A Death in Canaan (49 page)

Authors: Joan; Barthel

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 manâpleasant, 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 anguishâwho 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 caseâfrom 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 fiancÃ©, 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.

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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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