A Death in Canaan (33 page)

Mr. Bianchi handed the knife to juror William Jennings, in the first seat of the first row, by the witness stand. Jennings took it gingerly, looked at it, and passed it down the row. When all the jurors had seen it, and the alternates had passed it to one another, the knife was introduced as evidence and given the suitably dramatic number of State's Exhibit X.

Miss Roraback only asked Trooper Venclauscas, then, whether he'd found the broken-off tip. He said he hadn't.

State Trooper James Mulhern took the stand and gave his address as Troop B, Canaan. According to the usual ritual, each witness was asked to point out the defendant in the courtroom, so that the identification could be on the record, and when Jim Mulhern was asked whether he saw Peter Reilly there now, he nodded slightly toward the defense table and looked at Peter for just a moment, as he had done at the pretrial hearings. Then he looked at Mr. Bianchi again.

Trooper Mulhern said he had been a trooper for six-and-a half years, stationed in Canaan nearly all that time, and that he'd known Peter Reilly for three or four years, calling him “an acquaintance of a mutual friend of ours.” The mutual friend was Arthur Madow, and Mulhern remembered that “Peter and Arthur came down to shoot the breeze one evening.” He added that another time, Peter and the Madow boys and Paul Beligni had come down to help him break up pieces of concrete in his yard. He told of driving Peter to Hartford early Saturday afternoon, the day after Barbara died. Lieutenant Shay had told Mulhern not to discuss the crime, so Peter and the policeman talked about TV commercials and motorcycles.

“At any time, did he cry?” John Bianchi asked.

“No, sir,” Mulhern said. He described how, in between the lie detector test and the evening questioning, he'd brought Peter his dinner: “a ham and cheese sandwich on a roll, a package of chocolate cupcakes, and a can of Coca Cola.”

During the polygraph test, Jim Mulhern had sometimes watched through the one-way mirror, but Peter hadn't seen him, so that when the trooper brought Peter his dinner, it was the first time Peter had seen him for about four hours, since they'd arrived in Hartford. Mr. Bianchi asked Jim Mulhern, on the stand, what Peter had said to him then.

“He asked me if I was ashamed to know him now,” Mulhern said.

“I didn't hear that,” Mr. Bianchi said.

“He asked me if I was ashamed to know him now,” Mulhern said again, loudly. “I asked why. He said, ‘Because I did it. I killed her.'”

John Bianchi looked quickly at the jury, then back to Jim Mulhern. “I didn't hear that again,” he said, and leaning forward he cupped his ear with his right hand.

Mulhern looked at John Bianchi, speaking very loudly. “He said, ‘Because I did it. I killed her.'”

John Bianchi walked to his table and came back to the witness stand with papers in his hand. “I show you four pieces of paper,” he began, and Mulhern identified them as the statement he'd taken from Peter Reilly on the night of September 29, 1973. Each page was signed. Two of the pages were stapled together, and two were loose.

The statement was admitted as evidence in three parts: State's Exhibits Z, AA, and BB. It sounded complicated, but what it all seemed to mean was rather simple. Peter had confessed in segments, over a span of two hours and fifteen minutes. The first page of the statement was begun, according to the time Jim Mulhern had written in the margin, at 20:30 hours, the last at 22:45.

John Bianchi read the statement to the jury, rocking back and forth on his heels a little, in his familiar way. At first the statement sounded just like the one Peter had given to Trooper McCafferty, in the cruiser. It related how he'd gone to the Teen Center meeting, driven John Sochocki home, and then gone home himself. He got out of the car and went into the house. At that point, though, the Saturday night statement changed. It said:

I entered the front door of the house and yelled, “Hey, Mom, I'm home!” There was no answer, so I looked to the right, into the bedroom. At first I thought I saw my mother, Barbara Gibbons, on the top bunk, and then I saw her on the floor. I remember slashing once at my mother's throat with a straight razor I used for model airplanes. This was on the living room table.

I also remember jumping on my mother's legs. I am not sure about washing her off. Next I saw blood on her face and throat and I'm pretty sure on her T-shirt, which was rolled up to the bottom of her breasts …

The rest of the statement told how Peter had called the Madows, and Sharon Hospital, and gone outside to wait for somebody to come. John Bianchi also read the loose pages. One of them read:

I, Peter A. Reilly, voluntarily make this statement to clarify an earlier statement. As I indicated in the previous statement, I slashed my mother's throat with a straight razor. I failed to mention that when I slashed at her with the razor, I swung with my right hand in an arc from right to left and I cut her throat. This is the only thing I wanted to clarify.

And, finally, the last page, timed at 10:45:

There is one statement I want to clarify: When I slashed my mother's throat with a straight razor, I cut her throat. This is all I wanted to clarify.

Now, in the courtroom, Peter Reilly bent his head, his hair falling over his face. The courtroom was very quiet as Catherine Roraback rose. She held one of the papers in her hand and showed it to Trooper Mulhern.

“Was it before or after he signed this page that Peter said to you, ‘In the statement, can you say, I'm not sure?'”

“I don't know,” Mulhern told her.

“But he did say that to you?” she asked.

“Yes,” Mulhern said.

“But you don't remember if he said it before or after he signed?”

“I'd have to make a guess,” Mulhern told her, and the judge turned to him. “We don't want you to guess,” Judge Speziale said, not smiling as he said it.

Catherine Roraback looked at the pages again, then back to Mulhern.

“Page one started at eight-thirty
P.M
.,” she said. “Is it fair to say that page two might have been started as much as two hours after page one?”

“Yes,” Mulhern said.

Catherine Roraback then pointed out that Peter had asked again whether this statement could say he wasn't sure. “Did you tell him it would be included in the statement?” she asked Mulhern.

“I may have,” Mulhern said.

“Is it
in
that statement?” she asked loudly.

“No, ma'am,” Mulhern said, staring at her.

Catherine Roraback asked Mulhern about his presence in Hartford Saturday night.

“Did Lieutenant Shay suggest that you go in to see Mr. Reilly because you were close to him? Because you knew him best?”

“No, ma'am,” Mulhern said.

“Do you remember asking him, ‘Did you cut her throat?'”

“I believe so,” Mulhern said.

“Do you remember asking him, ‘What did you do with the razor?'”

“Yes, ma'am,” Mulhern said.

“Did Mr. Reilly ever speak of a knife to you?” she asked.

“No, ma'am,” Mulhern said.

She looked hard at him again. “Do you remember Peter saying to you, ‘I don't know what to do, Jim. I'm still not positive any of it happened. The only things I am positive about are that she was on the floor, and I called the Madows, and what I had in my original statement.'”

Mulhern looked straight back at her.

“I believe he said something to that effect,” the policeman said.

“Do you remember him saying, ‘Everything I'm saying, it's like I'm making it up, I'm not sure about it'?”

“I believe so,” Mulhern said.

“And this is not in the statement, is it?”

“No, ma'am,” Mulhern said.

“Did you tell him his mother's throat had been cut before he told you he cut her throat?” the prosecutor asked.

“I had no knowledge,” Mulhern said.

“Did you at this point know that her throat had been cut?”

“No, sir,” Mulhern said.

Catherine Roraback seemed to find that hard to believe and tried to ask Mulhern about watching Peter, that afternoon, through the oneway mirror. The state objected, objection sustained, and she shook her head in a little angry movement.

“I'll start again, but I'll come back to that, I guarantee it,” she said to the courtroom in general. Sarah Waldron and Margaret Wald smiled at her.

She didn't mention the mirror then, but simply asked the question: “Didn't you hear references during the questioning by Sergeant Kelly, references to the slashing of the throat?”

“I don't recall,” Mulhern said.

“Let me show you copies of the report and see if that refreshes your memory,” she said, smiling edgily, and handed the trooper a piece of paper, a report he'd written himself. Mulhern read it and handed it back to her.

“I must have heard it, then,” he said.

“So you knew that Mrs. Gibbons's throat had been cut, is that correct?” Miss Roraback asked.

“Apparently yes,” Mulhern said.

“And you knew at that point that Mr. Reilly had already been questioned about cutting his mother's throat?”

“Apparently yes,” Mulhern said.

Mr. Bianchi brought out, in his questioning of Jim Mulhern, that Peter had said the razor was either behind the barn, or behind the gas station across the street, or still in the house. He was right the third time. Trooper Donald Moran later testified that he'd found the razor at 12:45 on Saturday, just about the time Peter and Mulhern were on their way to Hartford. Moran said he found the razor on the top bookshelf in the living room. The razor was closed.

John Bianchi had one more question.

“When you saw Reilly in Trooper McCafferty's cruiser, was he crying?” he asked.

“Not that I remember,” Jim Mulhern said.

It was a long afternoon, and some of the jurors looked sleepy as they filed out of their room after the recess. But when the next witness for the state appeared, they suddenly revived. Here was a new face on the stand, a dark, slim man with a thin, almost gaunt look. When he was sworn in, he gave his name as John McAloon and his address as the Bridgeport Correctional Center.

“John McAloon, you are presently a prisoner of the state of Connecticut, is that correct?” John Bianchi asked in his most dramatic voice.

“Yes,” McAloon said, going on to say that he was in prison for “theft of an automobile,” and before that, he'd been in prison in Rhode Island for breaking and entering, and there were other charges he remembered, assault with a dangerous weapon … the list went on, going back a dozen years. The jury watched, not quite sure what to make of this witness, until he said that on the morning of September 30, 1973, he'd been an inmate at the Litchfield Correctional Center, when Peter Reilly was brought in.

“I was in cell C,” McAloon recalled. “They put him in E. There was one empty cell between us.”

“Did you thereafter speak directly to Peter Reilly?” the prosecutor asked.

“Yes, I did,” McAloon said. “I asked him what he got busted for. He said, for killing his mother. At first I thought he said grandmother.

“I asked him what happened,” McAloon went on. “He said that he had come home Friday night and that his mother was dead. At first he didn't know he did it, but after he was questioned, he realized he did it. He said his mother was drinking a lot and was making him stay home all the time, and that the night it happened he wanted to go out with some friends somewhere and she threatened to take the plates off the car, and that he just went crazy, went berserk, and the next thing he knew he had a knife in his hands and she was on the floor.

“He said he was illegitimate and didn't have a father,” McAloon recalled. “He said his mother had been ashamed of him all his life. He said she had had an operation and was supposed to take some follow-up shots and didn't, and between not taking her shots, and the drinking, it was real bad.”

He said that Peter had told him he'd got rid of the clothes he'd been wearing Friday night because he had been “all bloody in front.” On the stand now, the witness recalled what Peter had said he'd done with those bloody clothes. “He rolled them in a ball, got into his car and drove somewhere, threw the clothes away, and came back to the house.” As for the shoes, the witness said, Peter had “a pair of tan Hush Puppies.”

“How did it come about that you gave this information to the state police?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

“I was talking to a trooper one day who was taking me to court,” the witness said, “and I asked him, ‘Do you think the kid really killed her?' He said he didn't know, because he wasn't involved in the case. And I said, ‘I know he did it.'” And then, McAloon said, he'd told the trooper the story he'd just told here in court.

John McAloon said nobody had made any promises, nobody had mentioned any rewards if he would testify, and, in fact, he couldn't even remember the name of the trooper he'd been riding with. “I wouldn't know the name if you said it,” McAloon said. “A little short guy, smoking a pipe.”

Catherine Roraback brought up names, too, asking the witness if he'd ever used an alias. At first he said no, then he reconsidered. “Excuse me, yes,” he said.

“Was it Baker?” Miss Roraback asked him.

“Leroy Baker,” the witness said, sounding faintly nostalgic. “I was in Miami at the time.”

Catherine Roraback looked at her notes.

“Were you ever known as Richard Anderson?” she asked.

“I used that name one time to sign a book when I visited a friend,” the witness said, and Miss Roraback turned away to the table where the exhibits were stacked.

“Were those the tan Hush Puppies?” she said, her voice ironical, and plopped the shoes on the table in front of him. He picked one up and looked at it, then the other.

“No,” he said. “Those aren't Hush Puppies.”