A Death in Canaan (35 page)

“It's not a weapon, it's a knife,” she said, and the prosecutor turned to her.

“It's a weapon,” Mr. Bianchi said.

“It's a knife,” Miss Roraback said.

“It's a question of semantics,” the judge said. “Let's refer to it as a knife.”

Dr. Izumi still held it in his hands. “My opinion would be that this knife is the instrument that caused this type of wound,” he said carefully. He added that the same knife had been used on both the front and the back of Barbara's body. He said these wounds “were performed after death,” and for a moment, the image of a killer standing over the dead woman, knifing and carving her, hovered in the courtroom. Dr. Izumi said the knife could also have caused the defense wound in Barbara's hand. He turned the knife over once or twice in his hands, in a thoughtful way. Catherine Roraback walked over to him, took the knife out of his hands, and walked away from the witness stand.

“Dr. Izumi,” she said, with her back to him, “did you examine any other knives or instruments and compare them with these wounds?”

The doctor said he saw two other knives at the scene, but he “didn't have a chance to compare them” and hadn't compared them afterward, either.

Catherine Roraback said nothing, her back still turned to the witness, studying the ceiling again. A woman in the second row of the gallery stirred slightly. “She's taking her own sweet time, huh?” the spectator whispered to a man next to her.

Catherine Roraback turned back to Dr. Izumi, speaking quietly now. “If there were a knife on which the tip had not been broken off and that knife had the same width blade, could it have caused the defense wound you saw?”

“Yes, it could,” Dr. Izumi said, adding that it would be unlikely, because of a “double scratch” shown on a slide.

“No more questions, your honor,” both lawyers said, and Mr. Bianchi smiled. “May it please the court,” he said, with a little bowing motion, “the state of Connecticut rests.”

Miss Roraback stood then, looking vigorous, and immediately moved that the court dismiss the case entirely. The jury was sent out, while Miss Roraback argued that, basically, all that Mr. Bianchi had established was “a very gory and horrible murder was committed at the premises on Route sixty-three in Falls Village that were formerly occupied by the deceased and her son, Peter Reilly.” She said that Peter's statements, his confession, came only after he had been “held in custody some twenty-four hours and given under highly questionable circumstances, at a time when he was extremely tired, at a time when he had not had sufficient food, at a time when he had gone through the extreme trauma of having found his mother in those circumstances,” which she called “a horrible sight for anyone.” She talked about the questioning. “Even at the end of it, as Trooper Mulhern indicated,” she reminded the court, “Mr. Reilly was still saying, ‘I still don't think I did it, I'm not sure of anything I'm saying.'”

She looked at the judge, speaking very earnestly, as though he were a one-man jury whom she had to persuade. “All of the facts seem consistent with a finding of innocence and not a finding of guilt,” she said. “This defendant had clothing on which had no blood on it. He was subjected to a skin search. He had no indication on him that he had been involved in this horrendous crime.… Finally, your honor, I think there really is no prima facie case against my client.”

John Bianchi's reply was swift. “In my opinion, there is overwhelming evidence in this case that is just the opposite,” he said. “The evidence that Dr. Izumi just gave. Peter Reilly was there in the house when his mother was alive. She was gasping. It was clear that when he called, that Mrs. Gibbons was alive.” Mr. Bianchi added, pointedly, that “it could only have been Peter Reilly who made the after-death wounds, because he was the only one there.”

As for Miss Roraback's objections to the questioning, Mr. Bianchi reminded the court of Judge Armentano's earlier decision that “this is an alert, bright, able young man.” Somehow, as Mr. Bianchi listed the adjectives, they did not sound entirely positive. “He was warned four times with much, much care,” Mr. Bianchi declared. “The blurted-out, voluntary admissions that he made to Trooper Mulhern, who was his friend, when he brought him food … to John McAloon, who knew things only he would have known, that she wasn't taking her medicine, she wasn't taking her hormone injections … he told McAloon what he did with the clothing.” Mr. Bianchi sat down, looking satisfied, as Catherine Roraback made her rebuttal.

“The gasping that Peter Reilly heard, if indeed he did, that could have been—as I understand Dr. Izumi's testimony—the body of Barbara Gibbons sucking in air after the trachea had been cut. That could go on for five minutes. The lungs taking in air could make a gasping sound.

“When you come to Mr. McAloon,” Miss Roraback continued, her tone changing from serious to sarcastic, “I think you have to remember that Mr. McAloon said Peter had on tan Hush Puppies, which no one else has seen. Mr. McAloon, if that is his name, and I guess in this particular situation that
was
his name”—she glanced at Mr. Bianchi, who flushed and stared back at her—“Mr. McAloon said Peter Reilly told him he killed his grandmother.”

Judge Speziale had listened carefully, even politely, as though he might indeed consider dismissing the whole thing. But it took him only a moment to deny the motion to dismiss, to glance at the clock, and to announce lunch.

“Is that all they got on this kid?” Roger Cohn asked incredulously at lunch at Mitchell's. “It's all over Torrington that Sam Holden keeps saying, ‘We really got the goods on Reilly.'” Sam Holden was the County Detective.

Back in the courthouse hallway, Murray Madow was talking to Marie Dickinson. “I know a hunter who says gasping after death in an animal can go on for as long as half an hour, forty minutes,” he said. “If Peter's mother could have been gasping for five minutes after she bled to death, why couldn't the killer have cut her up and Peter have gotten there in the last part of the gasping time?”

We didn't know it then, but the jurors wondered about that, too. Some of them thought that was a definite possibility. Others thought that if Peter had driven into the yard just as Barbara was being cut and had come into the house just at the end of the five minutes, it would have been too much of a coincidence.

Joe O'Brien had another question. “How could there have been blood on both sides of the blade and not on the handle?” he wondered.

Peter Reilly's defense began quietly, with no further preliminaries, just after lunch. A short, slim man with dark hair and a slightly abashed look took the stand. He wore two pins in his lapel, a white dove and a red ladybug, thus managing to symbolize the fight for peace and against aphids. It was a nice, homey touch, and in a way it symbolized a change of atmosphere in the courtroom, as the witnesses changed from the doctors and the policemen, the pros, to the housewives and schoolboys, the amateurs. They looked scared and unprofessional, most of them setting foot in a courtroom for the first time, witnesses for the defense.

The man with the dove and the ladybug was the Reverend Dakers, who said he had been at the Teen Center meeting that night and had gone, afterwards, to Johnny's for a cup of coffee with Father Paul “about nine-forty, nine-forty-five.” He said it was hard to remember what Peter Reilly had been wearing, but he thought maybe it was a blue work shirt.

Barbara Curtis twisted a damp white handkerchief in her left hand and with her right hand held tightly to the side of the chair. She identified Peter's clothes, and she said she herself had been wearing a cranberry sweater and cranberry slacks, though when Mr. Bianchi asked her what other people at the Teen Center meeting had worn, she said she couldn't say.

“You are sure what Peter Reilly was wearing, even though you are unable to tell me what anybody else was wearing?” Mr. Bianchi asked.

“That's true,” said Mrs. Curtis, who had given a statement about Peter's clothes to the police the day after Barbara died.

Sue Curtis, her daughter, looked at the shirt Mr. Bianchi held up and identified it as the one Peter Reilly had worn.

“It isn't any different from any other long-sleeved brown shirt with white buttons on it, is it?” Mr. Bianchi asked heavily.

“No,” Sue Curtis admitted, and bit her nails. But Paul Beligni, behind the reporters, grumbled out loud. “That's no ordinary brown shirt,” he said. “That's a fourteen ninety-five Van Heusen doubleknit.”

John Sochocki, looking as though he had dressed in a grown-up's suit, the lapels wide over his narrow chest, the sleeves too long, hanging over his hands, said he had been given a ride home from the Teen Center by Peter Reilly. John Sochocki said he'd got to his house, not many blocks from the Methodist Church, at 9:45. He said Peter was wearing a brown plaid jacket.

“Are you married?” Catherine Roraback asked the witness.

“Yes,” the woman on the stand said. She was wearing a rose-and-gray two-piece dress; she had fair skin and shinning red-blonde hair.

“What does your husband do?” Miss Roraback asked innocently.

“He's a Connecticut State police officer,” Joanne Mulhern replied. The jury watched, entranced, as she related how, at the Teen Center meeting, both Peter and Geoff had said good-bye to her and had left about 9:30. She said she saw Peter again early the next afternoon, and he was wearing the same clothes he'd had on the night before.

Geoffrey Madow took the stand, and Marion looked worried. “John Bianchi really rips into kids,” she had told me. At first it was easy for Geoff, as Catherine Roraback led him gently through the events of September 28, 1973. He told how, after the phone call from Peter, he'd raced back out to the car and had been the first person to get to Peter's house.

“And what did you see?” Miss Roraback asked softly.

“I saw Mrs. Gibbons lying on the floor in the bedroom … I said, ‘Pete, I think she's been raped,'” Geoff said.

But John Bianchi took Geoff back to the living Barbara, the woman who drank so much and argued so much with Peter. At first Geoffrey held his own; when the prosecutor asked what Barbara and Peter had argued about, Geoff said “Watergate,” and a ripple of laughter ran through the courtroom again. John Bianchi frowned.

“She was always picking on Peter, wasn't she?”

“Not all the time,” Geoff said.

“They did use profanity when they would argue back and forth, didn't they?”

“Not all the time,” Geoff said, looking uneasy.

“What did they say?” John Bianchi asked blandly.

Geoff murmured something and looked a little sick. Mr. Bianchi pressed hard.

“What did they say?” he said loudly.

“They might say, ‘Fuck you,'” Geoff said, almost in a whisper.

John Bianchi looked solemn and spoke loudly.

“Isn't it true that they would use the term ‘shit'?” he demanded.

“Yes,” whispered Geoff. A woman behind the press row, a close friend of John Bianchi, gave a little snort. “Yes,
sir,”
she said.

Art Madow, the Beligni boys, and Jim Holmes broke up at Geoffrey's answer, and Judge Speziale frowned at them. “Any more such outbursts from spectators and those spectators will be thrown out of this courtroom,” he said. Coming from Judge Speziale, the vernacular was as surprising as it was refreshing; in a court of law, where people tend to say, “I utilized” instead of “I used,” and “I observed” instead of “I saw,” it was nice to hear “thrown out,” instead of “eject.”

Mr. Bianchi complained that he had lost the line of questioning and asked for the last exchange to be read back. Mr. Roberts lifted the white tape from his machine and read aloud in his most elegant and precise way.

“Question: Isn't it true that they would use the term ‘shit?'” Mr. Roberts read carefully, with such beautiful diction that the term might as well have been “chrysanthemums.” “Answer: Yes.”

Mr. Roberts held his hands over his machine, poised for the next question, and John Bianchi nodded in a satisfied way.

“They would use such terms as ‘bastard' and ‘bitch,' didn't they?”

“Not to each other, no,” Geoff said. He explained that they only used those terms about a third person, such as a teacher.

“In all the times you visited, what's your best estimate of the times Barbara Gibbons was drunk?” John Bianchi asked.

“Forty percent of the time,” Geoff said. Mr. Bianchi showed him his statement, in which Geoff had said Barbara was drunk “about half the time,” and Mr. Bianchi looked pleased.

“When she was sober, was she a nice person?”

“Yes,” Geoff said clearly.

“What was she like when she was drinking?”

“Sometimes she was nice, sometimes she was bitchy. Depending on how she was feeling, I imagine,” Geoff said, with a little smile.

Mr. Bianchi frowned again and showed Geoffrey the statement he'd signed, in which Geoff said he'd reached his own home around 9:30, though he'd just told Miss Roraback it was 9:40.

“What made you change your mind?” John Bianchi asked, with a definite sneer.

Geoff looked anguished. “It never
was
changed,” he said. “It never
was
changed. I always meant, around nine-thirty to nine-forty-five.”

“Were you subpoenaed?” John Bianchi asked suddenly.

“I don't know,” Geoff said, and when the prosecutor pressed the point, as though to cast doubt on Geoff's friendship for Peter Reilly, Geoff suddenly looked over to the defense table. “Did you subpoena me, Miss Roraback?” he asked innocently. The judge looked up, startled, and Mr. Roberts stifled a smile as he took down the question.

John Bianchi then pulled out all the stops with Geoffrey, being harsh and ironic and florid, referring once to the house where Barbara died, as “the Reilly homestead,” asking Geoff whether Peter had cried and how he had looked.