A Death in Canaan

by Barthel, Joan;

  I met Roy Daly soon afterward, at a meeting in his office. Aldo Beligni was there, and Father Paul, with Mickey, Murray, and Peter, and we talked all morning about the case. Mr. Daly said he would proceed on two levels—on a civil suit to appeal the verdict, step by step through the higher courts and, simultaneously, he would try to get a new trial.

  It was a slim hope, the requirements for a new trial being so strict. There had to be “newly discovered evidence,” evidence that would be judged admissible at a new trial and would be likely to produce a different result. New trials, therefore, were virtually unknown, and there was no compelling reason to think Peter Reilly would get one. We could only hope, and hope had never been nearly enough.

  Still, Roy Daly said he would get going on it. There was no transcript of the long trial for him to work from yet. Mr. Roberts had to do that in his spare time, when he wasn’t working in the courtroom, and it would be months before a transcript was ready. So I gave Roy Daly a copy of my notes to work with, in the meantime. I had taken the notes in shorthand, including the polygraph tapes, then typed them. Altogether, there were 182 single-spaced typed pages. They were not as official, nor as complete, as Mr. Roberts’s pages, but I liked to think they were as interesting to read. The official version didn’t mention rotting leaves.

  Peter went back to school in the fall. His senior schedule was about the same as it had been in September 1973, except that in Contemporary Problems he was excused from the “Crime in Society” segment and assigned to examine the problems of the American Indian.

  Another winter set in, and another character joined the ever-changing cast. It was a private detective, James Conway, who had followed the case in the papers throughout the trial. Once he had even written to Catherine Roraback. “A case isn’t won in court,” Conway said. “You need an investigator.” He lived some distance away, near Hartford, yet he volunteered to come over to Canaan and help out. But Catherine Roraback was suspicious of the stranger’s offer. She felt that many private detectives in Connecticut worked closely with the state police, too closely for comfort. “Why should we leak what little information we have to the prosecution?” she asked herself, and because she didn’t have an answer to that question, she didn’t answer the letter.

  As it turned out, Jim Conway wasn’t connected with the Connecticut police, although he had once been a policeman in New York City, walking a beat. After that, he’d been a bail bondsman for ten years, so he knew his way around the courts. He was a short, husky man with a fringe of short, white hair surrounding a bald spot, and a paunch surrounding his middle. His socks were often unravelling and falling down around his ankles. “I cultivate the hayseed look,” he told Mickey Madow, the first time they met. It was not the way you would expect a detective to look, which is the way Jim Conway wanted it.

  After the trial, when Roy Daly took the case, Jim Conway tried again. This time he didn’t write a letter; he drove down to Fairfield, without even calling first, and introduced himself. The two men talked a long time, then Jim Conway entered the case. At first he worked on it part-time, on Saturdays and Sundays, whenever he was able to drive over to Canaan and poke around. But the more he saw and heard, the more he asked and listened, the more enmeshed he became, the more the case turned into a crusade. He even barreled up Canaan Mountain in a snowmobile one day, following the advice of a dowser who had poked around the area with a divining rod and told Jim about bloody clues that might be on the mountain. Another day, Conway tried to squeeze into the crawl space under the church near Barbara’s house, but he didn’t fit.

  He asked questions. He went to some orthopedists and a pathologist he knew and asked them about the method of the killing; they thought Barbara might have been killed outside the house, perhaps hit by a car. Not long after Christmas, Jim Conway talked at a committee meeting. He said he did not think the knife introduced at the trial, Exhibit X, was the murder weapon. He thought a very sharp instrument had been used, a razor type, such as a sheetrock knife. As for the vaginal injuries, Jim Conway thought Barbara’s body had been penetrated with an empty whiskey bottle.

  Arthur Miller had stayed in close touch with Peter and the Madows, and he was a regular visitor in Canaan. The boys were accustomed to having him at the table now. That first night he’d come, not long after Peter was sentenced, they’d felt shy. Nan served fried chicken, and the boys weren’t sure whether, with Arthur Miller there, they should pick it up with their hands. Then Arthur Miller picked up a piece of chicken, and the boys grinned. “O-kay,” Geoffrey said, and everybody picked up a piece of chicken, too.

  Jim Conway and Arthur Miller hit it off right away. Miller liked the earthiness of the ex-flatfoot, and they spent a lot of time in the low-ceilinged living room of Miller’s elegant old farmhouse, trying to figure it out.

  They decided to give Peter another lie detector test; they thought he might have seen someone in the house and not said so because he was afraid. One Saturday a detective from Hartford, a friend of Conway’s, came to East Canaan and gave Peter another polygraph test, right there in the Madows’ living room. Timothy and Michael Parmalee were invited over to take the test. They came willingly, and Mickey Madow reported at the next committee meeting that all three boys had passed.

  A couple of weeks after the test, Dr. Milton Helpern, the former Chief Medical Examiner for New York City, came into the case, at the request of Arthur Miller. Dr. Helpern was an expert on forensic pathology, the medical specialty that reconstructs how deaths may have occurred. Dr. Helpern came to Litchfield and looked at the slides and pictures.

  Although Dr. Helpern didn’t send anybody a bill, money was still a problem for the committee. The year’s bond interest pledged at the Styrons was running out, and Mr. Roberts still hadn’t been paid in full for the transcript of the trial. Many people, including me, were surprised that a defendant had to pay for the transcript of his own trial, but unless he had a public defender, he did. For months we had been making calls, and Marion and Bea Keith were writing letters to the IRS, trying to incorporate the committee as a tax-exempt group, the Legal Defense Fund of Litchfield County. In the long run, it would help anyone who needed legal aid and couldn’t pay. In the short run, it would help Peter, because he was the first person who’d applied. But becoming a tax-exempt group was a discouraging process, as it was no doubt intended to be. I had spent days on a round of frustrating phone calls to the IRS office in Boston, but all I got sounded like a bureaucratic runaround. Later in the year, the incorporation was approved, but when Mickey talked with a reporter from the Berkshire Eagle, in late February, he sounded dejected. “We’re at a low ebb,” Mickey said.

  Roy Daly had not yet been allowed to hear interrogation tapes, but Judge Speziale intervened, and finally Daly and Bob Hartwell heard them at the courthouse. After he heard the tapes, Roy Daly filed a motion asking that a panel of experts be appointed to try to interpret the tape that had been made by Peter and Lieutenant Shay at Canaan barracks early Saturday morning, about ten hours after Barbara died. That was the tape that had not been played at the trial, because it was too garbled. Roy Daly said somebody should try to ungarble the tapes “in the interest of justice,” but nobody ever did.

  On the thirty-first of March, the defense filed a motion, listing other things it wanted: lab reports on Barbara’s clothes, any liquor bottles found at the scene, the unidentified fingerprint, and Barbara’s eyeglasses. The next day, Mr. Daly filed another motion, asking for a new trial. He claimed new evidence—and he didn’t even know, then, about Sandra Ashner. The phone calls had not yet begun, that remarkable chain of calls that pointed to a possible new suspect.

  On a balmy summer night in June, Peter Reilly graduated from Housatonic Valley Regional High School. The ceremony was held outdoors, on the broad lawn. Gloria Schaffer, Connecticut’s Secretary of State, petite and pretty, talked about the graduates “entering the world of adults,” and she quoted Art Buchwald. “We, the older generation, have given you a perfect
world, and we don’t want you to mess it up.” Diplomas were given in alphabetical order, so Ricky Beligni was way up front, Peter pretty far in the back, and John Sochocki six places behind Peter. John still had a scared look about him, as though he had not got over what had happened to him since his interrogation the night Barbara died.

  Peter was in the paper the next day, with a picture and a headline: CONVICTED KILLER RECEIVES DIPLOMA. John Sochocki was in the paper again two days after that, when he drowned. John had gone to the Falls Village swimming pond Monday night with a group of friends. He couldn’t swim, but he dived into eight feet of water, in the dark. Father Paul said the Requiem Mass for him on Thursday morning.

  Elizabeth Mansfield died that same week, after a long illness. She had found Barbara’s wallet. The funerals were held one hour apart and the burials were in the same cemetery, St. Joseph’s.

  By the time hearings on a new trial began, Peter Reilly had become a full-fledged celebrity.

  Roger Cohn had noticed it beginning, not long after the verdict, even before the sentencing. One Saturday night in early May, Roger went to a dance in Cornwall, organized to benefit the Reilly Fund.

  At the dance Roger saw how, when Peter walked in, people stood and applauded. There were whistles and cheers, Roger said, and something about it bothered him. It was the first sign of a celebrity aura beginning to swirl around Peter Reilly. At first it was thin and wispy, like the first threads of morning mist around Canaan Mountain. Eventually it would nearly envelop him.

  Some of the attention was to be expected. In this rolling green corner of Connecticut, where the State Police Reports in the Journal tended to involve loose cows on Route 7, or complaints of deer-jacking, an accused killer was something to see. And the attention accelerated when well-known people were attracted to the cause. But a writer in the Register had complained about “the Peter Reilly cult” much earlier, just after the sentencing. It was a familiar American perspective: the victim as hero.

  In December 1975, The New York Times ran two long articles on Peter Reilly. The stories began on the front page and continued inside, for several thousand words. Arthur Miller had gone to the Times for lunch that fall and had asked that John Corry write about the case. He and John Corry had gone to a Manhattan police precinct to visit some homicide detectives Corry knew and told them about the Reilly case. At first the New York policemen were inclined to be skeptical, inclined to believe their fellow policemen, but when they read the polygraph transcript, they changed their minds and said they’d help in any way they could. Later, John Corry went to Canaan, and Nan set another place at the table, as she had been doing for visitors for two years.

  CBS came to Canaan to film Peter playing with his band for a segment on “Sixty Minutes.” Three newspapers sent photographers to take pictures of the people taking pictures. “Cameras Whirr with Reilly in Star Role,” said a headline.

  Newsweek came, and Time. Good Housekeeping offered $300 for an interview with the committee. Peter was a property and everybody wanted a piece. Another writer began talking about a movie deal; Peter was told he would get rich.

  “I think Peter’s caught in a spider web,” Jean Beligni said. It was a web we all had spun together, though, including Peter. For two years he had been a fixture—often the lead item—on the local six o’clock news, and sometimes again at eleven. Nanny would wring her hands in annoyance and dismay as her dinner cooled on the stove. “I’d kind of still like to think of myself as an unknown kid from northwestern Connecticut,” he said, on a day in early spring, standing in the Madows’ driveway. But the quote went out over the UPI wire, with a UPI picture of Peter; microphones from Channel 3 and Channel 8 draped around his neck.

  Always—or almost always—people’s intentions had been to help Peter. But somehow, in the helping, Peter acquired a dimension that exceeded the facts, perhaps even the implications, of the tragedy. When the Torrington Register printed “The Ballad of Peter Reilly,” by George Cyr, Peter balanced on the brink of legend. And what better place could there be for a legend than a town called Canaan?

  15

  It was like the second act of a play. There had been an unusually long intermission, nearly two years, but now the curtain was going up again.

  Once more the Litchfield green was covered with snow, and new flakes drifted heavily down past the tall schoolroom windows. Inside, there were some changes. At the threshold of the courtroom, a sheriff stood guard by a metal detector that had been there ever since Judge Speziale got a death threat. It wasn’t connected with the Reilly case, but they had to take precautions. The call had come late at night. Mary Speziale had answered. “We’re going to blow your husband’s goddamn head off!” the caller had said, and hung up. A few minutes later, the phone rang again. It was the same voice. “And we’re going to do it tonight!”

  In the press row, Roger and George and Greg and Farn were replaced by other new young faces. Joe O’Brien was back, an entrenched courtroom veteran, and Charles Kochakian was back too.

  Beyond the bar rail, most of the principal players were onstage again. Mr. Roberts set up his stenotype machine in the same efficient way. Judge Speziale, presiding, still looked studious, and when a courtroom artist sketched the judge, he caught the light from the desk lamp glinting on his steel-rimmed glasses, and my memories came rushing back.

  John Bianchi looked a little more rumpled, a little less sleek, than he had at the first trial. There was more pressure on him now; in this suit for a new trial, Peter Reilly was the plaintiff, and John Bianchi referred to himself, and to the state, as “the defendant.” But he was still the orator; he often referred to Roy Daly as “my brother” or “Brother Daly.” Along with the prosecution assistant, Robert Beach, there was another attorney at Mr. Bianchi’s table. He was Joseph Gallicchio, whose suits were beautifully tailored; his teeth very white. His voice came out dark and velvety, as though it were filtered through his sideburns.

  Roy Daly, of course, was the major replacement in the cast. But his assistant, Bob Hartwell, had the same Dickensian appearance as Peter Herbst—moustache and glasses, and his hair had a rounded, old-fashioned look, as though it might have been cut around a bowl.

  Even some of the witnesses were familiar, especially in the first part of the hearing. Roy Daly was basing his petition for a new trial on three major issues: a new time sequence; his charge that the state had withheld evidence that might have cleared Peter; and new evidence.

  Time was truly of the essence. In the trial, Mr. Daly said the prosecution had fixed the time of Peter Reilly’s arrival home at 9:30 to 9:40. Barbara Fenn, the night supervisor at Sharon. Hospital, had testified that Peter’s call came through at 9:40, and Marion Madow had said she got the call from Peter between 9:40 and 9:50.

  Mr. Daly now asserted that Peter hadn’t arrived home until 9:50 or a bit later, and he called witnesses to prove it.

  Father Paul and the Reverend Dakers, who had seen Peter leave the Teen Center, testified that they’d reached Johnny’s Restaurant, a few minutes away from the church, at 9:50 P.M. John Sochocki’s aunt, Judy MacNeil, testified that John, whom Peter drove home that night, had arrived at exactly 9:45. She remembered the time because she hadn’t expected him until eleven or so, and she was surprised to see him back so early. She said she had told the police this, and they had come back later to ask whether her clock agreed with the noonday siren in Canaan. She said it did.

  Jim Mulhern testified that he’d timed the drive from John Sochocki’s house, not far from the church, out to Peter’s house. He said it had taken five minutes and twenty-nine seconds. After he testified, Jim Mulhern glanced at Peter. The policeman’s sideburns were longer now; he wore a yellow shirt, a rust-colored tie, and a plaid jacket.

  Joanne Mulhern was back, as fresh and pretty as ever, to say she’d left the Teen Center at 9:45. She said when she got home, she had called Sharon Hospital to talk to a friend, and the switchboard operator told her she was very busy because an emergen
cy call was coming in from the Barbara Gibbons place. Mrs. Mulhern said it was 9:51 or 9:52 P.M.

  The switchboard operator, Elizabeth Swart, said she remembered Joanne Mulhern calling that night, and she remembered, too, that Peter had called.

  Nurse Barbara Fenn had taken that emergency room call. She had been the first prosecution witness at Peter’s trial, and although she had changed jobs since then her testimony had not changed. She said she still remembered the call coming in at approximately 9:40, and she stared hard at Mr. Daly as she said it.

  He reminded her that the state police got the call at 9:58.

  “I ask you: Did you wait eighteen minutes to call the police, from nine forty to nine fifty-eight?” Mr. Daly asked.

  “I can’t recall,” Mrs. Fenn replied.

  Mr. Daly produced an emergency room log sheet that the executive director of Sharon Hospital had brought in, along with a radio log showing ambulance calls.

  “I ask you again: Did you wait eighteen minutes to notify the police?” Mr. Daly asked.

  John Bianchi objected.

  “I claim the question,” Mr. Daly said sharply, “on the basis that her testimony in the earlier trial was false.” The courtroom was suddenly very quiet, the harsh word false vibrating in the air. He turned back to the witness. “Do you know of any instances where you’ve waited eighteen minutes in an emergency situation to notify the state police?” he asked. “Could you have received the call later than nine forty?” Barbara Fenn, in a smaller voice now, said she could have.

  At the original trial, Marion Madow had described the scene from the movie Kelley’s Heroes, which she’d been watching when Peter called. Marion had estimated the time 9:40 to 9:50 P.M. Now, Roy Daly called Michael Marden, director of prime-time feature films for CBS Television in New York. Mr. Marden testified that the scene Marion described, where the last soldier was boarding a tank to cross the river, had been transmitted by the network to its affiliated stations at precisely ten seconds past 9:50 P.M. on the night Barbara died. When Mr. Bianchi cross-examined, Mr. Marden said that a local station might have omitted that scene, or shown it later, but it could not possibly have shown it earlier.