A Death in Canaan

by Barthel, Joan;

  He turned it down.

  Over the weekend, the word was out that Peter Reilly had been on the stand, like a Preview of a Coming Attraction, and on Tuesday morning, April 2, the courtroom was packed. Pat Alfano’s hand-lettered sign had gone up on the door: COURT FULL. NO SEATS. Dot Madow said she thought she was more nervous than Peter himself, and he certainly looked relaxed, not tense at all, as he took the stand. He sipped water from a styrofoam cup that Phil Plumb had filled, and he smiled a little as he looked around, glancing briefly at the jury, then toward his friends in the spectators’ rows.

  “Do you recognize it?” Miss Roraback asked, holding up the knife, State’s Exhibit X.

  “Yes, I do,” Peter said. He explained that his friend Wayne Collier had given Barbara the knife about a year and a half before, when she had complained that she didn’t have a really good meat-cutting knife. “Wayne said that he had one that was old, but he gave it to her,” Peter said, adding that Barbara kept it in a pouch on the side of the cabinet in the kitchen.

  Miss Roraback held up the razor, State’s Exhibit CC. “Do you recognize it?” she asked.

  “Yes, I do,” Peter said. He explained that Barbara had got it for him from Mario’s Barber Shop in Canaan because it had a handle on it, and “I could work on balsa models without carving up my fingers.” He said Barbara usually kept the razor on a shelf in the living room, on the shelf where they kept odds and ends, with two rows of books below it and one row above. That was the usual place.

  “Do you know a lady by the name of [Auntie B.’s name]?” John Bianchi asked abruptly.

  “Yes, I do,” Peter said.

  “Is she related to you?”

  “No, she is not related,” Peter said. Judge Speziale looked up from his notes and asked him to spell that name.

  “Does she hold some standing in relationship with you, though?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “I would say she is my godmother,” Peter said. He said that she had bought them the car and had sent money regularly.

  “Was your mother a welfare recipient?” the prosecutor asked.

  “I believe so, yes,” Peter said.

  “And on September twenty-eight, do you know whether or not a letter was received at your home from [Auntie B.]?”

  “I don’t think so,” Peter said. “All I know is, my mother cashed a check that day, that she received in the mail.”

  “Who did she receive the check from?” the prosecutor asked.

  “It may have been from my godmother,” Peter said. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” the prosecutor asked scornfully.

  “Mm-hm, right,” Peter said, very casually, perhaps a little too casually.

  “Have you seen [her] since September twenty-eight until today?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “No, I haven’t,” Peter said.

  Mr. Bianchi asked him about the arguments he and Barbara had had, and about the “extremely rude and crude language” they’d used, and about Barbara’s drinking.

  “She drank wine,” Peter said. “Every day, she drank wine. It was just something that she always did.” When the prosecutor pressed, Peter said yes, that Barbara had had a drinking problem, but that he hadn’t realized it until now.

  “Do you remember when you left your grandmother’s and your grandfather’s house on Johnson Road?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “Yes, I remember,” Peter said.

  “Weren’t there serious arguments between your grandparents and your mother over such things as that?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “I don’t remember the arguments that well,” Peter said. “There were arguments, but I don’t remember specifically what they were about.”

  Peter was only ten when he and Barbara left Johnson Road. By then the arguments had become so serious, the atmosphere so hateful, that Hilda had had her daughter arrested for breach of peace. Now Peter looked directly at Mr. Bianchi, for a moment seeming remote, very much like someone who could take his fishing pole and go off to spend the day alone, leaving all the grown-ups behind.

  At lunch two questions circled the press table. “How can you not know if your mother has a drinking problem?”

  “How can you have a godmother if you aren’t baptized?”

  On the way back into the courtroom, Peter stopped me in the hall. “I am scared to death,” he said. “How does it look?”

  “Fine,” I said. “You don’t look scared at all. You look very cool.” Why do people always say fine? He looked so cool that it bothered me, and I thought it might be bothering the jury. I should have told him so.

  Peter testified about the wallet.

  Altogether, there were three wallets in question. When the police searched the house, the night Barbara died, they found one wallet in a drawer, an old one with some old pictures and papers in it. It had not been used for a long time.

  A second wallet in question was one that had been stolen from Barbara a couple of weeks before she died. It had more than a hundred dollars in it when it was stolen. Peter testified that Barbara had reported it to the police. When she died, it was still missing. Later, it was found.

  A third wallet was brand-new, the wallet Barbara had bought at Bob’s Clothing Store the day she died. When Peter came home from school that afternoon, Barbara had pulled it out of the right rear pocket of her jeans and showed it to him. Bob Drucker at Bob’s Clothing Store remembered selling it to her. When Barbara died, that wallet was missing. It was never found.

  But when Peter Reilly was on the stand, brightly—even gaily—dressed in red bell-bottoms and a red sweater, it wasn’t the wallet, or the drinking, or the arguing, that lay at the heart of it all. It was his confession, and his confession was written down.

  “I signed several different sheets, but it’s very vague to me,” Peter told Miss Roraback. He said that before he had heard the tapes played back at the pretrial hearings, he hadn’t remembered much of what had gone on. “A little bit, yes, but not hardly anything.” He said he remembered “being interviewed by Sergeant Kelly and I remember being questioned by Trooper Mulhern, and I remembered signing a statement.”

  Miss Roraback showed him State’s Exhibit Z. He recognized his signature, he said, but other than that, he wasn’t sure if it was the statement he signed. She showed him Exhibit AA, and Peter said it was “something added to the statement after it was made,” and although he recognized his signature, he said he didn’t remember signing it. On Exhibit BB, he recognized his signature and his initials at different places around the page.

  Miss Roraback read from the statement now, as Mr. Bianchi stared at her. “I remember slashing at my mother’s throat with a straight razor used for my model airplanes. This was on the living-room table. I also remember jumping on my mother’s legs. I am not sure about washing her off.” The statement went on, with the account of the phone calls, throwing the hibachi out of the way, Geoff’s arrival, then the police. And the last addition: “When I slashed at my mother’s throat with a straight razor, I cut her throat. This is all I wanted to clarify.”

  Miss Roraback put the statement aside and stood in front of the witness stand, looking at Peter.

  “I ask you, Mr. Reilly, is that statement your best memory of what happened that night?”

  “No, it isn’t,” Peter said.

  “Did you in fact slash at your mother’s throat?”

  “No, I did not,” Peter said.

  “Did you in fact kill your mother, Mr. Reilly?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Peter said.

  Miss Roraback turned toward the jury. “I have no other questions,” she said.

  The prosecutor planted himself squarely in front of Peter, his legs spread apart a little.

  “You have known Trooper Jim Mulhern quite well, haven’t you?” he began.

  “Yes, I have,” Peter said.

  “And he is a friend of yours, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Peter said.

  “You ever go to his home … you helped h
im do some work on his property … you know Mrs. Mulhern?”

  “Yes,” Peter said.

  “And with this background, Mr. Reilly,” the prosecutor said, “with the friendship of Jim Mulhern, showing you State’s Exhibits AA, Z, and BB, it’s your testimony that your friend Jim Mulhern wrote down something that wasn’t true? or something that you didn’t say?” The prosecutor made a little bow in the direction of the jury and looked shocked. “Is that what you are telling these ladies and gentlemen?”

  “No, I never said that,” Peter replied. “I said that I wasn’t sure if I said this or not, that my signature was on this paper.”

  “Did you read it at the time Trooper Mulhern wrote it down for you?”

  “I don’t remember,” Peter said. “I don’t remember if I did or not.”

  “Were you sick, Mr. Reilly?” the prosecutor asked. It was one of the few times he had called the defendant “Mr.,” and it did not sound natural.

  “I wasn’t sick, I don’t think,” Peter said.

  Mr. Bianchi looked scornful. “Were you suffering from a lapse of memory or something during that time?”

  “No,” Peter said. “I was just totally exhausted.”

  “When did things start to go blank?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “It’s just the basic conversation,” Peter said. “I don’t remember it.”

  John Bianchi looked disbelieving. “But this good friend, Jim Mulhern, as he knew you, wrote this down and asked you to sign it, right?”

  “Yes, he did,” Peter said.

  Mr. Bianchi raised his voice.

  “When he walked through that door, with that sandwich and those two cupcakes and that Coke for you, Peter Reilly, and you looked up at him, and he hadn’t been interrogating you at all, and you said to him, words to this effect, ‘I suppose you are ashamed of me, Jim?’”

  “I may have,” Peter said.

  “And he said, ‘Huh?’ or, ‘Why, Peter?’ And you said to him, ‘Because I did it. I killed her.’”

  “I may have said that, yes,” Peter said.

  Mr. Bianchi asked how John McAloon had known about Barbara’s operation and that she wouldn’t take her medicine.

  “Will you explain to me, Mr. Reilly, how John McAloon could have known that without speaking with you?” the prosecutor demanded.

  “Well, if he had been in that area, maybe I could have said it to somebody else,” Peter said.

  “Did you?” Mr. Bianchi asked, and Peter smiled slightly.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I could have.”

  “Since you didn’t talk to John McAloon,” Mr. Bianchi continued, “he just made up the testimony that he gave on the stand, that you told him you threw your clothes away?”

  “He very easily could have,” Peter said, and reached out casually to take a sip of water.

  As he recalled that Sunday morning at Litchfield jail, he said he had talked with many inmates, including Robert Erhardt, crowding around the newcomer’s cell door. They told him he needed a lawyer, and one of them got the Litchfield phone book from a guard.

  “The name Roraback rang a bell,” Peter said, on the stand, “and I said I would like Catherine Roraback. They told me I probably couldn’t afford her.” Mr. Roberts smiled quickly as he took down the testimony, and most people in the gallery, and in the jury box, laughed out loud.

  “Your mother was breathing and gasping at the time you called Sharon Hospital?”

  “I think she was breathing,” Peter said. “She was making sounds or something. I thought she was breathing.”

  Mr. Bianchi waved the statement under Peter’s nose. “You didn’t say in here ‘I think she was.’”

  “Well, that’s what I felt,” Peter said. “I heard sounds. I thought she was breathing. So I said—”

  Mr. Bianchi interrupted. “You said she was having problems breathing?”

  “Well, she was making sounds, and I thought they were sounds of having problems breathing, so I thought she was breathing,” Peter said. The prosecutor paused slightly, then swung back to face the witness.

  “And there was nobody there but you?”

  “Mm-hm,” Peter said.

  “And you heard Dr. Izumi say that the cuts on her abdomen and on her back and in her vagina area were all done after death?”

  “I heard him say that, yes,” Peter said calmly.

  “And there was nobody there but you?”

  Catherine Roraback objected and brought up the question of clinical and biological death, but she was overruled.

  Now the prosecutor’s voice dropped as he asked about a man Barbara had known. “In 1969 or 70, did he come to live at your house?” Peter said he had.

  “And was he black?” the prosecutor asked softly. Peter said he was.

  “And did he live with you and your mother in the same house?” the prosecutor asked again.

  “Mm-hm,” Peter said.

  “And this was a pretty trying thing for you, was it not? Living with [the man], who was of another race, in your house—in that tiny little house with your mother and you—that had to be a pretty sad thing, wasn’t it?”

  “I guess,” Peter said quietly. The courtroom was quiet too, seeing the couple in one bunk and a teen-aged boy in the other, as vividly as though they had been photographed.

  “Could you tell me what you thought your relationship was with your mother?” Miss Roraback asked. It was her last question.

  “She was my mother. I loved her,” Peter Reilly said.

  With the jury out, the complicated matter of the tape recordings was argued. The crucial issue was the polygraph test, inadmissible evidence in a Connecticut courtroom. “If he had been successful and passed it, he probably would not be sitting here today,” John Bianchi argued. “The fact is, he didn’t pass it, and this led to his confession.”

  “I take exception to Mr. Bianchi saying that Mr. Reilly did not pass the lie detector test,” Catherine Roraback replied. “There is a very sophisticated question of whether or not an individual passes or flunks a test of this sort.”

  Judge Speziale sighed. “We’ve reached the point where the tapes have become deeply enmeshed in this entire trial,” he said. Finally, with the jurors in their seats, he told them the polygraph “is simply too unreliable for you to give any consideration at all to the test results.” But he said that if the court edited the tapes, to remove any reference to the lie detector test, the tapes might be misleading, so the court had decided the jury might hear them all. Then Mr. Roberts seemed to sigh a little, too.

  Once the jury knew that “the interview” and “the conversation” were actually a lie detector test, they seemed fascinated by Sergeant Tim Kelly, as neat and robust as ever, not at all frightening, out of uniform, casually dressed in a plaid jacket and beige slacks. Sergeant Kelly faced the jurors across the table, with Mr. Roberts at an angle, his hands poised.

  These were the tapes of the afternoon session at Hartford, which had so startled and affected—in so many different ways—those of us who had heard them then, for the first time, on that December day. They had been new then; even John Bianchi said that before the pretrial hearings, he’d heard only portions of the tapes.

  As the tapes began, all of us in the courtroom went back in time, to an autumn Saturday afternoon when, across the country, millions of people were cheering from football bleachers, or washing their cars, and one young man was sitting in a small, soundproof room, in what he was told was the seat of honor. I had time, on this second hearing, to muse on what I heard, and I found the questions to be as interesting, in a way, as the answers, as Sergeant Schneider and Peter discussed the Corvette, spending money, and God. On the polygraph, I wondered, are an atheist’s answers suspect?

  The voice of Sergeant Kelly came through clearly, as it had in December. “I think we’ve got a little problem here.” They did. And finally Peter again, at the end, asking whether the session had been tape recorded. There was an image of Sergeant Kelly pointing to
the tape as he replied. “There’s my tape. Right here. That’s all I need. That’s you.” And Peter, perhaps nodding a little, as he agreed. “That’s me.”

  The polygraph test was over. Then, at last, we heard them. We heard the evening tapes. We heard what had happened that Saturday night in Hartford. We heard all four hours.

  We heard Peter in the beginning. “Well, it really looks like I did it. The thing is, I must have flown off the handle …”

  We heard Lieutenant Shay. “Trust me. Tell me what happened.”

  We heard Peter in the middle. “Can you say I’m not sure, Jim? Everything that I say, the entire statement, I’m not sure of.”

  We heard Jim Mulhern: “Well, it sounds terrible, murder and all that … but I’m not a guy to sit here and judge you … Five years from now, I may do the same thing.”

  We heard Peter at the end. “Will I need a lawyer?”

  On April 11, Catherine Roraback and John Bianchi summed up their cases in Docket #5285, State of Connecticut v. Peter A. Reilly, and the jury retired to try to reach a verdict.

  13

  Long afterward, people remembered that time with an intensity that seemed, at first, to be out of proportion to the number of hours and days involved. There was a weight, an emphasis, to the end of the trial and its aftermath that affected not only Peter Reilly and others most closely concerned, including the judge and the jurors, but also some of the reporters and spectators, too. Even some people who had never come to court, but knew only what they heard on the news or read in the papers, seemed to sense that what happened to Peter Reilly had something to do with them all.

  Partly it was a feeling of involvement, a simple caring what happened, but beyond that, it was a process of perception, a process that had begun when Barbara died and Peter was taken away in a police car. It had been reflected in the confused, angry, bewildered voices at the early gatherings of the Peter Reilly Defense Committee, and it had deepened in the months since. Not everyone’s perceptions were identical, of course, and they did not always lead to consensus, let alone to change. Still, the process had begun, and it would not be ended when the jurors reached a verdict.