A Death in Canaan

by Barthel, Joan;

  Judge Speziale said he would not rule on the matter just then. “I’ll go back to it at some later date, your honor,” John Bianchi said, and the jury was called out. During the long arguments as to whether something might or might not be introduced as evidence in court—a knife, a tape recording, whatever—the jury was kept out until the matter was decided. It was the right thing to do, the legal thing, but the recesses seemed to get longer and longer; this one had lasted an hour and fifteen minutes, and after a while, it got on the jurors’ nerves.

  Mine, too. This was my first criminal trial, and I needed a guidebook. What were the rules of evidence? What was hearsay? Could you introduce something and call it the murder weapon, maybe? Why couldn’t you ask a leading question? Why was it all so complicated? As Jean Beligni said, “Why don’t they just let you get up there and tell your story?”

  Of all the lawbooks I consulted, only one really made some sense to me—The Nature of the Judicial Process by former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo. “We like to picture to ourselves the field of the law as accurately mapped and plotted,” he wrote. “We draw our little lines, and they are hardly down before we blur them.” I understood him especially well when he talked about an element of chance. “Someone must be the loser,” he wrote. “It is part of the game of life.”

  After Dr. Izumi’s testimony, the parade of police officers resumed, as the state of Connecticut pressed its case against Peter Reilly.

  I knew some of them by sight, and I’d talked with Lieutenant Shay and with Sergeant Kelly at the pretrial hearing. When the first piece came out in New Times, I’d sent them, and Jim Mulhern, a copy of the magazine. When my second piece appeared, the trial was already under way, so I didn’t mail it. Instead, I just knocked at the door of the prosecutor’s office and when Lieutenant Shay opened the door, I gave him a copy. He seemed friendly. But Sergeant Kelly turned away when he saw me in court. When I went next door to Marden’s for coffee, Jim Mulhern was sitting on a stool at the counter. When I came up to the counter to order coffee to go, he swung his stool around, away from me, an unmistakable message.

  The pictures my husband had taken for the second piece had turned out brilliantly. Jim Mulhern, looking proud and a little pugnacious, a good-looking Irish cop in full uniform, standing at his desk. Lieutenant Shay, rugged and handsome, working at his desk. John Bianchi in his office on Railroad Street, gazing thoughtfully out the window. Peter in handcuffs, coming out the jailhouse door. Later, in his darkroom, Jim made prints for everybody. I stopped by Mr. Bianchi’s office one day and gave him his pictures, then I went by the barracks. Anne went with me for protection. When I said who I was, the officer at the desk, whom I’d never seen, looked furiously at me. He said that Lieutenant Shay and Trooper Mulhern weren’t in and wouldn’t be in. But another trooper smiled at Anne and even, a little weakly, at me. I had heard that there was some controversy among the police at the barracks, and among other segments of the Connecticut State Police, about the handling of the Reilly case. Apparently not all the policemen agreed that what had been done was what should have been done. I remembered that on the Saturday after Barbara died Sergeant Salley had told Mickey that Peter didn’t need a lawyer then. But another trooper had told June, “It wouldn’t be a bad idea.” Several weeks after Barbara died, Mrs. Rose Ford, one of Peter’s elementary school teachers, had written a letter to the Lakeville Journal, deploring the actions of the police, especially the “wall of silence” she said they had maintained since the beginning. “Somewhere between the terse ‘no comment’ and premature, irresponsible statements lies an area of suitable communication between the police and the public,” she wrote. I agreed. I never understood why it had to be Them against Us.

  When I was told at the barracks that nobody was in, I could have left the pictures, but I really wanted to see Lieutenant Shay and Trooper Mulhern again. I would have liked to talk with them. I know they wouldn’t have discussed the case, but we could have talked about the law, and the system. We could have talked about Cardozo.

  Sergeant Salley was on the stand again, the supervisor who’d first taken Peter away, the night Barbara died, to the barracks. Around 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning, Salley had got a call from Lieutenant Shay, still out at the murder house, telling him to read Peter Reilly his constitutional rights.

  “Did you at any time tell Peter Reilly his mother was dead?” Catherine Roraback asked, in a very soft voice.

  “I don’t remember if I did or not,” Sergeant Salley said. Miss Roraback asked him whether any other policeman had told him, and Sergeant Salley seemed to shake his head slightly. “I thought he understood,” the policeman said.

  At the defense table, Peter jotted down something on a pad of yellow legal-size paper. Catherine Roraback walked to the table, looked at the pad, then walked slowly, almost casually, back to the stand.

  “Did he ask you to go to Mr. Madow’s?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Sergeant Salley said. “I told him Lieutenant Shay wanted to speak to him before he went.”

  The civil rights card that Sergeant Salley had read to Peter used the phrase, “the offenses charged against you.” But when Peter had asked Sergeant Salley if he was being charged, the policeman said he was not. In court now, Salley told Catherine Roraback that the phrase on the card was irrelevant.

  Catherine Roraback looked at the card again, then at the trooper.

  “You didn’t volunteer any explanation?”

  “No, I did not,” Sergeant Salley said.

  Mr. Bianchi leaned casually against the jury rail.

  “Did you know this fella, Mr. Madow, at all?” he asked Salley.

  “No, I did not,” the policeman said.

  “Other than the fact that he was connected with the Canaan ambulance corps, you didn’t know what he did for a living or where he lived, did you?”

  “No, I did not,” Sergeant Salley replied. He went on to say that he had heard some conversations between Peter and Geoff Madow.

  “Was it a tearful conversation?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “No, it was not,” Sergeant Salley said.

  Peter usually had a grinder at Marden’s for lunch, eating with whoever had brought him to court that day. Usually I had lunch with the rest of the press at Mitchell’s, a restaurant down the street from the courthouse. We had a good time together, trading gossip and opinions. There were black jokes passed around the table too, for that was one way to survive certain things. Farn Dupre said that when the AP wire carried Dr. Izumi’s testimony, that Barbara might have been hit in the face with a fist, there’d been a typo in the copy, so that the doctor was quoted as saying that Barbara “could have been hit with a fish.” At the Winsted Citizen, then, one of the reporters had set up a dummy headline that warned, “Killer Mackerel at Large.”

  Lieutenant Shay testified that when he’d arrived at the barracks, early that Saturday morning, he had advised Peter of his rights too, before Peter signed the waiver. “It is my custom to have a suspect sign two forms,” Lieutenant Shay said, and Paula Wall, the law clerk’s wife, sitting just behind the reporters, stirred restlessly. “A suspect,” she murmured.

  “WARNING” began the rights card Lieutenant Shay had read to Peter. “You have a right to remain silent. If you talk to any police officer, anything you say can and will be used against you in court.… You have the right to consult a lawyer before questioning and may have him with you during questioning.” The waiver section read, “I do not want a lawyer. I know and understand what I am doing. I do this freely. No threats or promises have been made to me.” It was signed Peter A. Reilly.

  Sergeant Salley had not looked at the jury when he testified, but Lieutenant Shay looked directly at them, gruff but honest, the sort of person you could trust. On the stand, although Mr. Bianchi referred to Peter as “the accused” or, simply and coldly, “Reilly,” Lieutenant Shay always called him “Peter.”

  “Did he at any time cry?” Mr. Bianchi asked the lieutenant.
r />   “No, he did not,” the officer said. “I was struck by the fact that he was very calm, very poised, and showed no emotion.”

  Lieutenant Shay had taken Peter to another room then, to talk with him privately. That was the talk that had lasted an hour or so, in a back room at the barracks. A quiet room, a quiet talk. That was the talk that had been recorded, and that was the talk that was too garbled, on the tape, for anyone to understand.

  Now, on the stand, Lieutenant Shay told how Peter had gone to Hartford with Jim Mulhern. He mentioned a “conversation” with another police officer in Hartford. “Conversation” was the term that had to be used in the presence of the jury, at least for the time being, for the lie detector test.

  Catherine Roraback again objected to Peter’s statement as evidence, describing how he had found himself in a “coercive situation.” She mentioned “prolonged interrogation, isolated from friends and relatives.” Mr. Bianchi reminded the court that Peter Reilly had been given his rights four times and that Judge Armentano had reviewed “every bit of evidence regarding the interrogation.” Mr. Bianchi looked at Judge Speziale now. “I don’t know if your honor has had a chance to review the document,” he began. The judge replied crisply. “I’ve got it right in my hands,” he said.

  Mr. Bianchi went on to quote from Judge Armentano’s decision, though, as though Judge Speziale had never heard it. “He said it was freely given by an alert, knowledgeable young man, and he found no coercion, your honor,” Mr. Bianchi said. The judge decided to confer with both lawyers in the back room and said he’d take a recess.

  Joe Battistoni hit the gavel. “There’ll be a short recess,” he announced, and the judge smiled, ever so slightly. “I didn’t say ‘short,’ sheriff,” he said.

  “What things did he tell you in Hartford that he had not told you before?” Mr. Bianchi asked Lieutenant Shay now, in an almost conversational tone. Shay said he remembered Peter saying he’d seen his mother in the top bunk and doing what Peter called “a double take.” Then he said he’d seen his mother on the floor, with blood all around.

  “He told me that he recalled picking up a straight razor and that he slashed his mother’s throat,” Lieutenant Shay said. “He told me that he remembered jumping on his mother’s stomach, and he told me he may have washed his mother down.”

  The jury stared at Lieutenant Shay, seeming almost transfixed. Edward Ives leaned forward on his chair, the first seat of the second row, very close to the witness.

  Lieutenant Shay said that Peter, during the Saturday night in Hartford, had looked “normal, calm, very poised.” The evening session had followed the lie detector test, and during the course of the evening, Jim Mulhern had taken Peter’s confession, which Peter then signed. Lieutenant Shay said he himself had been in the room at the beginning of the session. “Some of it came out with very little questioning,” he said. “Some of it came out as a result of questions that I asked.”

  Catherine Roraback asked Lieutenant Shay what he meant by “normal,” since he had never seen or spoken with Peter Reilly before the night Barbara died.

  “What I meant by normal,” said Lieutenant Shay, “was that I expected to find something different.”

  “Do you remember him saying, ‘The blood scared the hell out of me’?” Miss Roraback asked.

  “No, I don’t,” Lieutenant Shay said.

  “Do you remember asking him, ‘Why did you need an ambulance?’”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Do you remember him saying, ‘It looks like I did it’?”

  “I think he did say that, yes.”

  “Do you remember his referring to a ‘double take’?”

  “He said that frequently,” Lieutenant Shay said. “As a matter of fact, I think he used that term at six-thirty in the morning back at Canaan.”

  “Do you remember him saying, ‘My mind went blank?’” Catherine Roraback asked.

  “Yes, I remember him saying that a couple of times,” Shay said.

  “Isn’t it true,” Catherine Roraback asked, “that you suggested that Mr. Reilly needed some psychological help?”

  “Yes, I did,” Shay said.

  “Did you tell him you’d try to help him get it?”

  “Yes, I did,” Shay said. “He said he needed somebody he could trust, somebody he could turn to. He said he didn’t mean a lawyer; he needed somebody like a father.”

  “And then he began talking to you, is that right?” Catherine Roraback asked, her voice dark with irony. Lieutenant Shay looked her straight in the eye.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  Bit by bit, line by line, Catherine Roraback was trying to draw out the dialogue in Hartford and to establish the atmosphere of that Saturday night, which seemed so long ago. Like the polygraph session, the evening questioning, which resulted in the signed confession, had been taped too, but Miss Roraback was not sure the jury would ever be allowed to hear those tapes, so she was trying to recreate the questioning now. Besides, even if the tapes could later be heard, there was a benefit, she felt, in having Lieutenant Shay say these things himself, things he remembered saying and things Peter had said to him.

  I had not yet heard the evening tapes either. As this questioning emerged piecemeal in the course of a few days testimony, I was struck by the variety of its style and tone. At first, just after Sergeant Kelly brought Peter out of the polygraph room into the room across the hall, the talk was almost matter of fact. “One of the first things he said to me,” Lieutenant Shay recalled, “was that he now was aware that he did do this thing that happened to his mother.”

  But when the questioning turned to details of the killing—the knife, the razor, the reason—the tone changed. Peter either said he wasn’t sure, or else he would say he was sure and then change his mind and say he wasn’t sure, and finally Lieutenant Shay had told Peter impatiently, warningly, “There are many things we can do to make this a difficult process for you.” Sometimes the questioning was even briefly funny. When Peter asked for details on how Barbara had been killed and Lieutenant Shay declined to give them, Peter had pleaded, “Give me a hint.”

  Lieutenant Shay testified that he knew the autopsy details by the time he questioned Peter that Saturday night. He said he knew that Barbara’s legs had been broken, and her stomach cut, and her throat slashed, and that there was a defense wound in her hand. He said he himself had brought up the legs and the stomach, when he talked with Peter, but that Peter himself had told Shay about the slashing of his mother’s throat.

  Once, in the course of the questioning, when Peter kept veering back and forth, especially as he continued to refer to “a double take,” Lieutenant Shay had yelled at him, accusing him of playing “headgames” with the police and telling him the police had “proof positive” that Peter had done it. By that time, of course, fatigue was surely setting in. When Miss Roraback talked about the double take and about Peter’s blanking-out, she asked Lieutenant Shay whether he thought Peter was tired. “I imagine he was,” Lieutenant Shay said. “I know I was exhausted.”

  But then the mood had softened, and they had talked, Lieutenant Shay testified, “about life and death and God and so forth.” They talked again of trust.

  “Do you remember him saying, ‘I’ve gotta trust someone’?” Catherine Roraback asked Shay.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “And do you remember a conversation after that about your family?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Did he at that point break down and begin to cry?” she asked.

  “There was one point where his voice did falter,” Lieutenant Shay said. “There was one point where we were talking about his life and his problems. I was trying to encourage him to cry.”

  “You said, ‘Go ahead and cry’?” Catherine Roraback asked, disdain in her voice.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Shay said.

  “Do you remember saying, ‘I don’t feel sorry for your mother, I feel sorry for you,
because I think you’ve been a victim for years’?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Shay said.

  “Do you remember Peter then asking you where you lived?”

  “He did ask me where I lived, yes.”

  When Miss Roraback asked Lieutenant Shay whether he’d had training in interrogation and who gave him that training, John Bianchi objected, but he was overruled.

  “I’ve had the standard training at the police academy,” Lieutenant Shay said, adding that he’d also attended a course given by Mr. Fred Inbau at the University of Maryland, a course that dealt with interrogation. “How do you spell that?” the judge asked, and there was a pause while he wrote it down.

  “One of Mr. Inbau’s principles is that you should establish trust with the person, is that right?” Catherine Roraback asked him.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  Catherine Roraback leaned against the jury rail and studied the ceiling with infinite care.

  “You should tend to get that individual to rely on you, is that right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. She flicked her eyes from the ceiling and stared at him.

  “And that’s what you did here, is that right?” she asked coldly. “You attempted to create yourself as a father figure, did you not?”

  “That did cross my mind, yes,” Lieutenant Shay said.

  Except for the one outburst, Lieutenant Shay had apparently not yelled at Peter anymore, and, indeed, his part of the questioning seemed to have ended on a warm note. One of the last things Peter said to Lieutenant Shay, before the officer left the room and Jim Mulhern came in to finish taking down the confession, was to ask whether when they were finished, he could come to live with the Shay family, if they had room.