A Death in Canaan (48 page)

Both lawyers were quoted. Roy Daly called the decision “a victory for justice,” and Catherine Roraback said she was “very pleased for Peter.” Although the new lawyer seemed the hero, a
Journal
editorial, “Debt to Miss Roraback,” had pointed out during the hearing that she'd made an essential contribution to justice. “Whether someone else would have conducted the original defense in exactly the same way is not the issue,” the paper said tartly. “No one else seemed interested at the time.”

But there was enough glory to spare, glory to share. The judge's decision came just one year after Roy Daly had begun his quest for items of evidence from the state, including the unidentified print. Even after he got it, for months he couldn't find anybody to try to match it. The Federal agents wouldn't get involved without the consent of the state police, and the state police wouldn't consent until somebody Daly knew in Fairfield made an urgent personal request. When I asked Daly whether the delay could be called obstruction of justice, he smiled. “Let's just say this is a funny case,” he said.

When the press got to Peter, he held a news conference in the driveway at the Madows's, the house on Locust Hill that had a $15,000 mortgage on it, to pay for part of Peter's bail. “I was hoping all the way,” Peter told reporters, and some wrote later that there were tears in his eyes. But he didn't have much else to say. As Geoffrey Madow said, “We talk mostly about cars, and when we don't talk about cars, we don't talk very much.” And
The New York Times
story the next day said that Peter seemed “as impassive as ever.” The
Times
story was at the top of the front page, continued inside, with a map of Litchfield County, showing Canaan, Litchfield, and Roxbury, Arthur Miller's town, marked with black dots. There was a picture of Peter, grinning from ear to ear, on the front page of the
Times,
too. But Peter was accustomed to this kind of publicity, now.

I was at home in New York when Marion called me from her office, right after Peter called her. “Joan, Peter got a new trial!” she said.

“I knew it, Marion!” I shouted into the phone. “I knew it!”

Marion's sister Vicky mailed me a copy of the judge's opinion, copied from her copy of Joe O'Brien's copy. It was remarkable reading.

Judge Speziale said that although the petitioner hadn't proved that the state had withheld exculpatory material, and in fact, the State's Attorney “had made every effort to be fair,” there certainly was newly discovered evidence. Most of it could not have been discovered, he said, “with due diligence,” either before or during the trial. This included the identification of the fingerprint and the statement of Sandra Ashner. He noted that the state had claimed that Ashner was not a credible witness, but he pointed out that the issue was not whether her story was credible but whether it was admissible. He said it would be admissible if there were a new trial, and beyond that, it would be up to a new jury to decide whether or not to believe it.

He said that although “time was a key factor,” he didn't blame Catherine Roraback for not calling in the film man from CBS. “The discovery of the actual broadcast time of a specifically identified scene in a television program goes beyond the scope of reasonable due diligence.”

The judge didn't blame the police. “They were engaged in investigating a brutal and violent slaying. They were justified in considering the petitioner a suspect.” He criticized Miss Roraback for not bringing in an expert to raise the issue of the reliability of Peter's confession, which, he said, “went totally unexplained.”

He let the jury off the hook. “We must not lose sight of the fact that to convict Peter A. Reilly the jury had to believe and find that he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The unusual circumstances of this complicated and bizarre case explain why the jury at the original trial must have had great difficulty in arriving at its verdict.”

He had lived with this case, he said, for more than two years, and he had reached a conclusion. “It is readily apparent that a grave injustice has been done, and that upon a new trial it is more than likely that a different result will be reached.”

I had lived with the case a little longer than Judge Speziale, but my own conclusions were not so apparent. I was disappointed in my vision. Here was a case of grave injustice. I'd had a front-row seat, yet I was able to make only vague discernments, as of shadowy shapes upon a stage.

Certainly I could see the painful connection between money and justice. Money would have helped so much to ease the burden and the threat from the beginning, sparing Peter his five months in jail. Beyond that, my most obvious conclusion—and the most frightening—was the essential riskiness of justice.

In the nearly three years since I made that first call to Father Paul in Canaan, I had run many emotional lengths. When I first wrote about Peter Reilly, I had been a writer for ten years, but nothing I'd written ever had such a dramatic effect on other people's lives. When my article led to getting Peter out of jail, I felt enormous joy. It was more than pride, it was real joy, that something I might write could have such a direct and happy effect on somebody else. I remember that joy.

I remember the sorrow, too. I hear Edward Ives saying “Guilty.” I see him blinking quickly as he looks at Peter. I see Peter, the color of ashes, staring at the floor, his hand covering his mouth. I see Marion doubled over in her chair.

Eventually I felt relief; it was over. Not that all the questions had been answered. Was the affair a cover-up of some kind or, as Peter had said, were the police just overzealous, “too gung-ho”? Among the throngs of witnesses at the trial and at the hearing—nearly ninety people altogether—who was right? Who was wrong? Who killed Barbara Gibbons?

The most resonant question in the case had always been answered, from the time that handful of housewives and working men got together in an upstairs room and became the Peter Reilly Defense Committee. As it once might have been phrased: When shall we achieve justice in Canaan? When those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are.

There were two postscripts to Judge Speziale's decision. The first was John Bianchi's announcement that he would proceed with another trial; but even if he did it was “more than likely,” as the judge had said, that the result would be different. The other was that, of all things, Jim Conway was arrested. He was charged with illegally carrying a gun in Litchfield County, where his gun permit wasn't valid. Jim Conway said he had surrendered his gun voluntarily at the courthouse during the hearing and had been given a receipt; but the charge said he had refused to hand over the gun, which then had been seized from him. He was indicted. “When I came into this case,” he told me later, “I used to feel like the Man of La Mancha, always falling off the rear end of a horse. Now I feel more like a character in
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.”

I knew what he meant. A death in Canaan had occupied my life and the lives of my husband and daughter to a degree that had strained us all. Anne was a toddler when it all began; now she was finishing first grade, old enough to sense how preoccupied I'd been. Jim and I still had drinks by the fire, and he was happily back at work as a financial manager, but sometimes we didn't seem to have much to talk about, other than Peter Reilly.

On the day before Easter 1976, Jim and Anne and I drove up from New York to Litchfield. It was past five in the afternoon when we reached our house, and I knew I had to hurry to get to the market before it closed. I looked in the refrigerator, then in the cupboard, clicking off in my mind what I could quickly get to tide us through the weekend. Milk, eggs, bread, butter, a canned ham. “It's nice to be back in the country, isn't it?” I asked Anne, who was standing in the doorway. “But where do you think I have to go now, right away?”

“To court,” Anne said.

It was not a question, and I stared into the cupboard, not wanting to turn and look at her. “No,” I said finally. “Oh no. I don't have to go to court anymore.”

I did go back once more, though. One day during Easter week I drove into Litchfield and parked in the town lot, behind the county agent's office. There was plenty of room now. I walked up West Street to the courthouse, past the Marden Coffee Shop. Under New Management, it had become the Colonial Pizza. I wondered what had become of my crusty waitress.

After the scramble and the hubbub of the hearings, with the metal scanner and the network news, the courthouse now seemed hushed, the kind of country courthouse I had seen in the movies. As I walked down the first floor hall, my footsteps echoed. This is more like it, I thought.

There was no one to stop me, so I went up the back stairs, the stairs reserved for the judge and attorneys and courthouse staff. At the top, the door to the law library was open. I could see Catherine Roraback at the far end, near the window, talking to someone. She was free for lunch, so we walked down to the Village Restaurant and sat in the second-last booth. I was surprised and pleased to find her in the courthouse, and I asked what brought her back to Litchfield. It was something minor—a client accused of drunk driving, I think—and she didn't seem to want to talk about it. It occurred to me that these are hard times for constitutional lawyers.

“Do you feel you're a scapegoat in this case?” I asked her, and she said she did feel that way, more or less.

“I'm a Yankee, a WASP, and a Roraback,” she mused. “There's always been some dislike—and I know enough about my family to think some of it has probably been justified. People have an idealized version of what goes on in a courtroom,” she said, “and to deal with that illusion is something most people are not capable of doing. I have reached a certain level of cynicism, but I don't think I'm quite cynical enough.” We each had another Bloody Mary.

I wandered back to the courthouse and went upstairs to Superior Court. A young man with lots of bushy black hair was up on a charge of third-degree burglary, accused of stealing a color TV set, some pieces of pewter, and an old Kodak. Bond was set at $3,500, and he was taken away in handcuffs. John Bianchi, representing the state of Connecticut, told Judge Bracken that was the end of the docket for the day, and court was adjourned.

I stayed in my seat until the others had left. Then I walked up to the bar rail and said hello to John Bianchi. He said hello, and I asked if we could talk a bit. He said yes, though he looked a little wary, and I was not surprised. We walked back to the law library and sat at the table near the window.

“I don't look on this as an unusual case,” Mr. Bianchi said. “It was not a difficult case. It was relatively simple. The only unusual feature is that a lot of people became interested. I wish this happened more often.” He said it with a perfectly straight face, and I felt obliged to remind him that he had tried to throw the press out at the very start, back at the pretrial hearings.

“I just felt, from the portions of the tape I heard, that it would damage him,” Mr. Bianchi said. “Supposing that the only thing that was on that tape was just his admission and confession. How could you ever report it? With a headline that said,
REILLY CONFESSES GUILT
? We read your article, and we were wondering how he ever could get a fair trial. People were sending me that magazine from all over the country.” I said I'd sent him one too. He said he remembered.

I was surprised that he hadn't bothered to hear all the tape before he pressed for an indictment, but I hadn't come to argue. I wanted to listen, and as we talked, he seemed relaxed. He put his feet up on the table. His dark gold loafers gleamed. He lighted a cigarette.

“You always have to ask yourself two questions,” he said. “‘Have I got the right person?' and, ‘Is there sufficient evidence for you to proceed?' ‘Have I got the right person?'” he asked, rhetorically. “I couldn't prosecute somebody if I didn't think he was guilty. I couldn't sleep nights.

“I've never thought, ‘This is the prosecution's verdict,' or, ‘This is the defendant's verdict.' The way I look at it, the State's Attorney represents the people.” I thought of Jean Beligni, repeating what Peter had said to her one Saturday, when he was still in jail. “Oh, Mrs. Beligni,” he said, “it's the state of Connecticut versus Peter Reilly.” And Jean had tried to comfort him. “Oh, Peter,” she said. “Everybody isn't against you.
I
live in Connecticut.”

When I asked John Bianchi about the jury verdict, he laughed.

“Long ago I stopped trying to figure out what a jury might do,” he said. “It must be very hard for a jury. Reasonable doubt—not a surmise, not a conjecture, not a guess. You almost have to define it in the negative. Reasonable doubt,” he said again, slowly. “Isn't that a corker?”

We walked out into the courtroom. It was empty, except for John Bianchi and me. The first time I'd heard of John Bianchi was when Jean Beligni told me that she'd called him the Sunday night after Barbara died. “I told him, we're concerned about Peter,” Jean had said. “And John said, ‘We're all concerned about Peter.'” Now, after all that had happened, I stood with him in the courtroom, and we looked at the picture of Judge Warner hanging crookedly over the jury box. “Judge Warner was State's Attorney for twenty-one years,” he said, “before he became a judge.” He went into his office then. He was whistling.

I went downstairs, using the back stairs again, to see Mr. Roberts. I knew I was being compulsive. Like some kind of amateur recording angel, I was making the rounds, jotting down the numbers, even though I might never know how they added up.

I knocked on Mr. Roberts's door, half wood, half frosted glass, just right for a country courthouse. Mr. Roberts had his sleeves rolled up and his jacket hanging on the back of his chair. He was wearing his suspenders and the rimless glasses and speaking into the Stenorette. I had never been inside his office before, and it was just about as I'd expected—neat, plain, tidy—except that on the wall behind him was an enormous colored poster, nearly a mural, of Cypress Gardens.