I knew what he meant. A death in Canaan had occupied my life and the lives of my husband and daughter to a degree that had strained us all. Anne was a toddler when it all began; now she was finishing first grade, old enough to sense how preoccupied I’d been. Jim and I still had drinks by the fire, and he was happily back at work as a financial manager, but sometimes we didn’t seem to have much to talk about, other than Peter Reilly.
On the day before Easter 1976, Jim and Anne and I drove up from New York to Litchfield. It was past five in the afternoon when we reached our house, and I knew I had to hurry to get to the market before it closed. I looked in the refrigerator, then in the cupboard, clicking off in my mind what I could quickly get to tide us through the weekend. Milk, eggs, bread, butter, a canned ham. “It’s nice to be back in the country, isn’t it?” I asked Anne, who was standing in the doorway. “But where do you think I have to go now, right away?”
“To court,” Anne said.
It was not a question, and I stared into the cupboard, not wanting to turn and look at her. “No,” I said finally. “Oh no. I don’t have to go to court anymore.”
I did go back once more, though. One day during Easter week I drove into Litchfield and parked in the town lot, behind the county agent’s office. There was plenty of room now. I walked up West Street to the courthouse, past the Marden Coffee Shop. Under New Management, it had become the Colonial Pizza. I wondered what had become of my crusty waitress.
After the scramble and the hubbub of the hearings, with the metal scanner and the network news, the courthouse now seemed hushed, the kind of country courthouse I had seen in the movies. As I walked down the first floor hall, my footsteps echoed. This is more like it, I thought.
There was no one to stop me, so I went up the back stairs, the stairs reserved for the judge and attorneys and courthouse staff. At the top, the door to the law library was open. I could see Catherine Roraback at the far end, near the window, talking to someone. She was free for lunch, so we walked down to the Village Restaurant and sat in the second-last booth. I was surprised and pleased to find her in the courthouse, and I asked what brought her back to Litchfield. It was something minor—a client accused of drunk driving, I think—and she didn’t seem to want to talk about it. It occurred to me that these are hard times for constitutional lawyers.
“Do you feel you’re a scapegoat in this case?” I asked her, and she said she did feel that way, more or less.
“I’m a Yankee, a WASP, and a Roraback,” she mused. “There’s always been some dislike—and I know enough about my family to think some of it has probably been justified. People have an idealized version of what goes on in a courtroom,” she said, “and to deal with that illusion is something most people are not capable of doing. I have reached a certain level of cynicism, but I don’t think I’m quite cynical enough.” We each had another Bloody Mary.
I wandered back to the courthouse and went upstairs to Superior Court. A young man with lots of bushy black hair was up on a charge of third-degree burglary, accused of stealing a color TV set, some pieces of pewter, and an old Kodak. Bond was set at $3,500, and he was taken away in handcuffs. John Bianchi, representing the state of Connecticut, told Judge Bracken that was the end of the docket for the day, and court was adjourned.
I stayed in my seat until the others had left. Then I walked up to the bar rail and said hello to John Bianchi. He said hello, and I asked if we could talk a bit. He said yes, though he looked a little wary, and I was not surprised. We walked back to the law library and sat at the table near the window.
“I don’t look on this as an unusual case,” Mr. Bianchi said. “It was not a difficult case. It was relatively simple. The only unusual feature is that a lot of people became interested. I wish this happened more often.” He said it with a perfectly straight face, and I felt obliged to remind him that he had tried to throw the press out at the very start, back at the pretrial hearings.
“I just felt, from the portions of the tape I heard, that it would damage him,” Mr. Bianchi said. “Supposing that the only thing that was on that tape was just his admission and confession. How could you ever report it? With a headline that said, REILLY CONFESSES GUILT? We read your article, and we were wondering how he ever could get a fair trial. People were sending me that magazine from all over the country.” I said I’d sent him one too. He said he remembered.
I was surprised that he hadn’t bothered to hear all the tape before he pressed for an indictment, but I hadn’t come to argue. I wanted to listen, and as we talked, he seemed relaxed. He put his feet up on the table. His dark gold loafers gleamed. He lighted a cigarette.
“You always have to ask yourself two questions,” he said. “‘Have I got the right person?’ and, ‘Is there sufficient evidence for you to proceed?’ ‘Have I got the right person?’” he asked, rhetorically. “I couldn’t prosecute somebody if I didn’t think he was guilty. I couldn’t sleep nights.
“I’ve never thought, ‘This is the prosecution’s verdict,’ or, ‘This is the defendant’s verdict.’ The way I look at it, the State’s Attorney represents the people.” I thought of Jean Beligni, repeating what Peter had said to her one Saturday, when he was still in jail. “Oh, Mrs. Beligni,” he said, “it’s the state of Connecticut versus Peter Reilly.” And Jean had tried to comfort him. “Oh, Peter,” she said. “Everybody isn’t against you. I live in Connecticut.”
When I asked John Bianchi about the jury verdict, he laughed.
“Long ago I stopped trying to figure out what a jury might do,” he said. “It must be very hard for a jury. Reasonable doubt—not a surmise, not a conjecture, not a guess. You almost have to define it in the negative. Reasonable doubt,” he said again, slowly. “Isn’t that a corker?”
We walked out into the courtroom. It was empty, except for John Bianchi and me. The first time I’d heard of John Bianchi was when Jean Beligni told me that she’d called him the Sunday night after Barbara died. “I told him, we’re concerned about Peter,” Jean had said. “And John said, ‘We’re all concerned about Peter.’” Now, after all that had happened, I stood with him in the courtroom, and we looked at the picture of Judge Warner hanging crookedly over the jury box. “Judge Warner was State’s Attorney for twenty-one years,” he said, “before he became a judge.” He went into his office then. He was whistling.
I went downstairs, using the back stairs again, to see Mr. Roberts. I knew I was being compulsive. Like some kind of amateur recording angel, I was making the rounds, jotting down the numbers, even though I might never know how they added up.
I knocked on Mr. Roberts’s door, half wood, half frosted glass, just right for a country courthouse. Mr. Roberts had his sleeves rolled up and his jacket hanging on the back of his chair. He was wearing his suspenders and the rimless glasses and speaking into the Stenorette. I had never been inside his office before, and it was just about as I’d expected—neat, plain, tidy—except that on the wall behind him was an enormous colored poster, nearly a mural, of Cypress Gardens.
Mr. Roberts said he had learned a lot about people from where he sat. “The longer I sit in that court, the more I know things are not absolutely black and white,” he said. “I used to know an awful lot, when I first got out of school, then out of the army. But I’ve been in that courtroom twenty-eight years, and I don’t know quite so much anymore.”
They locked the courthouse at five, and I didn’t see Judge Speziale. He wasn’t in that day, and he wasn’t necessarily expected back. He had been named Chief Judge of the Superior Court, which meant he had a lot of other things to do, and within a year, he would probably be appointed to the State Supreme Court. Meantime, even if Peter Reilly were to be tried again, Judge Speziale would not be involved anymore. It was over for him too.
But we talked another day.
“If I seemed a little dour during the hearings,” he said, “it was because of that death threat.” I suggested he get an unlisted phone. He said listed was better, so
people could call if they wanted to. Otherwise they might be more dangerous. But he said he could see that a listed phone had its drawbacks.
I had spent twenty-six months waiting to sit down and talk with this man, and now we were talking about telephones.
But we talked about other things, too. In real life, as opposed to life in court, he seemed an approachable man—pleasant, plain-spoken. We talked about his studies and his growing up, and he said he had never been able to figure out that yearbook label. He said he had never been optimistic. He had gone by the book, though, at least until now. With his decision, he had written new law. State v. Reilly would go down in the books, too, in the Connecticut Law Journal and other places. It would be cited and recited, the phrases of the decision studied and endlessly analyzed by all those law clerks out of Dickens.
“I could have ducked this hearing,” he said. “I had already been named Chief Judge. I could have gotten out of it. The headaches, the anguish—who needs it?” I said I knew what he meant, and that what bothered me was the factor of chance.
He spread his hands apart, palms up, and shrugged expressively.
“Life is chancy,” Judge Speziale said. “This is real life. You take a chance.”
I said I had seen people take a chance with the law, and it was frightening. He threw up his hands again.
“Life is frightening,” he said. “The law is imperfect. What’s perfect? We’re not robots, and as long as we’re dealing with real people, we’re dealing with imperfection.”
I said I guessed so, but I know I sounded unconvinced.
“Listen!” he said. “This is not the best of all possible worlds. This is no Thomas More Utopia. The system works slowly, sometimes imperceptibly. But it works.” He sounded a little impatient now, so I said I was certainly glad, after nearly three years, after all the drama and the trauma, that he had decided as he had.
Judge Speziale smiled. “It worked out,” he said.
Peter Reilly spent Good Friday 1976, the second anniversary of his guilty verdict, working in the emergency room at Sharon Hospital. It was part of his training for the job of ambulance attendant. He and his girl had broken up, and his plans were vague. He would probably never get to be a policeman. “One of these days,” Aldo Beligni once warned Jean, “Peter is going to walk away from us, and not look back.”
On a Sunday afternoon, I sat at Jean Beligni’s kitchen table. Beverly King came by. Anne played upstairs with Gina, who had turned nine. Big girls now.
“What an education this has been for all of us,” Jean said. “For us, and for our kids. I can’t watch Petrocelli anymore. Petrocelli is a big fairy tale.” Beverly laughed softly. “We all learned,” she said.
Most of the kids I knew had graduated and scattered. Eddie Dickinson was working at Eddie Houston’s Shell station. Paul Beligni was going to college. His brother Ricky, who had told me the most terrible thing he was learning in Contemporary Problems was that his father was always right, was married now, and a father himself. Arthur and Geoffrey Madow were working as ambulance attendants in Hartford too. There was still very little for young people to do around town; after two years and all Joanne Mulhern’s efforts, the Teen Center was never built.
Something had changed, though. “I think that because of what happened to Peter, it won’t happen to anyone again,” Jean said.
That didn’t mean that Peter would not be tried again. The charge was reduced to manslaughter, but the state kept insisting there would be another trial. Later there would be some doubt as to who would prosecute. John Bianchi died on the Canaan golf course one hot August afternoon. He was fifty-four years old. His funeral mass was held at Father Paul’s church, St. Joseph’s. Fifty state troopers lined the sidewalk and saluted as the coffin was carried out.
In Jean Beligni’s kitchen, Beverly King paged through the scrapbooks she’d kept, four bulky loose-leaf binders that told the long, astonishing story, beginning with the article in September 1973: WOMAN, 51, DEAD WITH THROAT CUT. Beverly said she intended to keep clipping, but for the moment, her collection stopped with the Lakeville Journal of April 1, 1976.
There was a long editorial that week entitled “A Grave Injustice,” praising Judge Speziale’s decision, and calling for “some soul-searching” on the part of the state police. The Journal also praised the American system, under which an injustice could be remedied. On the front page, a long story listed the characters and the chronology of the Reilly case—from September 28, 1973 to March 25, 1976; alphabetically, from John Bianchi to James Shay. The central characters appeared in a large front-page picture, captioned MOTHER AND SON. The two of them are standing against the barn, near the house, where Mr. Kruse kept tools and barbed wire and Peter kept parts for his car. Both Barbara and Peter are wearing dungarees and matching sweat shirts with striped sleeves. Barbara is rubbing her little finger and thumb together on her left hand, as she had a habit of doing. Peter is looking toward the house, and Barbara is looking at him. She is smiling.
Publisher’s Note
In preparing this book on the trial of Peter Reilly and the subsequent judicial proceedings leading to the granting of his motion for a new trial, the author drew on her three years of direct involvement with the case. The text is based on the official court transcripts, the author’s own notes on the trial and related court proceedings (which she attended almost continuously from start to finish), and extensive interviews with virtually all the principals in the case.
The house where Peter Reilly lived with his mother, Barbara.
Author’s Note
For her help with this manuscript I am grateful to my friend Terry Kuschill.
About the Author
Joan Barthel is an award-winning author of nonfiction and a contributor to many national publications, including the Washington Post Magazine and the New York Times Magazine. Her first book, A Death in Canaan (1976), uncovered the miscarriage of justice in the case of a Connecticut teenager accused of murdering his mother. It won the American Bar Association Gavel Award, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and became an Emmy-nominated television movie. A Death in California (1981), the story of a Beverly Hills socialite caught in the thrall of the man who murdered her fiancé, was the basis for a television miniseries. Love or Honor (1989), the extraordinary account of a married undercover cop who infiltrated the Greek mafia only to fall in love with the Capo’s daughter, was called “fascinating” and “compelling” by Nicholas Pileggi. Barthel cowrote Rosemary Clooney’s autobiography, Girl Singer (1999), and is the author of American Saint (2014), a biography of Elizabeth Seton with a foreword by Maya Angelou.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1976 by Joan Barthel
Cover design by Rebecca Lown
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2821-9
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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A Death in Canaan Page 40
