A Death in Canaan (34 page)

She asked him then about the clothes Peter said he'd discarded and about a weapon.

“Did he say razor or knife?” she asked.

“He said knife,” John McAloon replied.

It seemed incredible. Was it a razor, or was it a knife? Or none of the above?

John McAloon didn't testify in the trial again, but when the Reilly trial was over, he did come back to Litchfield Superior Court. He came back to be sentenced, but at the recommendation of the State's Attorney, he got a suspended sentence.

Now, Judge Speziale looked at the jury with a weary little smile, as he told them again they were not to discuss the case with anyone, not even among themselves. “By now any one of you could give me the admonition,” he said, “but I hope you hear it in your sleep, ladies and gentlemen. I
do
want you to obey this order.”

As they put on their coats, the reporters talked with interest about John McAloon. “This is your basic bombshell,” George Judson said.

12

The quality of justice in the Peter Reilly case was not diluted by haste. This was not ramshackle justice, pieced together, barely holding. The trial lasted seven weeks and, at least until the day of the verdict, no one seemed in a hurry, no one seemed to begrudge the time. As Sergeant Kelly had told Peter in the polygraph room, “We don't rush here. We take our time. We have no place to go.”

What affected the quality of justice, it seemed to me, was its inconclusiveness, the element of contradiction. Perhaps there is often such an element in trial justice, but in the Peter Reilly trial, it seemed overwhelming. What mattered at one time to one person did not necessarily matter later to another.

What mattered most to Catherine Roraback was Peter's confession and the hours of interrogation that had led to it, even though Judge Armentano had allowed the confession, even though Peter Reilly had been read the Miranda warnings, the constitutional rights legally required by the Supreme Court decision. She was trying a criminal case, but within that framework she was raising constitutional issues.

But other things besides the confession mattered to other people.

There was the knife, Exhibit X. The knife mattered to the jurors. When the time came for them to be shut up in the jury room, they took the knife along with them. They were interested in whether this knife, with the broken-off tip, could have made the cuts on Barbara's body. Two jurors brought in stopwatches, too, because they wanted to see how long such cutting, and such a killing, might take.

There was the razor, which mattered to the police. Peter Reilly said in his statement that he had slashed his mother's throat with a razor. It was a straight razor made in Germany, inscribed with the number 7,000. The jurors handled it even more carefully than they'd handled the knife, and Frank Sollitto looked at it a long time, touching the blade thoughtfully.

There was a plastic bag of human hair, Peter's hair. Maybe it mattered, maybe not. Charles Kochakian, sitting next to me, groaned when an FBI agent began to testify about hair. Once Charles had sat through twelve hours of hair testimony, and he said he had learned one lesson from the ordeal. When it came to hair, they couldn't prove anything one way or the other. The police had sent Peter's hair to Washington, and, after making microscopic comparisons with the hairs found in Barbara's hands, the agency sent Peter's hair back by registered mail. The hairs in Barbara's hands, the FBI man said, were “brown head hairs, of Caucasian origin in one hand”; in the other, “one blond, several brown hairs, and one dark brown hair of Caucasian origin.” He said Peter's hair had a streaky appearance, light brown to red-brown in color. He said two of the hairs found in Barbara's hand had the same characteristics as Peter's hair, and that they either came from Peter's head or from the head of somebody whose hair was like Peter's. Charles was right. These were either Peter's hairs or somebody else's.

There was an arbitrary element, it seemed, when another FBI man testified, a man who specialized in stains. He looked at the knife and said he had examined it for blood and semen. He found no semen, but he had found blood on the blade. It was human blood, but he couldn't tell whether it was male or female blood, or what type, or how long it had been there. He said he had used a sterile scalpel for scraping the knife and had found blood on both sides of the blade, but none on the handle. He said the police had sent three other knives to him for examination, but they hadn't sent any razor.

Besides the knife, the razor, and the hair, Peter's clothes were on exhibit, in a plastic bag. The FBI man said he had found no blood on the shirt, no blood on the left sneaker. The police hadn't sent the right sneaker. When he looked at the blue jeans, he said he couldn't find his initials on them, which was the way he marked things for identification.

This was the kind of thing that kept happening in the trial of Peter Reilly. Vague, unanswered questions, fragments of questions swooped through the courtroom like moths. There was, always, the question of the wallet, the money. Miss Roraback hoped to establish that Barbara had had a good sum of money in the house Friday, the night she died, although Lieutenant Shay had only found sixteen cents on the floor. Barbara's new wallet was never found. But when Catherine asked Jim Mulhern on the witness stand whether he had investigated a check cashed by Barbara the day she died, Mr. Bianchi objected that the question was immaterial. “I'm trying to establish that there was a large sum of money in the house,” Miss Roraback said; nevertheless, the objection was sustained.

The clothes always mattered. Dr. Izumi had testified that Peter could have killed Barbara in the manner she was killed without getting bloody. Later in the trial, when he was recalled to the stand, he testified that the killer would have had to turn her over, or move her in some manner, in order to make the wounds on the back. The testimony seemed contradictory, or at least puzzling, and possibly very damaging.

Even Sergeant Kelly said he recalled the shirt and the dungarees. When he testified, he said that before he questioned Peter he had known there was “a good deal of blood around the neck and head area, and that Barbara's throat had been cut.” But he said Peter had told him he thought he'd cut his mother's throat before Sergeant Kelly asked him about such cutting. But the autopsy on Barbara lasted most of the afternoon, and until it was over, the police apparently hadn't heard about the vaginal injuries. By the time they did, the polygraph test was over, and Peter was across the hall in the interview room.

“I went back in and asked Peter what was the worst thing he could have done to his mother last night,” Sergeant Kelly said. “He said the only thing he could think of was that he raped his mother.”

The jurors stared at Sergeant Kelly. A few of us had heard this testimony before at the pretrial hearings in January, but the jurors had not, and the shock of the statement was clearly traced now on most of their faces.

After Kelly told Peter that Barbara hadn't been raped, and after he'd declined to give Peter details, saying, “I want to hear it from you,” Peter had told the officer, “I think I cut out her sex organs.”

Sergeant Kelly testified he'd asked Peter then, “Why did you want to do something like this?” and Peter had replied that he didn't know. “Could it be because this is where you came from?” Sergeant Kelly had asked, and Peter had said yes.

Helen Ayre, mother of three, looked close to tears, then she arranged her face in that half-smile, half-grimace she'd worn during the autopsy slides.

Catherine Roraback looked sternly at Sergeant Kelly, but she didn't seem to be angry with him in the same way she'd been angry with Lieutenant Shay or, most of all, with Jim Mulhern.

“When you asked him, ‘What was the worst thing you could have done to your mother last night?'” Miss Roraback said, “was that a question Lieutenant Shay asked you to ask him?” There was some exchange back and forth, then Tim Kelly said yes.

When Peter confessed to “rape,” however, that was the wrong answer, so Sergeant Kelly had persisted. “What's the next worst thing … the next worst thing …?” and Peter had answered “Jumping up and down on her” and “strangling her.” As the testimony came out now in the courtroom, it sounded like a dreadful game of twenty questions, played for the highest stakes.

“Did you also ask him, ‘What else did you do to hurt her?'” she asked Sergeant Kelly.

“Objection, your honor,” Mr. Bianchi said again. “He's already answered that question.” Catherine Roraback whirled angrily and looked at the prosecutor, then toward the bench. “He asked it sixteen times!” she said. Catherine Roraback knew precisely what was on the tapes. Mr. Bianchi, grinning angrily, moved that her comment be stricken.

“I don't remember the exact words,” Sergeant Kelly said mildly.

“Do you remember asking that general question a number of times?” she asked. “Do you remember asking him, ‘What else do you think you did?' Isn't it true that at least three times when you asked him what was the worst thing he could have done to his mother, he said, ‘raping her'?”

“The number of times, I don't know,” Sergeant Kelly said.

“You kept repeating that you needed one further detail, did you not?” Catherine Roraback asked.

Sergeant Kelly nodded slightly. “We talked about one further detail, yes.”

“Didn't you suggest that it most likely happened when she was flat on the floor?”

“I don't know,” Kelly said.

“And didn't Peter say, ‘I think strangling her or something'?”

“I don't recall that,” Kelly said.

“Didn't you go back to the question of, ‘Why does rape stick in your mind?' Didn't you suggest to Peter that it was the way she was lying there that you were referring to?”

“I don't recall that, ma'am, no,” Sergeant Kelly said.

“You don't recall?” she asked sarcastically.

“No,” he said. Catherine Roraback shook her head briefly and looked down at her notes. She walked over to the defense table then and stood near Peter Reilly. The jurors turned to look at her, waiting for a question.

“Do you remember Peter saying, ‘I'm just taking guesses now'?” she asked.

“I don't remember that,” Sergeant Kelly said.

“Didn't you say, ‘Assuming this happened, how would you have done it?'”

“I don't recall those words, no,” Sergeant Kelly said.

“Do you remember Peter saying, ‘I wouldn't know how to do it'?”

“I don't recall,” Sergeant Kelly said.

At the recess, Con Hitchcock, a law student, chatted with me, advising me to notice the lawyers' techniques—how John Bianchi, in questioning a witness, often leaned against the jury rail, so the witness would look in his direction and thus would seem to be looking squarely and honestly at the jury. Catherine Roraback, on the other hand, often wandered away from the jury box and back to the defense table, sometimes standing behind Peter, her hand resting on the back of his chair, so that the witness would have to look at her and Peter, and the jury would tend to look that way too. Con Hitchcock said that shortly after the magazine article had appeared, he had been at a party in Georgetown where two psychiatrists were discussing the article and the killing itself, in all its bizarre and gruesome aspects. One of the psychiatrists said there was no way in the world a son could have committed this kind of murder, and the other psychiatrist said only a son could have done it.

“Did he cry, trooper?” John Bianchi asked John Calkins. The trooper was back on the stand briefly, pleasant and a little sad-faced, with a soft voice.

“No,” Trooper Calkins said quietly, telling again that when Peter had been returned to the Canaan barracks, Trooper Calkins had driven him to the Litchfield jail. When they passed the house where Barbara had been killed, Peter asked what happened to his car. He also told Trooper Calkins that Lieutenant Shay was a nice man, and Peter said he hoped his predicament wouldn't keep him from becoming a policeman, or somehow interfere with his driver's license. Trooper Calkins said that Peter told him he'd seen Barbara in bed, and the next thing he knew, he was standing over her, and she was lying on the floor with blood on her.

One man was missing when the jurors filed out on Tuesday morning, March 26, and took their seats in the jury box. Raymond Ross was sick with a high fever. Catherine Roraback had liked the serious-looking man with the two grown sons and had been pleased when he was accepted by the state as well. But after conferring with counsel, the court decided not to delay the trial, but to choose one of the alternates.

Frank Sollitto, as dapper and well-pressed as ever, and Eleanor Novak, still wide-eyed, stared at the clerk as he reached into the cardboard box to draw one of their numbers. He drew out number sixty-four, Mrs. Novak. She grinned and stood up, and the sheriff led her around the corner of the jury box, up into the top row, to the empty seat at the end. Some of the jurors in the box smiled at Mrs. Novak, who looked at the judge with an air of noticeable eagerness. Catherine Roraback smiled, too. During the voir dire, when Miss Roraback had asked Mrs. Novak what the presumption of innocence meant to her, Mrs. Novak had said simply that it meant he wasn't guilty.

Even Mr. Sollitto smiled when Mrs. Novak's number came up. “It's the only lottery I've ever won,” he told me later.

With twelve jurors in the box, court proceeded again. Dr. Izumi made his last appearance, with two slides showing the cuts on Barbara's stomach and on her back.

“Did you come to an opinion with reasonable medical certainty as to what caused those wounds?” the prosecutor asked.

Dr. Izumi looked at the knife, State's Exhibit X, and said it would “match up with the wounds,” pointing out that it was a “sharp cutting instrument, and that the tip of the knife was broken off, and that the wound was from one-fourth to one-half-inch wide. But when Dr. Izumi referred to it as “the weapon,” Catherine Roraback scrambled to her feet.