The Rising

by Ryan D'Agostino

  How about her? Ron said to Bill one afternoon after a round of golf. The girl behind the bar.

  Bill shrugged. He didn’t even know how to think about something like a girlfriend.

  Eventually Christine went back to Boston, where she was studying photography at Boston University’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts. For her final project, she was required to volunteer her services to a nonprofit organization. She called Bill Petit, the good-looking guy from the club, who, she now knew, had lost his family and had set up a foundation in their memory. She asked him, by any chance would the services of a photographer be beneficial to the foundation?

  Bill remembered who Christine was when she called. Knew she could crack a joke, knew she was pretty. It took him about five seconds to say yes, Christine was welcome to take pictures for the foundation.

  Christine was nervous when she came to Bill’s parents’ house to take pictures of the memorial garden Bill had created in the backyard, her first assignment. She liked Bill, but she didn’t know he liked her, too. She thought maybe, but…then, as they were walking through the garden—him pointing out the different species, her taking pictures—he stopped, looked at her, and reached up and touched her earring, told her he liked it. She walked away, started taking pictures again.

  Bill is drawn to her. When he is around her, his own laughter surprises him. She shoots more and more for the foundation, so he sees her, and he likes seeing her. But there’s something inside him that flinches at his own attraction to her. He wonders if his feelings are…correct. It’s been about five years. He wonders whether Jennifer would approve. He wonders whether Hayley and Michaela would approve. He wonders if he should be feeling the way he feels about a woman who is not his wife, who is not Jennifer, the woman who died trying to save Bill and their girls. And so, for a while, he pushes the feelings down. For a long time, really. He wonders whether the feelings will dissipate like the smell of lilac in the wind, a momentary richness that you forget as soon as it’s gone. He wonders whether this is a passing thing, a normal, human reaction. Just a part of the process.

  But he is fairly certain it’s not a passing thing. Christine’s presence strengthens the world he has built for himself since the tragedy, and that strengthens Bill. And so, after letting the thoughts and feelings roil around in his head for too long, he decides it’s probably okay to feel good about something. It’s probably okay to feel good about Christine.

  She photographs the golf tournament in 2011, a warm June day under cotton-ball clouds and a pale blue sky. The volunteers wear Petit Family Foundation golf shirts. Early in the morning Christine takes pictures of the dozens of golf carts parked in neat rows outside the clubhouse like cars at a dealership, a scorecard and rule sheet clipped to each steering wheel. Bill’s foundation shirt is bright crimson. He has let his hair grow as long as it’s been in years, over the ears, and it curls up in gray wisps from under his baseball cap. He gets nervous before these things, but the brilliant sunny day helps, golf helps, and having all his friends and family around helps. And seeing Christine helps. Her sunglasses are pushed back into her wavy blond hair, and she wears a Petit shirt the color of the sky. A silver heart dangles from a bracelet around her wrist.

  A lot of people knew Bill Petit even before the tragedy, and he wonders about being seen in public with a woman. But that summer, he and Christine take hesitant first steps into a relationship. They hang out at Christine’s place and order in, or go for walks in the woods, or just drive, Christine sometimes taking pictures out the window.

  But you can’t eat in every night. One evening, not long after the golf tournament, Bill takes Christine out for dinner. He takes her to Apricots, a charming place right on the Farmington River, been there for decades. This is the first real date when Christine feels Bill is okay with being seen with her in front of other people. Not that he was scared before this, but—people stare at him. They probably judge. He’s dating? Who is she? He shouldn’t care, and he doesn’t, but it’s just easier to be private about things.

  Enough, though. He has spent so much time being unhappy, and thinking he can’t be happy. To him, Christine is happiness. She radiates it. It’s not that she’s insensitive to the daily trials of being Bill Petit—not at all. She somehow understands as if by intuition when to laugh and be normal. She does not feel the need to affect solemnity in his presence. She also knows when to let him disappear into the sad silences that sometimes envelop him. Tonight is a time to be happy. She is happy, and he is happy. After dinner, they sit outside and watch the river slide by. He reaches over and touches her cheek. She smiles. They sit. Up the river somewhere, off in the direction of Unionville, they can see fireworks over the trees. It isn’t even the Fourth of July.

  The wind blows where it pleases.

  You hear the sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from

  Or where it is going.

  —John 3:8, tweeted by Bill Petit, March 2015

  THE SECOND TRIAL

  September 19, 2011–January 27, 2012

  ONE YEAR after Jeremiah Donovan ran from Courtroom 6A, “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” blaring from his cell phone, he is there once again. It’s September 19, 2011, the first day of State of Connecticut v. Joshua Komisarjevsky. About a hundred people are stuffed into the spectator seating area. Donovan strides down the center aisle just before 10:00 a.m. The first two rows on one side of the gallery are filled with reporters squeezed in hip to hip. He smiles at them as he walks by, saying, “Hi, hi, good morning. Hey—hi! Hi.” He’s like an upperclassman on the first day of school after summer break. There are deep crow’s-feet splayed out from the corners of his eyes, because he flashes quick smiles all day, almost like a tic. He plops his briefcase on the defense table and ambles over to say hello to the court reporter. The normally reserved clerk stands, flips her hair, and giggles as she talks to him.

  The briefcase is a black doublewide with two combination locks on top, from which Donovan has never removed the plastic ties that keep the numbers set to 0-0-0. He begins piling folders and papers on the table, yellow Post-its jutting out at odd angles, notes written in the margins. He pops open a laptop, scratches out a few last-minute thoughts on a legal pad. If a society can be defined by the tenacity of the legal defense it provides those who are accused of the most depraved crimes, then Jeremiah Donovan could be regarded as a great compliment that our society pays itself. For, as one of Connecticut’s leading criminal defense attorneys, he throws himself into his cases, relentlessly defending some of Connecticut’s very worst, often as if his own life is at stake, in the firm belief that the survival of our justice system depends on it.

  In the service of his clients, Donovan’s tactics are notorious.

  The state’s attorneys, Mike Dearington and Gary Nicholson, are the same stalwarts from the Hayes trial. Bill sits behind them with Hanna, his parents, the Hawkes, all come again to this room to relive everything. Soon it will begin. The photographs, the 911 call, the psychiatrists attesting to the troubled childhood of the accused. A bad acid trip on a loop. Bill is miserable and his stomach is tight, and he is wary of this guy Donovan.

  This is the part Donovan relishes. When he got to Yale Law School in 1974, across town from here, he liked it okay, but law school is all about the case method. The professors tried to animate cold, dry principles by explaining how they’re applied in actual cases. It was interesting, but Donovan wanted to see some lawyering. Any chance he had he ran over to the federal court on Elm Street to watch trials. He loved the drama the lawyers acted out, each in his appointed role—“the interplay of intellect and experience,” he calls it. A person can understand the rules of evidence on a technical level, but when you see a sharp lawyer deftly flinging those rules at an adversary, winning even some small, evidentiary ruling that keeps out an exhibit—well, that was a thrilling thing.

  Then he started hanging around the United States attorney’s office in New Haven. He says he asked if he could be an intern—back
then you just asked, apparently—and they said okay. Interned all three years and served as an editor at the Yale Law Journal. By the time he graduated, the assistant U.S. attorneys were practically treating him like one of their own. Once, they sent him up to the correctional facility in Danbury to argue a case in which the inmates were suing the prison over mail they said was being wrongfully opened. Representing the inmates was one of their own, G. Gordon Liddy, who was serving his Watergate sentence. As his first witness, Liddy called the warden, who seemed to Donovan plenty angered about being questioned by one of his charges. This was Donovan’s first court appearance. He thought all of it was wonderful.

  By 10:02, Komisarjevsky is seated at the defense table with Donovan, his attorney. In his mug shot, Komisarjevsky was skinny and tanned, a flop of brown hair over his forehead, a pointy chin that was almost handsome. He sits in court now clean-shaven and heavier, round, even—not fat, just bigger. His hair is cropped short. He wears a black suit, a crisp white shirt, and a tie. He smiles and chats with his attorneys, makes notes, looks around. He is, at least in court, the opposite of the lumpy Hayes.

  Donovan wheels his chair around and stares at the section of the courtroom where Bill sits with his family and friends. Each of them wears the heart-shaped lapel pin painted with the logo of the foundation, a mother bird folding two chicks in her wing. It’s odd the way Donovan is just staring at the Petits, even creepy. But then you see why he’s doing it: He wheels back around, stands, and says to Judge Blue, “Your Honor, I count twenty-one Petit Family Foundation pins in the courtroom today.” He refers to Bill and his family and friends as the “Petit posse,” a term he came up with. And he says with sarcasm that having them all sit so close to the jury box—which is where the court has directed them to sit—wearing their pins amounts to “effective prosecution.”

  Surely, even with his back to the gallery, Donovan can hear people gasp and scoff at this bit of theater. But he makes his point calmly before sitting to wait for the jury to arrive. When they do file in, Donovan’s entire team—himself, cocounsel Walt Bansley, and Todd Bussert—stands in unison. Komisarjevsky stands, too. Donovan has coached them all to do this. It’s an old-fashioned move, just like when Donovan sometimes refers to opposing counsel as “my brother.” A bit of showmanship.

  The prosecution doesn’t stand once.

  —

  After college, in the early 1970s, Donovan roamed around Europe and Asia and eventually found himself sleeping on the roof of a Bangkok hotel while he awaited his orders from the Army. He had no money. There was a little restaurant at the Army base where for twenty-five cents you could get an egg and toast with coffee. They let you refill your coffee as much as you liked, which Donovan would do, so that he could fill his cup mostly with whole milk, for the calories—he had started his trip at 165 pounds and was down to about 145. He was always good with languages, and he picked up Thai quickly. The waitresses in Bangkok smiled as he tried to talk to them in their language, and whenever another customer didn’t finish his toast, they always brought it over to the American, Jerry. He had the gift of being able to talk to anyone.

  “Proceed, Attorney Donovan.”

  This is the deep, midwestern voice of Judge Blue once again. Donovan needs his gift of oratory today, the second day of State v. Komisarjevsky. He stands and clasps his hands behind his back, revealing the green suspenders that match his repp tie. He is tall and lanky, with a thatch of hair that runs from black to white.

  “May it please the court, as I will every morning, I notice that there are twenty-three Petit Foundation pins in the audience. What’s most disturbing to us, I suppose, is that Dr. Petit is wearing one,” Donovan says to the judge. The working-class Boston is still thick in his voice, so that doctor is dawk-tah. “We anticipate that he will be the first witness.”

  “Thank you. Proceed,” Blue says.

  “I do have a request with respect to witnesses, that is, the witnesses being ordered not to wear the pins,” Donovan says.

  Donovan has already tried this at a previous hearing, so he is simply renewing his request here for the record, knowing full well what Blue’s ruling will be.

  “You know,” says Blue, “if we’re talking about the pins that were the subject of the hearing, I think I’ve made my ruling on that. I don’t view the pins as disruptive or inflammatory, sir, so your objection is noted. Obviously, you could cross-examine him on the pin to your heart’s content. Sir, is there anything else I should address?”

  Blue is asking this as a formality. The assumption is that there is nothing else. But Blue knows Donovan.

  “Yes, Your Honor. I want to put on the record our objection as to the background of the victims, what they did that day—their accomplishments.”

  By “accomplishments,” he is referring sarcastically to what Bill, Jennifer, Hayley, and Michaela did on that Sunday, July 22, 2007, their last full day alive as a family. The fact that they went to church together, that Bill played golf with his father, that Michaela cooked dinner for the family—Donovan wants all of this kept out. This objection, too, has already been the subject of a hearing, and Blue shut it down then as he shuts it down now.

  Donovan is not done yet. Next, as a preemptive move, he wants to limit the number of photographs of Bill’s bludgeoned head that can be admitted into evidence. One is acceptable, Donovan argues, but there are three that the state intends to submit into evidence, and that is too many. He even offers up an argument that because one of the photos is of the back of Bill’s head, Bill would have no way of truthfully testifying that it is definitely his head.

  “The other two photographs seem to me to have minimal probative value that is far outweighed by the prejudicial effect. As Your Honor knows, and the record will reflect, those show photographs of Dr. Petit lying on a pillow, I assume at the hospital, and the pillow is soaked with blood. I have heard of waving the bloody shirt in front of the jury, but this is the first time I’ve heard of waving the bloody pillow,” Donovan says.

  A few members of the Petit family allow the faintest hint of shock to show on their faces.

  “With respect, the objection must be overruled,” Blue replies. “I can understand why it’s made, but the photographs are not cumulative, and they are not—obviously, while they are disturbing, I do not believe that they are so horrendous as to be prejudicial. And the adage that I typically follow is that the defendant may not object to the jury seeing photographic evidence of his handiwork, and I think that fits here.”

  —

  There are several ways to impeach a witness on cross-examination, according to Jeremiah Donovan.

  You can bring up his obvious interest in the outcome of the case as a factor that might color his testimony. But Bill Petit—how can you do that with Petit? He lost his wife, his two daughters, his home, his interest in work, his whole life, and he himself was left for dead. Spending time establishing that this witness has an interest in the outcome of the case would make a lawyer look stupid, because of course this witness has an interest in the outcome of the case.

  You can go after his prior inconsistent statements. But Petit’s head was beaten like a grapefruit by the man sitting at the defendant’s table, using the bat that’s now sitting on the evidence table in front of the court clerk, a bat still blackened with Petit’s dried blood. Prior inconsistent statements? If anything, that would make him more sympathetic.

  You can impeach a witness by questioning whether he was really in a position to see what he says he saw. But Petit doesn’t claim to have seen much. After the cranial bashing, Hayes and Komisarjevsky covered his head and hauled him down to the basement. That’s about all he remembers.

  The thing of it is, he’s not a witness at all, really. He is a living exhibit. And you can’t impeach an exhibit.

  So when the state finishes questioning Bill, and the judge says, “Your witness,” Donovan has a challenge before him. He likes an intellectual challenge, and he likes talking to people, but he’
s not particularly looking forward to this.

  “Thank you, Your Honor.”

  Donovan establishes that Bill gave three statements to the police: two the day the crime occurred and one a couple of weeks later. He does this quickly and with the calmness of a professor. He establishes that Bill attended the first trial in this case, of Steven Hayes, last year. He establishes that, due to the fact that Bill was not sequestered during that trial and was in fact allowed to sit through every minute of it, Bill has seen all the evidence and heard all the testimony already.

  “Yes, sir,” says Bill over and over, showing nothing on his face, revealing nothing in his voice. “Yes, sir.”

  “Fair enough,” says Donovan finally. “Now, can you, as you sit here today, tell the jurors how much you really remember and how much you are trying to put together from the things that you heard other witnesses testify to during the Hayes trial?”

  Dearington, the prosecutor, objects immediately. Without even asking the grounds, Blue says, “Overruled.”

  But Bill doesn’t take Donovan’s bait. “I believe what I’ve testified to is to the best of my own recollection,” he says, his voice flat, eyes on Donovan, as calmly as if he were recounting some arcane fact from an endocrinology textbook. “I was making a concerted effort…” Donovan is already looking down at his notes, preparing his next question.

  Donovan is smart. But Bill Petit is not only an extraordinarily sympathetic witness, he is extremely intelligent, too, and not just book smart. He is quick, he thinks three steps ahead, and he is calm.