A Death in Canaan (21 page)

Slowly, softly at first, then louder, voices began to speak out. At the town meeting in Falls Village, the Tuesday after Barbara died, Elizabeth Mansfield, who ran the general store, spoke for Peter. “Let's face it,” Mrs. Mansfield said, “he's in a lot of trouble, and he has no one but the townspeople in this world.” They talked about writing letters to Peter, and taking him clothes and cigarettes, but they didn't talk then about money. They all counted on Auntie B.

Then, pretty soon, Jean Beligni was back on the phone to Beverly King. “You asked if we needed help,” Jean said, a little sheepishly. “Well: Help!” Jean hadn't been able to reach Auntie B. by phone, and an eight-page letter she wrote went unanswered. In the letter, Jean explained in detail what had happened to Peter the night Barbara died. “Peter had no blood on him and was not messed up in any way,” Jean assured her, on Aldo's well-drilling letterhead.

“This is a quiet, gentle, sensitive, nonviolent boy,” Jean wrote. “I am sure it was shock, confusion, and questioning under extreme duress that made him say whatever he said that caused them to arrest him. They apparently have no weapon, as they are still combing the woods and surrounding areas of the house.”

Jean told Auntie B. about the weekend Peter was taken away, when so many people had tried to find him. “I guess for a while he felt everyone had deserted him. No one was allowed to see him, and he was never told that we were calling and were concerned about him.”

Jean said that when Peter got out of jail, the plan was for him to stay with the Madows until the trial was over, in order to spare Gina Beligni, who had just turned seven, the daily ordeal of a murder trial. “After the trial,” Jean wrote, “when Peter is found to be innocent, as I am sure he will be, he can decide whether he wants to stay with the Madows or with us.

“If you choose to help us in our attempts to raise Peter's bond, we would all be very grateful. If you choose not to help us, you alone know the reason.”

Beverly King called her little fund-raising committee back together, and in a few days, they all met at the Methodist Church meeting room, upstairs from the room where Peter had gone to the Teen Center meeting. It was the beginning of an astonishing exercise in community concern that was to spread far beyond this tiny village. It would spread beyond Canaan and Falls Village, beyond Litchfield County, far beyond the state of Connecticut.

But in the beginning, in October 1973, it was a small struggle. It was sad too. Not only was a young boy accused of the murder of his mother, but so much was at stake, so much that was subtle and painful. This was not New York or Chicago, or even Hartford, where things could be done in anonymity. This was Falls Village, Connecticut, voting population 575, minus one. This was Canaan, where people knew where you parted your hair. This was where people led their lives.

In his bowling league one season, Mickey Madow had been voted “Best Sport,” and the police in town had finally begun to call him “Mick.” Now they went back to saying “Mr. Madow.”

Father Paul was a young priest, ordained just three years. He thought Peter was innocent and he was having his coin collection appraised, to help raise bail. But his pastor was an older, more conservative priest who disapproved of controversy. The parishioners at St. Joseph's included John Bianchi and Jim Mulhern.

Jean Beligni's aunt worked as recording secretary at the Canaan barracks. Trooper Don Moran used to come by and help Aldo move the rig. Gina Beligni shared crayons in her second-grade classroom with Michael Mulhern. Some people told Jean that for these reasons, especially because of the children, she shouldn't get involved.

She did, though. They all did. And by establishing the Peter Reilly Defense Committee, they involved themselves in certain relationships, some rewarding, some intricate and difficult, with the other members of the committee and the police. And with Peter. And Barbara.

Peter told Jean, one Saturday afternoon at the jail, that he had asked for permission to attend his mother's funeral. The funeral had been on his mind for a long time; he had mentioned it to Lieutenant Shay that night in Hartford. In all the hectic worry about Peter, Jean hadn't thought much about burying Barbara, but she called Newkirk's Funeral Home the following week. Her uncle worked there.

“When will Barbara Gibbons be buried?” Jean asked.

“She was buried today,” her uncle said.

“Was it a service?” Jean demanded. “Who was there?”

It turned out that it wasn't a service, and nobody was there, although Mr. Pond from Newkirk's had read a few words when they put Barbara in the ground. It was just another piece of unfinished police business. There were no gravediggers; they used a backhoe instead, a kind of tractor with a scoop to dig out a place.

Right after Jean hung up, Peter called her from jail. “I got permission from the warden to come to my mother's funeral,” he said. Jean said she'd call him back, then she called Mickey Madow. “I didn't have the heart to tell him his mother was already buried,” Jean said. “He has permission to come to the service. What'll we do?”

“We'll have a service,” Mickey said emphatically.

They called everybody they could think of, and a week later, at two o'clock on the afternoon of Friday, November 2, a graveside memorial service was held at Grassy Hill Cemetery on Sand Road in Falls Village for Barbara Valerie Consuelo Gibbons, 1921–1973. Thirty people attended, most of them teen-agers.

Barbara wasn't buried in the main part of the old cemetery, near the historic Civil War graves. They had laid her on the side of a hill, against the little building where they stored the winter bodies, people who died when the ground was frozen hard and couldn't be buried till spring thaw.

When the car pulled up in front of the black iron gates at the cemetery, Peter and an Officer Murphy walked up the hill together. Officer Murphy wasn't wearing a uniform. He was in a dark suit, with his dark topcoat draped widely over his right arm.

He and Peter stood very close together, at the head of the little grave. There were flowers on the grave, a spray of orange and yellow mums. Jean figured that because Barbara and Mr. Kruse had planted some mums in front of the little house, they must have been Barbara's favorite flower.

There was no eulogy. Father Paul read a prayer. Everyone bowed his head and said the Lord's Prayer.

Officer Murphy let Peter talk to people for a little while. Peter met Beverly King, who had started the committee, for the first time. His cousin June had come from New Jersey, and his school friends were there. Officer Murphy was very nice. Jean noticed that he never pulled or jerked Peter in any way, as they walked, and because of the way he held his topcoat, some people at the service never even realized that he and Peter were handcuffed together.

The sun was still bright and warm as Peter walked away from the grave. Five days later, he was indicted by a grand jury. He would have to stand trial, now, charged with the murder of the woman who was buried on the hillside, up by the storage house. No gravestone was ever put up. As Mickey Madow said, “When this happened, nobody said, ‘Poor Barbara.' Everybody said, ‘Poor Peter.'”

PART TWO

7

I was having a drink by the fire when Barbara died.

My husband and I had bought our first house a few months earlier. It was a stone-and-frame cottage at the top of a steep, winding driveway, ten minutes from the courthouse in Litchfield, half an hour from Canaan. The house was chilly, and the roof leaked, but the living room had a fireplace with a brick mantel and a brick wall, nicely smoked by the fires of past years. A trail stretched behind the house into woods of birch and pine, and there was a red playhouse for our daughter Anne, who was three years old. We all had time to spend together. Jim had quit his job as a financial analyst in New York that year. The job was steady but dull, and he wanted to work as a free-lance photographer. He'd decided to make the move, drastic as it was, before he turned forty, before it was too late.

I was free-lancing, too. At
Life
magazine, I had been a staff writer for three years, until it folded, and I had signed on as a contributing editor to a new magazine,
New Times
. Jim and I were beginning to suspect that two free-lancers in a family was too many, with a city apartment to keep up and the monthly mortgage on the house. Still, our first autumn in Connecticut was all we had ever wished. The colors surged around us, and I was discovering narrow roads and church suppers and country journals to read by the fire, especially
Yankee
magazine and the weekly
Lakeville Journal
.

I first read about Barbara, and about the people who were trying to help Peter, in the
Journal
. I telephoned my editor, who said it sounded interesting as a story for
New Times
. On a Sunday afternoon in October 1973, I called Father Paul, who was mentioned in the
Journal
piece. “It's very bizarre,” he told me, and took my phone number. Within an hour, Jean Beligni called. “This kid has just inherited about six mothers and fathers,” she said. I asked to come to the next committee meeting and, because I'd never been in Canaan, we arranged to meet in the parking lot behind St. Joseph's. She said she'd be driving a white Mercury station wagon.

That is how it began for me, and for Jim, and even for Anne, as a story I read and a story I expected to write. For Anne, whose memories were just beginning to set, Peter Reilly became a natural fact of life. For nearly the next three years, Peter Reilly was a fact of all our lives. It made me happier sometimes, and sometimes more miserable, than any story I had ever done. It is hard to explain why, and perhaps it can't be entirely explained. Like birthdays, and earaches, and the weather, Peter Reilly was just something that happened.

“The most important thing you can do for Peter now is get him out of jail,” Catherine Roraback had said to Mickey, and he passed the word along at the committee meeting. But it seemed impossible, although a few people had given $1,000 each toward the bond fund, and an ad asking for pledges had run in the
Lakeville Journal
:
GET A BOY BACK INTO THE MAINSTREAM OF LIFE
.

Most of the original members of the Peter Reilly Defense Committee were people who knew him well: the three families who had permission to visit him each Saturday in jail—the Madows, the Belignis, and the Dickinsons. Priscilla Belcher had lived in Falls Village when Peter was a toddler; she'd been his baby-sitter. Beverly King had rounded up two members of her original committee, Norma Hawver and Bea Keith. As the weeks and months wore on, new people came and old ones went, but at the first meeting Jim and I went to, these were the people we met. I had brought a stack of
New Times,
the magazine that was going to run my article about Peter. Nobody had ever heard of it, but they were polite about it and seemed interested.

Two topics were discussed and dissected, hashed and rehashed, at the early meetings. How could they get Peter out of jail, and how in the world could this ever have happened?

None of us knew then all the details of the day and the night when Peter was out of sight—only that he had been taken from the house a few hours after Barbara died and had never come back; only that when different people tried to find him, they were told different things; only that Jim Mulhern had been with him, and that at some point, Peter had signed a statement saying he'd murdered his mother. He'd retracted the statement the next day, but, of course, it was too late.

“I asked him why he signed,” Jean Beligni said. “And he told me, ‘I got so tired, and it got so confusing.'”

She shook her head. “Jim Mulhern did his job,” she said vehemently, “but his job could have been tempered with a little bit of humanity. He should have said to Peter, ‘you're in serious trouble. You ought to get a lawyer.'”

“The police don't want people to have a lawyer,” Bill Dickinson said. “They figure with a lawyer around, people won't talk. The police say their hands are tied.”

“The thing about Peter,” Jean said, “he's eighteen, and legally a man, but he's still oriented as a child. He's oriented to school, to doing what grown-ups tell him to do.”

“Listen, I was talking to Catherine,” Mickey Madow said. Most people called her Miss Roraback, but Mickey, in his breezy, salesman-like way, used first names. “She told me she's going to file a motion that the confession, or whatever it is, be thrown out, on the grounds that it wasn't voluntary, that it was coerced.”

“Well, it's not believable,” Jean said. “Peter dropped John Sochocki off at a quarter to ten. Then he had to drive seven or eight miles home. How he could have had time, in just a few minutes, to make all those calls, change his clothes, throw away the bloody clothes, get rid of the weapon, turn the 'vette around …”

“And they were grappling in the lake,” Bill added. Marie Dickinson said nothing, but her hand shook a little as she reached for a cigarette. Barbara had told Marie someone was stealing gas from her car, and there had been other strange goings-on in the neighborhood. Marie knew the police had found obscene scrawls on the wall at the empty house on Route 63, and she had asked Bill not to go out at night for a while.

“My girl friend thinks the police are covering up for somebody important,” Jean said. “But I don't think so. They just walked in and saw the place and thought, ‘Look at these odd people, look at the way they live, he must have a problem, he must have done it.' I guess they never thought we all were going to scream.”

“It had to be somebody who knew the house,” Geoff Madow said. “The back door was open. And it was never open. It had five or six locks. That door was
locked
.”

“I got home at two-thirty or so,” Mickey recalled. “And just then they called and said we should come down Saturday to give our statements. I said we were still up and would come down right away. But they said not to come. They said tomorrow would be soon enough.”