A Death in Canaan

by Barthel, Joan;

  “He woke up—one, two, three o’clock in the morning, we sit on the couch,” she said. “He would be upset, shaking and nervous.” After a while, Sandra moved out of the trailer. She and Bobby went to live with her mother, and although Michael came to see her a couple of times, they didn’t live together any more.

  When the police had questioned her on October 7, 1973, Sandra told them that Michael had spent the night with her in the trailer.

  “Did there come a time when you decided to tell somebody what you have said here today?” Roy Daly asked.

  Sandra Ashner said that, more than a year later, she had told the visiting nurse, thus setting off a chain of phone calls that resulted in the County Detective coming to see her, then the police, then Jim Conway. I stared at this young woman, so tough yet scared-looking, wondering where she had found the strength to stand up to the barrage of questions she must have faced. “What she went through for Peter, you can’t imagine,” Jim Conway told me later, but even when I saw her for the first time, on the stand, I had an inkling.

  John Bianchi looked at her scornfully. “So you and Michael Parmalee occupied the same bedroom?”

  “Yes,” Sandra said.

  “And you did, did you not, on September 28, 1973?”

  “He was not there that night,” she said.

  “You didn’t occupy the same bedroom on September 28, 1973?”

  “No, he was not there,” Sandra said. “He left.”

  “You went to bed by yourself?”

  “Yes. When I woke up, he wasn’t there.”

  “Did you wake up by means of an alarm clock?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “No,” she said. “Mr. Scanlon woke us up. He walked by the room and he would say, ‘Get up.’”

  “And when Mr. Scanlon woke you up, Michael Parmalee was not in bed with you at that very moment?”

  “No, he wasn’t,” the witness said.

  “When you went to sleep, it was about what time? Nine-thirty?”

  “I went to bed about quarter to nine. I fell right to sleep. I was on medication, for my foot.”

  “What doctor treated you?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “Dr. White at the Torrington Hospital.”

  “And you were taking …” Mr. Bianchi paused. “What day did you see Dr. White?”

  “Oh my Lord, that was so long ago, I don’t remember,” Sandra Ashner said, and Mr. Bianchi smiled slightly.

  “But you remembered in 1973 that Michael Parmalee left the trailer that night and didn’t come back until the next morning and didn’t sleep with you. You remember that pretty well, don’t you?”

  Sandra Ashner looked straight at the prosecutor.

  “This is important,” she said. “My foot wasn’t.”

  Mr. Bianchi paused again.

  “In October of 1973, you told the Connecticut State Police, ‘We stayed in the trailer all night,’ didn’t you?”

  “I said that because I didn’t want to get involved,” Sandra Ashner said. “I had a child.”

  “You didn’t tell the truth in the statement that you made on October 7, 1973,” Mr. Bianchi said, “and today, you are telling us the truth?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Judge Speziale had turned to watch the witness as she spoke. I thought, as I watched him watching her, that he must be looking down on her, this man who preferred his women on a pedestal, and tipped his hat to them with a shy flourish on the street. But, as had happened to me before in this case, I was wrong.

  Paul Beligni spoke even more confidently than before, a college student now. He said that in early 1973, an Army investigator named Greg Harrop had visited him in East Canaan. They had sat at the kitchen table, the table I knew so well. Jean sat at the table with them.

  “Did you tell Mr. Harrop about a telephone conversation you had with Michael Parmalee?” Roy Daly asked.

  “Yes,” Paul said. “I told him that Michael Parmalee had called me and asked me to lie for him about the fact that I knew he was a homosexual so he could get out of the Army.”

  “Did you know whether Michael Parmalee had called anyone else and asked anyone else to lie?” Mr. Daly asked.

  “Yes,” Paul said.

  “And who was that person?”

  “Objection, your honor,” Mr. Bianchi said quickly, but Paul answered anyway.

  “Peter Reilly,” he said.

  Mr. Daly looked grave. “Did you, in fact, ever have a homosexual relationship with Michael Parmalee?” he asked Paul.

  “No, and not with anybody else,” Paul said firmly.

  Mr. Bianchi moved that the answer be stricken. “It was unresponsive,” he complained. But the judge glanced at Paul. “In fairness to the young man,” the judge said quietly, “I am going to let it stand.”

  Mr. Daly had another question. “After the visit by Mr. Harrop to the area, did you have occasion to observe the relationship between Barbara Gibbons and Michael Parmalee?”

  “Many times,” Paul said. “I observed Barbara Gibbons bad-mouthing Michael Parmalee about what he had said about Peter and I, calling him names and so forth. ‘Hey queer, how is things in fairyville?’ and so forth.”

  “And did Michael Parmalee react to Miss Gibbons’s observations?” Mr. Daly asked. “What kind of a reaction did you observe?”

  “Not too good a one,” Paul said.

  When the Army investigator came to see Peter, he didn’t sit in Barbara’s kitchen. The three of them—Barbara, Peter, and the investigator—stood at the edge of the road, by the Army car, as Peter answered the investigator’s questions.

  “I told him that I was not a homosexual,” Peter said, now on the stand, “that I had never had any homosexual activities with Michael Parmalee, that Michael Parmalee had called me from the base and asked me to say that I knew that he was a homosexual.”

  “Did you, in fact, ever have a homosexual relationship with Michael Parmalee?” Mr. Daly asked.

  “No, I didn’t,” Peter said.

  “After that visit, did you observe your mother’s action whenever she saw Michael Parmalee?… Did she taunt him?”

  “Yes,” Peter said.

  “Was Michael Parmalee ever again allowed into your mother’s house?” Mr. Daly asked.

  “No,” Peter said.

  “Was Timothy Parmalee ever again allowed into that house?”

  “No,” Peter said.

  “After that interview, did you see Timothy Parmalee in front of your mother’s house?”

  “Yes,” Peter said. “Three or four weeks before the murder … outside the house, looking in the window.” He told of an incident about a year and a half earlier than that. Michael Parmalee had been visiting Peter, and Peter accused Michael of stealing money from Barbara. “I confronted him with, ‘Did you take money from my mother?’ And he told me yes, he had. And he gave the money back to her.”

  Mr. Bianchi stared at Peter. “You palled around with the Parmalee boys?”

  “At one time, yes,” Peter said.

  “And it’s true, is it not, that you agreed with Michael Parmalee that you would lie on his behalf?”

  “Yes I did,” Peter said. “Because he wanted to get out of the Army so desperately.”

  “And it was because you were his friend that you were willing to lie for him, is that not so?”

  “Yes,” Peter said.

  Michael Parmalee had long, straight hair parted in the middle, and a hollow-eyed look. He told Roy Daly he had been in the Army for about five weeks before he went AWOL, and he was eventually discharged.

  “What was the basis of your discharge?” Mr. Daly asked.

  “AWOL,” Michael said.

  “Did you attempt to get out for any other reason?”

  “Yes,” Michael said. “Grounds of being homosexual.”

  “Did you tell anybody connected with the Army with whom you had a homosexual relationship?”

  “Yes,” Michael replied. “Peter Reilly and Paul Beligni.”

  “In c
onnection with your attempts to get out as a homosexual, did you speak with Peter Reilly?”

  “Yes, over the phone.”

  “And did you ask him to do something?”

  “Asked him to lie for me.”

  Then Mr. Bianchi had a question.

  “Did Reilly and Beligni agree to lie for you?”

  “Yes,” Michael said.

  Later in the hearing, Mr. Bianchi called Michael Parmalee as his own witness. Michael said that he and Sandra Ashner had indeed gone to visit his mother’s house that day, but he said they went “in the morning hours, around nine, nine-thirty.” He said his sister Marie drove them back to the trailer on her way to work.

  “What is your testimony as to the time that you went into the trailer to spend the night?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “Believe it was five-thirty,” Michael said.

  “What time did you retire?”

  “Just about nine o’clock.”

  “And what time did you get up?”

  “About seven, quarter after.”

  “And at any time from approximately nine o’clock until around seven on the morning of September 29, 1973, did you leave that trailer?”

  “I did not,” Michael Parmalee said.

  Mr. Daly showed Michael a statement he’d given to the police on April 17, 1975, in which he said he went to bed at 9:30 that night, September 28, and woke up the next morning around 8:30. Michael Parmalee agreed that it was his signature on the statement. It was signed by Jim Mulhern, too.

  “When you woke up, who was in the bedroom?” Mr. Daly asked.

  “Myself,” Michael said.

  “Alone, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did anybody awaken you?”

  “I believe Sandra did.”

  “Did you ever tell the police that ‘No one awakened me, I just woke up?’”

  “Yes, I did,” Michael said.

  “Was that on April 17, 1975?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you telling the truth when you spoke to the police?”

  “Yes,” Michael said. “To the best of my recollection.”

  But this was Mr. Bianchi’s witness, so he had the last question.

  “Mr. Parmalee, no matter what your testimony is about the time you went to bed on September 28, 1973, and the time you got up in the morning of September 29, 1973, did you leave the trailer?”

  “No I did not,” Michael said.

  Mr. Roberts said in all his experience, he’d never known anything like this hearing. It lasted five weeks, with more than three dozen witnesses, and thus was more like a trial than many actual trials. Like the original trial, it had its lighter moments, as when Thomas McAloon took the stand. He was the brother of John McAloon, who had testified that Peter told him he’d killed his mother and thrown away his bloody clothes. Thomas McAloon had come down from Warwick, Rhode Island, to testify about his brother John’s honesty. The question, in the language of the law, was whether a person’s “reputation for truth and veracity was on a par with mankind in general.” Thomas McAloon said his brother’s reputation wasn’t on that level. Then he got entangled in cross-examination, and finally he shook his head stubbornly. “I was asked to tell the truth,” Thomas McAloon said. “The truth is, he’s a liar, and that’s the truth.”

  The hearing was like Peter’s trial in other ways, not only in its conflicting statements but in all its ambiguities and contradictions, its half-answered questions and fragmented answers. A bank teller testified that she had cashed a check for Barbara on the day she died, and the canceled check was introduced as evidence. Ruth Madow, Murray and Dot’s daughter, testified that she’d seen Tim Parmalee several days after the murder with a large amount of money. Tim had testified that he had taken the money from his uncle. His uncle was sick during the hearing and couldn’t testify.

  Margaret Parmalee, the boys’ mother, who had lived in the house on Route 63 for forty years, testified that the two windows in Tim’s bedroom couldn’t be opened because there was “paneling over the windows.” Trooper Dean Hammond, who had examined the room, said there wasn’t any paneling. He said they couldn’t be opened from the inside, though, because the window sash had been painted, and the windows were stuck shut. Trooper Hammond had checked Tim’s room on October 9, 1973, more than a week after Peter Reilly had been arrested and arraigned on a charge of murdering his mother.

  Sherwood Scanlon, the hired man, said he got up at 4 A.M. to do the morning farm chores. Life in the trailer may have been casual, but it wasn’t easy. Around 7 A.M., he said, he returned to the trailer and woke everybody up.

  “Will you tell his honor where you found Michael Parmalee when you woke him at seven or a little after on September 29, 1973?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

  “In bed,” Mr. Scanlon said.

  “And was he in bed alone, or was somebody in bed with him?”

  “He wasn’t alone,” Mr. Scanlon said.

  “Who was in bed with him?”

  “Sandy Ashner.”

  Jackie Watson, who lived with Scanlon, testified that she’d been cooking breakfast for everybody, bacon and eggs, around 7.

  “Did you see Michael Parmalee come out of the bedroom that morning?” Mr. Bianchi asked her.

  “Yes,” she said, and Mr. Bianchi looked pleased.

  But then Roy Daly, in turn, asked the witness to draw a sketch of the trailer. She did, and he pointed to a rear door.

  “Could someone enter through that outside door,” he asked, “and proceed down the hallway, and you would not be able to see them from the stove area?”

  “Not from the stove area,” she agreed.

  On February 13, 1976, Mr. Bianchi first called Michael Parmalee, then Timothy Parmalee, to the witness stand. He asked them four of the questions they’d been asked on the polygraph test they’d taken voluntarily at the Madows’s on February 8, 1975.

  “Did you ever have sexual relations with Barbara Gibbons?”

  “Do you know for sure who killed Barbara Gibbons?”

  “Did you have anything to do with the death of Barbara Gibbons?”

  “Are you withholding any information concerning the death of Barbara Gibbons?”

  Both Michael Parmalee and Timothy Parmalee testified that he’d answered no to each question at the time the test was given. Now, a year later, each of them answered no to each question again.

  But this was not a criminal trial. The State of Connecticut was prosecuting no one. Judge Speziale had underlined the point when Timothy took the stand, after his fingerprint had been identified. “You have the right not to answer any questions, which you feel may incriminate you,” he said, and he added: “This is a witness, and not an accused.” Roy Daly acknowledged it. At one point, Mr. Beach, the prosecutor’s assistant, motioned toward Mr. Daly. “He attempts to cast the wrath of God upon an entire family …” Mr. Beach said, “to say ‘Well, one of the brothers did it.’”

  Mr. Daly made a small bow toward the bench with a kind of injured elegance. “My only burden here,” he said, “is to persuade the Court that if one juror heard what has been heard here, one juror would have a reasonable doubt.”

  Not all the people who were subpoenaed got around to testifying. One of Barbara’s caseworkers, who came to the hearings with her own attorney, didn’t testify, and neither did Wayne Collier. Wayne had told Jim Conway he had been drinking beer with Tim Parmalee and others the night Barbara died, and that his mother had dropped him off and picked him up later.

  But the most tantalizing potential witness was John Bianchi. Roy Daly tried to make the prosecutor take the witness stand, but he was overruled. “There is no case of reasonable necessity here,” Judge Speziale said, looking irritated, and calling it “a highly unorthodox and objectionable procedure.” Mr. Daly then read into the record a list of questions he wanted to ask the prosecutor, including whether the state police had gone to Tim Parmalee, after the fingerprint was matched, and told him not to worry; whether Jim Co
nway had been harassed and threatened and told to mind his own business; and whether the state police had questioned Auntie B. for several hours at the Canaan barracks, not long after Barbara died, and had later threatened her with criminal prosecution if she came to Peter’s aid. In the language of the law, Mr. Daly said he based these questions “upon information and belief.”

  Arthur Miller had brought two doctors into the case, both of them from New York. Their testimony came several days apart, but what they had to say seemed part of a piece. One of them talked about Barbara, the other about Peter. These were the threads that were woven together again, near the end, just as at the beginning they had been ripped apart. This was what it was all about and had always been about. Barbara and Peter. Peter and Barbara.

  Dr. Herbert Spiegel spelled out his name. “S,” he began. “P, as in Peter …”

  Dr. Spiegel was a psychiatrist, on the teaching staff at Columbia University in New York, and had a private practice. Roy Daly had heard of the doctor’s work in hypnosis and discussed it with Arthur Miller, who discussed it with another doctor he knew. Then Arthur Miller called Dr. Spiegel. “If Peter has amnesia, can you get it out under hypnosis?” Arthur Miller asked, and the doctor said yes, he could.

  On January 6, 1976, Roy Daly and Arthur Miller drove Peter down to Dr. Spiegel’s office in New York. The doctor tested Peter using a method called the Hypnotic Induction Profile, which he himself had developed over the past eight years. The test had just been recognized in the scientific literature in early 1975 and had not been available at the time of Peter Reilly’s trial.

  When Dr. Spiegel tested Peter, he found Peter had “a break in his concentration” and couldn’t be hypnotized. Still, he told Peter that he was in a trance and that he should keep his eyes closed. Dr. Spiegel told Peter to imagine a movie screen and then describe what was happening on it. Peter accounted for every fifteen-second interval, from the time he walked into the little house. There was no amnesia, no lapse of memory, no “gray area.”

  Now, on the witness stand, Dr. Spiegel prepared to testify about Peter’s personality.

  Mr. Bianchi objected furiously. He said he wasn’t sure what the definition of a personality was, and anyway, it was absolutely immaterial.