Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir Read online

  WHEN THE ISSUE of the Hartford Courant with Monsignor Musiel’s plea arrived on everyone’s doorsteps, the police had already brought in the man they suspect killed Irene, though he is not charged with that crime. He is, in fact, in police headquarters during Irene’s funeral. He’d been picked up because of his record, the incarcerations for sexual assault beginning with the stint in reform school in California when he was twelve and ending with his release from the Connecticut state prison eight months earlier.

  Robert Malm is informed that he is a suspect in the attack on Miss Patricia D’Allessio two weeks before on November 22. He is told he will take part in a lineup. He agrees, no doubt relieved that he isn’t under suspicion for the murder of Irene.

  The courageous Pidgie D’Allessio arrives at police headquarters within an hour after Bob is brought in. (This is a time when newspapers routinely printed the names of victims accusing men of rape.)

  Accompanied by her parents, Pidgie first looks at an array of photographs on Chief Godfrey’s desk. There are about thirty of them. She scans them, points to two of the photographs and says, These two look like him but they’re not him, and with those words, her gaze falls upon the photo of Robert Nelson Malm. The shock of seeing his face causes her to put her own face in her hands.

  Policewoman Conroy is in the room, too, and helps Pidgie compose herself. Chief Godfrey is attempting to calm Mr. D’Allessio, who is shouting once again, Where is he? Let me get one shot at him.

  Policewoman Conroy makes it clear to Pidgie that she is about to actually see before her own eyes the man who terrorized, humiliated, and choked her almost to death. The man who went on to kill a child named Irene.

  Do you understand, Pidgie?

  Yes.

  Pidgie and her parents are brought into a small room with a large picture window. The chief explains to her, Honey, it’s just like Dragnet. The other side of the window is mirrored and the nine men you’re going to see will not be able to see you. All they’ll see is themselves reflected in the mirror.

  Pidgie begins to whimper. The chief ignores that. He says, Come, Pidgie, and he takes her inside the room by the hand so that she’ll know she is being told the truth. Then the chief brings her back to the other side of the glass.

  A line of men led by a uniformed police officer files in. The representative of the department is always uniformed so that the witnesses won’t suddenly leap up and mistakenly identify him as the perpetrator of a crime.

  The tall, attractive man with black wavy hair and deep-set eyes is seventh in the line. Before he reaches the number painted on the floor, Pidgie moans and doubles over.

  Policewoman Conroy knows what to do just as the chief knew what to do. She takes Pidgie’s hand in both of hers and says, You have to look up now, dear. After that, you must wait until all the men are standing on their numbers and all you’ll have to do is say the number where the man who attacked you is standing. That’s all. Just say the number.

  The men arrange themselves on their assigned numbers. Pidgie looks up and whispers, Seven.

  While she sobs, her father flies to the door, where he is restrained by several officers. Once he gains control of himself, he says to the chief, What’s the bastard’s name?

  Captain Godfrey says to him, Robert Malm.

  Mr. D’Allessio repeats the name aloud and does exactly what his daughter did, moans and doubles over.

  Before Pidgie will fill out the necessary papers swearing that Bob Malm is the man who attacked her, she has to go into a room with her mother and Policewoman Conroy and listen to Bob Malm speak. The policewoman says, Pidgie, you’ve seen him. That was the hard part. It’s done. This will take just a few more seconds.

  Then she squeezes Pidgie’s hand. Pidgie squeezes back. The chief tells her father that if he goes in, too, and loses control, they might not be able to get Malm to admit to what he did to Pidgie. Mr. D’Allessio has to agree.

  The two women with the teenaged girl between them go into an interrogation room where Bob Malm is sitting between Captain Egan and a uniformed officer. The chief asks Bob Malm, who is cuffed, Did you attack this girl on the evening of November 22?

  Bob Malm looks up at Pidgie, gazes at her from beneath his hooded eyes, and says in a bored tone, Never seen her before in my life.

  Immediately, Pidgie and her mother are led out of the room. Outside, Pidgie needs no prodding; she says, That was him.

  The chief asks, You recognized his voice as well as his face?

  Yes.

  All present thank Pidgie and her parents and she is told she can go home as soon as she fills out the papers. Policewoman Conroy will help her.

  When they’ve been ushered out, the chief says to Captain Egan: That piece of shit picked the wrong kid when he grabbed Patricia D’Allessio.

  Now a second lineup is arranged, and Chief Godfrey and Captain Egan go back into the interrogation room and sit down at the table with Bob, who is smoking one of his Old Golds. Egan says to him, How ya doin’?

  Bob answers, I can’t get a break.

  Captain Egan asks him, What kind of break do you think you deserve?

  I was working that night. The night that girl says I grabbed her.

  No, you weren’t.

  I was filling in for another guy. We’re not supposed to do that. But I did him a favor. Our supervisor didn’t know about it.

  What’s his name?

  I can’t rat out a friend.

  The chief and the captain leave the room to see if the taxi driver has been brought in yet, the taxi driver who picked up a fare on the night of December 9 at 9 P.M. at a tavern on Hillside Avenue and took him to Cedarcrest Sanatorium.

  He is there, waiting. They inform Bob that they need to reconstruct the lineup. He says, sure.

  The taxi driver immediately identifies Bob Malm as his fare on the night of December 9.

  Later, a Hartford detective visits the six other men who work as dishwashers at Cedarcrest. All six insist Bob hadn’t taken their shifts on November 22.

  The next morning, while Bob Malm is processed, arrested, and printed in connection with the assault on Pidgie D’Allessio without any mention of the murder of a little girl two weeks later, Irene is lowered into the ground at St. Benedict’s Cemetery on the Hartford/Bloomfield city line very close to the new C.G. international headquarters.

  thirty-three

  THE POLICE CAREFULLY segue Robert Malm from his attack on Pidgie D’Allessio on November 22, to the murder of Irene committed on December 9. He denies all. He has been denying all since he was twelve years old.

  The police know they will need a confession from him. They have no evidence, no witnesses to the crime. They will need a confession because a capital crime, punishable by death, requires two witnesses to that crime or witnesses who will swear they saw the accused and the victim together near the scene of the crime, at the time of the crime.

  Connecticut is the only state of the thirty-six with the death penalty on the books that will allow a jury judging a capital crime to determine if the evidence is the equivalent of two eyewitness accounts. Even with that, the death penalty is difficult to achieve without the accused admitting he did it.

  Rape requires two eyewitnesses to the crime, period. Equivalent evidence cannot be considered by the jury since rape wasn’t a capital crime. What this means is that the police generally don’t arrest a rapist unless he’s murdered his victim. (Decades later, the feminist movement will be solely responsible for the change to that travesty of law.)

  In the initial rounds of the investigation, the police find no one who saw Bob Malm and Irene together. They canvass Charter Oak Terrace and learn that a teenage couple went to Jack’s store the evening Irene was killed. The couple saw her enter the store as they were leaving but they don’t remember anyone else being in the store at the time. They did spot Kathy Delaney on the way home playing behind the church with other children.

  Captain Jimmy Egan visits the Delaney family in Charter O
ak Terrace. Kathy Delaney tells him she saw two people she refers to as a boy and girl turning into Sequin Street. She is surprised when Egan asks if the girl was Irene. Since she can’t fathom Irene walking with a strange man, she says no. She says it was Brenda and her boyfriend, Charlie. The captain tries to get her to think harder. She insists the girl wasn’t Irene even though she was. (Kathy doesn’t mention any rock throwing.) Egan finally faces the fact that the children will not make reliable court witnesses when it comes to seeing to it that Malm is condemned to die. He’s going to need insurance.

  Up at the corner store, Jack initially tells investigators that he never saw Irene in his store the night she was murdered. They show him her photograph. He thinks he knows who she is, but is sure she wasn’t in his store that night. His employee pipes up, Yes she was!

  He recalls what a pain in the neck it was weighing those potatoes and coming up with exactly two pounds. He says to the cops, If I went over the two pounds her mother would be here the next day complaining.

  Jack says, Oh, yeah, that kid!

  A few days later, Jimmy Egan shows Jack and his employee a photo of Bob Malm and they are in agreement: Never seen him before.

  Egan visits each man at his home that night. He explains the police now have the man in the photo in custody. He describes what Malm did to Pidgie a few weeks earlier and tells the men he undoubtedly did the same thing to Irene before he killed her. With that, Jack remembers he did see Irene and Bob Malm in his store at the same time.

  Around seven-fifteen? asks the cop.

  Yeah. Around seven-fifteen.

  Jack’s employee remembers, too.

  In the Hartford County Jail, Bob Malm, when asked about the grocery store, says, What grocery store?

  The police have now got equivalent eyewitness testimony from two people. But the chief tells Egan he doesn’t want to use their statements unless he has to because of the risk of having their witnesses swayed under cross-examination by the defense when testifying to the accuracy of what they saw.

  But the only evidence the police have is that the killer used a square knot in Irene’s scarf to strangle her, a knot taught in basic Navy training, and Bob Malm served in the Navy. But in searching his locker at Cedarcrest, they discover a pair of dirty socks stuck all over with beggar’s-lice.

  A forensics team dashes to Officer Proccacino’s yard, where they are unable to find beggar’s-lice. So they walk a few feet to the yard abutting the Proccacinos’, Bobby Turner’s yard on Nilan Street, where our sledding flights always ended smack up against the Turners’ privet hedge. The team finds several patches. Mr. Turner is not such a fanatic about keeping his yard as weed-free as Officer Proccacino. The team next heads over to the Sequin Street lot with the overturned boat. The lot is rife with beggar’s-lice just as all overgrown lots are in Hartford, which is something every fifth-grader in Miss Bowie’s class now knows.

  However, that won’t ice anything. The two pieces of evidence are not the equivalent of eyewitness testimony.

  And so, Chief Godfrey sets his sights on eliciting a confession from the slick Bob Malm. Beyond questioning, there are only three things he can do to encourage a confession. Beating prisoners has been outlawed since the thirties, but he can withhold sleep, he can keep him from cleaning himself, and he can deprive him of food though the latter guideline doesn’t permit starving the prisoner. The chief has learned that if you get a man tired and hungry enough, maybe over a period of three days, he will confess to anything. But then the next day he’ll recant. Chief Godfrey doesn’t want recanted confessions so orders that Bob Malm be fed and rested. However, Bob is a meticulous fellow, snappily dressed. So the cops directly involved with him will see that he stays in his clothes and not be allowed to shower. They do that out of hatred for him.

  The chief will not utilize other acceptable tactics either. He will not threaten the prisoner or lie to him. He could tell Bob Malm that his mother is dying out in California and has asked on her deathbed that he tell the truth; the chief could tell him that they have an eyewitness to his crime; he could tell Bob Malm they found an item of his clothing at the scene of the crime. They could tell him what they told Irene’s brother, Fred—that he was in a fog and didn’t remember killing her. The police can do this because in Connecticut v. Palko, a ten-year-old case, the court ruled: The object of evidence is to get at the truth and a trick which has no tendency to produce a confession except one in accordance with truth is always admissible. In other words, call a lie a trick, and it’s okay. Tell a grieving young boy he’s killed his sister and trick him into an admission. Fine, says the law.

  I ask a couple of cops about that. One of them says, As long as lawyers lie, we have to lie too, or we’ll have empty prisons.

  CHIEF GODFREY has come to get a feel for Bob Malm. He knows Bob has been in police custody too many times not to recognize such a trick. And so, Chief Godfrey will use other methods to soften him up: camaraderie, sympathy, a perceived willingness to believe him, a promise of leniency if he confesses since as Egan tells him, You need psychiatric help, Malm, and a sausage and pepper grinder, too. Malm says a sausage and pepper grinder sounds great and one is ordered for him.

  A grinder is the Connecticut version of a hero, a sub, or a po’boy, except that most of the inside of the foot-long sliced-open Italian bread is scooped out and you’re left with two thick, chewy, leathery crusts, which are filled with meat, roasted peppers, tomatoes, and shredded lettuce, the entire contraption then sprinkled with olive oil. Before closing it up, the best Italian restaurants, like Luigi’s in Old Saybrook, will layer provolone cheese over all and run the open grinder under a broiler for just the number of seconds required to warm and soften, not melt the provolone.

  Bob Malm slowly begins to act in a way that indicates he is coming to trust his interrogators. He starts making excuses for his crimes. He says, yes, he was with Pidgie D’Allessio but insists it was a date and as for what happened . . . Well, she liked it.

  But right then, an especially large and heavy monkey wrench is tossed into the proceeding and it lands in the interrogation room with a loud reverberating bong. Someone else has confessed to murdering Irene.

  JOHN H. WILLIAMS is an Army private stationed at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. He says that he killed Irene after walking around my neighborhood in a drunken stupor, AWOL at the time. He writes a two-page confession after being questioned by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. This means Chief Godfrey must now convince the police commissioner and many other government officials—meaning a lot of politicians—that the soldier’s confession is a hoax. But with this timely confession of Private Williams, the politicians don’t want to hear about Chief Godfrey’s own suspect, Robert Nelson Malm. After all, Godfrey’s had Malm in custody for three days and he hasn’t cracked. Now with the soldier’s confession, there’s no need to crack Malm—they have Irene’s killer.

  The commissioner says to Godfrey, Let Hartford’s kids back outside to play. Time for them to get on with their little lives. And let’s not forget this, Chief: Christmas is coming!

  Chief Godfrey has no choice but to abandon the questioning of Bob Malm, and without waiting for a warrant to be issued for the arrest of Private Williams, grabs a couple of cops and races to Fort Devens in a police cruiser, a trip which normally takes three hours in a car unequipped with a blue dome on its roof plus a siren. The chief is at Fort Devens in two.

  Chief Godfrey immediately recognizes Private Williams, remembers seeing him at various police stations in the city, where he was brought in many a time on charges related to drunkenness. The first thing the chief asks the soldier is if he recognizes him, and Private Williams looks toward him in what the chief considers a dim-witted way and says, No.

  The chief listens, enraged, as Private Williams calmly explains that he followed Irene and some kids from Charter Oak Terrace to the little grocery store.

  He says, When Irene left the other children, I stopped her and she went wit
h me through several streets.

  Willingly?

  Yes. Then we went down an embankment and I started to molest her. When she screamed, I choked her and she got quiet and I left.

  You choked her with your bare hands?

  Yes.

  The Fort Devens provost marshal takes Chief Godfrey aside and tells him that at that point the soldier’s mind went blank though he thought he remembered carrying the body down a dirt path.

  The chief questions Private Williams further, knowing that in order to convince the politicians, he must disprove the confession beyond the details that do not match the events of the crime. So Chief Godfrey asks to see the provost marshal and requests that the marshal assign two military police to him in order to take John Williams back to Hartford in his custody so that he can walk him over the terrain of the crime and have him explain in detail what he did. Chief Godfrey knows military reservation law and civil law, as well, so he is aware that he is asking the impossible.

  The provost marshal cannot grant the chief’s request and suggests he speak to the judge advocate of the fort.

  The judge is familiar with the circumstances that brought the chief to the fort. He says to the chief, I am very sorry but the boy is a soldier of the United States Army; he’s on a military reservation; he is in another state, and I am sure you understand what that means.

  The chief says, I am only asking he be brought to Hartford for a short time. A few hours. He can be returned by the same MPs who bring him.

  The judge says, The only way I can let you have him is for you to obtain a warrant from your prosecutor and then I’ll turn him over to you and if there is nothing to it we will pick him up and take him back.