Upstairs, in the dinette and living room, the parents laughed too and talked about how difficult it would be to meet the interest payments, nearly $400 a month, on the bank loan that was keeping Peter out of jail. They were worried about paying Catherine Roraback, too, though she hadn’t set a fee.
“Aldo drilled a well for Arthur Penn once,” Jean reported. “So I wrote him a letter. He directed Bonnie and Clyde, so I thought he might be interested.”
Marion held up a torn bumper sticker: SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE in Day-Glow letters, bright orange on a black ground. Somebody had plastered the bumper of her car when it was parked at Mickey’s office; Marion peeled it off. Dorothy Madow said a telephone man had come to her house to make repairs and had said to her, “Boy, your brother-in-law is in big trouble.” Dorothy asked him why.
“Because people should support the police, no matter what,” the phone man said.
Everyone wanted to know more about Jacqueline Bernard, the woman who’d bailed Peter out of jail. It was an amazing gesture from a stranger, and I’d have liked to know more myself, but there wasn’t much I could tell them. She had asked that her name not be used because she didn’t want to be known as a Lady Bountiful. When I talked with her, she mentioned that her son Joel had taken a year out of college in the early 1960s to do civil rights work in Mississippi, so she knew exactly what it was like to have an eighteen-year-old in jail and to want to get him out.
Late into the night, there was laughter and talk. Gina and Anne were playing in the den, little girls then. At the dinette table, Marion had piled some of the mail that had come in since the New Times piece. The magazine had run a box, asking for contributions to the Reilly Fund, so many of the letters had brought checks, too, some of them from well-known people. Beatrice Straight, an actress who had a house in Norfolk, had sent a large check and had persuaded a friend of hers to send one, too. Brendan Gill of The New Yorker sent a nice check to Peter and a nice letter to me. He said he liked my article, and he’d sent copies to some lawyers he knew.
Most of the letters were from ordinary people. One retired couple sent part of their Social Security check. An anonymous note, with a dollar bill enclosed, said, “I am a law student, and this abuse of our legal system must be stopped.” A prison officer in Louisiana sent $5 and a sad note, wondering how many of the young people he saw had doubts about what had happened. From places as distant as Deadwood, Oregon, Pineville, Louisiana, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, the letters came; already the Peter Reilly affair seemed to be touching a sensitive nerve somewhere in the national consciousness. A psychiatric nurse who had worked in New York prisons thanked the committee for what it was doing. “You are all bright lights in a dark world,” she wrote.
I thought so too, not only that night, when Peter got out of jail and we were all so happy, but even afterward, when so much of the happiness had drained away, when some minor tensions, then some real grievances, had developed between members of the committee, and between some of them and me. I always thought so.
It was a wonderful night, but from time to time, in the midst of the laughter, somebody would say something serious, something that would recollect for everyone what might lie ahead. With several jurors already chosen, Peter’s trial was not far off. The charge was murder, a Class A felony in Connecticut. In Peter’s case, the state was asking for a penalty of ten years to life.
“The judge told the jurors not to think of the penalty,” Jean exclaimed. “How could they not think of the penalty? They might be putting this boy away till he’s fifty years old.”
Meantime, the boy was downstairs with his friends, playing his guitar. It seemed so unbelievable. How could it have happened? And who had let it happen? Whose fault was it, anyway? Was it Lieutenant Shay, telling Peter he was a suspect but not telling him he should get a lawyer? Was it Sergeant Kelly, telling Peter the truth was on his tape? Was it the prosecutor who’d pressed for an indictment before he’d heard all the tapes? Was it the other policemen, too, or some of them? Were there several villains, or just one nameless, faceless villain, the System? Because the people here knew Jim Mulhern best, and because he’d known Peter, they talked of him more, and thought he should be given the button that a New Times reader had sent in. The button had a picture of Adolf Eichmann and the caption read: I WAS ONLY FOLLOWING ORDERS.
John Bianchi looked disgusted as he picked up the newspaper and read the quotation out loud: “It’s a good feeling to be out of jail, but I won’t be happy until they catch the right person.”
He threw the paper down onto the counsel table and gestured toward other papers in a small stack. The prosecutor was angry about articles that had quoted Peter the day he was freed on bond. Peter talked about the mail he’d got from people who read his story in New Times, and he’d quoted someone as writing “We couldn’t believe the police worked that way.” Mr. Bianchi also complained about a New York Times story in which Catherine Roraback had talked about the case, referring to Peter’s interrogation by the state police as “a grilling … they planted in his mind that he must have done it,” and describing Barbara Gibbons, whom she’d known, as a kind of “rural Bohemian.” Mr. Bianchi said he was very upset by these articles; he felt they were prejudicial, and he said he felt very close to asking for a mistrial.
Judge Speziale peered over the bench.
“Do you care to respond, Miss Roraback?” he asked.
Catherine Roraback sighed a little as she stood up; she had known this was coming. She said she would address herself to two separate issues. As for the Times piece, she said, she had already complained to the newspaper, because her telephone talk with their reporter was off the record. Miss Roraback said she was as upset about the article as Mr. Bianchi—in fact, more so.
She defended the other articles, though. “Whether Peter Reilly’s statements are wise or not, whether they help or hinder is quite another matter. But I think he has the right to make these statements,” she declared. “I feel strongly that Mr. Reilly has the right of free speech.”
Thus in a small way, and in a small place, in an out-of-the-way courtroom tucked into a corner of Litchfield County, Connecticut, ah argument continued, one that stretched back over many years, many centuries. In general, the question was how free a person was to speak, and under what circumstances, or whether any qualifiers ought to apply. Those who opposed restriction leaned heavily on the First Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed freedom of speech and press, and those who were in favor of various restrictions leaned just as heavily on the Sixth Amendment, which guaranteed a fair trial. In the courts, restrictions on the press were popularly, or not so popularly, called gag orders, and in the case of Peter Reilly, one had already been handed down. “It’s like Grand Central Station in this courtroom,” the judge had complained on the morning of February 19, when the jury panel crowded into the room, and he spent his lunch hour that day dictating the gag order to his secretary. The defendant and the witnesses were prohibited from making “extrajudicial statements that might be reasonably calculated to affect the outcome of the trial.” Besides the ban on interviews and extrajudicial statements, there were to be no tape recorders, no cameras in or around the court, not even any sketching.
Now, a week after that order, the judge was hearing from the prosecutor that perhaps his order had been violated. Judge Speziale frowned deeply, and said he would call a recess so that he could read the articles Mr. Bianchi had complained about.
“The car’s gone,” Peter said casually, as we stood in the hall. “The state of Connecticut put a lien on the ’vette. But I’m better off without it.” He lighted a cigarette and leaned against the wall in the hall outside the courtroom. He still looked thin, but he looked far less tense, far more rested than he’d looked the week before. He’d had a good weekend, playing guitar with the boys, going to McDonald’s. On Sunday he had gone to the 7:30 mass at St. Joseph’s with Aldo and Paul, and at the Madows’ he’d slept well. One morning, when Marion and Mickey
passed by the den where Peter was sleeping, Marion had whispered, “Mickey, do you think he knows he’s here and not in jail?” Peter had heard her, lifted his head from the pillow, and grinned. “I know I’m here,” he said. “This is too soft for jail.”
Aldo Beligni had picked up Peter at the Madows and brought him into Litchfield. All the grown-ups planned to take turns driving Peter to court; they felt that in this precarious period, he should have older people around, and indeed, this morning he seemed to be the youngest person in the room. Miss Roraback had even challenged the validity of the process by which a jury pool was drawn, on the grounds that it excluded persons from eighteen to twenty-one, but her motion had been denied. As the trial progressed, more young people began coming to court—Geoff Madow and the Belignis, Art Madow, and occasionally Wayne Collier and the Parmalee brothers, Tim and Mike. Groups of young people eventually showed up, too, often led by their teachers, to watch the proceedings as a kind of living lesson in sociology, psychology, criminology, even social studies; the criminal trial of an eighteen-year-old male accused of murdering his mother clearly fit into all sorts of interesting curriculum categories.
Meantime, however, Peter had only grown-ups to talk to. Legally, of course, he was a grown-up himself, as Sergeant Kelly had pointed out to him in Hartford. But emotionally and psychologically he was not. As Jean Beligni had pointed out earlier, he was still in school, accustomed to taking orders. “Making the legal age eighteen instead of twenty-one is the best thing that ever happened to the police around here,” another committee member once said, with a trace of anger. Peter himself had underlined the point when he talked on the phone to a reporter the night he got out of jail. “I’m eating and sleeping and playing my guitar,” Peter said, “but I’m staying close to home. I don’t go anywhere unless I have an adult with me.” He said it casually, not sarcastically; apparently he found no irony in what he said, and neither did the reporter.
As the recess dragged on, Chief Deputy Sheriff Pat Alfano stood in the doorway of the courtroom and mused on what Judge Speziale might do about the publicity. “He’s tough,” said Sheriff Alfano, a tall, curly haired, affable Italian whom nearly everybody called Patsy. “Some judges, you can get away with anything, but Speziale will cream you for doing the slightest thing.”
Although a lot of people said a lot of things about other people in Litchfield Superior Court, not all of them well-founded, Patsy Alfano knew what he was talking about, because he and John Speziale had been schoolmates once, with a lot in common. The parents of both boys were Italian immigrants, hardworking and ambitious for their children, and the boys were high school classmates.
John Speziale was born in Winsted, Connecticut. His birthday was November 21, just one day after Barbara Gibbons’ birthday. His father worked for the railroad, and his mother worked in a needle factory to help her children get through school. John always knew he wanted to be a lawyer, but there were five children in the family; never enough money, never enough new clothes. “Look at you,” a girl in his class used to jeer. “Just look at you. Patches on your knee and on your fanny. How can you ever be a lawyer?”
In high school, John was known as a brain. He carried a briefcase to school. But he had other interests, especially music and tennis, and he was so cheerful and resourceful that he was voted the “Most Optimistic” member of the Class of 1940. At Duke University, he waited on tables, played in the marching band, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1943. He went right into the navy, serving in the Pacific, and he was one of the first men to go ashore at Nagasaki after the bomb.
When he returned from the war he went back to law school at Duke. He passed the Connecticut bar on his first try and almost immediately became a Municipal Court judge. He ran for state treasurer in 1958 and won, with a little campaign jingle: “Don’t dilly-dally; vote for Spez-ee-alley.”
In 1961 he became a judge in the Court of Common Pleas, and four years later was appointed to the Superior Court. In spite of his success, he and his wife, Mary, did not move to one of the big old houses in Litchfield. They stayed on in Torrington, where he was a member of the Elks, the Knights of Columbus, and the Sons of Italy, and he dressed in plain black or brown suits, with a soft tweedy country-style hat to add a little dash.
When Peter Reilly was brought into his courtroom, Judge Speziale was only fifty-one—just as old as Barbara was when she died—but because he’d been a judge at twenty-six, he always seemed older than he was. He was stern, strict, and, as Pat Alfano said, he was tough. He wasn’t what they called a hanging judge; he was considered fair and honest, and he had an old-fashioned, courtly air about him. On the street he invariably tipped his hat to women, even women reporters.
He had a round face and a soft smile that he didn’t use much in court; usually he wore a serious, semifrowning look, his forehead creased, rather like a worried monsignor continually fretting about the parish debt. Sometimes, in court, the afternoon sun glinted off the rims of his glasses, and as he bent over the notes he was writing, with the desk light beaming down onto the pages, he looked as he must have looked thirty years before, when he studied so intently to make Phi Beta Kappa and to live up to his parents’ dreams. The law was not only his life, but also his lifeline; his work, which was so burdensome, which involved the handling of the lives of other people, was made easier by his absolute reliance on the law. The law was written down in books, and life was always easier when a man went by the book.
He wore that worried look when he swept back into court after the recess, his full black robe making a definitive swish as he turned the corner of the doorway from chambers back into court. He said he had read the articles and felt they might indeed have created “a clear and present danger” to the fairness of this trial. He then read the entire text of the order he’d written during the recess. It threatened to use the contempt power of the court against any person who (a) “disseminates by any means of public communication an extrajudicial statement relating to the defendant or to the issues in the case that goes beyond the public record of this court, if the statement is reasonably calculated to affect the outcome of the trial and seriously threatens to have such an effect; or (b) makes such a statement with the expectation that it will be so disseminated.” Regarding Peter Reilly, the order said, “The defendant is forbidden from participating in interviews for publicity and from making extrajudicial statements about this case from this date and until such time as a verdict in this case is returned in open court. Any violation of this order by the defendant may well lead to a revocation of his release on bail.”
The language was legal and formal, but the message couldn’t be missed. Peter Reilly wasn’t nearly as free as he’d thought nor, for that matter, was anyone else.
None of the jurors, as it turned out, had seen any of the articles, but Mr. Bianchi moved for a mistrial, anyway. “Litchfield County has been inundated with publicity,” he declared, and he asked for a two-month continuance, “so that the publicity will have been tempered by time.”
Miss Roraback opposed it. “I’m as concerned as Mr. Bianchi that we have a fair trial,” she said. “But we have seven good jurors already, none of whom has seen or heard this …” She motioned to the newspapers on the prosecution table, and smiled a little. “In my experience, I was always shocked to discover how few people read the newspapers,” she said. Mr. Bianchi, who didn’t have an office near Yale, and who had never taken part in a nationally known trial, flushed a little. “I am likewise impressed with the jury, your honor,” he said hastily. Miss Roraback laughed a little, Mr. Bianchi laughed too, and Judge Speziale said they’d go on with the voir dire.
John Bianchi, impeccable in a pearl gray suit with a powder blue shirt, looked at the latest panel of prospective jurors.
“We are here to determine who caused the death of Barbara Gibbons on September 28, 1973, in the town of Canaan, Connecticut,” he told them solemnly. “This town is much more commonly referred to as Falls Village, Connecticut. Barb
ara Gibbons was murdered on the twenty-eighth day of September 1973, sometime between nine and ten o’clock that night.” Then he read off the names of some of the witnesses the state intended to call.
Catherine Roraback stood up, dressed in pale blue, with a string of pearls, and about a quarter of an inch of her slip showing.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the panel, I am representing Peter,” she said, and she half-turned and smiled at him. “Will you stand up, Peter?”
The jurors stared. They saw a pale young man, skinny and tense-looking with long, slender hands and large hazel eyes, his skin a little broken out, and his teeth a little crooked, his hair long and falling over his right eye. Miss Roraback paused, taking advantage of the stillness of the moment, then she said quietly that she wanted to correct something Mr. Bianchi had said.
“We’re not here to determine who caused the death of Barbara Gibbons,” she said, “but whether Peter Reilly caused it.”
One by one, the jurors came out to be questioned, to take the oath of the voir dire—“to speak the truth.” Some of them were clutching A Handbook for Jurors, the sixteen-page blue booklet each of them had been given in the jury waiting room. The style of the booklet was both pedantic and vivid, as though it were written for Boy Scouts who liked to read James Bond under the covers at night. Some of the text was lecturing (“The juror must be diligent and conscientious, patient and trustworthy … a juror must be courageous”) and some of it was blunt and graphic (“What is evidence?… the evidence is what the judge lets the jury hear and consider.… Evidence may take the form of photographs, bullets, or a scarred face …”). But the booklet also promised, “You will witness a real life drama in every case that you sit on.” I was fascinated by the drama of the voir dire itself, as these people came out of the jury room, trailing their ordinary sense of the serious, the tragic, the absurd. When Mr. Bianchi asked a woman from Winchester, who had two teen-age sons of her own, whether she would therefore feel sympathy for the accused, she shook her head. “I’m not really a sympathetic person,” she said.
A Death in Canaan Page 23
