A Death in Canaan (43 page)

Later—much later—as the Peter Reilly affair became well known, the involvement of these people was considered window dressing, an up-country version of radical chic. But it was never that. Peter Reilly wasn't lettuce, or grapes; he wasn't black or Chicano, or front-page in
The New York Times
. On the day after sentencing he was on the last page, near the TV listings.

Once in a while, word would leak out that one of the famous people to whom Mike Nichols had written had sent a check to the Reilly Fund, and a name might appear in the paper: Elizabeth Taylor, Candice Bergen, Art Garfunkel, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman. But mostly it was a very quiet, very backstage effort, which made it especially valid. When James Wechsler, the columnist for the
New York Post,
wanted to meet Peter in response to Jacqui Bernard's appeal, Mickey and Marion drove Peter down to Westport one Saturday. They spent the afternoon there, and Jimmy Wechsler wanted to write a column, but because we were afraid that publicity then would not help Peter, Jimmy Wechsler agreed not to write.

Police Commissioner Fussenich had announced he would not reopen the Reilly investigation, as the committee had petitioned him to do, so Roger Cohn did some legwork on his own, starting at Bob's Clothing Store. Bob told Roger about the wallet Barbara had bought on the morning of the day she died; he told Roger that he had been questioned by the police and had given them a signed statement. Roger talked with Lieutenant Shay, who told him that although the police had two wallets connected with the case—the old one found in the house, and the one found by Mrs. Mansfield—they'd never found the new one. Roger went out to Falls Village and talked with people around Barbara's neighborhood, including Tim and Mike Parmalee, teen-aged boys who lived just down the road.

Around that time, too, the Connecticut State Police announced that its troopers were switching from the standard .38 caliber pistol to the .357 Magnum, one of the deadliest handguns around, capable of blowing off an arm or a leg. They were switching to a new ammunition too, a hollow-nosed bullet that flattened out, then mushroomed, on impact. The switch was criticized in many places, including some newspapers and the civil liberties groups and the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut, but Commissioner Fussenich seemed undisturbed. “We don't use a gun to slow a person down,” he said. “We shoot to kill.”

In other police news, there was a personnel change at Canaan Barracks, and Lieutenant Shay was transferred back to Hartford.

By the end of summer, Peter had a new lawyer. He was T. F. Gilroy Daly of Fairfield, recommended by Arthur Miller's law firm in New York. Roy Daly was tall and slim, with crinkly blue eyes and the smile of a matinee idol. Once he had been a prosecutor himself. From 1961 to 1964 he was assistant District Attorney under Bobby Kennedy and had been involved in prosecuting organized crime in New York. In 1970 he ran for Congress on the Democratic ticket, but lost, and in 1974, when he entered the Reilly case, he was practicing law in a quiet little office on a quiet road in Fairfield. He worked part of each week as deputy state treasurer in Hartford, so he did not take on many private cases. But when he and Arthur Miller and Murray Madow had lunch at the Fairfield Hunt Club, he seemed interested in taking this one.

I met Roy Daly soon afterward, at a meeting in his office. Aldo Beligni was there, and Father Paul, with Mickey, Murray, and Peter, and we talked all morning about the case. Mr. Daly said he would proceed on two levels—on a civil suit to appeal the verdict, step by step through the higher courts and, simultaneously, he would try to get a new trial.

It was a slim hope, the requirements for a new trial being so strict. There had to be “newly discovered evidence,” evidence that would be judged admissible at a new trial and would be likely to produce a different result. New trials, therefore, were virtually unknown, and there was no compelling reason to think Peter Reilly would get one. We could only hope, and hope had never been nearly enough.

Still, Roy Daly said he would get going on it. There was no transcript of the long trial for him to work from yet. Mr. Roberts had to do that in his spare time, when he wasn't working in the courtroom, and it would be months before a transcript was ready. So I gave Roy Daly a copy of my notes to work with, in the meantime. I had taken the notes in shorthand, including the polygraph tapes, then typed them. Altogether, there were 182 single-spaced typed pages. They were not as official, nor as complete, as Mr. Roberts's pages, but I liked to think they were as interesting to read. The official version didn't mention rotting leaves.

Peter went back to school in the fall. His senior schedule was about the same as it had been in September 1973, except that in Contemporary Problems he was excused from the “Crime in Society” segment and assigned to examine the problems of the American Indian.

Another winter set in, and another character joined the ever-changing cast. It was a private detective, James Conway, who had followed the case in the papers throughout the trial. Once he had even written to Catherine Roraback. “A case isn't won in court,” Conway said. “You need an investigator.” He lived some distance away, near Hartford, yet he volunteered to come over to Canaan and help out. But Catherine Roraback was suspicious of the stranger's offer. She felt that many private detectives in Connecticut worked closely with the state police, too closely for comfort. “Why should we leak what little information we have to the prosecution?” she asked herself, and because she didn't have an answer to that question, she didn't answer the letter.

As it turned out, Jim Conway wasn't connected with the Connecticut police, although he had once been a policeman in New York City, walking a beat. After that, he'd been a bail bondsman for ten years, so he knew his way around the courts. He was a short, husky man with a fringe of short, white hair surrounding a bald spot, and a paunch surrounding his middle. His socks were often unravelling and falling down around his ankles. “I cultivate the hayseed look,” he told Mickey Madow, the first time they met. It was not the way you would expect a detective to look, which is the way Jim Conway wanted it.

After the trial, when Roy Daly took the case, Jim Conway tried again. This time he didn't write a letter; he drove down to Fairfield, without even calling first, and introduced himself. The two men talked a long time, then Jim Conway entered the case. At first he worked on it part-time, on Saturdays and Sundays, whenever he was able to drive over to Canaan and poke around. But the more he saw and heard, the more he asked and listened, the more enmeshed he became, the more the case turned into a crusade. He even barreled up Canaan Mountain in a snowmobile one day, following the advice of a dowser who had poked around the area with a divining rod and told Jim about bloody clues that might be on the mountain. Another day, Conway tried to squeeze into the crawl space under the church near Barbara's house, but he didn't fit.

He asked questions. He went to some orthopedists and a pathologist he knew and asked them about the method of the killing; they thought Barbara might have been killed outside the house, perhaps hit by a car. Not long after Christmas, Jim Conway talked at a committee meeting. He said he did not think the knife introduced at the trial, Exhibit X, was the murder weapon. He thought a very sharp instrument had been used, a razor type, such as a sheetrock knife. As for the vaginal injuries, Jim Conway thought Barbara's body had been penetrated with an empty whiskey bottle.

Arthur Miller had stayed in close touch with Peter and the Madows, and he was a regular visitor in Canaan. The boys were accustomed to having him at the table now. That first night he'd come, not long after Peter was sentenced, they'd felt shy. Nan served fried chicken, and the boys weren't sure whether, with Arthur Miller there, they should pick it up with their hands. Then Arthur Miller picked up a piece of chicken, and the boys grinned. “
O-kay
,” Geoffrey said, and everybody picked up a piece of chicken, too.

Jim Conway and Arthur Miller hit it off right away. Miller liked the earthiness of the ex-flatfoot, and they spent a lot of time in the low-ceilinged living room of Miller's elegant old farmhouse, trying to figure it out.

They decided to give Peter another lie detector test; they thought he might have seen someone in the house and not said so because he was afraid. One Saturday a detective from Hartford, a friend of Conway's, came to East Canaan and gave Peter another polygraph test, right there in the Madows' living room. Timothy and Michael Parmalee were invited over to take the test. They came willingly, and Mickey Madow reported at the next committee meeting that all three boys had passed.

A couple of weeks after the test, Dr. Milton Helpern, the former Chief Medical Examiner for New York City, came into the case, at the request of Arthur Miller. Dr. Helpern was an expert on forensic pathology, the medical specialty that reconstructs how deaths may have occurred. Dr. Helpern came to Litchfield and looked at the slides and pictures.

Although Dr. Helpern didn't send anybody a bill, money was still a problem for the committee. The year's bond interest pledged at the Styrons was running out, and Mr. Roberts still hadn't been paid in full for the transcript of the trial. Many people, including me, were surprised that a defendant had to pay for the transcript of his own trial, but unless he had a public defender, he did. For months we had been making calls, and Marion and Bea Keith were writing letters to the IRS, trying to incorporate the committee as a tax-exempt group, the Legal Defense Fund of Litchfield County. In the long run, it would help anyone who needed legal aid and couldn't pay. In the short run, it would help Peter, because he was the first person who'd applied. But becoming a tax-exempt group was a discouraging process, as it was no doubt intended to be. I had spent days on a round of frustrating phone calls to the IRS office in Boston, but all I got sounded like a bureaucratic runaround. Later in the year, the incorporation was approved, but when Mickey talked with a reporter from the
Berkshire Eagle,
in late February, he sounded dejected. “We're at a low ebb,” Mickey said.

Roy Daly had not yet been allowed to hear interrogation tapes, but Judge Speziale intervened, and finally Daly and Bob Hartwell heard them at the courthouse. After he heard the tapes, Roy Daly filed a motion asking that a panel of experts be appointed to try to interpret the tape that had been made by Peter and Lieutenant Shay at Canaan barracks early Saturday morning, about ten hours after Barbara died. That was the tape that had not been played at the trial, because it was too garbled. Roy Daly said somebody should try to ungarble the tapes “in the interest of justice,” but nobody ever did.

On the thirty-first of March, the defense filed a motion, listing other things it wanted: lab reports on Barbara's clothes, any liquor bottles found at the scene, the unidentified fingerprint, and Barbara's eyeglasses. The next day, Mr. Daly filed another motion, asking for a new trial. He claimed new evidence—and he didn't even know, then, about Sandra Ashner. The phone calls had not yet begun, that remarkable chain of calls that pointed to a possible new suspect.

On a balmy summer night in June, Peter Reilly graduated from Housatonic Valley Regional High School. The ceremony was held outdoors, on the broad lawn. Gloria Schaffer, Connecticut's Secretary of State, petite and pretty, talked about the graduates “entering the world of adults,” and she quoted Art Buchwald. “We, the older generation, have given you a perfect world, and we don't want you to mess it up.” Diplomas were given in alphabetical order, so Ricky Beligni was way up front, Peter pretty far in the back, and John Sochocki six places behind Peter. John still had a scared look about him, as though he had not got over what had happened to him since his interrogation the night Barbara died.

Peter was in the paper the next day, with a picture and a headline:
CONVICTED KILLER RECEIVES DIPLOMA
. John Sochocki was in the paper again two days after that, when he drowned. John had gone to the Falls Village swimming pond Monday night with a group of friends. He couldn't swim, but he dived into eight feet of water, in the dark. Father Paul said the Requiem Mass for him on Thursday morning.

Elizabeth Mansfield died that same week, after a long illness. She had found Barbara's wallet. The funerals were held one hour apart and the burials were in the same cemetery, St. Joseph's.

By the time hearings on a new trial began, Peter Reilly had become a full-fledged celebrity.

Roger Cohn had noticed it beginning, not long after the verdict, even before the sentencing. One Saturday night in early May, Roger went to a dance in Cornwall, organized to benefit the Reilly Fund.

At the dance Roger saw how, when Peter walked in, people stood and applauded. There were whistles and cheers, Roger said, and something about it bothered him. It was the first sign of a celebrity aura beginning to swirl around Peter Reilly. At first it was thin and wispy, like the first threads of morning mist around Canaan Mountain. Eventually it would nearly envelop him.

Some of the attention was to be expected. In this rolling green corner of Connecticut, where the State Police Reports in the
Journal
tended to involve loose cows on Route 7, or complaints of deer-jacking, an accused killer was something to see. And the attention accelerated when well-known people were attracted to the cause. But a writer in the
Register
had complained about “the Peter Reilly cult” much earlier, just after the sentencing. It was a familiar American perspective: the victim as hero.

In December 1975,
The New York Times
ran two long articles on Peter Reilly. The stories began on the front page and continued inside, for several thousand words. Arthur Miller had gone to the
Times
for lunch that fall and had asked that John Corry write about the case. He and John Corry had gone to a Manhattan police precinct to visit some homicide detectives Corry knew and told them about the Reilly case. At first the New York policemen were inclined to be skeptical, inclined to believe their fellow policemen, but when they read the polygraph transcript, they changed their minds and said they'd help in any way they could. Later, John Corry went to Canaan, and Nan set another place at the table, as she had been doing for visitors for two years.