Communicating Authentically

I’m a fan of the comedy podcast My Favorite Murder. It deals head-on with the fascination many of us have with horrific homicides. The hosts, Georgia Hardstark and Karen Kilgariff, present their take on examples of the greatest depravity that humans can inflict on each other, and call on listeners, or “Murderinos,” to accept our obsessions, our addictions, our mental illnesses, our innate ugliness, and transcendent beauty, with profound light-heartedness. At the end of each podcast and live show, they urge us to “stay sexy and don’t get murdered!” 

This is the story of the murder that made me a Murderino when I was 10.

This is an *unsolved* murder case from my home county of Litchfield, Connecticut.

It happened in 1973, and involved playwright Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman playwright and Marilyn Monroe’s one-time husband), Sophie’s Choice author William Stryon, actor Richard Widmark and movie director Mike Nichols. It spawned best-selling books, became a CBS documentary, and was the basis for a made-for-TV movie with Stephanie Powers and Brian Dennehy.

I’m talking about the murder of Barbara Gibbons, otherwise known as:

The Peter Reilly Case

Barbara Gibbons was an eccentric single parent to Peter Reilly, who was 18 at the time of her murder. Barbara was no picnic to live with, and she and Peter often argued loudly, but by all accounts, he was a good kid and was well-liked by friends and neighbors.

Peter was at a community meeting with some high-school friends in the local Methodist church one night. He came home to find his mother brutally murdered. Barbara was nearly decapitated, had a broken nose, ribs, and thigh, and had been sexually assaulted. Shocked, Peter called friends, who told him to call the police, which he did. He didn’t touch the body, because his mother was so obviously beyond help.

When the police arrived, they found Peter in the same clothes he had worn to the meeting, not a drop of blood on him, and took him in for questioning. They interrogated him for over 25 hours, talked him into a lie-detector test, which they told him he failed (a complete lie – it was inconclusive), and convinced him that he must have murdered his mother and just couldn’t remember doing it. Being impressionable and also in shock, he gave a rambling, incoherent statement that the police took as a confession.

Very quickly, evidence mounted proving that he could not have possibly committed the crime. He would not have had time from when witnesses saw him driving home until he phoned friends to kill his mother – certainly not without getting a drop of blood on him.

But the police had a confession, and that was all they needed to decide that Peter was guilty, and they never investigated anyone else.

At his first trial, Peter was convicted for manslaughter and sentenced to 6 to 16 years.

Eventually, Peter’s whole town rallied around him, as well as many celebrities, including those mentioned above. This collective raised money to pay his legal bills. His lawyer was Catherine Roraback, who gained fame from the famous Griswold v. Connecticut birth control case. Soon, Peter’s case received nationwide publicity, especially after the TV documentary aired.

An appeal was mounted based on new evidence in the form of a fingerprint that pointed suspicion at two local brothers, Timothy and Michael Parmalee. At the original trial, Michael’s girlfriend said Michael was with her on the night of the murder, but in 1975 she recanted. Eventually, the judge exonerated Peter entirely, saying that a “grave injustice” had been done.

Connecticut Governor Ella Grasso understood the case had been badly botched. She ordered a reinvestigation. Undeterred by facts or others’ moral outrage, the police dug in. Their report contained no new evidence, but merely a reiteration of the same innane theories with the same stubborn conclusion, naming Peter as the “sole perpetrator” in Barbara Gibbons’ murder. They claimed that he ran her over with his car, dragged her into the house, raped her and brutally stabbed her − all within about five minutes, and without getting his clothes dirty. The theory was so ridiculous and filled with contradictory statements that the police were forced to withdraw it and drop all charges.

After his exoneration, Reilly became an advocate for reforming police interrogation methods. He has continued to call for the investigation into his mother’s murder to be resumed, for the evidence to be tested for DNA. In 2004, he demanded to see the files and was told they had been “erased.”

My brother lived down the street from a Connecticut state police officer, who, years after the fact, could not be convinced that anyone would confess to a crime they didn’t commit and swore that “he knew” Peter Reilly was guilty as sin. For decades, the department’s answer to inquiries about the Gibbons murder was, “We are satisfied with the result of our original investigation.” To this day, there are cops from the case who swear they got it right.

The Parmalee brothers were never investigated, despite multiple witnesses who have said that either one or the other brother admitted to raping and killing Barbara. There was another man who was arrested in 1973 for an unrelated incident who also confessed to killing Barbara, and that was never investigated either. Strange how the police didn’t have a problem accepting that confession was false.

Peter Reilly is a free man today, but tragically, Barbara Gibbons’ murderer was never brought to justice. More tragically, the case is a textbook example of the kind of cognitive dissonance that is all too present in our law enforcement and judicial systems to this day.

Stay sexy and remember your rights – remain silent and call a lawyer if you’re ever questioned about a murder.