A Death in Canaan

by Barthel, Joan;

  Peter Reilly had been a puzzle, and something of a problem, for Judge Speziale throughout the trial, and even afterward. Especially afterward. The judge had often wondered why an eighteen-year-old boy would say he killed his mother if he hadn’t, and he had never been able to come up with a satisfactory answer. Here was a chance, perhaps, to find out. The objection was overruled.

  I was not in court when Dr. Spiegel testified, but Carol Cioe, from the Register, said he looked like Groucho Marx. This is part of what he said:

  He was a somewhat immature young man who has a serious deficit in his ability to identify who he is as a person. He has difficulty in integrating his concept of self, and a poor ability to integrate his conceptions of others.

  Because he had such a low self-esteem, under conditions of interrogation he needs support, protection, and understanding of a question, and formulating an answer. Without that support and guidance, he can easily be confused, and he most certainly can easily accept as a fact something he knows nothing about. This is especially true because of his long-standing respect for authority, especially police authority.

  The word ‘brainwash’ is more of a journalistic phrase than it is a professional term. But it loosely relates to the way in which deception or coercion is used to evoke in a person a response that is consistent with a particular hypothesis that the interrogator imposes upon the subject.

  There is related to that the other phenomenon that is often called “amnesia,” and this is where the deception takes place: that an event may not occur in the presence of an individual and, if it does not occur, he has no way of recalling that the event took place. If, in the context of a coercive brainwashing interrogation, or where deception was used, if a person with a low self-esteem is told that events happen that he does not remember, his shaky confidence in himself, combined with his respect for authority, may lead him to believe that perhaps the event did take place.

  Here is a young man who has a shaky sense of self in the first place—and now, awed by what he has just seen—when he returned and saw his mother’s body—how does he perceive it? He has trouble perceiving others, anyhow. Under this startling new situation, he is now trying to integrate to the best of his ability. What is he perceiving here?

  He stated that he could not account for what happened. Then, under subsequent interrogation procedures, he was told that certain events took place. He is presented with questions about what happened, and he says he doesn’t know. Then he is told that, although he doesn’t know, there are ways in which he can remember this event, and one of the devices used in trying to sharpen his recall was the use of the polygraph. He accepted the ‘scientific’ atmosphere of using the polygraph as a means of touching something within himself, as a means of accepting the proposition that, perhaps, he should confess because the police authority believed that he did it. He had no proof that he did not do it, and he accepted the notion that he must have had amnesia for an event that took place. He accepted in his unstable condition the notion that not knowing it took place would be accounted for by “amnesia.” In deference to the police authority, he accepted the responsibility for the killing on the basis of their assertions.

  The concept of his ego integrity is essential in withstanding the kind of interrogation he was put through. Somebody with a strong sense of self could very possibly have dealt with the nature of that interrogation. Somebody with such an immaturity and diffusion of self was helpless.

  The New York Times said Peter listened to the testimony “with his usual impassive stare.” But Carol Cioe said Peter had “blushed and stared at the floor” when he heard the doctor say he was so gullible.

  Finally, Roy Daly asked the doctor if Peter Reilly was the type of person to cry in public, or to fly into a rage. John Bianchi, who had asked several witnesses about Peter’s tears, called it “immaterial and irrelevant.” But again, the judge wanted to know. Dr. Spiegel said a person whose self-esteem was as low as Peter’s perceived emotions in a very shallow way, almost an alienated way, and the least likely thing such a person would do would be to cry. As for rage, he said, it wouldn’t even occur to him that he had the right. Apparently it still didn’t occur to him. When the doctor examined Peter, on January 6, 1976, Peter told him he wanted to become a policeman.

  Dr. Milton Helpern had been the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City for twenty years. He had retired, but he was still considered to be as familiar with the anatomy of murder as a man could be. Arthur Miller had arranged for Dr. Helpern to come to the courthouse back in the spring of 1975 to see the pictures and the autopsy slides, and now Dr. Helpern was in the courthouse to testify. He took the stand, smiling a little boyishly, his white hair falling over his forehead, looking a little like Robert Frost. He had seen the pictures before, but he studied them again, looking at Barbara lying slashed and bloody on her bedroom floor, her torso so glaring white, the blood splotches around her head bright orange. Peter watched Dr. Helpern, and Mr. Gallicchio watched Peter.

  Mr. Daly posed a long, hypothetical question.

  “Let us assume, Dr. Helpern,” the lawyer said, “that Peter Reilly departed a Teen Center meeting at nine thirty-five or nine forty P.M., drove to a friend’s house, and arrived there at nine forty-five P.M.

  “Assume that he then drove to his home, the driving taking five minutes and twenty-nine seconds, arrived at his home, locked the door of his car, found the body of his mother, called an ambulance, called the family doctor, and spoke to the doctor’s daughter-in-law for two or three minutes.

  “Assume that he called a nurse at Sharon Hospital, who asked several questions, and who then called another ambulance, and then the state police at nine fifty-eight P.M., and that the trooper arrived at ten-o-two P.M.

  “Assume also that no trace of blood was found on Peter Reilly, and assume also that he was five feet seven inches tall and weighed one hundred and twenty-one pounds.

  “And assume that the following wounds were inflicted: a stab wound in the hand; a blow to the elbow; a blow to the nose, breaking it; at least two severe slashes to the throat; three broken ribs; two broken thigh bones; a deep penetration of the vagina with an unknown object; a minor brain contusion; and multiple stab wounds of the back.

  “Based on these assumptions, and on your qualifications and your experience, what is your professional opinion as to whether Peter Reilly killed his mother?”

  Dr. Helpern said Peter couldn’t have done it. He said he couldn’t have, in that amount of time, in such close quarters, considering that the body was turned over, without getting some blood on him. He said that even if Peter had thrown away his clothes, there still would have been traces of blood under his fingernails. Even if Peter had not been alone, he said, he couldn’t have done it. In fact, Dr. Helpern said, if he were asked that same question about any person, he would say that no one else could have done it, either.

  It was the same question I’d been hearing since October 1973 when I first met the people in Canaan and heard about Peter Reilly. I had heard it throughout the trial, at the committee meetings, and in the Belignis kitchen, sitting around the kitchen table, on a Sunday afternoon, near the end of the trial.

  “How can you not get bloody, when you’re in such a rage?” Jean had demanded. “They say he went berserk—but then, would he be so careful? So methodical? They charged him with a crime that didn’t fit the temper.”

  Of all Peter’s friends, the Belignis had known Barbara best. There was the night when Ricky Beligni was lost on Canaan Mountain, and Barbara had come and told stories to Gina. Another time, she came to pick up Peter, who was downstairs in the basement practicing with the band. Jean was out shopping, so Aldo sat in the living room with Barbara. “I tried to entertain her,” Aldo said. “But she was very negative that night. She was criticizing the army, and I had been in the army. But you couldn’t help liking her. She never put on airs. She was herself. Whatever she felt like saying or doing, she would.” I said I wished I had known Barbara, a
nd Aldo said he wished I had, too. “You missed something,” he told me.

  “You know,” he continued, “I saw her that last afternoon. I was driving past the house, and she was asleep in the chair, sleeping in the sun. She had a book on her lap, and her head was tilted to one side, on her shoulder. She had a very serene look on her face. And you know what I thought? I thought, isn’t she pretty?”

  On the morning of March 25, 1976, five weeks after the end of the hearings, thirty reporters and photographers were jammed into the foyer of the Litchfield courthouse, wedged in the doorway, clustered around the water cooler, spilling out onto the steps. Barbara Bongiolatti, Judge Speziale’s secretary, counted them. She had been up late the night before, making Xerox copies of Judge Speziale’s decision.

  She had known the decision even before she began typing it, and the judge knew she knew. When he handed her the manuscript, entitled “Memorandum of Decision,” she smiled. “You guessed, didn’t you?” he said. “Yes,” she said. “I guessed.” She had not worked for this man for nineteen years without learning something about him. She knew he was fair, and she knew, about halfway through the hearings, what a fair man would have to do.

  The memorandum ran thirty-four pages, at fifty cents a page. But even the reporters for the smaller papers threw money wildly at the court clerk as he came down the stairs from the judge’s chamber, carrying copies of the decision.

  Judy Liner looked over Carol Cioe’s shoulder. “What does it say?” Judy demanded. “What’s the outcome?” They thumbed through the pages quickly, wading through the background of the case, the careful legal language. They found what they were looking for, at the bottom of page nine.

  “After a long and deliberate study of all of the transcripts of the original trial, and the instant proceeding, together with the pleadings and exhibits in both cases, this court concludes that an injustice has been done, and that the result of a new trial would probably be different.”

  The reporters and photographers were exclaiming, some even running for the phones, or looking for Peter. But Peter wasn’t there. Neither was Marion, or Mickey, or Roy Daly, or Jim Conway, or Arthur Miller. Neither was I. John Bianchi was in San Maarten, and Peter Reilly had stayed home. He was drinking iced tea in the dinette, waiting for the phone to ring. Marion and Mickey were at work, but Nanny was with him, and so was Joe O’Brien.

  Judy Liner called Peter from the phone at the grocery store, next to the courthouse.

  “You got it, kid,” she told him.

  “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” Peter yelled. Then he cried.

  Meanwhile, back at the courthouse, some of the reporters, realizing that Judy Liner was their only link with Peter Reilly, asked if she knew where he lived. “Follow me,” Judy said. “I’ll be doing eighty all the way.” So Judy led a convoy of cars, seven or eight of them, from the courthouse over to Canaan, doing eighty, easy, along Route 63, through Goshen, past Cornwall, past the Parmalees and the Dickinsons and the Kruses, past the little white house where Barbara died.

  While the reporters were coming, Peter made some calls. He called Marion, then he called Catherine Roraback. He called Arthur Miller. Nan suggested that he call Auntie B. “I don’t think so,” Peter said.

  Later, reporters talked with some of these people, too. Marion said she couldn’t express her happiness. “It’s like having a child with an incurable disease,” she said, “and then you find out there’s a cure.” Arthur Miller said he was delighted. “Do you know what this shows?” he asked the Times man. “It shows that if people don’t simply accept what’s handed down from above, and if they don’t surrender to despair, they can change things. They can get justice.”

  Both lawyers were quoted. Roy Daly called the decision “a victory for justice,” and Catherine Roraback said she was “very pleased for Peter.” Although the new lawyer seemed the hero, a Journal editorial, “Debt to Miss Roraback,” had pointed out during the hearing that she’d made an essential contribution to justice. “Whether someone else would have conducted the original defense in exactly the same way is not the issue,” the paper said tartly. “No one else seemed interested at the time.”

  But there was enough glory to spare, glory to share. The judge’s decision came just one year after Roy Daly had begun his quest for items of evidence from the state, including the unidentified print. Even after he got it, for months he couldn’t find anybody to try to match it. The Federal agents wouldn’t get involved without the consent of the state police, and the state police wouldn’t consent until somebody Daly knew in Fairfield made an urgent personal request. When I asked Daly whether the delay could be called obstruction of justice, he smiled. “Let’s just say this is a funny case,” he said.

  When the press got to Peter, he held a news conference in the driveway at the Madows’s, the house on Locust Hill that had a $15,000 mortgage on it, to pay for part of Peter’s bail. “I was hoping all the way,” Peter told reporters, and some wrote later that there were tears in his eyes. But he didn’t have much else to say. As Geoffrey Madow said, “We talk mostly about cars, and when we don’t talk about cars, we don’t talk very much.” And The New York Times story the next day said that Peter seemed “as impassive as ever.” The Times story was at the top of the front page, continued inside, with a map of Litchfield County, showing Canaan, Litchfield, and Roxbury, Arthur Miller’s town, marked with black dots. There was a picture of Peter, grinning from ear to ear, on the front page of the Times, too. But Peter was accustomed to this kind of publicity, now.

  I was at home in New York when Marion called me from her office, right after Peter called her. “Joan, Peter got a new trial!” she said.

  “I knew it, Marion!” I shouted into the phone. “I knew it!”

  Marion’s sister Vicky mailed me a copy of the judge’s opinion, copied from her copy of Joe O’Brien’s copy. It was remarkable reading.

  Judge Speziale said that although the petitioner hadn’t proved that the state had withheld exculpatory material, and in fact, the State’s Attorney “had made every effort to be fair,” there certainly was newly discovered evidence. Most of it could not have been discovered, he said, “with due diligence,” either before or during the trial. This included the identification of the fingerprint and the statement of Sandra Ashner. He noted that the state had claimed that Ashner was not a credible witness, but he pointed out that the issue was not whether her story was credible but whether it was admissible. He said it would be admissible if there were a new trial, and beyond that, it would be up to a new jury to decide whether or not to believe it.

  He said that although “time was a key factor,” he didn’t blame Catherine Roraback for not calling in the film man from CBS. “The discovery of the actual broadcast time of a specifically identified scene in a television program goes beyond the scope of reasonable due diligence.”

  The judge didn’t blame the police. “They were engaged in investigating a brutal and violent slaying. They were justified in considering the petitioner a suspect.” He criticized Miss Roraback for not bringing in an expert to raise the issue of the reliability of Peter’s confession, which, he said, “went totally unexplained.”

  He let the jury off the hook. “We must not lose sight of the fact that to convict Peter A. Reilly the jury had to believe and find that he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The unusual circumstances of this complicated and bizarre case explain why the jury at the original trial must have had great difficulty in arriving at its verdict.”

  He had lived with this case, he said, for more than two years, and he had reached a conclusion. “It is readily apparent that a grave injustice has been done, and that upon a new trial it is more than likely that a different result will be reached.”

  I had lived with the case a little longer than Judge Speziale, but my own conclusions were not so apparent. I was disappointed in my vision. Here was a case of grave injustice. I’d had a front-row seat, yet I was able to make only vague discernments, as of sha
dowy shapes upon a stage.

  Certainly I could see the painful connection between money and justice. Money would have helped so much to ease the burden and the threat from the beginning, sparing Peter his five months in jail. Beyond that, my most obvious conclusion—and the most frightening—was the essential riskiness of justice.

  In the nearly three years since I made that first call to Father Paul in Canaan, I had run many emotional lengths. When I first wrote about Peter Reilly, I had been a writer for ten years, but nothing I’d written ever had such a dramatic effect on other people’s lives. When my article led to getting Peter out of jail, I felt enormous joy. It was more than pride, it was real joy, that something I might write could have such a direct and happy effect on somebody else. I remember that joy.

  I remember the sorrow, too. I hear Edward Ives saying “Guilty.” I see him blinking quickly as he looks at Peter. I see Peter, the color of ashes, staring at the floor, his hand covering his mouth. I see Marion doubled over in her chair.

  Eventually I felt relief; it was over. Not that all the questions had been answered. Was the affair a cover-up of some kind or, as Peter had said, were the police just overzealous, “too gung-ho”? Among the throngs of witnesses at the trial and at the hearing—nearly ninety people altogether—who was right? Who was wrong? Who killed Barbara Gibbons?

  The most resonant question in the case had always been answered, from the time that handful of housewives and working men got together in an upstairs room and became the Peter Reilly Defense Committee. As it once might have been phrased: When shall we achieve justice in Canaan? When those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are.

  There were two postscripts to Judge Speziale’s decision. The first was John Bianchi’s announcement that he would proceed with another trial; but even if he did it was “more than likely,” as the judge had said, that the result would be different. The other was that, of all things, Jim Conway was arrested. He was charged with illegally carrying a gun in Litchfield County, where his gun permit wasn’t valid. Jim Conway said he had surrendered his gun voluntarily at the courthouse during the hearing and had been given a receipt; but the charge said he had refused to hand over the gun, which then had been seized from him. He was indicted. “When I came into this case,” he told me later, “I used to feel like the Man of La Mancha, always falling off the rear end of a horse. Now I feel more like a character in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.”