A Death in Canaan (31 page)

“That's correct,” the doctor said. “Clinical death occurs from one to five minutes before biological death.”

“Could a layman distinguish between clinical and biological death?” Mr. Bianchi asked. The doctor said yes, a layman could.

“So that this breathing, in a labored or gasping manner, could last from zero to four to six minutes?”

“Yes, sir,” the doctor said.

The autopsy had lasted more than six hours, ending at 3:45 Saturday afternoon, while Peter Reilly was in the lie box at Hartford. Dr. Izumi's autopsy report became State's Exhibit Q, which John Bianchi read to the jury now, rocking a little on his heels, back and forth.

Most of the information was already known from the testimony, but there were odds and ends: Barbara's ulcer was 0.5 cm in diameter. Her liver was firm, yellow-brown, with extensive fatty degeneration and fibrosis. Her abdominal fat was one inch thick; several ribs were broken, too. In her stomach there were pieces of corn and small bits of meat from the TV dinner she was eating when Geoff and Peter left for the Teen Center meeting. The soles of both her feet were callused, with embedded dirt. She wore a denture plate.

But after all the testimony, one horror piled on another, what it came down to, simply, was that Barbara was dead because her throat had been cut, and then she had been mutilated and violated in the most hideous way. Was it any wonder that Helen Ayre slept badly? As Mr. Bianchi had pointed out, this information was “not desirable.” Murder never was.

11

“I saw the jurors looking at my hands when Dr. Izumi talked about a great deal of force,” Peter said. He sounded very calm as he said it, sitting at the table in the Madows' dinette. The late winter morning sunlight splashed through the small squares of windowpane and onto the oval cloth, as Peter read aloud from the morning paper. George Judson's article dealt with Dr. Izumi's testimony, so it was not pleasant reading, but Peter read it through, anyway, including a phrase about Barbara's “battered, bloody body.”

Nanny sat on the high stool by the phone, where she had a good view out the dinette window, watching Peter. She looked worried, and after a moment, she spoke.

“You smoke too much, Peter,” she said.

“Now that's funny,” Peter said, almost absentmindedly, still looking at the paper, then he seemed to have caught what Nan said. “In jail I was smoking two and a half packs a day,” he said, without looking up. “Now I'm down to a pack a day.”

He put the paper down on the dining-room table, got up, and walked back into the den to watch TV. He was no longer calm but appeared restless, at loose ends this Friday, as he was on most Fridays, when there was rarely a criminal court session, and he had to stay around the house. Mickey and Marion had explained it was for his own good, and Peter not only accepted the restriction but said he agreed with it. Still, it left him with a lot of time on his hands, and on the days when there was no court, usually Mondays and Fridays, he sometimes stayed in bed much of the day, as he had done in jail.

Peter wandered out of the den again. “I've thought about doing professional car painting,” he said. “There's gobs of money in it. I've sent away for a paint book. I might like to study law, but that seems kind of farfetched.” Marion's sister was sending up from New York some information on getting a high school diploma at home, which Peter thought might help him make money. Perhaps because he had been dependent on so many people for so long, he didn't seem to want to have to depend on anybody else now. I remembered what he had written to me, from Litchfield jail: “My goal in life now is to become very welthy [sic] on my own.”

A fat sparrow waddled across the yard now, in front of the dinette window. “Down where we used to live we used to get grosbeaks,” Peter said suddenly. “Sometimes a purple finch. My mom was a fanatic about birds.” He talked about jobs some more, and about jail, in his soft, rambling way. “All the cons took a liking to me,” Peter said in a reminiscent tone. “One dude took me aside and said, ‘It's a real compliment to you, what those people are doing for you.'”

Those people, the members of the Peter Reilly Defense Committee, had met regularly every week, going on six months now. Besides the original members, other people from Canaan now came regularly, including the other Madows, Dot and Murray, and Dick and Elaine Monty, whose son Matt was in the same class with Gina Beligni and Michael Mulhern. Only one member, Judy Liner, came from Litchfield. Except for a few people who dropped in to court some days, the citizens of Litchfield generally ignored the murder trial in their midst. Even the weekly paper generally ignored it, until the last week, when it ran a picture of the courthouse. But Litchfield had always held itself aloof. Two hundred years before the Reilly affair, a new settler in town, a Mrs. Davies, complained to a friend back in England, “There is nothing to associate with but Presbyterians and wolves.”

The knife glinted through the plastic bag, tied with a green plastic twist tie. It lay on the prosecution table, along with the piles of books and papers. Everybody in the courtroom gazed at it as John Bianchi picked it up casually and strolled over to the witness stand.

“I show you a knife with a wooden handle and ask if you can identify that,” he asked Trooper Venclauscas, who nodded slightly.

“Yes, sir, I can.”

“How can you identify it?” the prosecutor asked.

“This is a knife that I took into possession at the Gibbons home on September twenty-ninth,” the policeman said. He was calm on the stand; as a trooper for eight years and member of the police crime lab at Bethany, he was at home in courtrooms, especially this one. He said he had put his initials on the knife, when he found it in a brown pouch on the side of a cabinet, around four in the morning, after Barbara died. There were two other knives in the pouch, but Trooper Venclauscas had taken this one, because it had blood on the blade. The blood had not been typed or identified, but it was human blood. The tip of the knife was broken off.

John Bianchi smiled slightly and walked across the courtroom to the defense table. “I have no more questions, your honor,” he said, and handed it to Catherine Roraback. She studied it for a moment, and Peter looked at it too, his long hair falling over his right eye, shielding his face from the spectators. Then she walked over to the witness stand.

“At that time did you have a search warrant?” she asked.

“No, I did not,” Trooper Venclauscas said. Miss Roraback turned to the judge. “This knife was seized during the course of a warrantless search,” she said. “I submit that anything seized without a warrant is improperly seized.” She objected to the knife being introduced, citing the Fourth Amendment, which provides for search by warrant. “It also includes the word ‘unreasonable,' Miss Roraback,” the judge reminded her.

“That's right, your honor,” John Bianchi said quickly.

Catherine Roraback looked stubborn. “What the state police did is just go into that house with numerous people and rummage through the house, in flagrant violation of the United States Constitution and the constitution of the state of Connecticut,” she said.

“Is this the first time you've seen the knife?” the judge asked her.

“Yes, your honor,” Miss Roraback told him. Judge Speziale looked thoughtful. When John Bianchi's assistant, Corporal James Bausch, had brought the knife into the courtroom, and Mr. Bianchi had asked to introduce a new witness who would testify about a knife, Miss Roraback had asked whether the state considered the knife to be the murder weapon. “I don't know really how to answer that, your honor,” Mr. Bianchi had replied cheerfully. “Whether it was actually the weapon that caused death—I don't think I could show that. But I can show through Dr. Izumi that this instrument will coincide with some of the markings on the body.”

Judge Speziale said he would not rule on the matter just then. “I'll go back to it at some later date, your honor,” John Bianchi said, and the jury was called out. During the long arguments as to whether something might or might not be introduced as evidence in court—a knife, a tape recording, whatever—the jury was kept out until the matter was decided. It was the right thing to do, the legal thing, but the recesses seemed to get longer and longer; this one had lasted an hour and fifteen minutes, and after a while, it got on the jurors' nerves.

Mine, too. This was my first criminal trial, and I needed a guidebook. What were the rules of evidence? What was hearsay? Could you introduce something and call it the murder weapon,
maybe?
Why couldn't you ask a leading question? Why was it all so complicated? As Jean Beligni said, “Why don't they just let you get up there and tell your story?”

Of all the lawbooks I consulted, only one really made some sense to me—
The Nature of the Judicial Process
by former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo. “We like to picture to ourselves the field of the law as accurately mapped and plotted,” he wrote. “We draw our little lines, and they are hardly down before we blur them.” I understood him especially well when he talked about an element of chance. “Someone must be the loser,” he wrote. “It is part of the game of life.”

After Dr. Izumi's testimony, the parade of police officers resumed, as the state of Connecticut pressed its case against Peter Reilly.

I knew some of them by sight, and I'd talked with Lieutenant Shay and with Sergeant Kelly at the pretrial hearing. When the first piece came out in
New Times,
I'd sent them, and Jim Mulhern, a copy of the magazine. When my second piece appeared, the trial was already under way, so I didn't mail it. Instead, I just knocked at the door of the prosecutor's office and when Lieutenant Shay opened the door, I gave him a copy. He seemed friendly. But Sergeant Kelly turned away when he saw me in court. When I went next door to Marden's for coffee, Jim Mulhern was sitting on a stool at the counter. When I came up to the counter to order coffee to go, he swung his stool around, away from me, an unmistakable message.

The pictures my husband had taken for the second piece had turned out brilliantly. Jim Mulhern, looking proud and a little pugnacious, a good-looking Irish cop in full uniform, standing at his desk. Lieutenant Shay, rugged and handsome, working at his desk. John Bianchi in his office on Railroad Street, gazing thoughtfully out the window. Peter in handcuffs, coming out the jailhouse door. Later, in his darkroom, Jim made prints for everybody. I stopped by Mr. Bianchi's office one day and gave him his pictures, then I went by the barracks. Anne went with me for protection. When I said who I was, the officer at the desk, whom I'd never seen, looked furiously at me. He said that Lieutenant Shay and Trooper Mulhern weren't in and wouldn't be in. But another trooper smiled at Anne and even, a little weakly, at me. I had heard that there was some controversy among the police at the barracks, and among other segments of the Connecticut State Police, about the handling of the Reilly case. Apparently not all the policemen agreed that what had been done was what should have been done. I remembered that on the Saturday after Barbara died Sergeant Salley had told Mickey that Peter didn't need a lawyer then. But another trooper had told June, “It wouldn't be a bad idea.” Several weeks after Barbara died, Mrs. Rose Ford, one of Peter's elementary school teachers, had written a letter to the
Lakeville Journal,
deploring the actions of the police, especially the “wall of silence” she said they had maintained since the beginning. “Somewhere between the terse ‘no comment' and premature, irresponsible statements lies an area of suitable communication between the police and the public,” she wrote. I agreed. I never understood why it had to be Them against Us.

When I was told at the barracks that nobody was in, I could have left the pictures, but I really wanted to see Lieutenant Shay and Trooper Mulhern again. I would have liked to talk with them. I know they wouldn't have discussed the case, but we could have talked about the law, and the system. We could have talked about Cardozo.

Sergeant Salley was on the stand again, the supervisor who'd first taken Peter away, the night Barbara died, to the barracks. Around 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning, Salley had got a call from Lieutenant Shay, still out at the murder house, telling him to read Peter Reilly his constitutional rights.

“Did you at any time tell Peter Reilly his mother was dead?” Catherine Roraback asked, in a very soft voice.

“I don't remember if I did or not,” Sergeant Salley said. Miss Roraback asked him whether any other policeman had told him, and Sergeant Salley seemed to shake his head slightly. “I thought he understood,” the policeman said.

At the defense table, Peter jotted down something on a pad of yellow legal-size paper. Catherine Roraback walked to the table, looked at the pad, then walked slowly, almost casually, back to the stand.

“Did he ask you to go to Mr. Madow's?” she asked.

“Yes,” Sergeant Salley said. “I told him Lieutenant Shay wanted to speak to him before he went.”

The civil rights card that Sergeant Salley had read to Peter used the phrase, “the offenses charged against you.” But when Peter had asked Sergeant Salley if he was being charged, the policeman said he was not. In court now, Salley told Catherine Roraback that the phrase on the card was irrelevant.

Catherine Roraback looked at the card again, then at the trooper.

“You didn't volunteer any explanation?”

“No, I did not,” Sergeant Salley said.

Mr. Bianchi leaned casually against the jury rail.

“Did you know this fella, Mr. Madow, at all?” he asked Salley.

“No, I did not,” the policeman said.

“Other than the fact that he was connected with the Canaan ambulance corps, you didn't know what he did for a living or where he lived, did you?”

“No, I did not,” Sergeant Salley replied. He went on to say that he had heard some conversations between Peter and Geoff Madow.