Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir Read online

  JUDGE J. BALDWIN and the two other presiding appeal justices deliberate a total of one hour and twenty minutes with an hour off in the middle for lunch. Judge Baldwin presents their conclusions in cold legalese.

  He begins with the most crucial, intent, picking up where Bill left off:

  Considering the evidence from the angle most favorable to the defendant, it could be said that he did not conceive an intent to take the life of his victim until after the sexual episode. This left but a short time for him to deliberate and premeditate before forming a specific intent to kill her. But the length of time elapsed is not the test. The question is whether the court could reasonably conclude that there was sufficient time to enable the mind of the defendant to conceive a willful, deliberate, premeditated intent to kill before the act was done.

  As the defendant stood talking with Irene on Sequin Street she said that she had to get home before her brother. She repeated this when they were in the rear of 80 Coolidge Street. While they were lying on the ground she said that her mother would be looking for her. When she was putting her clothes on, she threatened to tell her mother. The defendant admitted that he was worried. There can be no doubt that he knew that he had done wrong and feared detection. And, they were in a dark, secluded spot.

  Under these circumstances, the conclusion that he formed a willful, deliberate intent to kill her is reasonable and logical. His crime was murder in the first degree.

  There is no error.

  I think of Irene, her logic, telling her killer that she had to be home before her brother. It is an excuse you used with your friends to save face when they say they don’t have to go home yet. And then, after the sexual assault, when her killer threatened to kill her if she told, just as he’d threatened Pidgie D’Allessio, Irene said, I’m going to tell my mother. She spoke up because she had courage and spunk. She was just a little girl who was frightened in a way no little girl should be frightened, and still she expressed her only thought, which was to tell her mother. She did not yet have the maturity of seventeen-year-old Pidgie, who comprehended fully that her assailant would kill her if she stood up to him. The final act of Irene’s life demonstrated dignity in the face of hell.

  Judge Baldwin moves on to the two-witness equivalency rule. He states: General statute 8799 provides that no person shall be convicted of any crime punishable by death without the testimony of at least two witnesses, or that which is equivalent thereto. Simply stated, the statute requires that proof shall not depend upon the testimony of one witness. The crime was committed in the evening of December 9. The defendant was taken into custody on the evening of December 12. From that time on he was questioned at intervals, first about another incident which had occurred in November, and then about the crime here charged until he confessed at 9:30 in the evening of December 15. The state relied heavily upon this evidence.

  There was much corroborating testimony. Witnesses saw what they described as a tall boy and a girl disappear down a driveway on Sequin Street at the time the defendant stated he did so. They heard him shout, “Beat it,” as he said he had. The bag containing potatoes and cookies which Irene had purchased at the store was found in the backyard of 46 Sequin Street. The jacket which Irene wore was identified by some of the witnesses who saw her on Sequin Street with a boy. The fruit of what is botanically known as Bidens frondosa, beggar’s-lice, which grew in the yards in the rear of both 80 Coolidge Street and 46 Sequin Street, was found on the clothing of both Irene and the defendant. Police officers testified that after the defendant had confessed he took them over the course which he had followed on the night of the crime from the motion picture theater to the place where the body of Irene was found.

  These instances of corroboration are but a few of many which could be recited. It is fair to say that practically every important detail of the defendant’s statements were checked and evidence confirming them offered at trial. Much of the corroborating evidence had been obtained before the defendant confessed. The requirements of the statute were more than met.

  There is no error.

  Finally, the judge treats the third appeal protestation—that the confession was not given voluntarily: The defendant was arrested on December 12. He confessed on December 15. The state offered the testimony of Detective Mancini of the Hartford County Police Department as bearing upon the voluntary aspect of the defendant’s confession. On cross-examination, Mancini was questioned with regard to his knowledge of the statements concerning the death of the child made by a soldier named Williams. The defendant claims that the failure of Mancini to disclose this knowledge to him bore upon the voluntary aspect of the statements made by the defendant.

  But Mancini was under no duty to disclose to the defendant any knowledge he might have concerning Williams’s admissions. Withholding information concerning other persons who might be involved in the investigation of a crime is no differing in kind from the giving of false information concerning them, and yet the latter conduct, while not commended, has been held not to render a confession involuntarily.

  Hold it right there, Baldwin. I read the line about the “latter conduct” again. The judge has slipped an impotent little opinion he holds into his ruling. Okay, the law says you can trick suspects—give them false information, withhold information, whatever. And the law also says this is not the same thing as lying to them. Baldwin points out that such conduct is not commended. Well, that’s nice.

  I carry on.

  Had Mancini’s knowledge been divulged to the defendant it may be that he would not have confessed in the hope that the crime would be laid at another’s door and that he would escape. Viewed from this angle, the failure to divulge Williams’s statement could have no bearing whatever upon the question whether the defendant’s confessions were voluntary.

  To fully cover this episode, the defense offered Chief Godfrey as witness. He testified that he had talked with Williams and that Williams’s story differed so vitally from the facts of the crime as they had been disclosed that Williams could not have been the person who killed the child.

  There is no error.

  forty-two

  THE END of Robert Malm’s appeal document, by some miracle, ends on the left-facing page. My copy therefore includes the right-facing page, the beginning of the very next appeal taken up by the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors. It is titled: The State of Connecticut v. Patricia D’Allessio.

  What in God’s name is this? But I can’t know; there are no more pages copied. Yet again I head back to the library.

  IT SEEMS THAT after Bob Malm was arrested, Patricia D’Allessio tried to claim a three-thousand-dollar reward offered by the state of Connecticut, a reward for assistance in capturing Robert Nelson Malm. Her claim is denied. I look at the dates of the two appeals transcripts. Patricia D’Allessio appealed the ruling against her three days after Malm appealed his guilty sentence.

  I skim through her transcript; it isn’t over four hundred pages, it’s a wispy dozen. No need to copy it and bring it home to read.

  I am freaked out right from page one—the three judges are the same three judges who determined Bob Malm’s fate when he made his appeal. Judge J. Baldwin will write the ruling. And Cosgrove is representing Pidgie!

  Governor Abraham Ribicoff offered the reward to anyone with information leading to the arrest of Irene’s killer. When Pidgie claimed the reward eight days after Irene’s death, the governor’s staff members handling the state’s offer deemed that offer to be a simple contract not in force at the time Pidgie went to the police; Governor Ribicoff hadn’t tendered the reward until the day after she’d read the Hartford Times’s story of Irene’s murder. Yes, Pidgie called the police, and yes, she identified Malm in a lineup, and yes, she also endured the trauma of coming face-to-face with him to identify his voice as well, but that all came a day too soon for her to be entitled to the reward.

  She is denied the three thousand dollars. Pidgie, a tough cookie according to her father, appeals.
r />   I turn the tissue-thin page to read the appeal ruling and I’m thinking, Okay, Baldwin, set things right.

  First, he introduces his qualm: In a nutshell, there is no precedent. Pidgie’s appeal is unique. So Baldwin describes how he and the two other state Supreme Court judges reviewed sixty cases having to do with contract law, had to study sixty business contracts to determine whether or not Pidgie was entitled to receive the reward.

  The judges then spent four times longer on Pidgie’s appeal than they did on Robert Malm’s before they emerged from their deliberation.

  J. Baldwin’s ruling is a single brief paragraph:

  The appellant’s compensation is the consolation which comes to every citizen from the discharge of a public duty, which is the common obligation of all. The court cannot read into the terms of a (contractual) statute something which manifestly is not there in order to reach what the court thinks would be a just result.

  There is no error.

  Presiding judge Justice J. Baldwin had looked at the evidence against Bob Malm just a few days earlier from the angle most favorable to the defendant—in other words, from a generous angle giving him the benefit of the doubt. He’d even used benevolent phrasing. Pidgie’s is a civil case so he can draw a hard, condescending, and dispassionate line when it comes to the brave D’Allessio girl, without whose cooperation Bob Malm would not have been arrested. Basically, in order to avoid setting a precedent, the judge washes his hands of it, a precedent set by Pontius Pilate.

  Decisions of justice are based on points of law; there are rules that must be followed no matter what anyone might think. Such makes matters pretty easy for a judge, but when no point of law exists, when there needs to be a new interpretation, a judge fears the consequences of his precedent being questioned and being made to look a fool. So judges don’t do it, even when it’s clear they should. Instead, feeling guilty, they slyly express sympathy to the appellant in a cowardly ruling.

  Fuck them.

  forty-three

  ROBERT MALM is the second-to-the-last person to be executed in the state of Connecticut.

  A retired reporter from the Hartford Courant, Jerry Demeusy, self-publishes a book called Ten Weeks of Terror about the last killer to be executed, Joseph “Mad Dog” Taborsky, who robbed gas stations and package stores (package means liquor in Connecticut) with the help of his partner, Albert Culombe, who suffered mental retardation. The newspaper reporters, as well as Culombe’s lawyer, refer to Culombe as a mental defective.

  The two robbers pistol-whip their victims—plus any witnesses—and then shoot them.

  My Uncle Chick, my father’s oldest brother, the one who worked at the Hartford County Jail, brings us a beach blanket every summer. The blankets are the color and practically the texture of sandpaper so it is always a challenge to find the blanket when we come out of the water. One summer Uncle Chick brings us Mad Dog Taborsky’s blanket. It has a frayed corner. Uncle Chick grabs it when they take Mad Dog to Newgate Prison in Windsor, which houses death row and the execution chamber. The other prisoners won’t take bedding that belongs to a condemned man taken to Newgate. Bad luck.

  Just before Mad Dog’s execution, the Connecticut court, at the behest of a number of politicians, decides the state should execute the four other inhabitants of death row in the same week—double executions, where a pair of condemned men will be electrocuted, and then three days later, pair number two. That second pair included Irene’s killer, Bob Malm, and his partner in death, a twenty-two-year-old cop-killer named John Donahue.

  The idea is to deliberately save Mad Dog for last, to clear the deck in order to place him at stage center, Mad Dog being a killer who is big and mean and unrepentant. He had been sprung on a technicality a few years earlier, which allowed him to kill and maim some more. Politicians want his execution to be as close to a public hanging as possible in order to please their constituents, who detest Mad Dog so. (As for the “mental defective,” Albert Culombe, his lawyers take his appeal all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. Felix Frankfurter writes the ruling determining that his crime was second-degree murder rather than first because of his mental condition. With the conviction overturned, Culombe is released. He steps outside the prison fence, whereupon he is immediately arrested again on the new charge, murder in the second degree. He might have pleaded innocent to this charge with the defense arguing double jeopardy, or that he was not capable of understanding right from wrong, but he chooses to plead guilty so he can remain in prison where he won’t have to work or cook. I believe Tyler might have understood Culombe’s reasoning. And I do wonder why it is that the Culombe case has never been cited when people suffering from mental retardation are condemned to die.)

  In contrast to the bloodlust for Taborsky, people simply want to be rid of Irene’s killer because nobody can stand thinking about the poor little girl anymore; just be rid of Malm and then let’s put it out of our heads.

  In Connecticut, on the day of a scheduled execution, condemned prisoners are granted the opportunity to stand in front of the Board of Pardons at the state prison, presided over by the governor, and ask for mercy. The board then deliberates and decides whether or not the supplicant’s death penalty should be commuted to life in prison.

  The two men scheduled to be executed three days before Bob Malm and John Donahue choose to appeal for mercy. One is turned down and is executed three hours later, and one has his sentence commuted to life. This man is the only condemned prisoner whose sentence Governor Ribicoff commutes before he resigns his post to become John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. The man is a petty thief named Benny Reid, who, like Malm’s partner John Donahue, committed murder at seventeen years of age. He shot a clerk during a store robbery.

  A Trinity College student writes a compelling editorial in the Hartford Courant noting intellectual and legal reasons why the prisoner should serve life rather than be executed; his argument is based on Benny’s young age when he committed the crime. Governor Ribicoff invites the student to present his argument at the mercy hearing for Benny Reid. The student accepts the invitation, argues his opinion to the Board of Pardons, and Benny Reid’s sentence is commuted to life in prison. (The Trinity College student, George F. Will, is today’s preeminent conservative columnist and pundit.)

  IN THE LATE AFTERNOON of the day Robert N. Malm is scheduled to die, he makes a last attempt to save his own life. Without legal counsel, he stands before Governor Ribicoff and the Board of Pardons.

  Governor Ribicoff says: Let the condemned be heard.

  Malm says: Listen, I tried to brush the mud off her. I helped her with her coat. She said something about telling her mother and I knotted the scarf around her neck. She fell down. I think she fainted. So I left.

  Bob continues to deny he was responsible for Irene’s death.

  Justice Edward J. Daley of the board asks, Why didn’t you untie the scarf when the little girl fell to the ground?

  I couldn’t have.

  But you knew it was a dangerous situation for her, didn’t you?

  I didn’t think about it.

  The committee waits. But Bob has nothing more to say. Irene’s death was an accident. Period.

  He is led back to his cell. Fifteen minutes later Governor Ribicoff passes the word to the warden that Robert Malm’s plea for clemency has been turned down. He will be executed, as scheduled, at 10 P.M. Bob refuses a last meal.

  Then, in front of Governor Ribicoff, the lawyer for John Donahue, the second man who will be executed back-to-back with Bob, points out that John was a juvenile at the time of the crime, seventeen years old, and a mental defective besides.

  Governor Ribicoff says: Let the condemned be heard.

  John Donahue stands and says to the board: For the life of me, I don’t know why I did it. I am truly sorry for what I’ve done. There is no retribution I could make for the terrible thing I’ve done.

  Then John Donahue’s father speaks, his wi
fe by his side. He says, I have always felt and still do that something is wrong with my son. But still, I feel I must apologize for John’s crime to the people of the state of Connecticut.

  Governor Ribicoff, after hearing John Donahue’s petition for clemency, and after John is led back to his cell on death row, turns to John’s parents and tells them that he and other members of the board have the feeling that they are blaming themselves for their son’s crime. He says to Mr. and Mrs. Donahue: I don’t want you to go through the rest of your days, irrespective of the decision of this board, blaming yourselves for the homicide committed by your son. I will say that you are normal parents, in fact, wonderful parents, and we want you to know we have a deep sense of compassion for you.

  Weeping, they leave the chamber and go to sit just outside the heavy oak doors with their priest. But unlike Benny Reid, John Donahue didn’t shoot a store clerk, he killed a cop, and for that there is no mercy. Within minutes the couple receive the news that their son will die that night as planned. They and the priest decide it best to leave without saying good-bye to John.

  A COIN IS FLIPPED as to which of the two men—Malm or the cop killer—will be electrocuted first. The cop killer wins. But the state executioner doesn’t like the whole idea of a double execution. The executioner, a serious, small man with thick eyeglasses whose identity is kept secret, is an electrician. I guess it makes sense; hangmen of old were usually butchers. Historically, Connecticut executioners serve long careers; only one in the previous hundred years does not retire gracefully after putting in decades of service. He commits suicide.

  The Connecticut executioner receives good pay for the up-till-now infrequent gigs and he brags to everyone that he makes a professional, proficient job of it. Actually, he is obsessed with his job: he spends his days studying the effects of bolts of electricity that pass through human bodies. He becomes an expert on what happens when people are struck randomly by lightning. But he will breach no such randomness. He is not of the likes of Bob Malm, whose killing was the height of random selection.