The Peter Reilly-Barbara Gibbons Murder Case: A Chronology

A grave injustice occurred in Litchfield County, Connecticut, beginning on September 28, 1973, when Peter Reilly, 18, was arrested and subsequently coerced by State Police into falsely confessing to -- and was later wrongfully convicted of -- the grisly murder of his mother, Barbara Gibbons. Below, and reproduced here as part of the historical record, is an update and timeline of events as they appeared in the Lakeville Journal on March 17, 2005:

Connecticut Commissioner of Public Safety Leonard Boyle has agreed to give Peter Reilly access to state police files that could help him discover who murdered his mother, Barbara Gibbons, after more than 30 years. For decades, Reilly himself was the prime suspect for the police – in part because, after two days of interrogation without sleep, food or an attorney, the 18-year-old youth was induced to sign a confession saying he killed and sexually assaulted his mother. Reilly was not convicted of the crime but his name was never completely cleared, either. With the help of journalist Donald Connery, a Kent resident, and The Lakeville Journal, Reilly has been able at last to get access to the police files on the case.

[Photo at left of Peter Reilly speaking in 2005 at Noble Horizons by yours truly]

Searching through those files is likely to be a time-consuming endeavor, though. In 1983, The Lakeville Journal ran a chronology of the events up to the point of the investigation. The introduction to that listing notes that, "No other criminal case in Connecticut history has been so thoroughly investigated by so many people for so long a time ... State's Attorney Dennis Santore speaks of the principal investigative file on the case as something occupying not filing cabinets but whole closets."

That 1983 special section also noted that, "In the process, however, there has been much public confusion about what happened, and who did what to whom, and why the case went on and on like an Icelandic saga ... So many were the events and so mountainous the data that even insiders and diligent observers often lost their way."

To help readers understand the scope of the investigation and trial, The Lakeville Journal offers this abbreviated version of that chronology:

Irene: Minimal Damage Here

Check this out:



After seeing the devastation that was heaped on neighboring communities, such as this Vermont town that saw its covered bridge ripped from its moorings and washed away, I feel fortunate to have only a little water in the basement of my Lakeville home.

We never even lost power here, although it did blink a few times. My guess is we got about 7 inches of rain in maybe 10 hours. Under that kind of assault, one of my basement windows did leak a fair amount of water.

The wind accompanying the downpours was no big deal. But after the rain moved out yesterday afternoon, the back end of the storm produced some gusts in the 40-50 mph range. Once again, I feared we would lose power, but thankfully it was not to be.

I did, however, post the following on Facebook:

I've had it with TV meteorologists standing in 50 mph winds and horizontal rain telling us how bad things are. One of these days, a broadcaster will be killed or seriously injured and then maybe their producers will reconsider this idiotic practice.

Maybe a dead broadcaster and a lawsuit will get their attention.

From Bankrupt to Thriving

What has happened at the Journal Register Company is nothing short of a miracle.

Two years ago, the company was de-listed from the NYSE and mired in bankruptcy, the victim of crushing debt brought on by rapacious acquisition and the great recession. At that time, it was the fifth largest newspaper company in America, but perhaps its biggest distinction was that it was also the worst newspaper company in America.

Within six months, the JRC emerged from Chapter 11 as a privately held company and now it's doing so well -- a $41 million profit in 2010 -- that CEO John Paton announced on his blog that not only is he handing out bonuses to his executives, but he's awarding an extra week's pay to the company's employees.

Locally, the JRC owns the Register-Citizen of Torrington.

Standing Disclosure: This blog is linked on the R-C's homepage through an agreement with the publisher, Matt DeRienzo. In an act of voluntary reciprocation, I link to the R-C here and use it as a source whenever possible. However, the paper exercises no editorial control over this blog. According to my stat counter, registercitizen.com is by far the largest single source of page views for Devil's Advocate.

I give Paton and his staff credit. They have pursued what they call a "digital-first" business model that emphasizes the web over print. And at a time when many newspapers are struggling to wring revenue out of their websites, the JRC is making money by posting content as soon as it becomes available and arming its reporters with Flip video cameras.

The R-C has moved its headquarters to much larger digs and opened up a newsroom cafe, community media lab, community journalism school and a local news library, free and open to the general public. The paper has opened its daily news staff meeting to the public and streams those meetings live on its website.

Now, they just need to work on nailing down their facts and paying attention to details. The Register-Citizen is a far better paper than it used to be. It is far more transparent than most papers and has an unusually strong policy on corrections. But much of its staff is unfamiliar with the region, so misspellings and lack of context in stories are common.

Perhaps editorial oversight could also be strengthened. To wit: the paper published a letter to the editor concerning my employer that was signed by a dead man. People, including journalists, are human and they'll make mistakes. Someone, though, clearly dropped the ball and thoroughly embarrassed the company.

Be that as it may, the company and the R-C are clearly headed in the right direction. I wish Matt DeRienzo and his staff the best of luck. Any newspaper that has found a way to make good money from the Internet is doing something right.

Cellular Sickness, Marketing Opportunity

I have on my screen a really bad piece of journalism in the Litchfield County Times.

It's a feature on a Kent couple — a holistic doctor and an acupuncturist — who say they were forced to move out of town because a nearby cell tower was making them sick. So they relocated their business, Progressive Medicine, to Litchfield.

The reporter basically quoted what the couple said about the dangers of microwave radiation from cell towers and electronic devices and repeated it without even a hint of skepticism. No independent sources at all to support their contentions. Where was his editor?

Both the man and his wife say they're feeling better since relocating. But wouldn't it be interesting to put a fake cell tower next to the couple's new home in Litchfield and see whether they complain of a recurrence of their symptoms. You know, the placebo effect ...

As as my friend Chris pointed out on Facebook, this could be a brilliant marketing move, for as the LCT reports:

In their Litchfield practice they treat people with symptoms similar to the ones they overcame and, as such, are naturally better prepared to handle the problems.

And a letter to the editor on the same subject is hilarious. The writer thinks cell towers are ugly, so he suggests satellite phones instead:

The cost: $1,070, plus the regular cell phone plan, plus $25 a month for access to the satellite, plus 65 cents a minute per call.

OK, that would do for retired hedge fund managers on Lake Waramaug, but how about the rest of us? And I wonder how much the data plan is for that stupid phone. That's probably another $100 a month for only a quarter of a gigabyte.

The weekenders and NYC transplants in the Northwest Corner are some of the finest people I know, but honestly, there a few who should just keep quiet, lest they make complete fools of themselves.

Heads Up - Andrew Roraback Alert

According to The Hill, State Sen. Andrew Roraback (R-30) is considering a run for the fifth district congressional seat currently occupied by Democrat Chris Murphy, who himself has announced his candidacy for Joe Lieberman's Senate seat.

When I interviewed Roraback in December on my TV show on CATV6, I asked him at the end whether he'd be interested in Murphy's seat. He was very coy and refused rule it out, adding that "you never say no."

As the article in The Hill makes clear, it's very likely that many of the Republicans who ran for Murphy's seat in 2010 will try again, including Justin Bernier and Sam Caligiuri. So the field will likely be crowded.

Roraback wants to run as a old-fashioned New England Republican — "fiscally conservative and socially moderate." But can he win a GOP primary with such a strategy, especially with Tea Party Republicans nipping at his heels?

We'll see. Andrew has been in the General Assembly for more than 15 years and is not known as a great risk taker. Last year, he flirted with the idea of running for attorney general but ultimately dropped that idea. Was he wary of the popular Susan Bysiewicz? Heck, I think he was really afraid of facing the pit bull Martha Dean in a GOP primary!

Stay Tuned.

Miscellaneous Media Musings

P.J. O'Rourke

Writing for The Weekly Standard, P.J. O'Rourke has a tremendous take-down of The New York Times and its breathless coverage of the Arizona massacre. It is a humorous and insightful analysis of how selective use of language can be employed to create an impression in readers.

He concludes that the Times has become the equivalent of your crazy old aunt whom you tolerated in your attic but now must move to the nursing home on Staten Island:

But liberalism, as personified by  the New York Times, became a dotty old aunt sometime during the Johnson administration. She’s provincial, eccentric, and holds dull, peculiar views about the world. Still, she has our fond regard, and we visit her regularly in her nursing home otherwise known as Arts and Leisure and the Book Review. Or we did until Sunday, January 9, when she began spouting obscenities and exposing herself.

Mercifully, P.J. focuses on news coverage only and spares us an examination of a unfortunate blog post and an over-the-top column by Paul Krugman in which he coined the term "eliminationist rhetoric" and explicitly blamed the right for the tragedy.

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The Lakeville Journal has published a front-page article in its Jan. 13 edition about Scott and Roxanne Bok preserving 100 acres through a conservation easement along the Housatonic River at Twin Lakes Farm in eastern Salisbury.

I've already heard whispers that the very positive piece is payback for the tumult caused by the snarky food review in the LJ and the subsequent closing of Bok-owned White Hart Inn last year.

I have no idea if such is the case. It is odd, however, that I could not locate the Bok preservation story on tcextra.com, the LJ's website. The letters-to-the-editor page should be lively next week.

A Town of Wusses?

Not to steal Gov. Rendell's line, but there's a front-page story this morning in the Waterbury Republican-American featuring my hometown of Salisbury, Conn., where, at 55%, we had the lowest rate of response to the 2010 U.S. Census of any town in the state.

The Rep-Am puts all but the first three or so paragraphs of most its articles behind a pay wall, but click here if you want to read the teaser and the see the nice photo taken behind the pillars at Town Hall.

So why do we have such a lousy response rate so far below the state average of 78%? Is it that we're so timid or lazy that we don't want to stand up and be counted?

I don't think so. As longtime resident Peter Fitting observed, "People own property but they don’t live here."

I don't have the figures in front of me, but my recollection is that about half the homes in Lakeville/Salisbury (maybe even more) are owned or occupied by part-time residents. And I can attest to that figure anecdotally as well. In my neighborhood of 25 to 30 houses, about half are owned either by weekenders of retired people who spend half the year elsewhere in order to beat Connecticut income taxes.

We also have three private boarding schools that include as many as 100 faculty families who live in school-owned campus housing. Many of them own property elsewhere or do not feel terribly connected to the town anyway and might be less inclined to fill out a census form than local property owners or even renters.

And as someone who has lived here for almost nine years, I can say with certainty that traffic in this town roughly doubles on the weekend. Plus, as has been well documented, we have lots of old folks.

I like the comments of town assessor Barbara Bigos when asked by the reporter about her experience with the census workers:

... Bigos remembers meeting with census workers in her office and spending hours at a time trying to help them track down residents. First they mailed notices to homes. Then, she said, they went door to door and left notices.

Then they finally tried Bigos’ method by sending mail to their mailing addresses, where the property owners actually live.

"It was a waste of time and money," Bigos said.

Come to think of it, maybe the entire Rep-Am story itself was a waste of time and money. But hey, as I learned in the newspaper business myself, you gotta fill up that space somehow. Plus, it breaks the monotony. And it makes for a pretty ride up from the Brass City for the reporter and photographer.

An Old Acquaintance Is Vindicated

Greg Carlson
Courtesy of LoHud.com

Anyone out there remember Greg Carlson, the former business manager at the Webutuck School District and a resident of Falls Village for many years?

While I was editor of The Millerton News in 1999, Carlson left Webutuck, landing a plum job as assistant superintendent for finance at the Byram Hills Central School District, where IBM's corporate headquarters are located in Westchester County. With his departure from the tiny and acrimonious Webutuck, Carlson got a huge dose of prestige and a big raise. Seven years later, he found himself suspended (with pay) for a variety of bogus reasons, but I've just learned that he was vindicated in June.

I suppose that — in and of itself — wouldn't be major news. But the Byram Hills school district spent a staggering $1.1 million in an effort to rid itself of Carlson. This includes Carlson's salary while was suspended, the wages of his replacement for four years, plus $160,000 in legal fees. After all that taxpayer money spent in the futile effort to fire Carlson, Byram Hills was forced to offer him his job back and Carlson strolled back into his office six months ago.

I was initially shocked at the charges, which included insubordination, disloyalty and malfeasance. Turns out the first two charges were based on a telephone call Carlson had placed — taped without his knowledge — in which he made a disparaging remark about the superintendent to an on-leave employee whom Carlson thought had been wronged.

As for malfeasance, the Byram Hills Board of Education found a handful of directives — out of hundreds he'd given over the years — that Carlson had failed to perform or follow up on. In a word, school officials wanted to fire Carlson because he had sided privately with a fellow employee whom they had screwed.

I'm sure some of you will argue that Carlson's case illustrates the value of labor unions of the sort that represent school administrators such as Carlson. But my reading of Carlson's case, as presented in The Journal News, is that even without the union he probably would have had a good case for a wrongful termination suit.

The difference is that battling the union — and the protections it provides its members — wound up costing Westchester County taxpayers a lot more than settling a wrongful termination suit for, say, one or two year's salary.

Instead, the Byram Hills school board paid Carlson to do nothing for four years, paid the wages and benefits for his replacement during that time and provided a gravy train for a pricey Westchester law firm. Moreover, since Carlson returned, they have downgraded his job and kept his replacement on the payroll. So unless and until they can come to some accommodation with Carlson, it looks like they will continue to pay two people to do one job.

While in Millerton, I interviewed Carlson several times and found him to be very professional, articulate and knowledgeable about finance. Before moving out of town a few years ago, Carlson chaired the Falls Village Water Commission. He did not respond to a message from me seeking comment about this episode. Under the circumstances, I can't say that I blame him.

Sometimes It Takes a Closing ...

Salisbury's White Hart Inn, which closed on Nov. 2, has been deemed important enough by The New York Times to merit an article. It is, of course, an upscale, us-vs-them, Salisbury-is-dying take on the situation, although I must say that is precisely the approach that is called for here.

I mention this development not to critique Peter Applebome's piece, which I think is fair enough, but to examine local reaction to the closing, some of which is mentioned in the NYT article. Many of the media accounts of the closing have mentioned a snarky food review last May by The Lakeville Journal's Marsden Epworth, as if that piece contributed to what the White Hart's wealthy owners, Scott and Roxanne Bok, considered a hostile environment. On his fine website, Rural Intelligence, Dan Shaw even called the review "vicious."

I appreciate Marsden's honesty in assessing the food, which she obviously found lacking. After all, even in a community weekly newspaper, no restaurant or entertainment review is worth the paper it's written on if it isn't honest. But she went beyond that and quoted anonymous diners or customers she overheard. The result was an almost uniformly negative piece that gave the appearance of score-settling.

Ironically, the Boks reaction was to take out a large ad in the LJ responding to the review and to continue with a bold $5 million renovation of the 200-year-old inn once owned by Edsel Ford when he was sending his kids to Hotchkiss.

There are those in the community, such as my friend and colleague Mike Flint, who reject the notion that the locals caused the demise of a venerable local institution. Flint also takes issue with the way the closing was handled -- abruptly and with the sudden loss of jobs for locals themselves.

Let me say this: The only way the inn can continue is if a well-heeled buyer is found. In a interview I conducted with him four years ago, Bok told me the White Hart did little more than break even and the old building was a constant headache requiring endless capital investments.

Is there such a buyer out there in this economic environment? Don't hold your breath, folks.