A Death in Canaan

by Barthel, Joan;

  “I was just trying to probe your subconscious.”

  “But I wasn’t sure whether you meant what happened to her, or whether I knew who did it to her and everything.”

  “Well, I think we got a little problem here, Pete.”

  I smiled at Peter when he was taken out of the courtroom—one guard at his side, one behind him—and he smiled back at me. We still hadn’t met, but he guessed who I was, there were so few people in court. I met Barbara’s cousin June for the first time.

  In the front row, the press row, there were just four of us. Two of the newspaper reporters looked incredibly young, just out of college: Stan Moulton of the Berkshire Eagle, and Greg Erbstoesser, who wrote for the Lakeville Journal.

  The only veteran in the press row was Joe O’Brien, who had written the first Courant story. WOMAN, 51, DEAD WITH THROAT CUT. He had covered murder cases before and he looked hardened, at least in comparison with Stan and Greg and, I hope, with me. But Joe O’Brien was less cynical than he appeared. He was a family man, with five children, including two teen-aged sons. At the end of the second day of Peter Reilly’s pretrial hearing, after he’d heard the tapes, Joe O’Brien went home and told his boys that if they were ever arrested, they should say nothing.

  “About hurting my mother. We went over and over and over it, you know what I mean? When he told me I could have flown off the handle, I gave it a lot of consideration. But I don’t think I did.”

  “But you’re not sure, are you?”

  “That’s right. Well, I could have.”

  “I think you possibly did.”

  Man and boy, talking man to man. Even smoking in the polygraph room.

  “Is there any doubt in your mind, right now, that you hurt your mother last night?”

  “The test is giving me doubt right now. Disregarding the test, I still don’t think I hurt my mother.”

  “But you have a doubt, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I’ve been drilled and drilled and drilled.… I’m trying to think of what he did say. I know he told me something. I’m losing all memory now because I’m getting tired. But he did tell me that I could have forgotten. That really shook me.”

  Lieutenant Shay was in court. He was big too, but not as burly as Sergeant Kelly. He was in plainclothes, a chocolate-colored suit with a vest. Looking at his craggy, handsome face and square jaw, with his thick black hair and intense eyes, I could see what Peter meant about Dick Tracy.

  Although there were just four people in the press row, John Bianchi thought that was four too many, and he asked Judge Armentano to bar us from the hearing. Mr. Bianchi declared that press coverage might create “an inflammatory situation” and he complained especially about the Lakeville Journal, which he pointed out had “headlines every week.”

  That was true. Even before the Reilly case, Mr. Bianchi had not been on the best of terms with the Journal, which had opposed him on various community issues. And then came the big headlines. SECRECY SHROUDS MURDER CASE IN FALLS VILLAGE was one of the first, then FRIENDS SAY POLICE KEPT THEM FROM PETER REILLY. In that piece, Greg Erbstoesser had recreated the attempts by Peter’s friends to find out what was going on, in the long hours after Barbara died. The article didn’t mention Mr. Bianchi by name, but since he was the prosecutor in the case, whatever went on seemed to have had something, at least vaguely, to do with him.

  Miss Roraback objected to Mr. Bianchi’s motion. She wanted the press to stay. Judge Armentano peered out at us thoughtfully, and for a moment I expected he actually would throw us out. But he turned to Mr. Bianchi. “Can’t we give credit to the rights of a free press?” he asked, in that slightly waspish way.

  Then, however, he peered out into the courtroom again, studying us. I couldn’t blame him. We were a motley quartet—two shaggy haired boys, who must have looked like children to the judge; Joe O’Brien, a character straight from The Front Page, and me, somewhere between Nancy Drew and Dorothy Kilgallen, a woman no one knew who wrote for a magazine no one had ever read. The judge asked us to come see him in his chambers, and we trooped across the thin green carpet, single file.

  I sat at the end of the couch in the little study. Now that I was in the judge’s chamber, I was ready for an argument on the First Amendment, but the judge didn’t even sit down. He leaned against his desk in a casual way, and said a few words about the responsibilities of the press. Then he nodded. “Use your own judgment,” he said.

  Even though he felt as he did about the press, Mr. Bianchi seemed generally friendly with everyone. He was a remarkably affable man. Some people swore up and down that they’d never seen John Bianchi without a smile on his face. He was dapper and ruddy, with a haircut that always seemed fresh. His shoes gleamed, and he had a well-fed, prosperous look.

  He was a hometown boy from Main Street in Canaan, where he lived in a creamy yellow Victorian house garnished with curly white woodwork and a wraparound porch, across the street from the Methodist Church. John’s father owned a clothing store in Canaan, but the boy didn’t want to go into that business. His mother had her heart set on John becoming a priest; instead, he married the girl from Brooklyn who knew Catherine Roraback. Then he began to study law, mostly because he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do when he came back from World War II. He went to Fordham, a Catholic school in New York City, although he’d first applied to Yale, where all the Rorabacks had gone.

  It was more complicated than that, of course. It was more than the aristocrat’s daughter against the haberdasher’s son, more than the landed gentry against the immigrant family. And the prestige was not all on Catherine’s side: A State’s Attorney often went on to become a judge. “John isn’t a simple person,” Catherine Roraback once said to me. “But the least of my problems is whether John is a simple person.” Still, one of the most fascinating aspects of the Reilly case was always the confrontation of Catherine Roraback and John Bianchi. They even shared a birthday: September 17. It was a classic confrontation involving antagonisms, ambitions and pride.

  John Bianchi had been the prosecutor for Litchfield County about a year when Barbara was killed. Three judges had recommended him for the job, including Superior Court Judge John Speziale, Jean Beligni’s cousin.

  “As a prosecutor, I present the facts,” Mr. Bianchi said. “I present the facts as I know them. As I got them. As I interpret them.”

  When the tapes of Peter Reilly’s polygraph test were played in court, two and a half months after Barbara died, Mr. Bianchi hadn’t sat down and listened to them all the way through. Just parts of them.

  “I’m trying to figure this out.… a Corvette is a car you go like hell with.… You come flying in with that damned thing, and you went over her with the car, and you panicked.”

  “I didn’t, though.”

  “Then why does the lie chart say you did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know for sure if you did this thing, do you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, your chart says I did.”

  “Would it definitely be me? Could it have been someone else?”

  “No way.”

  “Now I’m afraid, because I was so sure I didn’t do it, you know what I mean? I want to go back to school. I don’t have any place to go.”

  “I think you want to tell me, but you’re ashamed to tell me.”

  “But do I realize I’m ashamed?”

  “Gotta keep digging. Gotta dig. Gotta keep pushing. I believe I did it.”

  “I know you did it.”

  Along with the words, there were sounds—a cough, a yawn, a tab top can opening. The sounds of life in a room so isolated, so removed, so thickly quiet. And beyond the sounds, there were the silences.

  “You’re right. Something’s coming.”

  A long silence.

  “Come on, Pete. Tell me.”

  A long silence.

  “I told you the truth. Now I want to hear the truth from you.”r />
  “Somewhere in my head a straight razor sticks in.”

  “So where did you cut her with this razor?”

  A helpless silence.

  “The throat is the only thing I can think of.”

  After three and a half hours:

  “Do you think we could quit now?… I think I’m saying things that I don’t mean to say.”

  “Oh no. You’re telling me the truth now.”

  And the end:

  “Do you have any records of this? Have you been tape recording me?”

  “No. I got my tape right here. That’s all I need. That’s you. That’s your conscience.”

  Mr. Roberts sighed and smiled and flexed his fingers, flaring them straight out in front of him, like a fan, then squeezing them into fists, and flaring them out again. Transcribing the tapes had been a demanding job, and Mr. Roberts was glad it was over. When I’d chatted with him, before court started, he had explained his method. “I go into a trance,” Mr. Roberts said. “I just take down the words. I hear them, but I don’t listen or I’d be a nervous wreck.” When I typed my own notes that night, typing so compulsively that I was still there, alone in the freezing room when the darkness in the pines faded to pearl gray, I knew what Mr. Roberts meant. You couldn’t stop to listen. You had to wait till afterward, to try to understand.

  Lieutenant Shay shook hands with Mickey and wished him a Merry Christmas. Catherine Roraback shook hands with Sergeant Kelly. Nobody shook hands with Peter, who was handcuffed and then hurried back across the green. I shook hands with June, and with her son, and said I’d see them in Hartford, where the hearings would resume after the holidays. Judge Armentano said he couldn’t possibly make it before then. “I’ve got nineteen sentences to hand down tomorrow,” he complained.

  Christmas was a good day, even in jail. There was sirloin steak for dinner, and Warden Brownell let Peter’s friends visit, even those who were under eighteen. Paul Beligni drove out and put a wreath on Barbara’s grave before he came to see Peter with the rest of the Belignis. In the jail cafeteria, tables and chairs were moved around, and everybody sat in a big, laughing group.

  Peter was allowed to play his guitar, another concession to the holiday, and the other band members brought their instruments and played with him. Some of the parents had been dreading the moment of reunion, but the meeting went easily. When Peter was brought down from his cell into the community room, he grinned at them. “What took you so long?” he demanded. “I got here three months ago.”

  The courthouse in Hartford reminded me of a Vatican palace gone to seed—an echoing, cavernous palace of justice, with vending machines and cuspidors standing incongruous in its pale marble halls. The pretrial hearing on Miss Roraback’s motion to suppress the confession was continued in Hartford instead of Litchfield because of Judge Armentano. He had begun the hearing, so he would see it through, and it was now his turn to sit in Hartford Superior Court. Back in the press row, also seeing it through, were Joe O’Brien, Greg Erbstoesser, and myself, along with a new reporter, Charles Kochakian of the Hartford Times. Charles had bright dark eyes, a beard, and a wry manner.

  The hearing resumed four months after Barbara died, on one of the coldest days of January. Again, only a few people had come to court—Mickey and Marion Madow, Peter’s cousin June, with her husband and her son, and a handful of policemen, including Lieutenant Shay, Sergeant Kelly, and Trooper Mulhern.

  Miss Roraback immediately asked that the tapes of the evening questioning be played, the recording of Peter’s interrogation by Shay and Mulhern after the polygraph test. Judge Armentano seemed disinclined to play them, but Catherine Roraback insisted. She had heard the tapes herself and knew what they revealed. “The total context is relevant,” she said. The judge said he’d reserve decision, and Jim Mulhern took the stand. With his blue eyes and brown wavy hair, he looked Irish, and he talked Irish, referring to Peter as “the lad,” telling how he’d brought Peter his dinner, around 7:00 or 7:15 as Peter sat in the interview room in Hartford. The food had come from the vending machine downstairs: ham and cheese on a roll; a package of chocolate cupcakes, two in a package; a can of Coke.

  John Bianchi looked directly at Mulhern, then at the judge, and spoke very loudly. “Upon entering the room, Trooper Mulhern, was anything said by you or by Peter Reilly?”

  “I said, ‘Hello, Pete,’ and he said hello back,” Mulhern said. “He said, ‘Are you ashamed to know me now?’ I said, ‘Why should I be ashamed to know you?’ He said, ‘Well, because I did it. I killed her.’”

  “Did you respond to that?” John Bianchi asked.

  “Not right away, sir,” Mulhern said. “He had kind of taken me by surprise. Then I asked him why.”

  “Did you get a reply?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “Only that he was confused, and he didn’t know. He said, ‘We’re going into it now, and it seems to be coming back to me.’”

  “Did you at some time that day take a written statement from Peter Reilly?” the prosecutor asked.

  “Yes,” Mulhern said.

  “Was this conversation before or after the written statement?”

  “This was before the written statement,” Mulhern said.

  Catherine Roraback stared at Jim Mulhern, and he stared back. Of all the policemen she confronted in court, Jim Mulhern seemed the most hostile. His round, handsome face was sullen, like an altar boy trying to hold his ground against a crochety pastor.

  “Does the statement, ‘Are you ashamed of me now?’ appear on the tapes?” she asked. She knew it did not.

  “No,” Mulhern said.

  “But the statement about killing his mother does appear on the tapes?”

  “I believe so, yes,” Mulhern said.

  “You did not question him at that time?” Miss Roraback asked.

  Mulhern shook his head. “Only to ask him why,” he said.

  “But when did the recording begin?” Miss Roraback asked.

  “I think it started after the door had been shut,” Mulhern said.

  Miss Roraback stared at him, then walked back to the table and picked up a yellow legal pad. She flipped pages, reading. Peter Reilly looked at Jim Mulhern with detached interest, but Mulhern looked straight ahead. His square Irish jaw stuck out a bit, tightly.

  Crossing the soiled blue carpet, back to the witness stand, she twirled her glasses and they dropped to the floor. She picked them up, a dirty Band-Aid showing on her left index finger, and as Peter Reilly’s glance followed her, Jim Mulhern looked quickly at Peter for a moment. Then he looked away again.

  “Do you recall Peter saying to you, ‘I don’t know what to do, Jim. I’m still not sure of what happened. The only thing I’m sure of, she was on the floor.’”

  “I don’t recall,” Mulhern said.

  “Do you remember him saying to you, ‘I’m being pushed into things. They won’t allow me to say what I think’?”

  “He may have said that. I don’t recall,” Mulhern said.

  “Do you remember him saying, ‘I’m not sure’?” Catherine Roraback asked.

  “Yes,” Mulhern said.

  “Did that get put in the statement?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Mulhern said.

  Catherine Roraback looked scornful and handed him a handful of white ruled paper. This was the statement Peter Reilly had given Jim Mulhern—the confession.

  “Can you tell me where it appears in there?” she asked.

  Mulhern took the statement and read it through. The courtroom was very quiet. At last Mulhern looked up.

  “It isn’t in the statement,” he said.

  Lieutenant Shay, in the front row of the spectators’ section, gazed at the ceiling with interest, and I gazed with interest at Lieutenant Shay. Jim Mulhern and Catherine Roraback continued to stare at one another, as she asked about the different pages of the four-page statement.

  “The statement was dictated by Peter to me,” Mulhern said flatly. “He had been speaking with the l
ieutenant, and corrections had been made.” He said that he had begun taking Peter’s statement at 8:30 P.M. and had gone back in to take a further statement, “to clarify points that had been made,” around ten o’clock.

  “Does that further statement refer to how Peter Reilly was supposed to have cut his mother’s throat?” Miss Roraback asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Mulhern said.

  “When you were questioning Peter Reilly about that, do you remember him talking about how tired he was?”

  “I believe he mentioned he was tired,” Mulhern said.

  “Do you remember him saying to you, ‘It’s almost like a dream’?”

  “He may have,” Mulhern said.

  “Do you remember, after he had signed that statement, he then said to you, ‘Do you feel bad about knowing me now, knowing what I’ve done?’”

  “I believe he did say that,” Mulhern replied.

  “The same thing you say he said when you first came in?”

  “No,” Mulhern replied. “When I first came in, he asked me if I was ashamed to know him.”

  “After he completed that statement, did you leave the room?”

  “No, I believe I stayed,” Mulhern said.

  “When did you finally leave Peter Reilly’s presence?” Catherine Roraback asked.

  “At that point, I think I stayed there and placed him under arrest,” Jim Mulhern said.

  John Bianchi took the statement and read it with what seemed to be a good deal of interest. Then he looked at Trooper Mulhern.

  “It says, ‘When I slashed at my mother’s throat with a straight razor, I cut her throat,’” Bianchi said. “Is there anything in that statement that would indicate what, if anything, Peter Reilly did with the razor?”

  “Yes, sir,” Mulhern said.

  Bianchi looked startled. “I mean, after cutting her throat,” he said. “Is there a statement relative to the final disposition of the razor?”

  Mulhern looked uncertain, and Bianchi looked tense. “Read it over carefully first,” he urged.

  Mulhern read the statement again.

  “There’s no disposition mentioned,” he said finally.

  “What did he say to you about the disposition of the razor that he used to cut his mother’s throat?” Bianchi asked.