A Death in Canaan

by Barthel, Joan;

  Dr. Izumi looked at his notes again and explained that there was a short period, four to six minutes, during which mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and cardiac resuscitation might be successfully applied, which is why medical people and ambulance drivers studied those techniques. After that period, though, biological death, real death, would occur. “If blood does not get to that brain within five to six minutes, this patient has died, biologically,” the doctor said.

  “Referring back to the body of Barbara Gibbons,” the prosecutor said, “with the cuts that you saw around her throat, and the arteries you know were severed, and the blood that you observed on the floor, would you testify that for a person that size, blood would be pumped out of the body in less than six minutes? How long after receiving such lacerations would be the limit of her actual life?”

  “Six minutes,” Dr. Izumi said.

  “One thing that was most important to us,” he went on, “was that the gaping abdominal wound which revealed the yellow underlying fat had not oozed any blood out.”

  “Did that indicate anything to you?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “It meant that with those wounds, with very little blood, if any, it meant that the major incisions in the neck had been completely exsanguinated on the blood in the region of the neck.”

  “With that in mind,” Mr. Bianchi continued, “do you have an opinion as to whether those other miscellaneous cuts, when they were inflicted, Doctor?”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Izumi. “It does mean that these wounds were inflicted after the patient had died.”

  At a recess, Marian Battistoni chatted with a neighbor. “I didn’t know she was cut up so much,” Marian said. Farn Dupre said she felt a little better, knowing Barbara had already been dead when most of the cutting was done. But I remembered what Mickey had said, as he recalled his own thoughts that night, when he walked into the house and saw Barbara dead on the floor. “She was hurtin’ when she died,” Mickey said.

  Dr. Izumi’s testimony lasted several days—long, wearying days that seemed to merge into one another in a murky, gray blur. Long recesses, often with the jury out, while the lawyers debated the law, dragged on too. Sheriff Battistoni never needed to bring out the smelling salts; the jurors had their own ways of coping. Mr. Collins usually took one quick look at the screen, whenever a slide came on, then looked down, not looking up again until the next picture was announced. The jurors looked numb, or just drained, most of the time. Sometimes one or the other would smile quickly, nervously, but nobody cried, although once Raymond Lind put his arm around Helen Ayre as they left the jury box.

  The first days of March dragged on, too. The days were wet and windy. More than once, clinical and biological death was discussed. “Clinical death is described as how an individual or a doctor sees that patient,” Dr. Izumi explained again. “In a period of one minute to five minutes there may be no pulse. It is during that time that the patient has no heartbeat. He appears dead, but he is really not, because it’s only the clinical judgment of the observer during this time. It is during the zero to five minutes, when no oxygen is gotten to that brain, that death occurs, because there is cellular and tissue death. The patient is biologically dead at the end of five minutes.”

  John Bianchi looked thoughtful.

  “So if a layman observed the body during this zero to five minute period, he might think the patient was dead?” he asked.

  “Yes,” the doctor said.

  They discussed the rest of that night in the little house on Route 63, how they’d put plastic bags around Barbara’s hands and rolled her in a sheet, to take her to Sharon Hospital.

  “When did you next see that body?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “At nine-thirty A.M.,” Dr. Izumi said, “in the Sharon Hospital morgue, for the autospy.”

  Mr. Bianchi coughed slightly. “At this time, may we have the slides?” he asked.

  There was another stir in the courtroom. “Oh my God,” murmured Farn Dupre, to no one in particular. “Oh my God.”

  So the slides came again, seeming more horrible, somehow, than the first showing.

  “What caused breakage of the nose?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “This is a direct traumatic blow, most likely to occur prior to death because at this time blood was being pumped up to the head, brain, and face. Blood oozes out of the nostrils, as seen here, indicating that this had been done prior to death.”

  The first showing had been speedy, just twenty-seven minutes, but this time each gruesome slide was examined and discussed with agonizing slowness. Dr. Izumi asked for the next one, 2.

  He described “a very deep wound to the left side of the neck here, extending across the midline of the neck, here where the voice box is, and extending beyond the midline to almost the right lower earlobe. This is a gaping wound,” the doctor said. “In the midline there is the larynx, or the voice box. The deep center wound was brought across the voice box someplace in this vicinity completely separating and opening the voice box so that the vocal cords could be exposed and closely seen.”

  “Are they visible in the slide, Doctor?” John Bianchi asked.

  “Yes, they are,” the doctor said, but to the spectators watching the jury, the answer was unnecessary. Helen Ayre grimaced at the screen, and Raymond Lind’s eyes seem to have sunk deep into his head, as he watched.

  “With such cuts, could a person speak before death?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “No, sir,” the doctor said softly but emphatically. “This victim could neither speak nor scream. There is no mouth, because these openings communicate directly with the outside.”

  Dr. Izumi talked about Barbara’s hand then, and how he’d opened it so Sergeant Chapman could photograph the defense wound. “As a forensic pathologist, it’s your experience that a wound such as that is incurred in defending oneself from an attacker?” “Yes, sir,” Izumi said. Later, at the autopsy, when he took the bags off Barbara’s hands, Dr. Izumi found, mixed with the dried clotted blood, four to six hairs. He picked them off her hand with forceps and put them in containers, which were sealed and witnessed.

  There was the slight bruise on the right elbow, where Barbara must have raised her arm to ward off whatever blow she saw coming, and the deep wound in the abdomen, “one inch in length and gaping half an inch or more. It shows the underlying fat and the so-called soft tissue. This shows no oozing or clotted blood present. This occurred after death.”

  Dr. Izumi said her thighs had been broken after she died, too. He had cut into the leg and gone to the bone. “As I cut in and inserted my finger and brought out pieces of bone, there was absolutely no blood,” he explained.

  “If the broken legs had occurred before death, you would have found a large amount of blood?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “Yes,” Dr. Izumi said.

  “And you did not find it?”

  “I did not find it.”

  “Do you have an opinion as to how those legs could have been broken?”

  “No, sir, I do not,” Dr. Izumi said. “Except that we try, as pathologists, to reproduce a fracture, and it would take a large amount of force. A great deal of force.”

  There was a whisper, audible, in the courtroom, and Mr. Murdick, one of the sheriffs, whirled around. It was Marian Battistoni, but he frowned slightly at her anyway and put a finger to his lips.

  “Can you tell me what you mean by a great deal of force?” Miss Roraback asked, when she cross-examined. “Are you referring to a swinging hit or a large object?”

  “In the region of the head, this is a tremendous blow, the force of the blow being an object; I would say a soft object,” Dr. Izumi said.

  “Like a person’s fist?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “What caused the fracture of the legs?” she asked.

  “A very forceful blow.”

  “Was there one blow or separate blows?”

  “I don’t know,” he told her.

  “It was a pretty powe
rful blow that broke those legs, wasn’t it?” she asked.

  “Yes,” the doctor said.

  “Could it have been caused by someone jumping on those legs?” the prosecutor asked.

  “Yes, sir, it could,” the doctor said, and even Gary Lewis looked shocked. Edward Ives took off his glasses and nibbled at one end thoughtfully.

  There was the abdominal cut again, two to three inches long, one to two inches wide. Paul Travaglin rubbed the side of his head with the palm of his hand as he looked at the screen. Dr. Izumi said it would take some force to cause such a large tear, and that because there was no free or clotted blood around, he felt that that wound, too, had occurred after death.

  There were the cut marks on the back, with no discoloration, also “produced after the victim was dead,” and then the disputed slides again.

  “Once more we are inside the body cavities,” Dr. Izumi said. “Below and just to the right of the hysterectomy clips is a tear or cut wound. This is inside the pelvic cavity.” He didn’t speak with relish, exactly, but with interest and muted enthusiasm, as though he were onto an interesting case and wanted to be sure the class got the benefit of it.

  “This is a one-and-a-half- to two-inch tear,” he said. “No liquid or clotted blood, therefore, this occurred after death.

  “This is the opening of the vaginal canal on the outside. This depicts cuts. These are a little deeper, a little further in.… This represents the inner portion here, within the pelvic cavity.” He said he had found no male sperm present.

  Finally, 0-19, the neck organs hanging outside, completely removed from Barbara’s body.

  “You testified that she could not talk or scream immediately after the neck cuts,” Mr. Bianchi reminded him. “I would ask whether, during that period of time, would there be any indication of her breathing or gasping or any such activity as that?”

  Dr. Izumi spoke carefully. “At the time the windpipe is cut, the air now comes out from these openings. The mouth plays no part in breathing at all. The victim would continue to breathe until the time of death. It would be labored or forced breathing.”

  “Would it continue to the time of biological death, Doctor?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “Yes, sir, it would,” Dr. Izumi said.

  “Four to six minutes after this cutting, before the person was biologically dead?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So there would be, during that span, some evidence of breathing, Doctor?”

  “Yes, sir,” Dr. Izumi said.

  “You said that the biological death is the very, very end?” John Bianchi asked.

  “That’s correct,” the doctor said. “Clinical death occurs from one to five minutes before biological death.”

  “Could a layman distinguish between clinical and biological death?” Mr. Bianchi asked. The doctor said yes, a layman could.

  “So that this breathing, in a labored or gasping manner, could last from zero to four to six minutes?”

  “Yes, sir,” the doctor said.

  The autopsy had lasted more than six hours, ending at 3:45 Saturday afternoon, while Peter Reilly was in the lie box at Hartford. Dr. Izumi’s autopsy report became State’s Exhibit Q, which John Bianchi read to the jury now, rocking a little on his heels, back and forth.

  Most of the information was already known from the testimony, but there were odds and ends: Barbara’s ulcer was 0.5 cm in diameter. Her liver was firm, yellow-brown, with extensive fatty degeneration and fibrosis. Her abdominal fat was one inch thick; several ribs were broken, too. In her stomach there were pieces of corn and small bits of meat from the TV dinner she was eating when Geoff and Peter left for the Teen Center meeting. The soles of both her feet were callused, with embedded dirt. She wore a denture plate.

  But after all the testimony, one horror piled on another, what it came down to, simply, was that Barbara was dead because her throat had been cut, and then she had been mutilated and violated in the most hideous way. Was it any wonder that Helen Ayre slept badly? As Mr. Bianchi had pointed out, this information was “not desirable.” Murder never was.

  11

  “I saw the jurors looking at my hands when Dr. Izumi talked about a great deal of force,” Peter said. He sounded very calm as he said it, sitting at the table in the Madows’ dinette. The late winter morning sunlight splashed through the small squares of windowpane and onto the oval cloth, as Peter read aloud from the morning paper. George Judson’s article dealt with Dr. Izumi’s testimony, so it was not pleasant reading, but Peter read it through, anyway, including a phrase about Barbara’s “battered, bloody body.”

  Nanny sat on the high stool by the phone, where she had a good view out the dinette window, watching Peter. She looked worried, and after a moment, she spoke.

  “You smoke too much, Peter,” she said.

  “Now that’s funny,” Peter said, almost absentmindedly, still looking at the paper, then he seemed to have caught what Nan said. “In jail I was smoking two and a half packs a day,” he said, without looking up. “Now I’m down to a pack a day.”

  He put the paper down on the dining-room table, got up, and walked back into the den to watch TV. He was no longer calm but appeared restless, at loose ends this Friday, as he was on most Fridays, when there was rarely a criminal court session, and he had to stay around the house. Mickey and Marion had explained it was for his own good, and Peter not only accepted the restriction but said he agreed with it. Still, it left him with a lot of time on his hands, and on the days when there was no court, usually Mondays and Fridays, he sometimes stayed in bed much of the day, as he had done in jail.

  Peter wandered out of the den again. “I’ve thought about doing professional car painting,” he said. “There’s gobs of money in it. I’ve sent away for a paint book. I might like to study law, but that seems kind of farfetched.” Marion’s sister was sending up from New York some information on getting a high school diploma at home, which Peter thought might help him make money. Perhaps because he had been dependent on so many people for so long, he didn’t seem to want to have to depend on anybody else now. I remembered what he had written to me, from Litchfield jail: “My goal in life now is to become very welthy [sic] on my own.”

  A fat sparrow waddled across the yard now, in front of the dinette window. “Down where we used to live we used to get grosbeaks,” Peter said suddenly. “Sometimes a purple finch. My mom was a fanatic about birds.” He talked about jobs some more, and about jail, in his soft, rambling way. “All the cons took a liking to me,” Peter said in a reminiscent tone. “One dude took me aside and said, ‘It’s a real compliment to you, what those people are doing for you.’”

  Those people, the members of the Peter Reilly Defense Committee, had met regularly every week, going on six months now. Besides the original members, other people from Canaan now came regularly, including the other Madows, Dot and Murray, and Dick and Elaine Monty, whose son Matt was in the same class with Gina Beligni and Michael Mulhern. Only one member, Judy Liner, came from Litchfield. Except for a few people who dropped in to court some days, the citizens of Litchfield generally ignored the murder trial in their midst. Even the weekly paper generally ignored it, until the last week, when it ran a picture of the courthouse. But Litchfield had always held itself aloof. Two hundred years before the Reilly affair, a new settler in town, a Mrs. Davies, complained to a friend back in England, “There is nothing to associate with but Presbyterians and wolves.”

  The knife glinted through the plastic bag, tied with a green plastic twist tie. It lay on the prosecution table, along with the piles of books and papers. Everybody in the courtroom gazed at it as John Bianchi picked it up casually and strolled over to the witness stand.

  “I show you a knife with a wooden handle and ask if you can identify that,” he asked Trooper Venclauscas, who nodded slightly.

  “Yes, sir, I can.”

  “How can you identify it?” the prosecutor asked.

  “This is a knife that I too
k into possession at the Gibbons home on September twenty-ninth,” the policeman said. He was calm on the stand; as a trooper for eight years and member of the police crime lab at Bethany, he was at home in courtrooms, especially this one. He said he had put his initials on the knife, when he found it in a brown pouch on the side of a cabinet, around four in the morning, after Barbara died. There were two other knives in the pouch, but Trooper Venclauscas had taken this one, because it had blood on the blade. The blood had not been typed or identified, but it was human blood. The tip of the knife was broken off.

  John Bianchi smiled slightly and walked across the courtroom to the defense table. “I have no more questions, your honor,” he said, and handed it to Catherine Roraback. She studied it for a moment, and Peter looked at it too, his long hair falling over his right eye, shielding his face from the spectators. Then she walked over to the witness stand.

  “At that time did you have a search warrant?” she asked.

  “No, I did not,” Trooper Venclauscas said. Miss Roraback turned to the judge. “This knife was seized during the course of a warrantless search,” she said. “I submit that anything seized without a warrant is improperly seized.” She objected to the knife being introduced, citing the Fourth Amendment, which provides for search by warrant. “It also includes the word ‘unreasonable,’ Miss Roraback,” the judge reminded her.

  “That’s right, your honor,” John Bianchi said quickly.

  Catherine Roraback looked stubborn. “What the state police did is just go into that house with numerous people and rummage through the house, in flagrant violation of the United States Constitution and the constitution of the state of Connecticut,” she said.

  “Is this the first time you’ve seen the knife?” the judge asked her.

  “Yes, your honor,” Miss Roraback told him. Judge Speziale looked thoughtful. When John Bianchi’s assistant, Corporal James Bausch, had brought the knife into the courtroom, and Mr. Bianchi had asked to introduce a new witness who would testify about a knife, Miss Roraback had asked whether the state considered the knife to be the murder weapon. “I don’t know really how to answer that, your honor,” Mr. Bianchi had replied cheerfully. “Whether it was actually the weapon that caused death—I don’t think I could show that. But I can show through Dr. Izumi that this instrument will coincide with some of the markings on the body.”