Michael Benson - Murder in Connecticut: The Shocking Crime That Destroyed a Family and United a Community

The Lyons Press

Guilford, Connecticut

An imprint of The Globe Pequot Press

Copyright 2008 by Michael Benson

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to The Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

The Lyons Press is an imprint of The Globe Pequot Press.

Designed by Sheryl P. Kober

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Benson, Michael.

Murder in Connecticut : the shocking crime that destroyed a family and united a community / Michael Benson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

E-ISBN 978-0-7627-9752-3

1. Murder--Connecticut--Cheshire--Case studies. 2. Murder--Investigation--Connecticut--Cheshire--Case studies. I. Title.

HV6534.C394B45 2008

364.1523097467--dc22

2008024505

This book is dedicated to the people of Cheshire, Connecticut, and its surrounding towns who refused to die a little when unspeakable evil invaded in the middle of the night. Their story is one that should be mandatory reading for grief counselors, all who grieve, and every community that has had the misfortune of suffering the cruelest of tragedies.

Contents

Preface

Central ConnecticutA Lesson in How to Heal

During summer vacation, when I was nine years old growing up in a small town south of Rochester, New York, my next-door neighbor, a fourteen-year-old girl, and her sixteen-year-old friend from down the road went missing. Theyd gone swimming in the creek by a railroad trestle early on a Saturday evening and had not returned. Their bodies were found a month later alongside the railroad tracks not far from my house.

The day after the bodies were found, Monroe County Sheriff Skinner told the local paper, It looks like our man is a sex fiend. [The knife wounds] make it certain that this is a sex murder.... This is the most brutal case Ive seen in this county in my thirty-seven years in the department.

The wounds were said to be a combination of stab wounds and slashes. As a kid I had no way to process information like that, but it nonetheless made for a troubled sleep. The boogeyman was real, and he was nearby.

The murderer was never caught.

The neighborhood, once happy and a little bit loud, went silent. No one ever mentioned the murders. Doors were locked and kids were kept closer to home. The back fields, once crossed with dirt paths worn by the bare feet of playing children, now grew over, forever hidden by unchecked foliage.

No one discussed the thing that had happened. Within six months, it was as if those girls had never existed. In a sense my neighborhood died a little with the two victims.

I compare that dreary response to the inspiring celebration of human character that has blossomed in central Connecticut since three members of the Petit family were murdered during a home invasion on July 23, 2007, and I am filled with amazement and admiration. Although the fear and grief suffered by the survivors was the same as that which my community felt when I was a child, the way people dealt with their pain could not have been more different.

Instead of retreating, they marched forward. Rallying around the heroic words of the surviving husband and father, vigils were held in honor of the victims at first, then rallies in support of tougher legislation, then fund-raisers in support of the victims favorite charities. The townspeople heard the call to action and they responded.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the following individuals and organizations, without whose help the writing of this book would have been impossible: Megan Alexander, Anne Darrigan, my brilliant editor Meredith Davis, my agent Jake Elwell, Mrs. A. Burch Tracy Ford, Joe Fantasia, Scott Frommer, Justin Ivey, Brent Lane, Norm Mesel, Jessica Norton, Dayna and Elizabeth Ollero, Lisa Riera, Andrew and Christine Wyzga, Joe Williams, Chionn Wolfe, Linda Friedner Cowen, Shining Peace Upon the Petits, Survivors of Homicide, and all of the reporters who got there before me. For a complete listing of my sources, see the bibliography at the back of the book.

Introduction:

Double-Locked Doors and Restless Nights

In this cold, cold world, with its explosion of electronic media and information overload, the omnipresent grappling for our attention has led to entertainment forms that appeal solely to our baser instincts. Whosay, in 1950could have predicted that there would be in the first years of the twenty-first century a briefly popular genre of film known as torture porn? Even in the mainstreamand by this I mean what used to be referred to as broadcast televisionmuch of our entertainment is derived from the sophisticated simulation of violent death. In fiction we have all become amateur crime-scene investigators. In nonfiction we have granted a certain celebrity of infamy to those who commit the most shocking of crimes. Many true-crime books published these days change names to protect the innocent yet put the correct names of the criminals in bold letters right on the cover. There is an argument that it should be the other way around. Perhaps we should deny the sadistic and the sociopathic their fifteen minutes of fame, change their names when we write about them, put black bars across their eyes when we publish their photographs. Its a thought.

The best way to get from herethe world in which you can go into candy stores and buy Serial Killer Trading Cardsto there, a world in which criminals are routinely denied recognition, is to take baby steps. First step: Lets recognize the murderers whose deeds are briefly depicted in this book for what they are, pieces of slime whose crimes are so brutal and ugly and horrible that they could have lowered the quality of life for everyone, especially for those in the vicinity. Theirs was a crime against humanity that seeps into your pores and crawls into your dreams, that makes for double-locked doors and restless nights hearing phantom footsteps in the den below.

This is not the story of the two nonentities who attacked one summer night, although out of necessity they must appear. It is rather the story of an idyllic little town in central Connecticutthe town of Cheshire, population 29,000, median household income $80,466a town that could have buckled under, its world sullied forever, a black spot evermore blocking its sun, but instead did not.

It is the story of a community that has stuck together and supported one another during the hardest possible timesa community that, only in crisis, has discovered its own formidable strength.

It is a story of anger and how even the most liberal of neighbors have rethought their opinions of capital punishment.

And it is the story of a husband and father who lost everything yet somehow clung to his sanity, who in a town of thousands of lights became the brightest beacon of all.