A Death in Canaan (20 page)

Jim Mulhern left the room with the signed statement. In the other room, Corporal Schneider turned off the tape recorder. After twenty-five hours, they were finished with Peter Reilly at last. Corporal Schneider took the last reel of tape off the machine. Altogether there were five reels of tape, ninety minutes on each side. Corporal Schneider put the boxes of tapes on top of the file cabinet in Sergeant Kelly's office and left them there.

Peter was riding in a police car again, in the deep of the night. Again they were on Route 7, down the long straight stretch of road, past the swamp and the dark mountain. Only now he was going in the opposite direction. He was going to jail.

6

After Peter was photographed and fingerprinted at Hartford, Jim Mulhern had brought him back to the Canaan barracks and turned him over to Trooper Calkins. Mulhern went home to bed at last, and Calkins wasted no time. Within ten minutes, they were on their way. It was nearly 1
A.M
. when they drove past the little house, roped off now, policemen standing guard. Peter looked at the house as they drove by.

“What happened to the car?” Peter asked.

“It's in a safe place,” the policeman told him. “It was put in a safe place because it has a lot of expensive accessories on it.”

Peter seemed satisfied, even pleased, at this attention from the state police.

“What's your name?” he said to the trooper, who identified himself as Trooper Calkins. He and Peter had once talked on the phone, when Calkins was gathering information on a girl who had run away from home. Peter remembered the conversation.

“Did I help you out?” he asked Calkins, and the trooper said yes, he had.

Trooper Calkins was a small, slim man, with a short dark crew cut and sad dark eyes. He had been on the force for eleven years. He thought Peter seemed relaxed and friendly, and they chatted during the half-hour ride. They were driving to Litchfield, the county seat, home of the courthouse and the Litchfield Correctional Center, more familiarly known as the county jail.

“Lieutenant Shay is a very nice man,” Peter told Calkins. “Do you think this thing will interfere with my becoming a policeman, or with my driver's license?”

“I don't know,” Calkins said. “What thing?”

“You know, killing my mother,” Peter said.

“How did it happen?” Calkins asked.

“I looked to my right,” Peter said, “and my mother was in bed. And the next thing I knew, she was on the floor of the bedroom, and I was standing over her and she was lying on the floor with blood on her. In between, there's a blank.”

“Why did it happen?” Calkins asked.

“Oh, my mother was always on my back, for about the past four months,” Peter said. “I know it was wrong, but in a way, I'm not sorry.”

Trooper Calkins was very interested in the conversation, so when he had dropped Peter off at the jail, he sat in his cruiser and made some notes for a report. Later he destroyed the notes.

Litchfield is a historical gem, a classic New England town, a picture-postcard town. In fact, the jail itself is on a picture postcard, available at the pharmacy on the opposite corner, across the village green. And it is a handsome jail—red brick, substantial but not formidable. The entrance is around the side, at the end of a little sidewalk lined by a small white picket fence. A friendly sign hangs above the door.
THROUGH THESE PORTALS PASS THE FINEST CORRECTIONAL OFFICERS IN THE WORLD
.

The desk officer took Peter into a small room and told him to strip. Peter took off his clothes—brown shirt, Landlubber bell-bottoms, brown braided belt, the Converse sneakers. They asked him his weight and his height. “Five seven, one hundred twenty-one pounds,” Peter said. It didn't seem to matter, though. They didn't have anything small enough, and the clothes they gave him were far too big. The khaki shirt hung loosely on his thin, narrow chest, and the trousers were baggy. He heard someone say $100,000 bond.

When they put him in cell 32, and the door closed loudly, he had one thought: that nothing else was ever going to happen, that he would be there for the rest of his life. Then he lay down on the bunk and immediately fell asleep.

Daylight came. Someone came to his cell door, unlocked it, and put down a tray of food. When the tray was set down, the cup overturned, and the milk spilled. The door closed again. Peter sat alone and ate, then he lay down again, rolled over, and was asleep almost at once.

Once again Peter Reilly was falling asleep just around the time that people who knew him were beginning to wake. It was a marvelous autumn day. People were picking up their Sunday papers.
WOMAN
, 51,
DEAD WITH THROAT CUT
. Joe O'Brien, the
Courant
reporter who hadn't been able to get any information from the police, filled out the story with human details, such as Mr. Kruse's complaint that the police wouldn't let him into the house to get the cat's dish. He quoted the police that “no suspects were in custody Saturday night.”

Early Sunday morning, Marion called the barracks again. “Peter Reilly has been arrested for murder,” a trooper told her. Marion stood stunned and silent, holding the phone. She and Mickey went down to the barracks then; they were told that a public defender would see Peter, and that he'd be arraigned the next day. Then Corporal Logan took Mickey into a room, and Lieutenant Shay asked Marion to sit down. He asked her if she knew whose dungarees had been lying on the floor at Barbara's feet. Marion said they had to be Barbara's, because she always wore hers rolled up at the cuff, and Peter never did. Lieutenant Shay asked Marion to tell him all she knew about Barbara and Peter and their life together. She told him that Peter's godmother sent money and that the Corvette always needed repairs. There wasn't a great deal Marion could tell him, but what she knew, she told. “You sit across that desk from him, you want to tell him everything,” Marion said later.

Back home, Mickey called John Bianchi, the State's Attorney, who had once been Mickey's lawyer, and Barbara's lawyer, too. He was out, and Mickey asked that he call back.

Conrad King, a junior at Regional, had driven home from school with Peter and Geoff on Friday afternoon. “This just can't be true about Peter,” he told his mother. “He doesn't have any family. Isn't there something we can do?”

Beverly King already had her hands full, raising four children. Her husband was a telephone lineman in Falls Village, and besides keeping house for a family of six, Beverly worked part-time as a practical nurse.

But she told Conrad she'd see what she could do. Not long before, Beverly and a handful of people in town had joined, in an informal way, to help a boy from the Methodist Church who had been accused of arson. It had been a small but effective effort. They'd raised $1,000 bail and helped him get his job back. The little group was just about to disband when Barbara died.

Beverly had never met Peter Reilly, but Conrad told her that Peter had often stayed over at the Belignis'. Beverly called Jean Beligni and asked whether Peter needed help. “Oh no,” Jean told Beverly. “Peter's Auntie B. will pay for everything. Thanks anyway.”

In cell 32 at the Litchfield Correctional Center, Peter Reilly was awakened by a guard. “Come on,” the guard said. “Pack up. You're going to boundover.” There they locked him in again and gave him a pack of cigarettes, a ball-point pen, and a piece of stationery, in case he wanted to write a letter. Some of the other prisoners—like those in work-release programs—were not locked up, and some of them crowded around his cell door, asked who he was and what he was in for. There was a small kitchen, and one of the inmates who was talking to Peter, a thin, middle-aged man named Bob Erhardt, made Peter a cup of cocoa.

“What have they got you for?” Bob Erhardt asked.

“I feel too ashamed to tell anyone,” Peter said.

“Hell, there's nothing to be ashamed of in here,” Bob Erhardt said cheerfully. “We all did something to get here, so what can be so bad you can't talk about it?”

“Well, I'm so confused at this point, I don't know what to say, I'm very shy,” Peter said. “My name is Peter Reilly, I live in Sharon. I've been at the Canaan state police barracks for hours and hours … I'm really a very shy person, I wouldn't fight back with anyone, I'm good in school, I have a good record, I'm very shy, I'm not very strong, I don't bother anybody.”

He seemed rambling and incoherent, “talking in circles,” Bob Erhardt said later. “Go ahead,” he urged. “Get whatever it is off your chest.”

“They are charging me with murdering my mother,” Peter said.

Bob Erhardt was speechless for a moment.

“Come on now, you got to be kidding,” he said finally. “Do you know what you're saying? Did you admit to it?”

“I think I did,” Peter said. “I really don't know what I said, but I know I gave them a statement, and I'm not even sure what happened. All I can remember is that I came home and Mom was laying on the floor, and I called for an ambulance and they came, and then I was brought to the police barracks and questioned.”

“Did you make a phone call to anyone?” Bob Erhardt asked. “Have you called a lawyer?”

“No,” Peter said. “I haven't made any calls, I haven't seen anyone but the police.”

“Well, I'll give you some good advice,” Bob Erhardt said. “Get a lawyer, because you are going to need one.”

One of the other men asked a guard for a phone book, and they looked under “Attorneys” in the
Yellow Pages
. One name they came to was Roraback, and that name rang a bell with Peter. Once he had heard Jean Beligni talking with admiration of a lawyer named Catherine Roraback, in Canaan, and he told the men now that he wanted her. They laughed. “You probably can't afford her,” they said, but Peter was insistent. “That's who I want,” he said.

Earlier Sunday morning, around 2
A.M
., after Peter had been taken to jail, someone from Canaan barracks had called his cousin June to say that Peter had been arrested on a murder charge and that a public defender would be appointed to represent him. Sometime after eleven o'clock Sunday morning, a public defender, Henry Campbell, came to see Peter. He was a tall, stooped man with a gentle face. Peter still said he didn't need a lawyer.

Late in the afternoon, Peter called Jean Beligni.

“Are you all right, Peter?” she exclaimed. “Do you need anything? Where are you? Are you in jail?”

“I'm at, I think, the Litchfield Community Institution,” he said vaguely. “Wait a minute, I'll ask.” He was away from the phone for a moment, then he came back. “Yes, it's the jail,” he said. Geoff and Art Madow were down at the Belignis, with Paul, when Peter called, and they talked with him too. Peter asked Jean to please call Catherine Roraback.

All evening, Jean called Miss Roraback, hoping the phone would ring in her home as well as in her office. But late that evening, when she still hadn't got an answer, she called John Bianchi, the State's Attorney for Litchfield County.

“We're concerned for Peter,” she told him, and asked for Catherine's home phone number. “We're all concerned for Peter,” Mr. Bianchi told her. He said that Peter's arraignment the next morning would be “just a formality,” but if she still wanted Catherine Roraback, he suggested that Jean try calling her secretary. “You can't afford Catherine,” he warned Jean.

Miss Roraback's secretary told Jean that the lawyer was in New York, at a weekend meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union. Catherine Roraback had founded the New Haven chapter, and was on the national board. She would be back, the secretary said, on Monday morning, and Jean left an urgent message.

Sometime that evening, John Bianchi called the Madows. “I'm sorry to be so long in returning your call, Mick,” he said. “I was away for the weekend.” John Bianchi said he hadn't known that the Madows were waiting for Peter. “That's funny,” Mickey said. “All the troopers knew.”

On Monday morning, the first day of October, Peter was arraigned in the Eighteenth Circuit Court in Torrington. He looked pale and tired when he arrived, his hands clasped behind his back, handcuffed. Dorothy Madow, Mickey's sister-in-law, who had driven to the Litchfield jail with cigarettes and candy for him, drove over to Torrington. She was shocked, she thought he looked awful, and the jailhouse khakis didn't help. Even the article in the Winsted paper that afternoon mentioned Peter's baggy trousers. He was wearing unmatched boots, too.

When Catherine Roraback got to her office on Main Street, she heard that Peter Reilly had asked for her. She drove quickly to Torrington, arriving at court forty-five minutes late.

Catherine Roraback walked into the law library, where Peter was sitting at a table. Peter stood up when Miss Roraback walked in.

“Did you do it, Peter?” she asked.

“No,” Peter said.

Barbara's cousin Vicky and her husband had driven over from New York and had seen Peter in the law library, too. Vicky and Barbara had been close, as children, more than forty years before, but as they grew up they drifted apart. In 1951, when Vicky's twin boys were born, Barbara and Hilda came to her house one evening, walked in, looked at the babies, and walked out again, without saying a word. A few years later, Barbara telephoned, asking whether Vicky had any baby things left; Barbara said a friend of hers was going to have a baby. But Vicky felt sure it was Barbara herself who was expecting.

Vicky had never met Peter, and when she came out of the library it was plain she had been crying. Her husband, a big man who looked like John Wayne, had been crying, too.

On Thursday morning, Peter stood up in Litchfield Superior Court, where his case had been transferred. He was still handcuffed when he came in, but he was much better dressed, in some of his own clothes that Jean Beligni had brought over to Litchfield. At the hearing, Miss Roraback asked that Peter's bond be reduced from $100,000 to $5,000, a more feasible sum for his friends to come up with. Mickey and Marion Madow told the court that Peter could have a home with them. Father Paul Halovatch asked that the bail be reduced, and so did the principal of the high school. So did Peter himself. “I know I would show up in court,” he said. “I don't feel I have anything to run from.” Finally, Judge Anthony Armentano cut the bond in half, from $100,000 to $50,000. He seemed affected by the turnout. “I am reducing the bond only because of strong community backing,” he said. Nobody had $50,000, though, so Peter went back to jail in handcuffs.