A Death in Canaan

by Barthel, Joan;

  But other things besides the confession mattered to other people.

  There was the knife, Exhibit X. The knife mattered to the jurors. When the time came for them to be shut up in the jury room, they took the knife along with them. They were interested in whether this knife, with the broken-off tip, could have made the cuts on Barbara’s body. Two jurors brought in stopwatches, too, because they wanted to see how long such cutting, and such a killing, might take.

  There was the razor, which mattered to the police. Peter Reilly said in his statement that he had slashed his mother’s throat with a razor. It was a straight razor made in Germany, inscribed with the number 7,000. The jurors handled it even more carefully than they’d handled the knife, and Frank Sollitto looked at it a long time, touching the blade thoughtfully.

  There was a plastic bag of human hair, Peter’s hair. Maybe it mattered, maybe not. Charles Kochakian, sitting next to me, groaned when an FBI agent began to testify about hair. Once Charles had sat through twelve hours of hair testimony, and he said he had learned one lesson from the ordeal. When it came to hair, they couldn’t prove anything one way or the other. The police had sent Peter’s hair to Washington, and, after making microscopic comparisons with the hairs found in Barbara’s hands, the agency sent Peter’s hair back by registered mail. The hairs in Barbara’s hands, the FBI man said, were “brown head hairs, of Caucasian origin in one hand”; in the other, “one blond, several brown hairs, and one dark brown hair of Caucasian origin.” He said Peter’s hair had a streaky appearance, light brown to red-brown in color. He said two of the hairs found in Barbara’s hand had the same characteristics as Peter’s hair, and that they either came from Peter’s head or from the head of somebody whose hair was like Peter’s. Charles was right. These were either Peter’s hairs or somebody else’s.

  There was an arbitrary element, it seemed, when another FBI man testified, a man who specialized in stains. He looked at the knife and said he had examined it for blood and semen. He found no semen, but he had found blood on the blade. It was human blood, but he couldn’t tell whether it was male or female blood, or what type, or how long it had been there. He said he had used a sterile scalpel for scraping the knife and had found blood on both sides of the blade, but none on the handle. He said the police had sent three other knives to him for examination, but they hadn’t sent any razor.

  Besides the knife, the razor, and the hair, Peter’s clothes were on exhibit, in a plastic bag. The FBI man said he had found no blood on the shirt, no blood on the left sneaker. The police hadn’t sent the right sneaker. When he looked at the blue jeans, he said he couldn’t find his initials on them, which was the way he marked things for identification.

  This was the kind of thing that kept happening in the trial of Peter Reilly. Vague, unanswered questions, fragments of questions swooped through the courtroom like moths. There was, always, the question of the wallet, the money. Miss Roraback hoped to establish that Barbara had had a good sum of money in the house Friday, the night she died, although Lieutenant Shay had only found sixteen cents on the floor. Barbara’s new wallet was never found. But when Catherine asked Jim Mulhern on the witness stand whether he had investigated a check cashed by Barbara the day she died, Mr. Bianchi objected that the question was immaterial. “I’m trying to establish that there was a large sum of money in the house,” Miss Roraback said; nevertheless, the objection was sustained.

  The clothes always mattered. Dr. Izumi had testified that Peter could have killed Barbara in the manner she was killed without getting bloody. Later in the trial, when he was recalled to the stand, he testified that the killer would have had to turn her over, or move her in some manner, in order to make the wounds on the back. The testimony seemed contradictory, or at least puzzling, and possibly very damaging.

  Even Sergeant Kelly said he recalled the shirt and the dungarees. When he testified, he said that before he questioned Peter he had known there was “a good deal of blood around the neck and head area, and that Barbara’s throat had been cut.” But he said Peter had told him he thought he’d cut his mother’s throat before Sergeant Kelly asked him about such cutting. But the autopsy on Barbara lasted most of the afternoon, and until it was over, the police apparently hadn’t heard about the vaginal injuries. By the time they did, the polygraph test was over, and Peter was across the hall in the interview room.

  “I went back in and asked Peter what was the worst thing he could have done to his mother last night,” Sergeant Kelly said. “He said the only thing he could think of was that he raped his mother.”

  The jurors stared at Sergeant Kelly. A few of us had heard this testimony before at the pretrial hearings in January, but the jurors had not, and the shock of the statement was clearly traced now on most of their faces.

  After Kelly told Peter that Barbara hadn’t been raped, and after he’d declined to give Peter details, saying, “I want to hear it from you,” Peter had told the officer, “I think I cut out her sex organs.”

  Sergeant Kelly testified he’d asked Peter then, “Why did you want to do something like this?” and Peter had replied that he didn’t know. “Could it be because this is where you came from?” Sergeant Kelly had asked, and Peter had said yes.

  Helen Ayre, mother of three, looked close to tears, then she arranged her face in that half-smile, half-grimace she’d worn during the autopsy slides.

  Catherine Roraback looked sternly at Sergeant Kelly, but she didn’t seem to be angry with him in the same way she’d been angry with Lieutenant Shay or, most of all, with Jim Mulhern.

  “When you asked him, ‘What was the worst thing you could have done to your mother last night?’” Miss Roraback said, “was that a question Lieutenant Shay asked you to ask him?” There was some exchange back and forth, then Tim Kelly said yes.

  When Peter confessed to “rape,” however, that was the wrong answer, so Sergeant Kelly had persisted. “What’s the next worst thing … the next worst thing …?” and Peter had answered “Jumping up and down on her” and “strangling her.” As the testimony came out now in the courtroom, it sounded like a dreadful game of twenty questions, played for the highest stakes.

  “Did you also ask him, ‘What else did you do to hurt her?’” she asked Sergeant Kelly.

  “Objection, your honor,” Mr. Bianchi said again. “He’s already answered that question.” Catherine Roraback whirled angrily and looked at the prosecutor, then toward the bench. “He asked it sixteen times!” she said. Catherine Roraback knew precisely what was on the tapes. Mr. Bianchi, grinning angrily, moved that her comment be stricken.

  “I don’t remember the exact words,” Sergeant Kelly said mildly.

  “Do you remember asking that general question a number of times?” she asked. “Do you remember asking him, ‘What else do you think you did?’ Isn’t it true that at least three times when you asked him what was the worst thing he could have done to his mother, he said, ‘raping her’?”

  “The number of times, I don’t know,” Sergeant Kelly said.

  “You kept repeating that you needed one further detail, did you not?” Catherine Roraback asked.

  Sergeant Kelly nodded slightly. “We talked about one further detail, yes.”

  “Didn’t you suggest that it most likely happened when she was flat on the floor?”

  “I don’t know,” Kelly said.

  “And didn’t Peter say, ‘I think strangling her or something’?”

  “I don’t recall that,” Kelly said.

  “Didn’t you go back to the question of, ‘Why does rape stick in your mind?’ Didn’t you suggest to Peter that it was the way she was lying there that you were referring to?”

  “I don’t recall that, ma’am, no,” Sergeant Kelly said.

  “You don’t recall?” she asked sarcastically.

  “No,” he said. Catherine Roraback shook her head briefly and looked down at her notes. She walked over to the defense table then and stood near Peter Reilly. The jurors turn
ed to look at her, waiting for a question.

  “Do you remember Peter saying, ‘I’m just taking guesses now’?” she asked.

  “I don’t remember that,” Sergeant Kelly said.

  “Didn’t you say, ‘Assuming this happened, how would you have done it?’”

  “I don’t recall those words, no,” Sergeant Kelly said.

  “Do you remember Peter saying, ‘I wouldn’t know how to do it’?”

  “I don’t recall,” Sergeant Kelly said.

  At the recess, Con Hitchcock, a law student, chatted with me, advising me to notice the lawyers’ techniques—how John Bianchi, in questioning a witness, often leaned against the jury rail, so the witness would look in his direction and thus would seem to be looking squarely and honestly at the jury. Catherine Roraback, on the other hand, often wandered away from the jury box and back to the defense table, sometimes standing behind Peter, her hand resting on the back of his chair, so that the witness would have to look at her and Peter, and the jury would tend to look that way too. Con Hitchcock said that shortly after the magazine article had appeared, he had been at a party in Georgetown where two psychiatrists were discussing the article and the killing itself, in all its bizarre and gruesome aspects. One of the psychiatrists said there was no way in the world a son could have committed this kind of murder, and the other psychiatrist said only a son could have done it.

  “Did he cry, trooper?” John Bianchi asked John Calkins. The trooper was back on the stand briefly, pleasant and a little sad-faced, with a soft voice.

  “No,” Trooper Calkins said quietly, telling again that when Peter had been returned to the Canaan barracks, Trooper Calkins had driven him to the Litchfield jail. When they passed the house where Barbara had been killed, Peter asked what happened to his car. He also told Trooper Calkins that Lieutenant Shay was a nice man, and Peter said he hoped his predicament wouldn’t keep him from becoming a policeman, or somehow interfere with his driver’s license. Trooper Calkins said that Peter told him he’d seen Barbara in bed, and the next thing he knew, he was standing over her, and she was lying on the floor with blood on her.

  One man was missing when the jurors filed out on Tuesday morning, March 26, and took their seats in the jury box. Raymond Ross was sick with a high fever. Catherine Roraback had liked the serious-looking man with the two grown sons and had been pleased when he was accepted by the state as well. But after conferring with counsel, the court decided not to delay the trial, but to choose one of the alternates.

  Frank Sollitto, as dapper and well-pressed as ever, and Eleanor Novak, still wide-eyed, stared at the clerk as he reached into the cardboard box to draw one of their numbers. He drew out number sixty-four, Mrs. Novak. She grinned and stood up, and the sheriff led her around the corner of the jury box, up into the top row, to the empty seat at the end. Some of the jurors in the box smiled at Mrs. Novak, who looked at the judge with an air of noticeable eagerness. Catherine Roraback smiled, too. During the voir dire, when Miss Roraback had asked Mrs. Novak what the presumption of innocence meant to her, Mrs. Novak had said simply that it meant he wasn’t guilty.

  Even Mr. Sollitto smiled when Mrs. Novak’s number came up. “It’s the only lottery I’ve ever won,” he told me later.

  With twelve jurors in the box, court proceeded again. Dr. Izumi made his last appearance, with two slides showing the cuts on Barbara’s stomach and on her back.

  “Did you come to an opinion with reasonable medical certainty as to what caused those wounds?” the prosecutor asked.

  Dr. Izumi looked at the knife, State’s Exhibit X, and said it would “match up with the wounds,” pointing out that it was a “sharp cutting instrument, and that the tip of the knife was broken off, and that the wound was from one-fourth to one-half-inch wide. But when Dr. Izumi referred to it as “the weapon,” Catherine Roraback scrambled to her feet.

  “It’s not a weapon, it’s a knife,” she said, and the prosecutor turned to her.

  “It’s a weapon,” Mr. Bianchi said.

  “It’s a knife,” Miss Roraback said.

  “It’s a question of semantics,” the judge said. “Let’s refer to it as a knife.”

  Dr. Izumi still held it in his hands. “My opinion would be that this knife is the instrument that caused this type of wound,” he said carefully. He added that the same knife had been used on both the front and the back of Barbara’s body. He said these wounds “were performed after death,” and for a moment, the image of a killer standing over the dead woman, knifing and carving her, hovered in the courtroom. Dr. Izumi said the knife could also have caused the defense wound in Barbara’s hand. He turned the knife over once or twice in his hands, in a thoughtful way. Catherine Roraback walked over to him, took the knife out of his hands, and walked away from the witness stand.

  “Dr. Izumi,” she said, with her back to him, “did you examine any other knives or instruments and compare them with these wounds?”

  The doctor said he saw two other knives at the scene, but he “didn’t have a chance to compare them” and hadn’t compared them afterward, either.

  Catherine Roraback said nothing, her back still turned to the witness, studying the ceiling again. A woman in the second row of the gallery stirred slightly. “She’s taking her own sweet time, huh?” the spectator whispered to a man next to her.

  Catherine Roraback turned back to Dr. Izumi, speaking quietly now. “If there were a knife on which the tip had not been broken off and that knife had the same width blade, could it have caused the defense wound you saw?”

  “Yes, it could,” Dr. Izumi said, adding that it would be unlikely, because of a “double scratch” shown on a slide.

  “No more questions, your honor,” both lawyers said, and Mr. Bianchi smiled. “May it please the court,” he said, with a little bowing motion, “the state of Connecticut rests.”

  Miss Roraback stood then, looking vigorous, and immediately moved that the court dismiss the case entirely. The jury was sent out, while Miss Roraback argued that, basically, all that Mr. Bianchi had established was “a very gory and horrible murder was committed at the premises on Route sixty-three in Falls Village that were formerly occupied by the deceased and her son, Peter Reilly.” She said that Peter’s statements, his confession, came only after he had been “held in custody some twenty-four hours and given under highly questionable circumstances, at a time when he was extremely tired, at a time when he had not had sufficient food, at a time when he had gone through the extreme trauma of having found his mother in those circumstances,” which she called “a horrible sight for anyone.” She talked about the questioning. “Even at the end of it, as Trooper Mulhern indicated,” she reminded the court, “Mr. Reilly was still saying, ‘I still don’t think I did it, I’m not sure of anything I’m saying.’”

  She looked at the judge, speaking very earnestly, as though he were a one-man jury whom she had to persuade. “All of the facts seem consistent with a finding of innocence and not a finding of guilt,” she said. “This defendant had clothing on which had no blood on it. He was subjected to a skin search. He had no indication on him that he had been involved in this horrendous crime.… Finally, your honor, I think there really is no prima facie case against my client.”

  John Bianchi’s reply was swift. “In my opinion, there is overwhelming evidence in this case that is just the opposite,” he said. “The evidence that Dr. Izumi just gave. Peter Reilly was there in the house when his mother was alive. She was gasping. It was clear that when he called, that Mrs. Gibbons was alive.” Mr. Bianchi added, pointedly, that “it could only have been Peter Reilly who made the after-death wounds, because he was the only one there.”

  As for Miss Roraback’s objections to the questioning, Mr. Bianchi reminded the court of Judge Armentano’s earlier decision that “this is an alert, bright, able young man.” Somehow, as Mr. Bianchi listed the adjectives, they did not sound entirely positive. “He was warned four times with much, much care,” Mr. Bianchi d
eclared. “The blurted-out, voluntary admissions that he made to Trooper Mulhern, who was his friend, when he brought him food … to John McAloon, who knew things only he would have known, that she wasn’t taking her medicine, she wasn’t taking her hormone injections … he told McAloon what he did with the clothing.” Mr. Bianchi sat down, looking satisfied, as Catherine Roraback made her rebuttal.

  “The gasping that Peter Reilly heard, if indeed he did, that could have been—as I understand Dr. Izumi’s testimony—the body of Barbara Gibbons sucking in air after the trachea had been cut. That could go on for five minutes. The lungs taking in air could make a gasping sound.

  “When you come to Mr. McAloon,” Miss Roraback continued, her tone changing from serious to sarcastic, “I think you have to remember that Mr. McAloon said Peter had on tan Hush Puppies, which no one else has seen. Mr. McAloon, if that is his name, and I guess in this particular situation that was his name”—she glanced at Mr. Bianchi, who flushed and stared back at her—“Mr. McAloon said Peter Reilly told him he killed his grandmother.”

  Judge Speziale had listened carefully, even politely, as though he might indeed consider dismissing the whole thing. But it took him only a moment to deny the motion to dismiss, to glance at the clock, and to announce lunch.

  “Is that all they got on this kid?” Roger Cohn asked incredulously at lunch at Mitchell’s. “It’s all over Torrington that Sam Holden keeps saying, ‘We really got the goods on Reilly.’” Sam Holden was the County Detective.

  Back in the courthouse hallway, Murray Madow was talking to Marie Dickinson. “I know a hunter who says gasping after death in an animal can go on for as long as half an hour, forty minutes,” he said. “If Peter’s mother could have been gasping for five minutes after she bled to death, why couldn’t the killer have cut her up and Peter have gotten there in the last part of the gasping time?”

  We didn’t know it then, but the jurors wondered about that, too. Some of them thought that was a definite possibility. Others thought that if Peter had driven into the yard just as Barbara was being cut and had come into the house just at the end of the five minutes, it would have been too much of a coincidence.