A Death in Canaan (32 page)

“Was it a tearful conversation?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

“No, it was not,” Sergeant Salley said.

Peter usually had a grinder at Marden's for lunch, eating with whoever had brought him to court that day. Usually I had lunch with the rest of the press at Mitchell's, a restaurant down the street from the courthouse. We had a good time together, trading gossip and opinions. There were black jokes passed around the table too, for that was one way to survive certain things. Farn Dupre said that when the AP wire carried Dr. Izumi's testimony, that Barbara might have been hit in the face with a fist, there'd been a typo in the copy, so that the doctor was quoted as saying that Barbara “could have been hit with a fish.” At the
Winsted Citizen,
then, one of the reporters had set up a dummy headline that warned, “Killer Mackerel at Large.”

Lieutenant Shay testified that when he'd arrived at the barracks, early that Saturday morning, he had advised Peter of his rights too, before Peter signed the waiver. “It is my custom to have a suspect sign two forms,” Lieutenant Shay said, and Paula Wall, the law clerk's wife, sitting just behind the reporters, stirred restlessly. “A suspect,” she murmured.

“WARNING” began the rights card Lieutenant Shay had read to Peter. “You have a right to remain silent. If you talk to any police officer, anything you say can and will be used against you in court.… You have the right to consult a lawyer before questioning and may have him with you during questioning.” The waiver section read, “I do not want a lawyer. I know and understand what I am doing. I do this freely. No threats or promises have been made to me.” It was signed Peter A. Reilly.

Sergeant Salley had not looked at the jury when he testified, but Lieutenant Shay looked directly at them, gruff but honest, the sort of person you could trust. On the stand, although Mr. Bianchi referred to Peter as “the accused” or, simply and coldly, “Reilly,” Lieutenant Shay always called him “Peter.”

“Did he at any time cry?” Mr. Bianchi asked the lieutenant.

“No, he did not,” the officer said. “I was struck by the fact that he was very calm, very poised, and showed no emotion.”

Lieutenant Shay had taken Peter to another room then, to talk with him privately. That was the talk that had lasted an hour or so, in a back room at the barracks. A quiet room, a quiet talk. That was the talk that had been recorded, and that was the talk that was too garbled, on the tape, for anyone to understand.

Now, on the stand, Lieutenant Shay told how Peter had gone to Hartford with Jim Mulhern. He mentioned a “conversation” with another police officer in Hartford. “Conversation” was the term that had to be used in the presence of the jury, at least for the time being, for the lie detector test.

Catherine Roraback again objected to Peter's statement as evidence, describing how he had found himself in a “coercive situation.” She mentioned “prolonged interrogation, isolated from friends and relatives.” Mr. Bianchi reminded the court that Peter Reilly had been given his rights four times and that Judge Armentano had reviewed “every bit of evidence regarding the interrogation.” Mr. Bianchi looked at Judge Speziale now. “I don't know if your honor has had a chance to review the document,” he began. The judge replied crisply. “I've got it right in my hands,” he said.

Mr. Bianchi went on to quote from Judge Armentano's decision, though, as though Judge Speziale had never heard it. “He said it was freely given by an alert, knowledgeable young man, and he found no coercion, your honor,” Mr. Bianchi said. The judge decided to confer with both lawyers in the back room and said he'd take a recess.

Joe Battistoni hit the gavel. “There'll be a short recess,” he announced, and the judge smiled, ever so slightly. “I didn't say ‘short,' sheriff,” he said.

“What things did he tell you in Hartford that he had not told you before?” Mr. Bianchi asked Lieutenant Shay now, in an almost conversational tone. Shay said he remembered Peter saying he'd seen his mother in the top bunk and doing what Peter called “a double take.” Then he said he'd seen his mother on the floor, with blood all around.

“He told me that he recalled picking up a straight razor and that he slashed his mother's throat,” Lieutenant Shay said. “He told me that he remembered jumping on his mother's stomach, and he told me he may have washed his mother down.”

The jury stared at Lieutenant Shay, seeming almost transfixed. Edward Ives leaned forward on his chair, the first seat of the second row, very close to the witness.

Lieutenant Shay said that Peter, during the Saturday night in Hartford, had looked “normal, calm, very poised.” The evening session had followed the lie detector test, and during the course of the evening, Jim Mulhern had taken Peter's confession, which Peter then signed. Lieutenant Shay said he himself had been in the room at the beginning of the session. “Some of it came out with very little questioning,” he said. “Some of it came out as a result of questions that I asked.”

Catherine Roraback asked Lieutenant Shay what he meant by “normal,” since he had never seen or spoken with Peter Reilly before the night Barbara died.

“What I meant by normal,” said Lieutenant Shay, “was that I expected to find something different.”

“Do you remember him saying, ‘The blood scared the hell out of me'?” Miss Roraback asked.

“No, I don't,” Lieutenant Shay said.

“Do you remember asking him, ‘Why did you need an ambulance?'”

“No, I don't.”

“Do you remember him saying, ‘It looks like I did it'?”

“I think he did say that, yes.”

“Do you remember his referring to a ‘double take'?”

“He said that frequently,” Lieutenant Shay said. “As a matter of fact, I think he used that term at six-thirty in the morning back at Canaan.”

“Do you remember him saying, ‘My mind went blank?'” Catherine Roraback asked.

“Yes, I remember him saying that a couple of times,” Shay said.

“Isn't it true,” Catherine Roraback asked, “that you suggested that Mr. Reilly needed some psychological help?”

“Yes, I did,” Shay said.

“Did you tell him you'd try to help him get it?”

“Yes, I did,” Shay said. “He said he needed somebody he could trust, somebody he could turn to. He said he didn't mean a lawyer; he needed somebody like a father.”

“And then he began talking to you, is that right?” Catherine Roraback asked, her voice dark with irony. Lieutenant Shay looked her straight in the eye.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said.

Bit by bit, line by line, Catherine Roraback was trying to draw out the dialogue in Hartford and to establish the atmosphere of that Saturday night, which seemed so long ago. Like the polygraph session, the evening questioning, which resulted in the signed confession, had been taped too, but Miss Roraback was not sure the jury would ever be allowed to hear those tapes, so she was trying to recreate the questioning now. Besides, even if the tapes could later be heard, there was a benefit, she felt, in having Lieutenant Shay say these things himself, things he remembered saying and things Peter had said to him.

I had not yet heard the evening tapes either. As this questioning emerged piecemeal in the course of a few days testimony, I was struck by the variety of its style and tone. At first, just after Sergeant Kelly brought Peter out of the polygraph room into the room across the hall, the talk was almost matter of fact. “One of the first things he said to me,” Lieutenant Shay recalled, “was that he now was aware that he did do this thing that happened to his mother.”

But when the questioning turned to details of the killing—the knife, the razor, the reason—the tone changed. Peter either said he wasn't sure, or else he would say he was sure and then change his mind and say he wasn't sure, and finally Lieutenant Shay had told Peter impatiently, warningly, “There are many things we can do to make this a difficult process for you.” Sometimes the questioning was even briefly funny. When Peter asked for details on how Barbara had been killed and Lieutenant Shay declined to give them, Peter had pleaded, “Give me a hint.”

Lieutenant Shay testified that he knew the autopsy details by the time he questioned Peter that Saturday night. He said he knew that Barbara's legs had been broken, and her stomach cut, and her throat slashed, and that there was a defense wound in her hand. He said he himself had brought up the legs and the stomach, when he talked with Peter, but that Peter himself had told Shay about the slashing of his mother's throat.

Once, in the course of the questioning, when Peter kept veering back and forth, especially as he continued to refer to “a double take,” Lieutenant Shay had yelled at him, accusing him of playing “headgames” with the police and telling him the police had “proof positive” that Peter had done it. By that time, of course, fatigue was surely setting in. When Miss Roraback talked about the double take and about Peter's blanking-out, she asked Lieutenant Shay whether he thought Peter was tired. “I imagine he was,” Lieutenant Shay said. “I know I was exhausted.”

But then the mood had softened, and they had talked, Lieutenant Shay testified, “about life and death and God and so forth.” They talked again of trust.

“Do you remember him saying, ‘I've gotta trust someone'?” Catherine Roraback asked Shay.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said.

“And do you remember a conversation after that about your family?” she asked.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said.

“Did he at that point break down and begin to cry?” she asked.

“There was one point where his voice did falter,” Lieutenant Shay said. “There was one point where we were talking about his life and his problems. I was trying to encourage him to cry.”

“You said, ‘Go ahead and cry'?” Catherine Roraback asked, disdain in her voice.

“Yes, ma'am,” Shay said.

“Do you remember saying, ‘I don't feel sorry for your mother, I feel sorry for you, because I think you've been a victim for years'?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Shay said.

“Do you remember Peter then asking you where you lived?”

“He did ask me where I lived, yes.”

When Miss Roraback asked Lieutenant Shay whether he'd had training in interrogation and who gave him that training, John Bianchi objected, but he was overruled.

“I've had the standard training at the police academy,” Lieutenant Shay said, adding that he'd also attended a course given by Mr. Fred Inbau at the University of Maryland, a course that dealt with interrogation. “How do you spell that?” the judge asked, and there was a pause while he wrote it down.

“One of Mr. Inbau's principles is that you should establish trust with the person, is that right?” Catherine Roraback asked him.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said.

Catherine Roraback leaned against the jury rail and studied the ceiling with infinite care.

“You should tend to get that individual to rely on you, is that right?”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said. She flicked her eyes from the ceiling and stared at him.

“And that's what you did here, is that right?” she asked coldly. “You attempted to create yourself as a father figure, did you not?”

“That did cross my mind, yes,” Lieutenant Shay said.

Except for the one outburst, Lieutenant Shay had apparently not yelled at Peter anymore, and, indeed, his part of the questioning seemed to have ended on a warm note. One of the last things Peter said to Lieutenant Shay, before the officer left the room and Jim Mulhern came in to finish taking down the confession, was to ask whether when they were finished, he could come to live with the Shay family, if they had room.

The weather was raw and cold, and when court convened at ten o'clock Tuesday morning, March 12, with the familiar clump of the gavel, Peter Reilly wasn't there. There was a brief buzz in the courtroom, which subsided the minute Judge Speziale appeared, making the short sweeping turn around the corner into the courtroom. John Bianchi glanced at Catherine Roraback as she asked permission to approach the bench.

Miss Roraback handed the judge a note, signed by Dr. Roger Moore of Sharon, saying that Peter was sick and couldn't come to court. He had a high fever and had to stay in bed, because he had strep throat. The judge read the note, then said, for the record, that the trial would be postponed because the defendant could not be present. Mr. Bianchi rose. “The State would like to think about it just a bit,” he said. The judge looked at him, then called a recess.

“Maybe they want to send out for a get-well card,” Greg said, but George shook his head. “They're trying to arrange to have their own doctor look at Peter. Dr. Izumi.” Charles Kochakian leaned over the rail and beckoned to Catherine Roraback, who came over to the group a little warily. “Is it over for the day?” Charles asked. “Is it safe to go back to Hartford?”

Miss Roraback grinned. “It's
never
safe to go back to Hartford,” she said.

The knife was still in its plastic pouch, the jury still safe behind closed doors, as John Bianchi tried again, a week later when Peter Reilly was well and the trial was resumed, to get the knife introduced as evidence.

“I show you a knife,” he said again, taking it out of the bag and handing it to Trooper Venclauscas on the stand. Again the trooper identified it by his initials. When Mr. Bianchi asked him to describe it, he said it was what he would call “a fish fillet knife, with a broken-off tip, with a six-inch blade and a four-inch handle.”

Catherine Roraback brought up the Constitution again and talked of illegal search and seizure, but John Bianchi was well prepared. “The Fourth Amendment protects people, not places,” he declared, and after some dialogue, Judge Speziale said the objection was overruled. The jury would be allowed to hear about the knife, and as they filed out of their room and took their places, they looked at it with interest.