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Be it a premeditated plan on his part or not, Billy Sullivan launched a campaign as pretrial hearings got under way in May that seemed to reinforce his argument that he was insane. As the first hearing was set to begin, Billy’s mental capacity to take part in his upcoming trial became a hot-button issue. The hearing had been scheduled for mid-May, but had to be postponed due to a surprise (second) hearing on Billy’s mental competence to stand trial. Billy’s lawyers were convinced their client was mentally incapable of undergoing such a rigorous process, one in which his life, essentially, hung in the balance. Trial judge Gary Hicks became rather impatient as Billy seemed to unnecessarily delay proceedings.
It had all begun in late 2004. Billy’s attorneys first raised the issue of whether Billy understood what was happening to him and was sane enough to participate in his own defense. Of course, without his input, Billy’s lawyers couldn’t present a case. Although Billy could choose not to sit in court during his trial and basically leave the courtroom whenever he needed, he had to participate in building his case. In theory, without an effort on Billy’s part, it was nearly impossible for his lawyers to prepare.
In November 2004, after a brief hearing on the matter, in which Billy’s lawyers failed to explain the actual reason that brought about their concern, Judge Hicks listened as they explained how their client wasn’t taking his prescribed antipsychotic medication regularly. There was also an argument about the medication itself. According to Billy’s lawyers, it wasn’t the same prescription Billy had been taking before he was incarcerated. Then, at some point during the hearing, Paul Garrity asked that Billy be transferred to a different jail.
“Defendants,” Will Delker argued, “do not get to choose where they will be incarcerated.”
With jury selection slated to begin on June 7, 2005, as the first hearing got under way on Wednesday, June 1, Monteith and Garrity presented witnesses to further support Billy’s continued claim of incompetence, while Billy himself, although he wasn’t slated to testify, did his best to convince the court that his mind was somewhere else.
Dr. Albert Drukteinis, the state’s psychiatrist, first explained that Billy was, in fact, “pretty defensive and not willing to suddenly give a confession” on the night of the murder, and “denied any involvement in the crime…only to later begin to reveal his involvement.”
Indeed, Billy first told detectives he had no idea what had happened to Jeanne, but then admitted killing her in a fit of rage. Most criminals will lie until they are faced with unmitigated evidence proving their guilt—and then cop to the crime.
In his professional opinion, Drukteinis added, if Billy was mentally indisposed and had not known the difference between right and wrong, there was no way he could have spoken with detectives in the manner he did—that by clinical definition alone, Billy’s behavior on the night of August 6, 2003, in and of itself, proved he knew exactly what he was doing, what he was saying and, more important, what he was leaving out of the conversation with police.
Billy must have sensed the tide shifting away from his argument, because as Drukteinis spoke, Billy became restless and disturbed, whispering things in Richard Monteith’s ear, while writing words on a notepad in front of him.
Focused on his witness, Will Delker had his back to Billy and couldn’t tell what was going on.
According to Monteith, Billy leaned over at one point and threatened to “stab” the doctor if he continued testifying.
A while later, as Will Delker questioned Billy’s expert, Dr. Richard Barnum, Monteith noticed Billy wrote “strike two” on a piece of paper. Moments after that, Billy wrote something to the effect of his wanting to again “stab” someone—but this time it was Will Delker.
When Monteith noticed what his client had written, he looked alarmed and frightened. Billy then pushed some papers off the table, which created somewhat of a minor commotion.
Monteith then interrupted Will Delker’s cross-examination of Dr. Barnum and asked to approach the bench.
Good lawyers protect their clients at all costs. They stand beside them, regardless of what they are accused of, what the evidence proves or perhaps even how they feel personally about the criminal and/or the nature of the crimes he or she committed. Still, there is a line most defense attorneys will not cross, one of which Billy’s lawyer Richard Monteith knew he had to expose to the court.
During the early-morning hours of June 2, Richard Monteith took the stand and spoke about several death threats Billy had made against Will Delker and the state’s witness Dr. Albert Drukteinis.
When Monteith finished, Delker stood. He was unhindered by Billy’s obvious acting out to bolster his insanity plea. So he argued that the threat—although taken seriously—was a further ploy on Billy’s part to convince the court he was too unbalanced to continue. It was just an act. Typical Billy. If he couldn’t get his way, he’d see to it that the process was disrupted. But the truth of the matter was, Delker argued, that Billy Sullivan knew exactly what he was doing.
Judge Hicks denied Billy’s claim of incompetence, stating, “The state, in essence, has met its burden of proof that Mr. Sullivan is competent by a preponderance of the evidence. The court, accordingly, finds that he is competent to stand trial, and these proceedings will continue.”
Billy might have been able to control a few teenage girls, but he was dealing with a court of law now. It was clear he wasn’t running the show any longer.
After issuing his ruling, Judge Hicks ordered “additional security” for Will Delker and Dr. Drukteinis, before ordering the defense and state to begin presenting witnesses concerning trial evidence. Part of Billy’s pretrial argument included the notion that “the stress of being questioned by police” so quickly after the crime “rendered” him “incapable of making a voluntary decision” to waive his constitutional right to remain silent and request an attorney. Beyond that, Garrity and Monteith fought against the videotaped confession Billy agreed to give on the night of the murder. They claimed it should be thrown out on the same grounds, and the fingerprint evidence police collected shouldn’t be allowed into trial because police searched Jeanne’s house without a warrant.
Some major issues were on the docket.
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Nicole Kasinskas celebrated her eighteenth birthday behind bars on Monday morning, June 6, 2005. On that day, there had to be a subtle voice inside her head saying, “If I had only waited.” By New Hampshire law, Nicole was now an adult. She could have left her house in Billy’s arms and never looked back—with or without her mother’s consent. But instead, Nicole sat in prison waiting to testify against her former lover, anticipating what sentence the court was going to give her. The judge had made a ruling that Nicole, although she had pleaded guilty and cut a deal with the state, was not going to be sentenced until Billy’s trial was completed. All she could do was sit, wait and prepare for the day she faced Billy once again.
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The day dawned cool in Nashua, as temperatures in the 60s throughout the previous night had dropped to between 51 and 55 degrees by sunrise. A cold front in Canada had moved in somewhere around 3:00 A.M. and blanketed the region with an autumnlike chill that was to continue sending mercury levels downward as the day progressed. Rain was forecast, and the gloomy skies, so innately depressing, cast a shade of gray over everything, setting the tone for what was to take place inside Hillsborough County Superior Court throughout the next few months.
Jury selection was under way, as were discussions and arguments over allowing certain pieces of evidence into trial. The buzz around town was that justice for Jeanne was on the horizon.
Finally, Chris McGowan thought as he prepared himself emotionally for the trial.
When Chris took the stand as the second day of pretrial hearings started, he recounted for the judge what he found on the evening of August 6, 2003, after arriving at Jeanne’s, and seeing her on the kitchen floor in, he said, “a puddle of blood.”
It was the first time the community had heard of the horror inside Jeanne’s modest home. Now everyone had an image. Jeanne was no longer an accomplished community member; she was the victim of a brutal murder.
Chris had gained about forty pounds since Jeanne’s death. He’d had a tough time socializing. Didn’t leave the house much. Had little use for Nicole. And although it had been two years since his fiancée’s death, therapy and what-ifs now took up much of his mind space. He had dated—a night out with a friend of a friend, drinks with friends trying to set him up—but nobody could match the beauty and serenity he had found in Jeanne Dominico.
“She was one in a million,” he said later, “and I don’t care how clichéd that sounds. That was Jeanne. There will never be another woman in my life like Jeanne.”
There were days when Chris drove around town listening to the same music he and Jeanne had enjoyed together. When he felt he needed to talk to Jeanne or get close to her, he made the two-hour trip to her grave in Massachusetts and ate a picnic lunch by her gravestone, or sat and thought about what little time they’d had together.
Jeanne’s death had deflated Chris’s desire to move on. He couldn’t, even after two years, picture himself with another woman. Maybe the trial could put some closure on it all?
Then again, maybe not.
After Chris finished testifying, NPD officer Kurt Gautier explained how he had responded to the 911 call and met Chris at the front door, shortly before entering the house and determining Jeanne was dead. It was standard police testimony: direct, procedural, symbolic of a police report.
Ending the day, testimony more pertinent to the matter of allowing fingerprint evidence and Billy’s confession into the trial resumed. Chris McGowan’s and Kurt Gautier’s testimony had set the stage: both men put a face on the name, described the murder scene in graphic detail and allowed the judge to gain an understanding of how vicious the attack on Jeanne had been.
Will Delker and Kirsten Wilson called Stephen Ostrowski, the state’s fingerprint expert, who hailed from the New Hampshire State Police Forensic Lab. For the most part, Ostrowski testified that although no scientific study existed regarding the “error rate in fingerprint identification,” there had been only “twenty-two known mistaken identifications in more than eighty years of fingerprint analysis throughout the world.”
Incredible numbers, considering how many cases had been tried worldwide and how many of those undoubtedly included fingerprint evidence. Fingerprint analysis seemed like flawless science. It didn’t prove a murder suspect guilty, but it could certainly place a suspect at a crime scene.
Ostrowski’s testimony spoke to how rarely fingerprint evidence was taken to task during trials, which made some wonder why Billy’s team was even fighting to get the prints thrown out.
Fundamentally, Monteith and Garrity’s core dispute centered around that exact argument: people assumed fingerprint evidence was never questioned, but that wasn’t the case.
“No two people,” Ostrowski continued, speaking words that most in the room had likely taken for granted, “have ever been found to share the same prints, even genetically identical twins.”
The fingerprints in question—a bloody palm print impression Billy supposedly left on the freezer door in Jeanne’s kitchen, along with a latent print Billy apparently left on the baseball bat used to render Jeanne defenseless—had been identified by the state’s experts as his. Additionally, Billy had admitted hitting Jeanne with the bat and struggling with her. Was there any question whose prints they were?
Garrity and Monteith had every right to question the authenticity of any fingerprint, and promised to bring the house down with the testimony of a man who wrote the book on the history of criminal fingerprint identification, literally. It was a book, in fact, that discussed partly a theory of how the process of analyzing fingerprints as evidence “is far murkier than we have been led to believe.”
Sit back, Billy’s lawyers seemed to promise. Forget what you’ve heard about fingerprint evidence, because the testimony on its way will speak for itself.
Opening the day’s testimony on June 9 was assistant criminology professor at the University of California, Irvine, Simon Cole. Cole had a doctorate in science and technology studies. A bookish-looking man in his mid-thirties, donning black-rimmed glasses and boasting shiny black hair, Cole specialized in the “historical and sociological study of the interaction between science, technology, law and criminal justice.” His best-known book, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification, was awarded the 2003 Rachel Carson Prize for a Work of Social or Political Relevance.
Cole was Billy’s expert—on the stand to float the notion that fingerprint identification wasn’t the infallible scientific method to determine one person from another it had been cracked up to be throughout history. If Billy wanted the one person in the nation who could sit and talk about the reliability of fingerprint evidence until crickets chirped, Cole was that person. The main thesis of his book, however, wasn’t that fingerprint evidence should be ousted from American courtrooms, but that our court system should at least weigh fingerprint evidence against some “margin of error.” Right now, courts rarely did.
It seemed to be a logical point. And as he spoke, Cole backed up his theories with some rather eye-opening comparisons.
“All human faces are unique,” he said at one point, “but we don’t contend from that, that all eyewitness testimony is reliable.” After all, “eyewitnesses have been found to be highly unreliable.”
In other words, ask ten people what they saw and each will likely give a slightly different version of the same event. Cole suggested fingerprint evidence should be scrutinized under the same set of guidelines.
“We don’t know how reliable it is. We haven’t done sufficient studies. Every latent print identification is phrased as being a matter of certainty, and yet we know there is an error rate.”
Cole’s argument made perfect sense. There was no definitive study to prove how accurate fingerprint identification was. So why trust it unquestionably, without debate?
By the end of the week, word came down that Nicole Kasinskas, the one person who could place Billy at the scene of the crime and, in a sense, corroborate the state’s contention that those were his fingerprints in Jeanne’s kitchen and on the baseball bat, was going to take the stand early the following week. It would be the first time since they were separated by police in front of Jeanne’s house on the night of August 6, 2003, that Billy and Nicole were in the same room together.
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Nicole Kasinskas had put on a little bit of weight since her incarceration, but still had that same cute, pudgy Italian look Billy had arguably fallen in love with. Her hair was thick, dark black and flowing halfway down her back. She looked somber and subdued walking into the courtroom, wearing an orange jumpsuit over a white T-shirt. She certainly wasn’t the child Billy had so easily manipulated. It was implicit in the way she carried herself as she sauntered into the courtroom. For two years, Nicole had sat behind bars thinking about what she had done. One woman close to her later said Nicole had come to terms with the tragedy by then and accepted responsibility for her part in her mother’s murder. Yet, there was not one person on Jeanne’s side who could bear the hurt of hearing Nicole out, writing to her or visiting her. Chris McGowan certainly wasn’t interested in talking to Nicole then, nor did he feel he ever could. I just don’t see how talking to her would help me understand what she had done. Many couldn’t get around the questions: Why didn’t Nicole just run away with Billy and shack up in a trailer park, have five kids and go on welfare? Why didn’t she stop Billy? She’d had multiple opportunities.
With Nicole on the stand, anyone in need of answers was going to hear some version of what happened that night and, perhaps, how Nicole had turned from loving daughter to savage killer. Billy’s lawyers hadn’t called Nicole to the stand to hear her account of Jeanne’s death, howev
er. They had called Nicole so she could reinforce their theory that cops failed to give Billy the option of calling an attorney before giving police what was a very detailed confession.
Nicole said she and Billy discussed how they were to approach police once they returned to the house, then she explained Billy’s temperament on the night he killed Jeanne.
“He was very upset,” she testified. “He kept having flashbacks, seeing what had happened. He kept freaking out…hitting the steering wheel. I was trying to calm him down. I was a wreck. I didn’t know what to think, what to do. I was beyond help at that point.”
Then she claimed police “immediately separated” them when they returned to the scene of the crime.
Once at the NPD, Nicole said, no one told her she could “leave” if she wanted. It never occurred to her that she didn’t have to go to the police department to give a statement. She was a child. What does a child know about constitutional rights?
Billy and Nicole never made direct eye contact throughout her daylong testimony. Billy was seen taking notes and whispering in his attorney’s ear at times, while Nicole avoided any chance of looking at him.
Still, it wasn’t the last time they were going to see each other.
After a combined eleven hours of testimony over a three-day period, Judge Gary Hicks ruled that “the ACEV [Analyze, Compare, Examine and Verify] methodology” used by just about every law enforcement agency in the world to analyze fingerprint evidence “is the product of reliable principles and methods.” Thus, Will Delker and Kirsten Wilson could plan on offering expert testimony regarding fingerprint identifications during trial.
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