At the heart of the criminal matter, the confession, the statements of Peter Reilly, “This court says that they are voluntary.… the defendant was not denied due process under the Fourteenth Amendment.” On the matter of the polygraph test, though, he said sternly, “You may not consider the polygraph test to have any bearing on the credibility, guilt, or innocence of the accused.”
He told them their decision must be unanimous and that they must have “no concern whatever with the punishment to be inflicted in the case of conviction,” and, like Catherine Roraback, he mentioned three possible verdicts. The jury could find Peter Reilly guilty as charged, guilty of murder. Or they could find him not guilty. But whereas Miss Roraback had talked, rather wistfully, of the Scottish alternative, “not proven,” the court’s third option was different.
“If not guilty as charged, consider manslaughter in the first degree,” the judge said. He explained that manslaughter meant causing a person’s death “with intent to cause serious physical injury … intent is a mental process … ordinarily, intent can be proved only by circumstantial evidence.” In the language of the lawbooks he knew so well, Judge Speziale explained that a person who committed manslaughter acted “under the influence of severe emotional disturbance: a sudden frenzy, or passion, of the slayer … what he does under the first hot spur of impulse.”
He ended his charge, as he had begun it, by relying on the law. “The law does not require that the state must prove a motive. If no motive can be inferred or found, it may raise a reasonable doubt.” He paused slightly. “Or it may not raise a reasonable doubt.” The jurors walked across the courtroom then to the jury room. Their hard work was starting now. Eleanor Novak was smiling to herself. It was her wedding anniversary, and her husband had promised to take her down to Washington for the weekend to see the cherry blossoms.
“That car’s worth money!” Peter exclaimed. He watched as the automobile, a black and white Thunderbird, turned the corner at the Stop sign, went past the Congregational Church, and rolled out of sight. He seemed relaxed, though he smoked constantly. The night before, Mickey had taken him and Geoff to see Magnum Force, to get their minds off things.
It was midafternoon. The jury had gone to lunch, not in a group, but in whatever arrangements they chose, just as they had during the trial. Miss Roraback objected that the jurors ought to be sequestered, but she was overruled.
Only an hour or so after lunch, a knock came from inside the jury room, and a vibration, a kind of electric shock, ran through the courtroom. Geoff Madow, who had gone back upstairs briefly, raced down the stairs to the courthouse door. “Pete!” he called. “Pete! They’re coming out!” Peter raced up the stairs. John Bianchi came out of his office, looking very serious.
It was generally felt that the longer a jury stayed out, the more likely they were to find a person guilty. A verdict reached so quickly probably meant an acquittal, and John Bianchi looked tense as he stood near the counsel table.
The sheriff took the note from the hand that reached out from the jury room and gave it to the clerk, who took it back to Judge Speziale’s chambers. In a few minutes, the judge swept out around the corner and stepped up to the bench. He told the sheriff to bring the jury out, and in a few minutes all the jurors were back in their seats, watching him.
It was not a verdict, but a question, and Judge Speziale did not look pleased as he read it aloud. “The plaid jacket—where is it?”
The judge looked at the jurors, who stared back at him, looking a little guilty. He reminded them, not smiling, that the jacket was not part of the evidence. “You are not to surmise or conjecture as to its whereabouts,” he told them sternly, and sent them back to their little room.
As the jurors’ handbook had said: The law was what the judge said it was, and the evidence was what the judge let the jury hear and consider.
Outside the jury room, the rest of the afternoon passed easily. With the trial over, some barriers were down, and conversation among sheriffs and spectators flowed freely. Phil Plumb knew a lot about juries. “If you hear a toilet flush, they’re ready to come out,” he said. “A little rap at the door means more questions. A loud rap means a verdict.” A sheriff’s wife, Marian Battistoni, said she’d read in the New York Daily News that a baby born in 1974 had a two percent chance of being murdered and was therefore more likely to be slain than an American soldier in World War II had been likely to die in combat.
Dinnertime came, without a verdict. Judge Speziale drove away with his wife and his daughter in his burgundy Fleetwood, smiling and tipping his hat as he came out of the courthouse. Marion and Mickey, Dot and Murray, Bill and Marie Dickinson, Beverly King, and a bunch of the boys went to the Village Restaurant. Peter hadn’t had lunch, only a Coke, but now he was hungry, and he asked for a steak.
The night session had a strange eerie quality. The fluorescent lights turned the courtroom a garish white, with blackness pressing against the tall schoolroom windows. People came and went, in and out of the courtroom. Jacqui Bernard, the woman who had put up most of the bail, had come up from New York to hear the summations. She was a striking woman, with big, quizzical eyes and close-cropped, almost white hair, and she was noticed in the court when she showed up. She was spending the night at our house, and when Joe O’Brien saw us chatting together in the courtroom, he asked me who she was. But Jacqui had asked to remain unknown. She had done some writing for a neighborhood weekly in New York, so I told Joe she was a reporter for the West Side News. It was a limited truth, and Joe O’Brien, after fourteen years as a newspaperman, knew all about limited truths. “The West Side News, you say?” Joe grunted, halfway between a laugh and a scoff, not bothering to ask the west side of where.
Mr. Roberts leaned over the bar rail and chatted about other trials, other transcripts. He said once a man was on trial for armed robbery, and the lawyer was questioning a friendly witness who was supposed to testify to the accused man’s character as an upstanding citizen. “Do you know this man?” the lawyer began. “Yes,” the witness said. “Do you know his reputation?” “Yes,” the witness said. “And what is his reputation?” “He’s known as a straight shooter,” the witness replied.
None of us talked about Barbara. When I thought about it later, it seemed natural that we didn’t. Tony Cookson, a college senior who wrote a thesis on the case, explained why. “In court, it’s just a terrifying game,” Tony said. “You lose track of the person who got killed.”
While we were milling around the courthouse, however, sipping coffee and telling jokes, the jurors were talking about Barbara. They had stopwatches in the jury room, the knife, and the razor. They scraped the knife on the table in the jury room and found that it made marks on the table similar to the marks on Barbara’s back. Although in Peter’s confession he said he’d used a straight razor, the jurors were much more interested in the knife. They were interested, too, in the psychological overtones of the killing, especially the vaginal cutting.
They generally agreed that Peter didn’t know what he was saying on the tapes, that he was just saying what people were saying to him. But the jurors were aware how important the tapes were, and during the late evening, they asked to hear part of the tapes again. They’d have preferred to listen in the privacy of their little room, but the judge made them come out and take their seats in the box again. He sat on the bench in his black robe, and the courtroom was still filled with spectators, even at this hour, as the last portions of the tapes played again in the courtroom.
They sounded different now. They probably sounded clearer because of the nighttime hush, but besides the clarity there was a new—or at least a different—reality. I thought Peter’s words might be sounding very different to us now, in this courtroom context, than they had sounded when he was actually being questioned in Hartford. The jurors’ handbook had promised “a real life drama” in the courtroom, but real life wasn’t always the clearest reality.
Here was Peter’s voice again, gravelly and
low, as Mulhern got to the slashing of the throat.
“Did you draw blood?”
“That I don’t remember.”
“You saw the razor cut, though?”
“I’m pretty sure. It’s almost like in a dream.”
“OK, sign.”
“Are you proud of me?”
“Will I need a lawyer?”
“I can’t advise you one way or the other. You have a right to have a lawyer.”
“Yeah, but, I mean—the statement—”
“Doesn’t matter. You can have an attorney at any time you want.”
“Yeah, but I mean, everything I said I mean, I mean it is the truth.”
The jurors went home that night. They were still about evenly divided, as they had been at the outset: five voting guilty, four not guilty, three undecided. All together they took six ballots before they reached their verdict Friday afternoon.
I went over to the courthouse that morning. Time dragged. Hardly anyone had anything to say anymore, and I sat for an hour on the grass across from the courthouse, where I could see people coming and going, but wouldn’t have to make conversation. The jurors asked to go to lunch early, and this time they went in a group to a private room that had been reserved for them in the back of Mitchell’s.
From the phone booth on the stairway landing, I called Jean Beligni, who was waiting it out at home. She said that the night before, on the eleven o’clock news, she’d heard the newscaster begin, “A jury today reached a guilty verdict …” and had felt so faint she had to put her head in her lap. A friend who was with her went into the bathroom and threw up. As it turned out, the item was about the Yablonski murders, and the newscaster went on to say that, closer to home, in the Peter Reilly case, the jury has not reached a verdict.
“I am absolutely going bananas,” Jean said. “I just can’t understand it. There’s no weapon! There’s no blood! And what about the other fingerprint? But Paul said to me, after he heard John Bianchi’s summation, that for the first time during the trial, he was worried and thought it might go the wrong way.”
I was trying to read Yankee magazine when the word spread in midafternoon that the judge had asked the jury be brought out. Charles had been expecting this; he took a typed piece of paper from his notepad and followed along as the judge read the jurors a modified version of the famous “Chip Smith” charge, a little lecture that was considered by some lawyers to be both necessary and discreetly persuasive, by others to be nothing less than judicial arm-twisting.
“All right, ladies and gentlemen,” the judge said, smiling a little wearily at them, “you have been deliberating for some time in this case. I have no criticism to make of the length of time you have been in conference … however, I feel it is my duty to give you whatever aid I can in arriving at a verdict, if you are having a problem.
“Although the verdict to which each juror agrees must, of course, be his own conclusion and not a mere acquiescence in the conclusions of his fellows, and although each juror has the right and duty to retain his own opinion, yet, in order to bring twelve minds to a unanimous result, each juror should examine with candor the questions submitted to them, with due regard and deference to the opinions of each other …”
Miss Roraback protested that she had never heard the Chip Smith charge used until a jury announced it was deadlocked, which this jury had not done. But the jurors had gone back into the little room, Helen Ayre looking surprised and somewhat chagrined. Mr. Roberts was leaning over the bar rail, telling me about Chip Smith, also accused of murder, back in the 1800s, and the first use of the charge. “As a result, Chip Smith was hanged,” Mr. Roberts said dryly. The rap at the door came then, twenty-six minutes after the jury had gone to their room. It was a loud rap. It was loud as thunder.
The jury filed back into their places. Most of them looked at the judge, although Gary Lewis looked right at Peter, and Helen Ayre looked straight ahead of her, at some point on the opposite wall. When the jury came out, she had noticed Peter cross his fingers, and after that she didn’t look at him again. Not even when the jury foreman, Edward Ives, gave the verdict: guilty of manslaughter in the first degree. Not even when the clerk, at Miss Roraback’s request, polled the jury, in the formal, rather frightening language of the law: “Helen Ayre, look upon the accused. What say you, is he guilty or not guilty of the crime with which he stands accused?” “Guilty,” Mrs. Ayre had said, as each juror had done. Her voice sounded low and strained. Catherine Roraback never took her eyes off Mrs. Ayre, watching her even as the jury was dismissed and filed out of the courtroom in a single, silent file, in a courtroom so hushed that the quiet itself was obtrusive.
Judge Speziale set May 14 for sentencing and said the bond would be continued. But Peter hardly seemed to hear, as he stood at the defense table, his shoulders sagging, his face ashy white, his mouth hanging open. The judge said he wanted to commend the attorneys and to give them “the thanks of the state of Connecticut, and my individual thanks.” He looked at the reporters in the first row and said he wanted to thank us, too, because he knew that CBS had wanted us to talk in defiance of the gag order, and he knew that we had declined. He said he appreciated that. “It has been a long road for all of us,” Judge Speziale said. “We’ve all left a little bit of ourselves here.”
He left the bench quickly then, and in a few minutes the courtroom was nearly cleared. Geoff Madow sat in the middle of the third row, his head buried in his hands. The prosecutor and his assistants went back into their offices; Miss Roraback put her hand on Peter’s shoulder and said something to him, before she and Peter Herbst went back toward the judge’s chambers. Marion Madow sat in the second row of the courtroom, nearly empty now, just looking at Peter, who still stood by himself at the defense table, his hand covering his mouth, staring at the floor. Bill and Marie Dickinson sat in the row behind her, watching Marion. Then Eddie Dickinson came over to Marion to give her Peter’s coat. She looked at the coat, then she looked at Eddie, and then Marion burst into tears—loud, gasping sobs that caused her to bend over and cross her arms in front of her stomach. Mickey put his arms around Marion and helped her get up. “Come on,” Mickey said gently. “Come on now. Let’s go home.”
I had been on my way out of the courtroom, following the other reporters, but I stopped at the door. Farn put her hand on my arm quickly, as she hurried past. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. I was staring at Peter and the Dickinsons and at Marion, and when Marion cried, like one domino toppling another, I began to cry too, in the same loud, gulping way. Mickey hurried over to me and put his arm around me. “Do you want to come home with us?” he asked, and I said yes.
Going down the courthouse steps, Murray Madow spoke loudly, not caring who heard. “Now all we have to do is find the killer,” he said angrily. A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk and across the street, on the green, watching people come out. A TV crew from Hartford had tried to interview the jurors, but they were escorted out of the courthouse by deputies. A woman standing in the door of the coffee shop said: “He was such an arrogant kid. He thought he could get away with it.”
John Bianchi was smiling when Roger took his picture, and he paused for a comment. “That’s all it was, manslaughter,” Mr. Bianchi told Roger. “I believed that from the day it happened.” Not far behind him, Joe O’Brien approached Catherine Roraback, but she shook her head. “I haven’t got a goddamn comment,” she said.
Peter Reilly came down the steps, flanked by a sheriff and two deputies, with Mickey Madow leading the way. Peter’s hair was streaming in the wind, and he still had that ashen, sick look, his hands thrust into his pockets. Mickey looked bad, too. He was carrying Miss Roraback’s briefcase. It was always heavy, filled with papers and bulging folders. Sometimes she had so much to bring to court that everything wouldn’t fit into the case, and she had to use a tote bag or a satchel. Even a paper bag. Peter’s plaid jacket had been in a paper bag—the jacket John Sochocki had mentioned, the jacket the jurors had
asked about. When the police returned it to Marion Madow, along with the rest of Peter’s and Barbara’s things, the jacket had a red stain in front. Miss Roraback thought either it was wine, or the residue of a lab test the police had done, and twice she had brought the jacket into court, to show the jury the jacket wasn’t missing. But each time she had changed her mind.
All evening, people came by to see Peter, very much as they’d done the night he got out of jail. Marion and Nan put out cold meat loaf, rice, and salad, and made pots of coffee. Marie Dickinson sat at the dinette counter, smoking. “The way I feel tonight reminds me of the weekend they took Peter,” Marie said. “I keep asking myself, ‘What happened?’”
Reporters kept calling up, but nobody was quite sure what Peter should say. Everybody remembered what had happened when he’d talked the day he got out of jail, and with the sentencing now hanging over his head, the fear remained. We called Catherine Roraback to ask her advice. “I think it’s healthy for him to do it himself,” she said. “He could just say, ‘I’m innocent, and I hope someday I’ll be able to prove it.’”
I didn’t take many notes on what Peter said that night, or on what other people said. One reason was that I was in and out of the den, trying to get to the phone. The other reason was that I didn’t feel like taking notes. I remember Peter sitting on the floor in the living room, looking up at Elaine Monty, telling her about the day. “John Bianchi came over to me afterwards and wished me good luck,” Peter said.
I remember Marion’s sister Vicky. She had sometimes been at the Madows’ when Jim Mulhern came by. “He used to tease me and say, ‘Aren’t you afraid to live in New York City?’” Vicky recalled bitterly. “Well, I’ll take my chances with the New York cops any day.”
Late that night, the phone was still busy, and I slipped out and drove over to the Belignis’. The Belignis and the Madows were not nearly as friendly as they’d been, and although Aldo had gone over to the Madows’ after the verdict, Jean, who was more outspoken, had decided to stay home. Jean was the first person I’d met when I first heard about Peter Reilly, and I wanted to see her tonight. We sat in her kitchen for a while, just the two of us.
A Death in Canaan Page 33