A Death in Canaan (38 page)

Partly it was a feeling of involvement, a simple caring what happened, but beyond that, it was a process of perception, a process that had begun when Barbara died and Peter was taken away in a police car. It had been reflected in the confused, angry, bewildered voices at the early gatherings of the Peter Reilly Defense Committee, and it had deepened in the months since. Not everyone's perceptions were identical, of course, and they did not always lead to consensus, let alone to change. Still, the process had begun, and it would not be ended when the jurors reached a verdict.

April 11 was a chilly day, Geoffrey Madow's birthday. Chunks of muddy ice were clumped at the curbs on West Street, in front of the courthouse, and the village was scattered with patches of old snow.

Inside the courtroom, with its
NO ADMITTANCE
sign on the door, John Bianchi thanked the jurors for paying such close attention to the case and reminded them that the state did not have to prove Peter Reilly guilty beyond all doubt, but beyond a reasonable doubt. “My argument to you will be based on direct evidence, and on circumstantial evidence,” he said. “Direct evidence is anything that comes through our senses.” To explain circumstantial evidence, Mr. Bianchi described a winter scene. “If you came upon a house with your car one snowy evening, just as it started to snow, and you saw some footprints coming from the front porch, and you followed them around the house … and inside the door was a pair of wet rubbers, and a person came to the door, and the rubbers fit his feet, and the treads were the same … and he says he hasn't been out, the circumstances show the man isn't telling the truth.” He looked at the jury and gestured toward Peter Reilly. “There is direct evidence that this young man committed this murder. There is overwhelming circumstantial evidence that he did so,” Mr. Bianchi said, and sat down.

Catherine Roraback wore a pretty dress, a powder blue, with a silver pin and a string of pearls. Her hair was freshly washed and shone. But she looked wan. She had just learned that morning that her only brother Albert had terminal cancer. She had told Mickey Madow the bad news when she came in, and she'd told John Bianchi, too.

Still, when she faced the jury for the last time, she managed to smile at them. “This isn't like TV,” she said. “I won't be able to point to somebody back in the spectators' section and say, ‘That's the person who did it.'” Most of the jurors smiled at that, too, and some people in the gallery laughed.

“Mr. Reilly is charged with a very gruesome crime,” she said. She stood behind Peter, her hand on the back of his chair, and spoke softly. “Mr. Reilly, who discovered his mother, knows that far better than any of us.”

She walked slowly over to the evidence table in front of Mr. Roberts and picked up a paper with a bright red label, State's Exhibit C, the first statement Peter had given to Trooper Bruce McCafferty, as they sat outside the house that Friday night, only an hour or so after Barbara died. It all seemed long ago, another time, another world, as she read how Peter and Geoff had gone up to the Shopwell, after school, to see if they needed Geoff on the weekend; how they bought a dollar's worth of gas at the Arco station; how they'd left Barbara watching TV around 7:20, and how when Peter came home and found his mother, he'd called the Madows, and had gone outside to wait for help.

“I have read the above, and it's the truth,” Miss Roraback finished quietly, and put the statement back down on the table. Slowly, as though she had all the time in the world, she took out each item of clothing from the plastic bag, looked at it with great care, and showed them again to the jury. She reminded them that even Joanne Mulhern, “the wife of Trooper Mulhern,” had testified that these were the clothes Peter had been wearing. She reminded them that Lieutenant Shay, in the skin search in the Kruses' kitchen, had found “no blood, no bruises, no scratches,” nothing but one red knuckle. She pointed out that although “everybody's memory of time is elastic,” there was a general consistency, and that sometime between 9:45 and 9:50, Peter Reilly got home, and that, in just a few minutes, “he is supposed to have done this awful thing.”

She shook her head slowly and walked back around the courtroom, standing behind Peter's chair. The hush in the courtroom was thick and tangible.

“You know what the questioning was like in Hartford,” she said, in an almost gentle voice. “First it was Sergeant Kelly for three and a half or four hours. Next it was Lieutenant Shay. Then Trooper Mulhern came in. Then we had Lieutenant Shay and Sergeant Kelly again. And out of it all, as I understand the state's claim, Mr. Reilly made certain admissions. After he'd been told that they had him cold, after he'd been told that it really wasn't so bad to kill his mother—after all, he was
her
victim, she was not his—after he'd been told that anybody can fly off the handle—after he had been told and drilled that he had a mental problem, that he needed help, that he could turn to his great friends, Kelly, Shay, and Mulhern, and get it from them.” She paused, and shook her head slightly, in that angry little way she had.

“He was not told that the Madows were trying to reach him. He was there in isolation, and in a topsy-turvy way, his world got turned upside down. Most shocking to me, the state police of Connecticut created in Mr. Reilly's mind the fact that it wasn't so bad to have killed his mother, and that, in fact, he had killed her, although Peter Reilly, right up to the end, says, ‘I still don't think I did it. I'm not sure. It's like I'm dreaming.'”

Again she walked over to the exhibit table and picked up a paper. “I remember slashing with the razor I used for model airplanes,” she read, and looked at the jury. “You will remember that that razor had no blood on it whatsoever,” she told them.

“I also remember jumping on my mother's legs.” Again she looked up at the jury. “You will recall that chat derived from the first questioning by Sergeant Kelly,” she said, thus reminding the jury that it was the officer who had first suggested to Peter that he might have “jumped up and down.”

She looked at the statement, then back at the jury. “On the tape, Peter said he swung from left to right. Trooper Mulhern wrote ‘I swung at her from right to left.' What Trooper Mulhern wrote down was a little more consistent with where the cuts occurred,” she said dryly.

“The last sentence on the final statement: ‘I want to clarify one point: When I slashed at my mother with a straight razor, I cut her throat.'” She shook her head again. “I would raise a serious question as to where page one of that original statement may be,” she said softly, “and whether perhaps …” her voice trailed off, “but that's really neither here nor there. By the time they got through with him at Hartford, I think he would have signed a statement saying he had tried to cut out her sex organs. I think they could have had Peter Reilly sign a statement that after he committed this horrible crime he had turned his mother over and inflicted those wounds on her back.” She shrugged a little, with a half-smile. “Maybe they didn't know about them.

“I think they could have had Peter Reilly say almost anything by the end of that time,” she said, her voice stronger now, “and I think the tapes bear that out.

“I ask you to consider whether it makes sense that when an individual says, ‘I did it, I killed my mother,' you would say, ‘Here's a ham and cheese sandwich.' Peter Reilly says, ‘Thank you very much,' and Trooper Mulhern says, ‘What's happening?' It hardly seems consistent with what Peter Reilly is supposed to have said before.”

Then she came to John McAloon. “A man of many names, many crimes,” she said dryly, glancing at John Bianchi, who flushed and stared at her. “If Peter Reilly said something to him about throwing away his clothes, it wouldn't surprise me. It's part of the same old pattern. It's not surprising that after that brainwashing in Hartford, he'd still be saying things of that sort. It's almost hardly necessary to talk about. I would submit that the Madows and Mrs. Mulhern are far better witnesses.”

She walked around the defense table and came closer to the jury, reminding them that Barbara had complained about a theft, and that she had told Peter, the day she died, that she'd bought a brand-new wallet and had cashed a check for $100.

“What was found in the house?” Miss Roraback asked now. “Sixteen cents. The back door ordinarily was never open, but that night it was open, and it was on that back door there was an unidentified, but identifiable, fingerprint.”

She paused again, in a thoughtful way. Altogether, her summation had a slow, deliberate, sometimes rambling quality, as though she was trying to anticipate every possible thing the prosecutor might say, knowing that once she stopped, she could not refute anything, ever again.

She walked back to Peter's chair again and put her hands on his shoulders. “He's a young man who's lived in Falls Village about all his life,” she said. “He's gone to school here; he's been active in the Teen Center.… Few of us have ever been submitted to such shock. And after that traumatic moment in his life he was placed in isolation, away from his friends, held by the police and not given sleep or food. And he came out with these statements, which I submit should not be given any weight at all.

“How, if Peter came home and indeed committed this awful offense, do you think that he could have gotten so angry over what I consider to be a rather petty issue, the car? An issue we've all probably had with our own parents or our children. I submit that's probably the most common argument in the American household.” Peter smiled slightly, and Helen Ayre smiled at them both.

“Would he have had time,” Miss Roraback asked, in an almost musing way, “to clean himself up? And what about those clothes?” She looked at the jury, speaking in a louder, more definite tone now. “I submit that that's impossible … There's certainly reasonable doubt … I would submit that there is no verdict you can return other than one of not guilty,” she said slowly, and sat down.

Judge Speziale looked at the clock. “Short recess, Mr. Sheriff,” he called out, and the jury looked relieved, seeming to draw a sort of collective breath.

None of the spectators talked much. Beverly King had come, Marion and Dot Madow and Geoff, Paul Beligni and Pam Belcher. Bill and Marie Dickinson stood quietly together, and in the hallway, Peter and his girl held hands.

George Judson leaned against the bar rail, watching Peter in the hall with speculative interest. “I've been wondering,” George said, deadpan. “If Peter had gone home to live with Lieutenant Shay, do you think he would have been happy?”

“There she was!” John Bianchi told the jury, and gestured toward the floor with a flourish. He clenched his fist and made a smashing motion toward his own face. “That happened before death, and there's no evidence that anyone else was there. We find cuts on her stomach”—Mr. Bianchi slashed across his own middle, with the side of his hand—“when there was nobody in that house but Peter Reilly!” He turned to the defense table and shook his finger at Peter, “when there was nobody in that house but Peter Reilly!” Peter stared at him. As I watched, Peter's profile from the spectators' gallery looked sharply, bleakly outlined.

Mr. Bianchi stalked over to the exhibit table and picked up the knife, waving it at the jury. “This was covered with a thin layer of blood, on both sides and on the cutting edge,” he said forcefully. Miss Roraback rose quickly to object, admitting that it was an unusual thing to do during a summation, but she pointed out that this was not the evidence that had been given.

Mr. Bianchi just looked at her and shrugged a little. But it was an eloquent gesture, seeming to say that what he'd just said about the knife was now part of the script. And this was, in a way, a performance, well-rehearsed and effective. Earlier Mr. Bianchi had set the stage, in a melancholy and evocative word-picture of Peter's life and times.

“A dirty house … a mother who had clearly turned into an alcoholic,” he said in a grave voice. “When she was murdered, she had a blood alcohol reading of point twenty-two and was under the influence at the time of her death.

“Recall the tapes, where he indicated that she was on his back constantly … that she harassed him about the car, the one real item that they owned …

“This had to be a very, very unhappy arrangement for Peter Reilly,” the prosecutor said gloomily. “And thus it's not strange to me that when he finally began to tell what had happened in Hartford, he felt ‘free at last.' His burden was gone.”

The prosecutor stood close by the jury rail. “Would it surprise you, ladies and gentlemen, that he had difficulty in remembering each and every detail? It doesn't surprise me at all. He was finally free of this horrible life he'd been living.” In the second spectators' row, Paul Beligni, who had spent so much time with Barbara and Peter, often sleeping overnight on the roll of foam rubber in the living room, sneered audibly. Sheriff Battistoni frowned at him.

Mr. Bianchi backed away from the jury rail. “The circumstantial evidence is
overwhelming,”
he repeated. “If there was nothing else, no statements, do the circumstances lead you to believe that somebody else did this?” He gestured toward Miss Roraback. “She has
hinted
that this might be a robber.” His voice dripped scorn. “Miss Roraback says there was sixteen cents in the house. Think about it. Is a robber going to take the time to mutilate her body after she's dead? Does it make sense to you that this is what a robber would do?” He paused dramatically and shook his head. “It sure doesn't to me.

“Now let's go to the direct side of the case, besides the circumstantial,” he said briskly. “Miss Roraback has pooh-poohed—has told you not to give one iota of weight—to anything this young man said. I submit his honor will charge you differently on this. He will tell you that those confessions and admissions were voluntary, that they were not in violation of Peter Reilly's constitutional rights.