A Death in Canaan (28 page)

William Jennings,
twenty-seven, a tall, skinny redhead, father of two small children. He lived in Kent, but worked for the phone company in New Milford, and he read the Danbury papers.

John Wheeler,
small and dapper, in a kelly green jacket, thirty years old. He lived in Harwinton but worked for the phone company in New Milford too. He was unmarried but had an eighteen-year-old brother.

Gary Lewis,
twenty-nine, a tall, handsome man who looked a little like Richard Boone. He and his wife had two children, eleven and nine.

Helen Ayre,
fifty-four, a minister's wife. Her children were seventeen, twenty-three, and twenty-four. She said she thought a lot about whether she could be fair and impartial, and decided she could. “I'm basically an honest person,” she said. “I know myself.”

Margaret Wald,
sixty-one, a grandmother who spent the jury waiting time knitting for her grandchildren. Petite and cheerful, she dressed like a cheerleader in a full, swinging red skirt and a red-and-white striped blouse.

Gertrude Collins,
sixty-three, short and plump, mother of children aged nineteen and twenty-seven, dressed mostly in red, including red shoes. She worked at the Becton-Dickinson factory in Canaan. She said she would feel some sympathy, and said a little later, “It might not be possible to remove every single doubt.”

Raymond Ross
of New Milford, sixty-three, tall, a little slump-shouldered, unsmiling. “I feel that young people are no worse off than we are, or no better off,” he said, when he was asked about his feelings toward the younger generation. His sons were grown, twenty-eight and twenty-five.

Raymond Lind
of Litchfield, fifty-one, a commercial artist, self-employed. He said he didn't think there was any such thing as a black-and-white situation. “I do very little talking,” he said.

Sarah Waldron,
thirty-six, mother of a two-year-old boy. She planned to drop him off at her sister-in-law's house every morning on her way to court and pick him up on her way home.

Carl Fabiaschi,
twenty-eight, another snappy dresser, unmarried, with a gondolier's smile. He worked in Hartford for the state motor vehicle department. He knew some state police, he said, and said that might conceivably influence him, but when questioned further he said he thought he could keep an open mind.

Eleanor Novak,
alternate, forty-one years old, mother of four children, ranging in age from nine to nineteen. Her husband worked at the Pratt-Whitney plant. Her hobby was making candles. She had bouffant blonde hair and a wide-eyed look.

Frank Sollitto,
alternate, forty-five, manager of an insurance company, with the look of a Welsh poet. He had served on two grand juries in the past and said if he had to serve now, he would “do my duty.”

Those were the jurors, and this was what they heard:

The Grand Jury of the County of Litchfield by this indictment accuses Peter A. Reilly of Canaan, Connecticut, of the crime of Murder and charges that at the Town of Canaan on the 28th day of September 1973 the said Peter A. Reilly, with intent to cause the death of Barbara Gibbons of Canaan, did cause the death of Barbara Gibbons, by slashing her throat, breaking bones in her body, and inflicting stab wounds, all in violation of Section 53a-54 of the General Statutes of Connecticut.

10

Mickey Madow kissed Marion. Patricia Alfano kissed her dad, Chief Deputy Sheriff Joe Battistoni's wife kissed him, and the first prosecution witness, Barbara Fenn, kissed Sergeant Chapman, the police photographer. Peter Reilly's trial was underway with a feeling of good will in the air. It was a rainy Friday, the first day of March 1974.

Bill Dickinson brought Peter to court and took a seat in the third row on the left side of the courtroom. The defense counsel table was on that side, the prosecution table on the right, near the jury box, so it became a habit for people who were friends of Peter, or who were at least favorably disposed toward him, to sit on the left. John Bianchi's people sat on the right, where he could greet them as he walked past the gallery on his way to his office, the State's Attorney's office, which opened directly off the courtroom. A center aisle separated these two groups of chairs in the spectators' section, so it was easy to choose one side or the other, just as people sat on either the bride's side or the groom's side at a church wedding.

There were six rows of seats in each section, six chairs to a row. The first row was still reserved for the press, a dozen seats in all. Although there were more reporters covering the trial than had covered the pretrial hearing, there still weren't enough to fill the entire row. Joe O'Brien of the
Courant,
Greg Erbstoesser of the
Lakeville Journal,
and Charles Kochakian of the
Hartford Times
were familiar to me from the pretrial hearings. Now I met three new reporters.

George Judson was covering for the Waterbury paper. Two years out of Antioch, he wore Earth Shoes and had a lively humor, which helped.

Roger Cohn of the
Torrington Register,
who had studied writing with William Zinsser at Yale, was one of the best writers in the group. Roger had just graduated the year Barbara died; he was enthusiastic and ambitious, nice to be with. Farn Dupre was a small, shy-looking woman not long out of Beloit. She wrote part time for the
Winsted Citizen
and was being paid $12 a day for the Reilly trial. Farn thought it wasn't enough, and Roger advised her to ask for more.

There were no newspaper people from New York and no TV people anymore. Rick Kaplan of CBS wanted to film a segment for the network news and asked some of us to talk on camera about the case, but after the gag order, most of us were afraid to. In the long run we would probably be cleared of contempt-of-court charges. But in the short run we would be jailed, and while that might have been dramatic and interesting, meantime, I'd have missed the trial. John Bianchi had already moved for a mistrial, on the day the last juror was picked, citing “inflammatory” publicity. There was the chance, too, hinted in the gag order, that something we might say or write would lead to Peter's bond being revoked. Nothing at all seemed worth that, and when I went to the committee meeting the week Peter was out, I told them so. I said I would take notes, but the notes would be for a book someday, not for an article. The committee members were as chagrined about the gag order as the reporters were. “It didn't take them long how to figure out how to get to us, did it?” Jean Beligni asked bitterly. “All we have to do is say the wrong thing, or what somebody thinks is the wrong thing, and Peter's back in jail.” Cilla Belcher agreed. “It's a form of blackmail,” she said, “but we can't take the risk.” I didn't think I could, either. I called Steve Gelman and
New Times
's lawyer, and they didn't think so either. Later I was sorry, but at the time it seemed like the right thing to do, the only thing to do.

However, I wrote another article, one of the shortest, blandest stories I ever hope to write, two pages in
New Times
called “Peter Reilly Gets Ready for Trial.” Jim said I'd never before written a piece in which I said so little so nicely. I couldn't say anything about the case, so I wrote about the people—the jurors, the sheriffs, the people in the courtroom. They were nice people. Jim had taken a picture of Peter, sitting on our sofa the day we drove him home from jail, his head bent over the guitar, and that picture ran with the piece. It was a nice picture.

Mr. Bianchi was dressed in gray again, with a powder blue shirt and a fresh haircut. Catherine Roraback wore a two-piece dress in deep rose-pink with one strand of pearls. She and Peter Herbst and Peter Reilly gathered at the defense table, looking through some papers. John Bianchi had gone back behind the courtroom, then came out quickly, heading toward his own counsel table.

“He's coming out,” Mr. Bianchi told Miss Roraback.

“Give me a minute,” she said, without looking up, continuing to look through the papers on her table.

“I'll give you a minute, but I don't run the court, Catherine,” Mr. Bianchi said tartly.

Everyone stood up as Judge Speziale swept through the doorway and stepped up onto his bench, the dais. “You may open court, Mr. Sheriff,” he said.

The jury came out, filing solemnly across the dingy carpet to their boxed-in rows of wooden armchairs, the back row raised higher than the front so that all twelve jurors had an unobstructed view of the witness, the judge, the lawyers, and whatever else they were supposed to see. Edward Ives came first this morning, taking the first seat in the top row. On most days the jurors sat in various seats, except Gary Lewis. He would inevitably come out last, which meant he got to sit in the bottom row of the jury box, in the last seat, the seat nearest the spectators' gallery. If a juror were hanging behind, gathering a handbag or something, the people in the press row could see Gary Lewis waiting to fall in line behind that person. The two alternates, Frank Sollitto and Eleanor Novak, sat in wooden armchairs in front of the jury box, very close to the prosecution counsel table, not removed from the arena, as the other jurors were, but right there on the same level with everybody. On the first day Mr. Sollitto and Mrs. Novak looked a little uncomfortable sitting there, but by and by they forgot themselves and became engrossed in the drama the handbook had promised.

The first witness called by the state of Connecticut was Barbara Fenn. She told John Bianchi that she was a registered nurse, employed at Sharon Hospital, and that on the night of September 28, 1973, she had been the evening supervisor in the emergency room. On the stand now, she wore a white pants uniform with a white jacket, and white shoes. She wore rimless glasses, with her grayish hair swept back plainly above her forehead, giving her a strict, serious, supervisory look.

She said she had been in the emergency room when Peter Reilly's call came through. “I said, ‘This is Mrs. Fenn, the evening supervisor, may I help you?'” The person calling didn't give his name, but said he was at the house of Barbara Gibbons, and said, ‘She's having difficulty breathing. There's blood all over the place.'” He sounded “a little apprehensive, a little excited.” Mrs. Fenn said she told the caller she would dispatch the Falls Village ambulance and would notify the state police. She testified that she got the call “at approximately nine-forty
P.M.
”

Trooper Calkins wasn't in uniform. He had a crew cut, though, and he wore a dark brown suit, as he identified the police log for the night of September 28, 1973. He explained that the Connecticut State Police operated on military time, and that 21:58, the time he'd received Mrs. Fenn's call from Sharon Hospital, meant 9:58
P.M
. The log book became State's Exhibit A, the first in a long list of exhibits, and the call, and the time Trooper Calkins said she called him, became the first in a long list of topics that would be discussed, hashed over, and rehashed throughout the trial.

“Eighteen minutes!” exclaimed Charles Kochakian in the hall during a recess. “It took her eighteen minutes to call the police? Remind me not to go to Sharon Hospital if I'm in an emergency.” We laughed; on the first day of the trial, the time element was still something to laugh about.

Trooper Calkins said he had radioed to Trooper McCafferty, who came to the stand next. Bruce McCafferty looked different, older than he had at the pretrial hearings, no longer the rookie. He had grown a thick moustache, which gave him an air of assurance, but as he told again how he'd arrived at Barbara's house and what he'd found, his eyes had a wide, apprehensive look. Miss Roraback talked about the time noted on the police report. “I have difficulty with military time,” she said lightly. Judge Speziale looked up from his notes. “If it's more than twelve, just subtract twelve,” he told her gravely.

John Bianchi walked back to the counsel table, picked up something, and walked back to the witness stand. “I show you a picture …” he began. From the press row, the picture showed as a flash of bright orange. Trooper McCafferty looked at it and nodded. The judge looked at it and handed it back to John Bianchi, who walked across to the counsel table and handed it to Catherine Roraback. She looked at it, her face angry. Peter Reilly looked at it and turned ashen. There was a tense silence in the courtroom as Mr. Bianchi handed the picture then to Mrs. Ayre, the first juror. She looked at it and passed it on. When it reached the end of the first row, Sheriff Battistoni, stationed next to the jury box, passed it from the front row to the back. Normally the sheriff didn't stand by the jury box, but he had been told that today and for the next several days of testimony, as these pictures and slides were shown, he was to stand there in case any of the jurors needed him. His hand was thrust casually into his pocket, holding a bottle of smelling salts.

The pictures were hideous. There was a full-length shot of Barbara, sprawled on her back, her naked body glossy, almost waxy-looking. The blood showed up as garish orange-red splashes on the color print. As the pictures came her way, Mrs. Collins put on her glasses, then took them off again and looked down, staring at the floor.

There were long shots, showing Barbara looking almost like a mannequin, remote and distant, and there were close-ups: the torso picture with the gaping, slashed stomach; the neck shot, showing Barbara's head nearly cut off; and the lower-body shot, with Barbara's pubic hair showing as a very black V-shape against the glaring whiteness of her thighs and lower body.

The jurors showed little emotion as they looked at the pictures. Some of them looked down, as Mrs. Collins had done, some looked at the judge or at Mr. Bianchi. Edward Ives nibbled thoughtfully at the end of the frame of his glasses. Sarah Waldron looked at the pictures and then looked across the room at Peter, keeping her eyes on him for a very long time.