Joe O’Brien had another question. “How could there have been blood on both sides of the blade and not on the handle?” he wondered.
Peter Reilly’s defense began quietly, with no further preliminaries, just after lunch. A short, slim man with dark hair and a slightly abashed look took the stand. He wore two pins in his lapel, a white dove and a red ladybug, thus managing to symbolize the fight for peace and against aphids. It was a nice, homey touch, and in a way it symbolized a change of atmosphere in the courtroom, as the witnesses changed from the doctors and the policemen, the pros, to the housewives and schoolboys, the amateurs. They looked scared and unprofessional, most of them setting foot in a courtroom for the first time, witnesses for the defense.
The man with the dove and the ladybug was the Reverend Dakers, who said he had been at the Teen Center meeting that night and had gone, afterwards, to Johnny’s for a cup of coffee with Father Paul “about nine-forty, nine-forty-five.” He said it was hard to remember what Peter Reilly had been wearing, but he thought maybe it was a blue work shirt.
Barbara Curtis twisted a damp white handkerchief in her left hand and with her right hand held tightly to the side of the chair. She identified Peter’s clothes, and she said she herself had been wearing a cranberry sweater and cranberry slacks, though when Mr. Bianchi asked her what other people at the Teen Center meeting had worn, she said she couldn’t say.
“You are sure what Peter Reilly was wearing, even though you are unable to tell me what anybody else was wearing?” Mr. Bianchi asked.
“That’s true,” said Mrs. Curtis, who had given a statement about Peter’s clothes to the police the day after Barbara died.
Sue Curtis, her daughter, looked at the shirt Mr. Bianchi held up and identified it as the one Peter Reilly had worn.
“It isn’t any different from any other long-sleeved brown shirt with white buttons on it, is it?” Mr. Bianchi asked heavily.
“No,” Sue Curtis admitted, and bit her nails. But Paul Beligni, behind the reporters, grumbled out loud. “That’s no ordinary brown shirt,” he said. “That’s a fourteen ninety-five Van Heusen doubleknit.”
John Sochocki, looking as though he had dressed in a grown-up’s suit, the lapels wide over his narrow chest, the sleeves too long, hanging over his hands, said he had been given a ride home from the Teen Center by Peter Reilly. John Sochocki said he’d got to his house, not many blocks from the Methodist Church, at 9:45. He said Peter was wearing a brown plaid jacket.
“Are you married?” Catherine Roraback asked the witness.
“Yes,” the woman on the stand said. She was wearing a rose-and-gray two-piece dress; she had fair skin and shinning red-blonde hair.
“What does your husband do?” Miss Roraback asked innocently.
“He’s a Connecticut State police officer,” Joanne Mulhern replied. The jury watched, entranced, as she related how, at the Teen Center meeting, both Peter and Geoff had said good-bye to her and had left about 9:30. She said she saw Peter again early the next afternoon, and he was wearing the same clothes he’d had on the night before.
Geoffrey Madow took the stand, and Marion looked worried. “John Bianchi really rips into kids,” she had told me. At first it was easy for Geoff, as Catherine Roraback led him gently through the events of September 28, 1973. He told how, after the phone call from Peter, he’d raced back out to the car and had been the first person to get to Peter’s house.
“And what did you see?” Miss Roraback asked softly.
“I saw Mrs. Gibbons lying on the floor in the bedroom … I said, ‘Pete, I think she’s been raped,’” Geoff said.
But John Bianchi took Geoff back to the living Barbara, the woman who drank so much and argued so much with Peter. At first Geoffrey held his own; when the prosecutor asked what Barbara and Peter had argued about, Geoff said “Watergate,” and a ripple of laughter ran through the courtroom again. John Bianchi frowned.
“She was always picking on Peter, wasn’t she?”
“Not all the time,” Geoff said.
“They did use profanity when they would argue back and forth, didn’t they?”
“Not all the time,” Geoff said, looking uneasy.
“What did they say?” John Bianchi asked blandly.
Geoff murmured something and looked a little sick. Mr. Bianchi pressed hard.
“What did they say?” he said loudly.
“They might say, ‘Fuck you,’” Geoff said, almost in a whisper.
John Bianchi looked solemn and spoke loudly.
“Isn’t it true that they would use the term ‘shit’?” he demanded.
“Yes,” whispered Geoff. A woman behind the press row, a close friend of John Bianchi, gave a little snort. “Yes, sir,” she said.
Art Madow, the Beligni boys, and Jim Holmes broke up at Geoffrey’s answer, and Judge Speziale frowned at them. “Any more such outbursts from spectators and those spectators will be thrown out of this courtroom,” he said. Coming from Judge Speziale, the vernacular was as surprising as it was refreshing; in a court of law, where people tend to say, “I utilized” instead of “I used,” and “I observed” instead of “I saw,” it was nice to hear “thrown out,” instead of “eject.”
Mr. Bianchi complained that he had lost the line of questioning and asked for the last exchange to be read back. Mr. Roberts lifted the white tape from his machine and read aloud in his most elegant and precise way.
“Question: Isn’t it true that they would use the term ‘shit?’” Mr. Roberts read carefully, with such beautiful diction that the term might as well have been “chrysanthemums.” “Answer: Yes.”
Mr. Roberts held his hands over his machine, poised for the next question, and John Bianchi nodded in a satisfied way.
“They would use such terms as ‘bastard’ and ‘bitch,’ didn’t they?”
“Not to each other, no,” Geoff said. He explained that they only used those terms about a third person, such as a teacher.
“In all the times you visited, what’s your best estimate of the times Barbara Gibbons was drunk?” John Bianchi asked.
“Forty percent of the time,” Geoff said. Mr. Bianchi showed him his statement, in which Geoff had said Barbara was drunk “about half the time,” and Mr. Bianchi looked pleased.
“When she was sober, was she a nice person?”
“Yes,” Geoff said clearly.
“What was she like when she was drinking?”
“Sometimes she was nice, sometimes she was bitchy. Depending on how she was feeling, I imagine,” Geoff said, with a little smile.
Mr. Bianchi frowned again and showed Geoffrey the statement he’d signed, in which Geoff said he’d reached his own home around 9:30, though he’d just told Miss Roraback it was 9:40.
“What made you change your mind?” John Bianchi asked, with a definite sneer.
Geoff looked anguished. “It never was changed,” he said. “It never was changed. I always meant, around nine-thirty to nine-forty-five.”
“Were you subpoenaed?” John Bianchi asked suddenly.
“I don’t know,” Geoff said, and when the prosecutor pressed the point, as though to cast doubt on Geoff’s friendship for Peter Reilly, Geoff suddenly looked over to the defense table. “Did you subpoena me, Miss Roraback?” he asked innocently. The judge looked up, startled, and Mr. Roberts stifled a smile as he took down the question.
John Bianchi then pulled out all the stops with Geoffrey, being harsh and ironic and florid, referring once to the house where Barbara died, as “the Reilly homestead,” asking Geoff whether Peter had cried and how he had looked.
“What do you mean, he had a blank expression on his face?” the prosecutor asked scornfully.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Geoff said helplessly, and Mr. Bianchi looked satisfied.
“Are you sure Peter Reilly was wearing the brown shirt we’ve been talking about?”
“Yes I am,” Geoff said.
“He does have a brown plaid
jacket, doesn’t he?”
“Yes he does,” Geoff said, and the prosecutor abruptly returned to Barbara’s drinking.
“You visited Miss Gibbons’s home about five or six times a week?”
“Yes.”
“And about half the time she was drunk?”
“About that, yes,” Geoff said.
Mr. Bianchi’s last question was whether Peter was crying. “No,” Geoff said, and the prosecutor thanked him. “No further questions,” he said, turning aside.
Marion told about arriving that night and putting her arms around Peter. “I held him for a minute because I didn’t know how to tell him what had happened. I just hugged him.”
John Bianchi smiled widely at her, but she did not smile back.
“It was cold that night?” he asked Marion.
“It was cold, yes,” she said, and the prosecutor asked whether Peter was shaking from the cold.
“It was not that kind of shaking,” Marion said.
Mr. Bianchi widened his eyes.
“Oh, there are different kinds of shaking?” he asked.
“With children, yes,” Marion said.
“He’s eighteen,” Mr. Bianchi told her. “The state of Connecticut says he’s a man.”
Marion looked at him. “But a mother says he’s a child,” she said. Helen Ayre smiled.
“Was he crying, Mrs. Madow?” the prosecutor asked.
“No,” Marion said.
When Mickey Madow testified, there was a verbal scuffle, as John Bianchi tried to prevent the jury from learning that Mickey waited around that night, wanting to take Peter home. When Miss Roraback asked Mickey what he’d said to Sergeant Salley—that he would come down to the barracks and take Peter home when the police were through—the prosecutor jumped up and said it was immaterial. “It’s highly material to the subsequent detention of Peter Reilly,” Miss Roraback said dryly.
“Is it your testimony that you checked the pulse of the left wrist?” Mr. Bianchi asked when his turn came.
“Right,” Mickey said.
“On the left wrist?”
“Right,” Mickey said.
It was an Abbott and Costello bit, and the courtroom broke up. But the prosecutor’s last question wasn’t funny.
“Was he crying, Mr. Madow?”
“No, he wasn’t,” Mickey said.
The new witness had a faraway look in his eye. His name was Robert Erhardt, and his address was the State Prison at Somers, Connecticut. He said he’d first met Peter Reilly at eight o’clock in the morning, at Litchfield jail, the Sunday after Barbara died, and that at first Peter wouldn’t say why he’d been arrested.
“I made him a cup of cocoa and gave him a pack of cigarettes, and he said, ‘They’re charging me with killing my mother.’ I said, ‘You got to be kidding.’ I asked him if he had made a telephone call or talked to an attorney. He was talking in circles. He didn’t know what to do … one minute he’d be talking about his school classes, then he’d leave it unfinished, and he’d talk about playing his guitar, then he’d say, ‘What am I here for?’” Erhardt shook his head. “None of his statements were coherent,” he recalled.
John Bianchi, who prosecuted this witness on a robbery charge, asked him whether he recalled saying to Sergeant Norman Soucie about Peter, “I don’t think it was a planned thing.”
“Definitely not,” Robert Erhardt said.
“You don’t remember saying it?” Mr. Bianchi asked.
“I didn’t say it,” the witness said firmly.
Instead of giving a statement to the police, Robert Erhardt had prepared his own statement, saying he’d been offered a “time cut” and a transfer if he would testify against Peter Reilly. “In my opinion,” he wrote, “and I was asked for an opinion by Sergeant Soucie, I really feel that Peter Reilly is not guilty of the crime he is charged with.” He sent copies of his statement to Catherine Roraback, to Peter Reilly, to me, and even to the state police.
John Bianchi asked Robert Erhardt whether he had refused to sign a statement for Sergeant Soucie because he was afraid some other inmate might hurt him.
Robert Erhardt was a wry, thin man with a glint of humor in his eyes, a man who, like Peter Reilly, had been put into Litchfield jail when he was eighteen. Now he was forty-five years old. He had been in various prisons, on serious charges—robberies, car thefts, intermittent escapes—off and on for sixteen years. So when John Bianchi asked whether he was afraid of another inmate, Erhardt smiled, a slight, wan smile. “I’m pretty well aware of how to carry myself in prison,” he said. The wry remark had nothing to do with Peter Reilly but, in a way, it seemed the most important thing Robert Erhardt could say.
Of all the young people who took the stand, Paul Beligni seemed the most self-assured. Jean had given him a little lecture on how to handle himself. “Try to sound humble,” she said, and she’d hoped that as Paul sat facing the courtroom, her cousin John would notice the boy’s profile and think, “Here is Sam’s grandson, he’s got the Speziale nose.”
But as it turned out, it was neither Paul’s humility nor his nose that seemed to matter most. After testifying, with a broad smile, that he and Peter Reilly were “the best of friends,” and that he’d visited him “many, many times,” Paul recalled the summer of 1973. The two boys were target shooting in the backyard, and Paul dug one bullet slug out of a tree on the side of the house, using the knife that was now Exhibit X.
“And what happened?” said Miss Roraback.
“I broke the point off,” Paul said, smiling.
The calendar turned to April, but an ice storm came through, turning the branches of the elms on Litchfield green into sheaths of brittle diamonds. Charles said the sheriffs were keeping winter going so we wouldn’t find out it was spring. There was, indeed, an air of unreality about all this, a sense of time suspended, as though we were Sartre characters, forever sipping lukewarm coffee from our paper cups, grouped around the water cooler in futile debate, doomed to roam restlessly, endlessly through the corridors at Litchfield Superior Court.
In fact, though, the trial was nearly over. Only a few more witnesses were called for the defense, most of them professionals.
Dr. Abraham Stolman, chief toxicologist for the Connecticut State Department of Health, said he had examined the razor and had found no blood on it. On cross-examination, Dr. Stolman said he found 22 percent alcohol in Barbara’s blood, the equivalent of ten ounces of 86-proof whiskey or ten 12-ounce bottles of beer. He couldn’t tell whether she’d been drinking whiskey, beer or wine, but she was “definitely under the influence of intoxicating liquor.”
Trooper Walter Anderson looked at a sketch of the inside of the house and said he had marked “a bloody footprint” on the carpet, pointed out to him by Lieutenant Shay, near Barbara’s left foot. But when the section of carpet was sent to the FBI lab, they sent back word that it was not a discernible footprint.
It had always been a puzzle that the razor that Peter said he used to slash Barbara’s throat had been found closed and clean on the living-room shelf, where it was always kept. Obviously the police thought he might have washed it and dried it and put it away. So they had taken the kitchen sink trap and its contents, the bathroom sink trap and its contents, and the bathtub drain trap and assembly and contents, and sent everything down to the state police lab. No blood was found.
Sergeant Gerald Pennington of the police lab at Bethany testified that he’d compared fingerprints found on the door with prints of the victim, with prints of the officers at the scene, and with prints of the defendant. Two of the prints belonged to an auxiliary trooper, he said, but there was a partial palm print on the inside of the front screen door and a partial fingerprint on the rear screen door that were not identified, though identifiable. He said he couldn’t tell how long the prints had been there, but they were definitely not Peter’s.
There were only a few nonprofessional witnesses in the last days of the trial. There was Vicky, Barbara’s childhood compa
nion, all grown up now, plump and matronly, with gray in her hair and grown sons of her own. “His mother was my cousin,” she said softly. She had never met Peter Reilly, until she saw him at his arraignment, but she said she’d held him in her arms that autumn morning, and he’d cried and cried. Vicky’s husband, John, a large, ruddy-faced man, also testified. He waved toward Peter Reilly and toward his wife in the gallery. “He was crying—she was crying—I was crying!!” he boomed, throwing his hands into the air. Helen Ayre smiled broadly. Margaret Wald and Raymond Lind whispered together, but Gary Lewis merely looked bored.
The other nonprofessional witness took the stand late on a Thursday afternoon. The court had been recessed most of the day, and a number of people, to their everlasting regret, had already decided nothing would happen anymore that day and were not there when the jury was called back, after four o’clock, and the judge told Miss Roraback she could resume.
The witness gave his name, Peter Anthony Reilly, and said that he lived on Locust Hill Road in East Canaan, “at the moment.”
His appearance on the stand, so late in the day, seemed a carefully planned move by Miss Roraback, who knew that she had to get to the language matter first, before John Bianchi did, to take the sting out of the words. So she asked Peter, right away, about the sort of language he and Barbara had used.
“Well, we did use bad language,” Peter said, managing to look both a little abashed and a little pleased at his daring, an accused murderer in the role of Peck’s Bad Boy. “I guess you would call it profanity.” And when Miss Roraback asked him for an illustration, Peter smiled sheepishly. “We used terms such as ‘fuck you,’ ‘bastard,’ and ‘bitch,’” He added that they didn’t talk that way “on all occasions,” only when they were arguing—sometimes about the car, sometimes about other things, “anything that happened to be of interest at the moment.”
After only twenty minutes of testimony, court was adjourned for a long weekend. It seemed to have been a slow day, but there had been interesting activity backstage. The state had offered to plea bargain with Peter, promising a light sentence—three to five years—if he would plead guilty to manslaughter.
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