
P:
To the right. Can you stop for a second after you finish with this line?
M:
Go ahead, say whatever you want to say.
P:
Everything that I’ve been saying, it’s almost like I’m making it up. I’m not sure about it.
S:
Now look. Now listen. You’ve been playing headgames with us now for too long a period. Now, I told you once before when you and I were talking here that we have definitely established that you were in that house when your mother was killed. OK, now look. There are many things that we can do to make this thing a very difficult process for you. You realize that?
P:
Yes.
S:
All right. Now, I’ve tried very hard to be understanding and I’ve tried very hard to get across to you that we’re not out to hurt you. We’re out to treat you as a decent human being. But, I’ve been fooling around here for a lot of hours with you and I’m getting tired. I don’t want you to treat me like some kind of a jerk.
P:
I’m not.
S:
Now, you sit there and you tell me that you’re responsible for your mother’s death and you say it twelve or fifteen times. I tried to treat you like a human being. I tried to be understanding, but it seems you’ve had such a rough upbringing that you reject every offer that we’ve made to be kind to you. Now you’re trying to treat us like muck. I’ve been out of bed—I missed two days sleep. And I just can’t fool around with you forever. Now you said here fifteen times in the last two hours that you were responsible for your mother’s death, that you cut her throat with a razor, that you threw the razor either over the barn or over the gas station yard. You’ve indicated that you jumped on your mother’s legs and that you jumped on her. These remarks, although they were solicited from you, were reported back very accurate and very astute comments on what actually happened there.
P:
Right.
S:
OK. Now, I don’t want you to play any more headgames with us. And if you want to play this way we’ll take you and we’ll lock you up and treat you like an animal. Now, you’re eighteen years old, I realize you’ve had a hell of a rough time in your life but sooner or later you’re going to have to face this. You’re going to face life and you’re going to have to face what you’ve done. And I think it’s about time that you sat up in that chair and you faced us like a man and you realize that trying to talk to two state policemen like they’re two goddamn idiots, it’s not gonna work. Now, you are here because you are responsible for the death of your mother. I am not sitting in judgment of you. I am not saying it was right or wrong. It is a death that we must investigate.
P:
Mm-hm. I understand that.
S:
Then let’s stop the nonsense and let’s get going here. Our design is not to hurt you. Our design is to help you. We know what your life has been like. We know what your mother’s reputation is. We know a lot more than you give us credit for. I’m not even saying that you were wrong doing what you did. But, you’ve got to take hold of yourself and you’ve got to get yourself some help. OK?
P:
Right.
S:
Now, let’s get the problem solved. I don’t want to see you in prison. That’s not what I get paid for. I don’t get paid by the number of people I put in jail. Neither does he. And neither does Sergeant Kelly or Sergeant Schneider. Or anybody on our whole state police department. Now somebody is dead. You are responsible, we know. We can prove it with extrinsic evidence. Now we’re telling you that we are offering you our hand, take it. Do I make sense to you?
P:
You say you can prove it?
S:
Yes, we can prove it.
P:
Wait a minute.
S:
Just a minute, Peter. I told you that I’m not going to play headgames.
P:
I’m not.
S:
When two people are in a room and there’s a third person outside that witnesses those two people in a room, and one is dead and the police should establish that death occurred at a certain time and the third party puts the second party in the room, the second party is responsible for murder. That’s common sense.
P:
Right.
S:
That’s rules of evidence. Now, your mother called the doctor at nine-thirty. You called the hospital at ten minutes of ten. We can place your mother’s death in that fifteen-minute period. That means you and her were there alone. Now, if you think you can beat that you’re crazy. And, if you’re going to act like a hardened criminal, John Dillinger, try to beat the police, you’re nuts. So just sit there like a man and understand that you’re not gonna go to the gas chamber or you’re not gonna go to life imprisonment. You’re going to be treated. You’re going to be put into a hospital where you get care. Why? Because you have to.
P:
Am I going to be put in a hospital?
S:
Yes, you are. Now, let’s stop the headgames and maneuvering here. I’m not going to give you the details of the murder. You know the details and so do I. I’m telling you if you cooperate with us, stop kidding around with us, fooling around with us, we will do right by you. And that’s no kidding and that’s no con job to get you to give a statement. That’s just plain simple truth. Now shall we proceed?
P:
Mm-hm. I looked to the right into the bedroom. OK. First I thought I saw my mother
in bed and then I saw her on the floor.
M:
Which bed was she in?
P:
Top bunk.
M:
What was she doing on the floor?
P:
What do you mean what was she doing there? That was the double take. Right there.
S:
Pete …
M:
Look, Pete, let me explain something to you. What the lieutenant is telling—I don’t know what he knows. He knows a hell of a lot more than I do because he’s in charge of this investigation.
P:
Right.
M:
He told me that you were responsible for her death.
P:
Right.
M:
What the lieutenant is trying to tell you, you will be charged. This is a formality. You’ll be charged with murder. But there’s extenuating circumstances here. The only one that can give us the answer to these questions is you, yourself.
P:
Mm-hm.
M:
We have enough from what he tells me and from what he says here, apparently, to prove you guilty of murder in the state of Connecticut.
P:
Mm-hm.
M:
But if there’s a problem here, something is wrong. You’re going to have to go see a psychiatrist. You may have to spend time in a hospital. In fact, it’s a good possibility that you will spend time in a hospital. It may be a week, it may be a month, it may be three months. But there’s no sense, if you are responsible for her death, sitting here telling us you don’t know what’s going on.
S:
Now there’s no such thing as a double take. There’s no double take. You’re not a camera. You’re a human being.
P:
But, what I mean by double take is I looked once and I thought I saw her in bed and I looked again and saw her on the floor.
S:
No, you looked once and you saw her in bed. You have good eyesight. You’re not a camera. You don’t double take. This is a maneuver.
P:
What I mean is, in between the time that I saw her in bed and on the floor, it seemed like a split second. So it was a blackout in my memory there. That’s what I’ve been trying to draw all these facts from, all these things about the razor and stuff. They’re coming back. Now, the man in there who gave me the thing on the polygraph told me that after I had done what I done, that I was ashamed of it and what I was doing was I was rejecting it from my memory. And that’s what I wanted to explain about that in the statement.
S:
Do you remember cutting your mother’s throat?
P:
I remember going like that by my mother’s throat. That’s one of the things that came back.
S:
Do you remember cutting your mother?
P:
Just at her throat.
S:
You remember seeing blood?
P:
Yes.
S:
On her throat?
P:
No, ’cause when I saw her on the floor I had come back into normality again and I’ve already blanked out what happened. And I didn’t realize what had happened at that point.
S:
Do you remember jumping on your mother’s stomach and legs?
P:
Yes.
S:
Do you remember cutting your mother’s abdomen?
P:
No.
S:
Do you remember doing anything else to your mother?
P:
No. There were things in there that I was not positive about.
M:
Well, I’ll take this as such and put that he don’t recall …
S:
Now, wait a minute now. Just a minute. You recall cutting your mother’s throat?
P:
Yes.
S:
You recall seeing blood on your mother’s throat?
P:
No.
S:
You just said you did!
P:
I said I recall seeing blood on my mother. First I said I saw her in bed, next I said I saw her on the floor. When I saw her on the floor was when I saw the blood.
S:
Where did you see the blood?
P:
On—it was on her chest and her T-shirt was rolled up to about—
S:
When did you say that you pushed the T-shirt up over her chest?
P:
I didn’t say that. I never said anything about the T-shirt. I said I saw it pushed up like that.
S:
Did you push it up over her breasts?
P:
I don’t remember. I’m not playing games now, I’m being as honest as I possibly can with you.
S:
Mm. Did you take her pants off?
P:
That I don’t know. I may have tried to wash her down.
S:
Why did you try to wash her down?
P:
Because of the embarrassment of what I’d done.
S:
What did you try to wash off?
P:
Blood, I guess.
S:
What do you mean, blood, you guess? Did you try to wash off blood?
P:
Well, what else would I want to wash off?
S:
I don’t know. I’m asking you, blood? What part of the body did you wash?
P:
That I don’t know.
S:
How did you wash it?
P:
That I don’t know. I don’t remember taking her pants off.
S:
Well, how did you wash her if you didn’t take her pants off?
P:
I don’t know. The pants were wet though.
S:
Do you remember taking her panties off?
P:
No, I don’t.
S:
The pants were wet or you wet the pants?
P:
The pants were wet, the police officer showed me.
S:
Now never mind the police officer. I’m asking you, from your own experience. Were the pants wet?
P:
I don’t even remember the pants from my own experience.
S:
Well, you just said that you took the pants off to wash the blood off your mother, didn’t you?
P:
I said I must have washed the blood off my mother. I didn’t say I remembered taking the pants off her to do it.
S:
Where’d you get the water?
P:
That I don’t know either.
S:
Were you in the bathroom at any time?
P:
I don’t know.
S:
Did you take her panties off?
P:
That I don’t know. That’s all blank to me.
S:
Did you have blanks before in your life?
P:
No.
S:
Pete, why should I believe that you have blanks now?
P:
I don’t know.
Eddie Dickinson, Peter’s friend, asked his mother on Saturday afternoon if he could go to the barracks to try to see Peter. She told him he’d better not. “Peter’s closer to the Madows and the Belignis than to us,” she told Eddie. “I don’t think we should interfere.”
Marie Dickinson was worried, though. Her family lived just down the road from the Gibbons’ house, on Route 63, and all day Saturday they could see police searching the area, in and out of the house, digging up the septic tank, raking through the fallen leaves at the side of the road. Once her husband went out and spoke to one of the troopers.
“Where is Peter now, do you know?” Bill asked.
“No, I don’t know,” the trooper sai
d.
Marie called the barracks. “We’re not through with him yet,” somebody told her. When she called several more times, the answer was the same. Marie thought maybe they just didn’t want to give out information on the phone, and she told Bill she could understand that. Finally, Saturday night, she told Eddie he could go down.
Eddie drove down and saw the man at the front desk, Trooper Calkins.
“Can I see Peter?” Eddie asked.
“Sure, you can see Peter,” Trooper Calkins said. He paused, then he smiled. “Only Peter isn’t here.”
“My God, what’s going on?” Marie asked Bill, when Eddie reported back. “Where could he be?”
With so many people calling and asking, messages zigzagging and overlapping, some confusion was bound to occur. And some troopers—perhaps the trooper to whom Bill spoke, the man raking leaves—really didn’t know where Peter was. But there also seemed to be more involved than confusion and not knowing. When Barbara’s cousin had asked whether anybody in the area was looking out for Peter—“Doesn’t anybody care?”—she’d been told nobody had been asking for him, nobody cared.
A Death in Canaan Page 15