|
Marty
Tankleff | Wilfred
Hathway | Kyle Unger | James Driskell | Peter
Rose | Clifford St. Joseph
| John Stoll | Ludrate
Burton | Albert Johnson
| Peter Reilly| A list of Canadian
cases appears further down in right column | Shaka
Sankofa: Executed after conviction based on faulty eye-witness
Peter Reilly
In Tankleff case, some
see shadows of a 1973 murder mystery
By John Springer, Court
TV, Oct. 29, 2004
PORT JEFFERSON, N.Y. - In 1988,
teenager Martin Tankleff confessed to murder after a few hours
of finger-pointing, suggestions and even trickery by detectives
investigating the brutal beating and stabbing of Tankleff's wealthy
parents in their Long Island home.
It wasn't a bright-lights,
TV-cop-show interrogation, but the questioning got police what
they needed to make an arrest. Ultimately, Tankleff's self-incriminating
statements and mild denials at his trial led to two second-degree
murder convictions and a sentence of 50 years to life in prison.
"A normal person doesn't
crack for something that he didn't do," a juror remarked.
To this day, Tankleff insists
he was wrongly accused, coerced into confessing, and punished
by a corrupt, self-preserving justice system that refused to
go after people his lawyers call "the real killers."
Peter Reilly knows what that
is like. The Connecticut man says the same thing happened to
him.
"When I read about [the
Tankleff case], I couldn't believe it," Reilly said recently.
"It seemed almost identical to my case. It was almost like
they just substituted the names. It was scary."
The similarities in the Tankleff
and Reilly cases are striking.
Both were high-school seniors
who summoned authorities to investigate murders in their home,
quickly became suspects, gave confessions, recanted them and
were convicted.
In Reilly's case, the victim
was his mother, 51-year-old Barbara Gibbons. On Sept. 28, 1973,
Reilly found her severely battered body on the floor of their
cottage in Canaan, Conn., after returning home from a church
youth meeting. Gibbons had been sexually mutilated and nearly
decapitated.
Connecticut state troopers
immediately found Reilly's demeanor odd, and he was whisked away
by detectives for questioning. A failed polygraph examination
solidified investigators' belief that Reilly attacked his mother,
and they used the lie detector's findings as a hammer during
an eight-hour interrogation.
Reilly eventually adopted their
suggestion that he may have blacked out and attacked Gibbons.
Later, the defense argued that the confession was the product
of police manipulation and brainwashing.
A jury convicted Reilly of
first-degree manslaughter in April 1974, despite a strong showing
of community support and charges that overzealous detectives
overlooked key evidence - including Gibbon's missing wallet and
$100 from a check she had cashed that day - that pointed to someone
other than Peter Reilly.
Reilly was finally exonerated
after it was disclosed that prosecutors improperly withheld an
auxiliary trooper's statement that placed Reilly far from the
crime scene at about the time police said he was attacking his
mother. A judge concluded that "a grave injustice"
had been committed and vacated the conviction with prejudice,
meaning Reilly could never be retried for the still-unsolved
crimes.
Two cases coincide
Reilly, now 49 and living with
a Connecticut family who took him in after he was accused, recently
signed an online petition started by Martin Tankleff's long and
growing list of supporters. The petition drive coincides with
a hearing in which Tankleff's lawyers are presenting evidence
of other culprits in his parents' murder.
"[Martin Tankleff] has
obviously been in much longer than I was," said Reilly,
who was released on appeal bond after his conviction and never
went to back prison. "He's sitting there and we're hearing
evidence about these characters. I felt I had to say something.
It's starting to walk and quack like a duck."
State police in Connecticut
are clinging to their belief that Reilly killed his mother, regardless
of the judicial finding. Similarly, prosecutors in Suffolk County,
N.Y., are working to protect their convictions against Tankleff,
who stood to inherit his adopted parent's estate of an estimated
$3 million had he been acquitted.
"I am amazed by the relationship
to the Reilly case," said independent journalist and author
Donald Connery, who is waging a court battle in Connecticut to
get decades-old police records released.
"As in the Reilly case,
the circumstances in the original investigation, the crime scene
activity, the confession and how that was obtained - common sense
tells you that it is ludicrous that Marty would have done the
murders," Connery said. "I think it is a clear false
confession case."
Assistant Suffolk District
Attorney Leonard Lato said he was not familiar with the Reilly
case, which is the most often cited case in books and articles
about interrogation tactics that can yield false confessions.
He declined further comment, noting only that he believes the
Tankleff case isn't a false-confession case.
Retired homicide detective
James McCready, who got Tankleff to incriminate himself by falsely
telling him that Seymour Tankleff had come out of his coma and
implicated the son, said he was only "vaguely" familiar
with the Reilly case and couldn't comment. McCready still maintains
that Tankleff killed his parents and offered a "Could I
have blacked out?" confession only because he believed his
father survived the attack and that he wouldn't be getting away
with murder.
Although the judge, detectives
and elected district attorneys involved in the Tankleff case
in its early days have all either retired or moved on to other
things, supporters of Tankleff, like Reilly, believe that the
current prosecutors know an innocent man is in prison, but either
don't care or fear that admitting a mistake would somehow undermine
their efforts in other prosecutions.
"They would rather leave
someone innocent in jail than, God forbid, have the public image
that they might have made a mistake," Reilly said.
Marianne McClure, the sister
of murder victim Arlene Tankleff, expressed a similar opinion
in an online petition that will be sent to New York governor
George Pataki requesting his personal intervention in the case.
"We are all becoming dreadfully
fearful that this judge is part of the 'old boys' network' and
will rule against Marty in what is a blatantly obvious miscarriage
of justice," McClure wrote, referring to the judge overseeing
the evidentiary hearing which began July 19.
"Please do not underestimate
the passion with which we all feel about this case and Marty,"
McClure wrote further. "It will never go away, and I feel
the strength of my sister, Arlene, to keep me going until my
last breath is drawn as well."
The hearing on new evidence
in the Tankleff case resumes Dec. 6 in Riverhead, N.Y.
Reilly is expected to be back
in a New Britain, Conn., courtroom next month to support an effort
to bring all of the police records pertaining to his mother's
unsolved murder to light.
Tankleff kin seek Spota
removal
BY ZACHARY R. DOWDY, STAFF
WRITER, NY Newsday, October 20, 2004
Martin Tankleff's family Tuesday
urged the state's highest elected officials -- and the public
-- to help remove Suffolk District Attorney Thomas Spota from
the hearing they hope will free him.
"A young man was wrongfully
convicted of a crime and it appears the district attorney is
doing everything in his power to uphold a wrongful conviction,"
said Ron Falbee of Westbury, Tankleff's cousin. "We believe
... we have murderers walking around Suffolk County."
Falbee and several other relatives
of the man convicted in 1990 of killing his parents held a news
conference at The Inn at Great Neck Tuesday to urge the top elected
leaders in the state and Suffolk County to urge Spota to step
down from his role in the hearing, and to remove him if he doesn't.
They also launched a drive
to get support for their campaign by asking the public to sign
online and paper petitions.
Tankleff's attorneys have filed
two unsuccessful motions to have Spota removed.
Specifically, the family is
calling on Gov. George Pataki to appoint a special prosecutor,
saying that Spota's connections to key players in the case constitute
conflicts of interest.
They also said they hope state
Attorney General Eliot Spitzer intervenes by urging Pataki to
act, and that U.S. Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Charles Schumer,
and Rep. Tim Bishop weigh in.
Spota has said he has no conflict
of interest and it is his responsibility to continue handling
the case.
Pataki's spokeswoman, Lynn
Rasic, said the family's request is "under review."
None of the other officials responded to calls for comment Tuesday.
In March 1996, Pataki removed
Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson from a high-profile murder
case because the prosecutor would not pursue the death penalty.
Tankleff was convicted in 1990
of the Sept. 7, 1988, killings of his parents, Seymour and Arlene
Tankleff of Belle Terre. Suffolk County Court Judge Stephen L.
Braslow is presiding over an evidentiary hearing that could get
him a new trial. Tankleff's attorneys, Bruce Barket of Garden
City and Barry Pollack of Washington, have said the hearing is
uncovering new evidence that could persuade a new jury to return
a different verdict.
Several witnesses who have
testified in the hearing, which started in July, have linked
three other men to the murders.
One of those men, former bagel
shop mogul Jerry Steuerman, was represented by Spota's former
law firm partner, Gerard Sullivan, in a criminal case. Steuerman,
a business partner of Seymour Tankleff, owed him hundreds of
thousands of dollars at the time of the murders, and Martin Tankleff's
lawyers have cited evidence in the hearings that they say shows
Steuerman was involved. Steuerman has denied those allegations.
Steuerman's son, Todd Steuerman,
was also represented twice by Sullivan, including in a 1983 drug
case when Spota and Sullivan were partners. The case stemmed
from charges Todd Steuerman sold cocaine at a store operated
by his father.
In a 1993 assault case, Spota
represented Det. James McCready, the Suffolk homicide detective
who extracted on the day of the murders a confession Tankleff
did not sign and later said was coerced.
"Marty Tankleff is an
innocent young man who is paying the price for others' misdeeds,"
said Howard Asness, husband of Autumn Tankleff, who is Seymour
and Arlene Tankleff's niece.
Copyright © 2004, Newsday,
Inc.
In the Peter Reilly Case,
Odd New Developments
By: Kathryn Boughton, January
30, 2004
In a move that
state Freedom of Information Commission hearing officer Victor
Perpetua likened to a scene from "Alice in Wonderland,"
State Police argued last week that they could not release files
associated with the infamous Peter Reilly murder case from the
1970s because those files have been "erased."
At the same time, police reserved
the right to argue in the future that the files cannot be released
because the case remains open for investigation. No one has ever
been convicted for the homicide in Falls Village of Mr. Reilly's
mother, Barbara Gibbons.
"At one point you said,
[the investigation] was pending; as I understood your testimony,
it still is pending, which raises a logical inconsistency-how
can it be pending if there are no records on which to investigate
it? Sounds like 'Alice in Wonderland,'" Mr. Perpetua said
to Dawn Hellier, a legal advisor for the state Department of
Public Safety who testified at the hearing.
The hearing was held Jan. 22
in Hartford to determine the accessibility of case files sought
by Kent journalist and author Donald Connery and the Lakeville
Journal. Mr. Connery and the newspaper filed separate requests
to peruse the files of the 31-year-old murder mystery and were
denied access.
Mr. Connery, who wrote a book
about the case, "Guilty Until Proved Innocent," said
that his renewed focus on the case resulted from the efforts
by retired State Police Capt. Thomas McDonnell to write a new
"blockbuster" book that would "prove" beyond
doubt the guilt of Peter Reilly.
Ms. Gibbons, 51, was found
brutally murdered Sept. 28, 1973, when her son returned from
Canaan, where he had attended a meeting of a church youth group.
Mr. Reilly, then 18, made frantic calls for emergency assistance,
but soon found himself the focus of the police investigation.
After more than 24 hours of interrogation, conducted without
legal counsel, he confessed to the murder-a confession that was
quickly recanted.
There was a flood of public
support for the orphaned youth, but Mr. Reilly was nevertheless
tried and convicted of the murder. He was later exonerated when
the public prosecutor in the case died of a heart attack and
exculpatory evidence that had never been revealed was found in
his files. The evidence, based on reliable eyewitness account,
placed Mr. Reilly more than five miles from the scene at the
time the police said the murder had been committed.
Two years later, calling the
conviction a "grave injustice," Judge John A. Speziale-the
same judge who had sentenced the young man to between six and
16 years in prison-overturned the conviction. A year after that,
Judge Maurice Sponzo dismissed all charges against Mr. Reilly
"with prejudice."
The State Police have continued
to assert, however, that they arrested the right suspect and
a number of officers have gone on record in remaining convinced
of Mr. Reilly's guilt.
"This is a case that is
still unsolved and it is important to understand how it went
so long, Mr. Connery said this week in a telephone interview.
"When we requested the file, we got back a response that
the files could not be accessed because the case is still pending-that's
so ridiculous because nothing has been done in 25 years. We filed
an appeal to the Freedom of Information Commission in September,
but they couldn't schedule a hearing until January.
"The second reason we
were given [for denial] is that files don't exist," Mr.
Connery continued. "When I saw that, it didn't make any
legal sense. At the hearing, that was the basis of the state's
response. It was like a mantra; they said it a dozen times. They
wouldn't even admit whether the files had been erased or destroyed.
It was sort of left in the air that the records had physically
not been destroyed, but erased."
Under Connecticut state statute,
the part of a case file that refers to a suspect who is later
exonerated can be "erased." The erasure is not supposed
to apply to an entire case file, however, according to Mr. Connery.
"They couldn't even talk
about erasure," said Mr. Connery, who taped and made his
own transcript of the hearing. "Someone who has been wrongly
convicted will have the records of a supposed crime removed,
taking out of public sight anything that has to do with the accusation.
Our response is that we are not going after records relating
to Peter Reilly-we're after the Barbara Gibbons murder case.
Are they saying there are no records of the whole case?"
Mr. Connery and Alan Neigher,
a Westport attorney representing the writer and the Lakeville
Journal pro bono, feel that allowing the police to hide behind
the erasure statute establishes a dangerous precedent.
"If they are allowed to
get away with this, any police agency that has made a big mistake
and named a person and he is exonerated ... then the police can
wipe out the whole case record with result that perpetrators
get a free pass," said Mr. Connery.
"It is breathtaking in
its sweep because it would say, in effect, that unsolved murders
when someone is exonerated-found not guilty or had their conviction
reversed-then all the records are swept from public view,"
said Mr. Neigher during the hearing last week. "And that
is a dangerous precedent because mistakes in law enforcement,
misconduct by law enforcement, are thereby hidden from public
view."
Ms. Hellier and Assistant Attorney
General Stephen R. Sarnoski, who represented the Department of
Public Safety, declined to admit whether there are any public
documents to be made available. However, Mr. Sarnoski argued
that because no public records exist, the FOI commission lacks
jurisdiction.
Mr. Perpetua, the hearing officer,
was not impressed. You're asking me to conclude [whether I have
jurisdiction] based on your fairly bald assertion that no records
exist. I think that counsel is entitled to inquire, and is not
required to accept, that assertion. It may be true or may not
be true. .... I can't just say, well, you said the records don't
exist, everyone go home, case dismissed."
Mr. Connery said that the hearing
ended in "kind of a standoff." The hearing officer
said the attorneys have until Feb. 22 to file briefs expanding
upon their arguments. Mr. Sarnoski insisted that the only way
to "unerase" a file is to seek redress through the
superior court.
"It seems to me inevitable
that this will go to a higher court," said Mr. Connery.
He also questioned when the
files were erased. "We will look for a decision about when
they were erased," he said. "Was it only after our
request for access? We had not a word that anything was happening."
He said Mr. Reilly is currently
living with the Madow family, formerly of East Canaan and now
residing in Tolland. The Madow family unofficially adopted him
after his mother's murder. He works in a music store and plays
guitar in a band.
"The delicious part is
that the band is named Voodoo Justice," Mr. Connery
reported. "He's fine, just a wonderfully decent person who
is taking care of [the widowed Mrs. Madow] and driving his 'brother,'
Art [Madow], to therapy [following a truck accident]. He's never
even had a traffic ticket in all these years."
He said that Mr. Reilly is
eager to see the case pursued, noting that in a 2001 "American
Justice" segment on the A&E television channel,
two state prosecutors echoed the continuing claim of the State
Police that Reilly is guilty.
"They were only expressing
what the State Police have said for 25 years-that they were satisfied
with results of their investigation. That is so bothersome to
Peter and to me that anyone should be subjected to this cloud
of suspicion. He just wants them to find out who killed his mother."
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
