A Death in Canaan

by Barthel, Joan;

  Nanny nodded. “He was a good boy,” she said softly. “He still is. That’s why we want him back.”

  In jail, Peter spent the time in a kind of uneasy limbo, as he waited for a hearing on the motion to suppress his confession.

  Sometimes he watched TV. He listened to the radio Jean had brought him, using the earplugs. He went to a couple of AA meetings, just to pass the time. Jean had brought him books and homework, too, but he wasn’t particularly interested. He preferred playing cards, and he once won a watch in a card game, then lost it in another game the next night. When Marion visited, Peter bragged to her about his new gambling skills. That dismayed her, and so did his new cynical attitude, which she felt he’d never had before. But Marion didn’t know what to do about it. He wasn’t always cynical, just for the first fifteen minutes or so of the two-hour visiting period. “It takes him a while to become Peter again,” Marion would report sadly when she got home.

  No one under eighteen could visit Peter in jail, so a spirited letter-writing campaign began. Altogether he got 143 letters, mostly from teen-agers, although Joanne Mulhern wrote, and so did the Marine Corps, trying to recruit him. Auntie B. wrote an encouraging letter, telling him to keep his chin up.

  Except for reading, and writing, and waiting, the only other thing Peter did one day was to walk across the Litchfield green to the courthouse. As he stood there, handcuffed, in the second-floor office of the State’s Attorney, a state trooper took out a pair of scissors and cut off three thick strands of his hair. “Man, they must have found something,” an inmate told him later, “or they wouldn’t need a piece of your hair.” Peter seemed worried then.

  One rainy, cold morning in November, I went back to Canaan and drove around for a while with Jean Beligni. We drove past the little white house where Barbara died, with the mountain skimming up behind it. Now there was a sign out front saying WARNING! KEEP AWAY! Jean pointed out the Dickinsons’ neat red house, and the Parmalees’ house beyond it, a frame house in a cluttered yard. In Falls Village we stopped at Peter’s high school, where Jean had graduated and where her boys now went. We took Sand Road, past the cemetery where Barbara was buried, back into town. Jean pointed out Bob’s Clothing Store, where Barbara had shopped the day she died.

  In Jean’s kitchen, we talked a little more about Peter. She remembered a picture, the last picture of Barbara and Peter together, taken in the spring. Father Paul was allowed to see Peter in jail any day, not just on Saturday, and Jean said she’d ask him to get the picture for me from Peter. Then she showed me some of the letters he’d written to her and Aldo from jail, letters that started out “Dear Mom and Dad …” He was usually in good spirits on visiting days, Jean said, except for one Saturday when he’d seemed depressed, really down in the dumps. When she left, Jean noticed tears in his eyes. She thought about it all the way home, and by the time she got home, she was so upset that she sat down and wrote to Auntie B. “There are people on our committee who have worked so hard to help Peter who don’t even know him,” Jean wrote. “They are doing it because he is alone, and in the name of justice. Many are doing it out of Christian decency and in God’s name, because they believe they are their brother’s keeper. In God’s name, why aren’t you?”

  Auntie B. called Jean when she got the letter. “I just can’t get involved,” she said. Jean thought Auntie B.’s voice was trembling. “I can’t explain it to you,” Auntie B. said. “You just don’t understand the situation.”

  It wasn’t easy to write about Peter Reilly without meeting him, so I wrote to Warden Brownell, asking if I could visit. The warden said no, but he said it nicely. He added that I was free to correspond with Peter, and he with me. So I wrote, telling him who I was, and he wrote back. Altogether he wrote me four letters from cell 4. The stationery was standard jail paper, and the spelling was standard Peter.

  “I am very happy that your magazine is writing the story,” Peter wrote. “My personal opinion about the situation is, The enterigation prosedures are, Mind boggeling and upsetting.…” He said he had been questioned by a guy who looked like Dick Tracy.

  I’d asked Peter to tell me about himself, and he answered in terms of music and cars. He said that although he’d gotten his first guitar when he was only six or seven, he didn’t learn to play until several years later, after he’d taken lessons from a farmer up the road. “Music is a part of my life,” Peter wrote, “and these last ten weeks without a guitar has been absolutely dreadful.…

  “I also am a nut about cars and I have a 1968 Corvette that I am going to have to sell. I think I’ll buy a used V.W. Square back.…”

  He said he wished they would catch the person responsible for killing his mom. He wished that eventually he would become very wealthy. He wished me a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

  8

  On a cold December morning, Peter walked from the jail to the courthouse, still in handcuffs, for his pretrial hearing. Catherine Roraback was asking that the confession he’d signed be suppressed as evidence, claiming that it was “involuntary and coerced” and had been obtained “in violation of his constitutional rights, including the right to have a lawyer present during questioning.” The prosecution claimed that Peter had been informed of his constitutional rights—more than once, in fact—and that not only had he been aware of his rights but he’d also signed a waiver.

  The elms were bare as Peter walked across the village green. They stood proud and rigid, as they were intended to. “We have the people and the houses and the elms and the hills,” says an old history of Litchfield.

  The first courthouse in Litchfield was a temporary affair, erected quickly in 1751 when the town was chosen as the county seat, over the ferocious protests of Goshen, Cornwall, and Canaan. The second courthouse was more impressive, a picturesque oak building, painted white, with a red roof and a picket fence and windows of English crown glass, twelve squares to a window. It burned down in the fire of 1886, and its replacement burned two years later. Then the community, finally wiser, built a courthouse of granite, which is the one standing today.

  Peter had been in this gray granite building before, on the day of his bail hearing, and on the day they cut off a lock of his hair, so it wasn’t totally unfamiliar. I’d never been in the courthouse before, but I felt more or less at home, there was such an aura of friendliness about the place. Most of the courtroom staff had been around for years, notably Phil Plumb, a wiry, white-haired; fellow who, as court messenger, filled the water carafes, did other odd jobs, and kept everyone entertained with yarns from his years as a sports reporter, when he wrote about the Gashouse Gang and Dizzy Dean.

  In his courthouse career, Phil had worked both upstairs and down. On the first floor was the Court of Common Pleas, used for civil cases, along with clerks’ offices, rest rooms, and the jury waiting room. Everything else went on upstairs, in Superior Court. Divorces were granted on Friday, which Phil, who liked to view life in terms of sports writing, called “Ladies Day.”

  The court on the second floor could be reached by two flights of stairs—one for the press and the public, for the witnesses and for people on trial, and the back stairs for the judge, the attorneys, and the courthouse staff. The courtroom itself was considerably less charming than country courtrooms are generally thought to be. The walls were painted an uneasy green, and fluorescent lights glared on the dingy carpet. The jury box, two rows of wooden chairs with arms and a thin brown cushion on each chair, lay to the right of the courtroom, just to the right of the witness stand. The sheriffs’ chairs, also cushioned, ranged along the walls, and the thickest cushion of all was on the chair used by the official court reporter, Arthur Roberts.

  Mr. Roberts was tall but a trifle hunched in the shoulders from so much sitting and bending over the stenotype machine. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and suspenders. His hobby was reading reference books. Mr. Roberts had been in the courtroom for twenty-six years, but there was a gleam of humor in his eye, in spite of it. He could take d
own three hundred words a minute on his machine and read them back instantly in precise diction, near-Shakespearean with a Massachusetts flavor. When Mr. Roberts pronounced the word defendant, as he often did, the last syllable rhymed with “can’t.” “Whatever would we do without Mr. Roberts?” a judge once mused aloud, during a hearing, and everybody smiled, including Mr. Roberts who, as a reflex, took down the phrase on his machine.

  Two tall, high windows, the old schoolroom kind that are opened and closed from the top with a long hooked pole, were set into the west wall of the courtroom. Right next door was the Marden Coffee Shop, the only quick eating place on the block. It was run by a man who was also a guard at the jail; his wife worked at the counter, serving mostly pies and coffee and grinders. She had a brusque air and went about her business of serving in a hard-boiled way, like the waitresses Hollywood has always believed in.

  Opposite the windows in the courtroom was a large institutional clock, with big black letters on a white circle and a sweeping second hand. At one side of the courtroom was the jury room, where jurors were sent when they weren’t supposed to hear something said in court, or when they were deliberating. To reach the jury room, the jurors had to file out of the jury box and walk all the way across the center of the courtroom, very much as though they were crossing center stage. Behind the witness stand, just next to the judge’s bench, there was a chalkboard and a tall gray steel locker, a regular gymnasium locker with a padlock. A deputy sheriff told me there was a skeleton in the locker, but I never looked.

  Altogether, the nicest thing about the courtroom was the wood—dark and old, deep with the patina of the years. A broad wooden railing, hip-high—literally, the bar—separated the people in the spectators’ gallery from the central well of the court. The judge’s bench was handsome—as imposing, perhaps, as the bench in the grandly designed oak courthouse of old Litchfield, which one town historian described as “a raised dais with a broad pulpitlike desk [lifting] the judges to an almost ecclesiastical height.”

  Catherine Roraback smiled when Peter was brought into the courtroom, and she walked back to the rear of the room to meet him. She put her hand on his shoulder, and he smiled then, too. His face looked thin and somewhat hollowed, his nose sharp in the thin face. His hair was still long. Marion had brought over some of his clothes that the police had returned to her, and he was wearing plain brown slacks and a raspberry shirt, a ribbed knit that clung tightly to his chest. He was very slender. I remember Marion saying, “He’s gaining weight at the jail, with all the potatoes and bread,” and I wondered what on earth he’d looked like before.

  Catherine Roraback was one of the best-known lawyers in Connecticut, and her family was one of the oldest, its roots running deep and tangled. Her grandfather and two of her uncles had been lawyers. They were all dead, but she still carried their names on her letterhead, the dates spreading back as far as 1872. One uncle, J. Clinton Roraback, had been a defense lawyer too, a big, portly man who carried a cane and lived most of his life in court, which is where he died, too, in the arms of the court reporter, eighteen years before the Reilly trial. “Good morning, Mr. Roberts,” the attorney boomed, then crashed to the floor. Mr. Roberts knelt quickly, cradled Mr. Roraback’s head in his lap, and called for a sheriff. Later, when the body had been taken away, the judge asked Mr. Roberts whether he should adjourn court. “No, I think Clint would prefer that court go on as usual,” Mr. Roberts said. And it did.

  Catherine’s father had not chosen the law. He had been a minister at a church in Brooklyn, where Catherine grew up, only a few blocks from the Kasper family. One of the Kasper girls, Charlotte, who knew Catherine, married John Bianchi, the state’s attorney, who was the Rorabacks’ neighbor in Canaan. It was a small, complicated world.

  Catherine had gone to Mount Holyoke, then Yale Law. She still kept an office in New Haven, though her main office was a little white-frame building on Main Street in Canaan, which she kept just as her uncle had kept it, with rolltop desks and wooden coat racks, left from olden days. Her mother had died, and her father was retired, a patient at Geer Memorial, where the VFW ambulance was kept.

  Although her life was so deeply rooted in Canaan, Catherine Roraback was, in a way, more at home in New Haven. She fit in better there. She had been one of the defense lawyers at the Black Panther trial, and her work for liberal causes was well known, especially the legal work she’d done for Planned Parenthood, helping to get the state’s ancient ban on contraceptives reversed. She’d gone into that project, which some doctors and lawyers were running as a test case in the courts, at the invitation of a doctor she knew from Yale. When he called and asked her to join the contraception crusade, she pretended not to understand. “Do you want me as a lawyer, or as a single woman?” she asked.

  But for all her humor and candor, Catherine Roraback was not popular at Litchfield Superior Court. Partly because she was blunt and outspoken and liberal, involved in controversial causes, partly because of some of her family history, and partly because she was a woman, and a smart one at that, Catherine Roraback seemed to rub some people the wrong way. She was strong-looking, with a chunky figure and short, choppily cut hair that often fell into her eyes. She wore sensible shoes and had a habit of whipping off her glasses, nibbling thoughtfully at them, gazing at the ceiling with great interest, then turning sharply back toward a witness and hurling a question. Her nickname wasn’t Cathy, but Kate.

  Catherine and Peter walked to the center of the courtroom, to the long rectangular table where her assistant, Peter Herbst, was peering at papers. This was Peter Herbst’s first job as a lawyer. He had a long, handlebar moustache and an air of dignified innocence, rather like a law clerk in Dickens.

  Catherine and the two Peters and the lawyers at the opposite table and the handful of spectators in the courtroom all stood as Judge Anthony Armentano swept in. He was presiding over this pretrial hearing, which was an important step for Peter Reilly. Though the language was often intensely legal and hard to understand, the issue was vividly clear: If Peter Reilly’s confession were squashed, the state would have a far flimsier case against him, and he would be likely to go free. If the confession he’d signed, and later recanted, was allowed to stand, obviously he was in far greater jeopardy. Everyone in the courtroom understood this, including Peter himself. He looked pale and tense as Catherine Roraback rose to ask that Peter’s $50,000 bail be reduced. “His friends in the community have engaged in an extensive campaign to raise money for him,” she said. “Mr. and Mrs. Madow have been anxious to have Peter come to live with them, and I know that Peter is anxious to do so.”

  Judge Armentano peered over the bench at Peter Reilly, standing beside his lawyer, gazing at the judge with a serious, tense expression. The judge looked cross, almost waspish, as though he had a touch of heartburn. “The bond remains at fifty thousand dollars,” the judge said in a husky voice. “The crime is a serious crime. A man may be tempted to flight.” Peter sat down then, his expression unchanged, and it didn’t change many times during the next two days. The hearing lasted that long because, after a good deal of argument, Miss Roraback was allowed to play the tapes of Peter Reilly’s polygraph test in Hartford.

  “Pete, how are you?”

  “OK. And you?”

  “Good. Tim Kelly is my name. Sergeant of the state police.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Know why you’re here, Pete?”

  “Well, I guess, to determine whether the things in my statement are true.”

  “Right.”

  I was taking notes in shorthand, my own brand of shorthand, evolved over the years from classic Gregg into a personal system that went beyond classicism into more creative realms of abbreviations and spontaneous scrawls. But when I typed up my notes that night, I understood them very well.

  “Do you know for sure who hurt your mother?”

  “No.”

  “Did you hurt your mother?”

  “No.”

&nb
sp; Here was Barbara, here in our winter courtroom, lying among us, naked and bloody on the floor, her T-shirt pushed up to here. I could see Peter making the gesture. Pushed up to here. Blood all over the place, on the chin and the throat and the carpet. Here was Peter, rubber-cuffed and connected, sitting in the seat of honor. Talking about Barbara.

  “Does that read my brain for me?”

  “Definitely. Definitely. And if you’ve told me the truth, this is what your brain is going to tell me.”

  “I just want to understand how it works.”

  “It works on your heart. That’s your conscience. All we’re trying to do is arrive at the truth. And the truth will be on that tape.”

  Sergeant Kelly had come to court to testify and to play the tapes. He looked big and strong, a striking figure, every inch a brown belt in judo. He had a round, full face with a round, full smile.

  “Did any of these questions bother you?”

  “Well, whether I harmed my mother or not.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, that question … they told me up at the barracks yesterday that—how some people don’t realize—all of a sudden, fly off the handle for a split second …”

  “Right.”

  “… and it leaves a blank spot in their memory.”

  “Right. This will help bring it out.”

  “Well, I thought about that last night, and I thought and I thought and I thought, and I said no, I couldn’t have done it, I couldn’t have done it, you know. And now, when you ask me the question … that’s what I think of.”

  “Do you have a clear recollection of what happened last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there any doubt in your mind, Pete?”

  “I didn’t understand that last question.”