A Death in Canaan (39 page)

“Miss Roraback would have you believe that he was held in isolation. Nothing could be further from the truth …

“If he said, ‘Get me an attorney,' that would have been done. But he said he wanted to go to Hartford, and he went, driven by his friend, Jim Mulhern.”

As for Sergeant Kelly, the prosecutor continued, “he sat right here in front of you for two days, ladies and gentlemen, and you had an opportunity to view this man and to come to a conclusion as to what kind of an individual Tim Kelly is. You heard them discuss model airplanes and model boat building.” Mr. Bianchi looked indignant. “Did he use a rubber hose to beat it out of him? He tried, in good police procedure, to do it gently.

“Then we come to Lieutenant Shay. He obviously was a bit angry. He got rather perturbed, I thought. But what did that mean to this young man? He wanted to go home with him! Is that the response of somebody who has been in anguish?

“And then we come to the other ‘inquisitor,'”—Mr. Bianchi's voice was thick with sarcasm. “They would have the utmost
gall
to say that he altered that statement. But Jimmy Mulhern couldn't care less. He only wanted the truth.” Mr. Bianchi repeated how Peter had asked Mulhern, “Are you ashamed to know me now?” and when Mulhern asked why, Peter said, “Because I did it, I killed her.”

“If there was ever a confession, ladies and gentlemen, that was it!” John Bianchi declared, close up to the jury rail now, almost breathing into the jurors' faces. “Right then and there. To his good friend, Jim Mulhern.”

As for John McAloon, Mr. Bianchi admitted, “he certainly is a man of many crimes.” He turned to the defense table, with a slight smirk. “He's got almost as bad a record as Mr. Erhardt. Not
quite,
but almost.” The prosecutor turned back to the jury, then, speaking in a low, conversational tone, as though he were confiding in them.

“You know what convinced me of the truth of John McAloon's statement?” he asked them. “When he said that the kid told him his mother had had an operation and wouldn't take her medicine. How in the world did John McAloon know that if Peter Reilly hadn't told him?”

He shook his head, backed away from the jury rail, and stood in the middle of the floor. The jury and the spectators watched, fascinated. The difference in the lawyers' styles had never been more evident than they were today. This could have been a scene from a theater workshop. Here was a woman who appeared to be something of a loner, intellectual, complicated, and subtle, given to philosophical musings; she had begun her summation with a remark about the judicial system in Scotland, which allowed a jury to reach a verdict somewhere between guilty and not guilty, the verdict, “not proven.”

And opposite her was a prosecutor who was jovial and folksy, portraying a man of plain old common sense. And he was theatrical—he dramatically waved a knife, made mock slashes against his own stomach, and clutched the lapels of his chocolate-colored suit as he addressed the jury. He had begun his summation by declaring that he had been trying criminal cases for twenty years.

“This case, like all criminal cases, is a difficult case,” he declared. “But I submit to you that the state of Connecticut has carried forth its burden. The statements that this youngster made to the police—are they liars? Recall the tapes. He said, ‘Everything I said I mean. And it's the
truth
.'”

The courtroom door was locked, nobody could go in or out while Judge Speziale charged the jury. Peter Reilly, in a bright yellow shirt with a burgundy V-necked sweater over it, stared at him. The judge talked about the law, which he said made no distinction between direct evidence and circumstantial evidence. “It is your duty to consider circumstantial evidence in the same way as direct evidence …” In the voir dire, he had said he would explain reasonable doubt when the time came, and now he did. He said it meant “doubt which is something more than a guess or surmise … not a captious or fanciful doubt, nor a doubt suggested by the ingenuity of counsel or a juror.” Reasonable doubt, he declared, was “a real doubt, an honest doubt, which has its foundation in the evidence or lack of evidence.”

He pulled out a big white handkerchief and wiped his nose. It suited the occasion, just as John Bianchi's wiping his face with a white handkerchief, near the end of his summation, had been an appropriate flourish; Kleenex would have been entirely out of place.

Regarding the testimony of Peter Reilly, the judge said, the jurors were to remember “his obvious interest in the verdict which you ladies and gentlemen are about to render.” Speaking of interests, he reminded them, too, that John McAloon's case was still pending, and “he may in his own mind be looking for some favors.”

At the heart of the criminal matter, the confession, the statements of Peter Reilly, “This court says that they are voluntary.… the defendant was not denied due process under the Fourteenth Amendment.” On the matter of the polygraph test, though, he said sternly, “You may not consider the polygraph test to have any bearing on the credibility, guilt, or innocence of the accused.”

He told them their decision must be unanimous and that they must have “no concern whatever with the punishment to be inflicted in the case of conviction,” and, like Catherine Roraback, he mentioned three possible verdicts. The jury could find Peter Reilly guilty as charged, guilty of murder. Or they could find him not guilty. But whereas Miss Roraback had talked, rather wistfully, of the Scottish alternative, “not proven,” the court's third option was different.

“If not guilty as charged, consider manslaughter in the first degree,” the judge said. He explained that manslaughter meant causing a person's death “with intent to cause serious physical injury … intent is a mental process … ordinarily, intent can be proved only by circumstantial evidence.” In the language of the lawbooks he knew so well, Judge Speziale explained that a person who committed manslaughter acted “under the influence of severe emotional disturbance: a sudden frenzy, or passion, of the slayer … what he does under the first hot spur of impulse.”

He ended his charge, as he had begun it, by relying on the law. “The law does not require that the state must prove a motive. If no motive can be inferred or found, it may raise a reasonable doubt.” He paused slightly. “Or it may not raise a reasonable doubt.” The jurors walked across the courtroom then to the jury room. Their hard work was starting now. Eleanor Novak was smiling to herself. It was her wedding anniversary, and her husband had promised to take her down to Washington for the weekend to see the cherry blossoms.

“That car's worth money!” Peter exclaimed. He watched as the automobile, a black and white Thunderbird, turned the corner at the Stop sign, went past the Congregational Church, and rolled out of sight. He seemed relaxed, though he smoked constantly. The night before, Mickey had taken him and Geoff to see
Magnum Force,
to get their minds off things.

It was midafternoon. The jury had gone to lunch, not in a group, but in whatever arrangements they chose, just as they had during the trial. Miss Roraback objected that the jurors ought to be sequestered, but she was overruled.

Only an hour or so after lunch, a knock came from inside the jury room, and a vibration, a kind of electric shock, ran through the courtroom. Geoff Madow, who had gone back upstairs briefly, raced down the stairs to the courthouse door. “Pete!” he called. “Pete! They're coming out!” Peter raced up the stairs. John Bianchi came out of his office, looking very serious.

It was generally felt that the longer a jury stayed out, the more likely they were to find a person guilty. A verdict reached so quickly probably meant an acquittal, and John Bianchi looked tense as he stood near the counsel table.

The sheriff took the note from the hand that reached out from the jury room and gave it to the clerk, who took it back to Judge Speziale's chambers. In a few minutes, the judge swept out around the corner and stepped up to the bench. He told the sheriff to bring the jury out, and in a few minutes all the jurors were back in their seats, watching him.

It was not a verdict, but a question, and Judge Speziale did not look pleased as he read it aloud. “The plaid jacket—where is it?”

The judge looked at the jurors, who stared back at him, looking a little guilty. He reminded them, not smiling, that the jacket was not part of the evidence. “You are not to surmise or conjecture as to its whereabouts,” he told them sternly, and sent them back to their little room.

As the jurors' handbook had said: The law was what the judge said it was, and the evidence was what the judge let the jury hear and consider.

Outside the jury room, the rest of the afternoon passed easily. With the trial over, some barriers were down, and conversation among sheriffs and spectators flowed freely. Phil Plumb knew a lot about juries. “If you hear a toilet flush, they're ready to come out,” he said. “A little rap at the door means more questions. A loud rap means a verdict.” A sheriff's wife, Marian Battistoni, said she'd read in the
New York Daily News
that a baby born in 1974 had a two percent chance of being murdered and was therefore more likely to be slain than an American soldier in World War II had been likely to die in combat.

Dinnertime came, without a verdict. Judge Speziale drove away with his wife and his daughter in his burgundy Fleetwood, smiling and tipping his hat as he came out of the courthouse. Marion and Mickey, Dot and Murray, Bill and Marie Dickinson, Beverly King, and a bunch of the boys went to the Village Restaurant. Peter hadn't had lunch, only a Coke, but now he was hungry, and he asked for a steak.

The night session had a strange eerie quality. The fluorescent lights turned the courtroom a garish white, with blackness pressing against the tall schoolroom windows. People came and went, in and out of the courtroom. Jacqui Bernard, the woman who had put up most of the bail, had come up from New York to hear the summations. She was a striking woman, with big, quizzical eyes and close-cropped, almost white hair, and she was noticed in the court when she showed up. She was spending the night at our house, and when Joe O'Brien saw us chatting together in the courtroom, he asked me who she was. But Jacqui had asked to remain unknown. She had done some writing for a neighborhood weekly in New York, so I told Joe she was a reporter for the
West Side News
. It was a limited truth, and Joe O'Brien, after fourteen years as a newspaperman, knew all about limited truths. “The
West Side News,
you say?” Joe grunted, halfway between a laugh and a scoff, not bothering to ask the west side of where.

Mr. Roberts leaned over the bar rail and chatted about other trials, other transcripts. He said once a man was on trial for armed robbery, and the lawyer was questioning a friendly witness who was supposed to testify to the accused man's character as an upstanding citizen. “Do you know this man?” the lawyer began. “Yes,” the witness said. “Do you know his reputation?” “Yes,” the witness said. “And what is his reputation?” “He's known as a straight shooter,” the witness replied.

None of us talked about Barbara. When I thought about it later, it seemed natural that we didn't. Tony Cookson, a college senior who wrote a thesis on the case, explained why. “In court, it's just a terrifying game,” Tony said. “You lose track of the person who got killed.”

While we were milling around the courthouse, however, sipping coffee and telling jokes, the jurors were talking about Barbara. They had stopwatches in the jury room, the knife, and the razor. They scraped the knife on the table in the jury room and found that it made marks on the table similar to the marks on Barbara's back. Although in Peter's confession he said he'd used a straight razor, the jurors were much more interested in the knife. They were interested, too, in the psychological overtones of the killing, especially the vaginal cutting.

They generally agreed that Peter didn't know what he was saying on the tapes, that he was just saying what people were saying to him. But the jurors were aware how important the tapes were, and during the late evening, they asked to hear part of the tapes again. They'd have preferred to listen in the privacy of their little room, but the judge made them come out and take their seats in the box again. He sat on the bench in his black robe, and the courtroom was still filled with spectators, even at this hour, as the last portions of the tapes played again in the courtroom.

They sounded different now. They probably sounded clearer because of the nighttime hush, but besides the clarity there was a new—or at least a different—reality. I thought Peter's words might be sounding very different to us now, in this courtroom context, than they had sounded when he was actually being questioned in Hartford. The jurors' handbook had promised “a real life drama” in the courtroom, but real life wasn't always the clearest reality.

Here was Peter's voice again, gravelly and low, as Mulhern got to the slashing of the throat.

“Did you draw blood?”

“That I don't remember.”

“You saw the razor cut, though?”

“I'm pretty sure. It's almost like in a dream.”

“OK, sign.”

“Are you proud of me?”

“Will I need a lawyer?”

“I can't advise you one way or the other. You have a right to have a lawyer.”

“Yeah, but, I mean—the statement—”

“Doesn't matter. You can have an attorney at any time you want.”

“Yeah, but I mean, everything I said I mean, I mean it is the truth.”

The jurors went home that night. They were still about evenly divided, as they had been at the outset: five voting guilty, four not guilty, three undecided. All together they took six ballots before they reached their verdict Friday afternoon.

I went over to the courthouse that morning. Time dragged. Hardly anyone had anything to say anymore, and I sat for an hour on the grass across from the courthouse, where I could see people coming and going, but wouldn't have to make conversation. The jurors asked to go to lunch early, and this time they went in a group to a private room that had been reserved for them in the back of Mitchell's.