Barbara Gibbons

Case background and investigation

Barbara Gibbons, 51, lived with her 18-year-old son, Peter Reilly, in a small one-bedroom house in the Falls Village section of Canaan, in Litchfield County, Connecticut. On the night of September 28, 1973, Reilly returned from a meeting at a church youth center and found his mother on the bedroom floor. According to an account by psychologist Saul Kassin published in the Hartford Courant in 2023, she had been sexually assaulted and stabbed, and her throat had been cut. Reilly telephoned for an ambulance, a doctor and the local hospital, which notified the state police.

Reilly was taken to a state police barracks in the early hours and questioned without a lawyer or family member present. Kassin writes that he was given a polygraph examination and told that he had failed it, and that over hours of questioning he came to doubt his own memory and signed a statement saying he had attacked his mother. A chronology compiled by Connecticut journalist Terry Cowgill states that he had gone more than 25 hours without sleep when he signed. He withdrew the confession soon afterward. Kassin notes that no witness or physical evidence implicated him.

A grand jury indicted Reilly for murder on November 7, 1973. A judge declined to suppress the confession, and the trial began in February 1974. On April 12, 1974, the jury found him guilty of first-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced on May 24, 1974, to six to sixteen years in prison, according to Encyclopedia.com and the Cowgill chronology.

Residents of the area, joined by playwright Arthur Miller, organized support for an appeal. A new defense team sought a new trial, and a hearing opened in January 1976 before Judge John Speziale. Evidence presented included a fingerprint attributed to another person and an analysis of the timing of Reilly's movements that night. On March 25, 1976, Speziale set aside the conviction, saying that a grave injustice had been done.

The original prosecutor had died, and his successor found material in the state's files that had not been given to the defense and that indicated Reilly could not have been at the house when the attack occurred. The charges were dismissed on November 4, 1976, according to the Cowgill chronology.

A one-man grand jury reported on the investigation in June 1977, and a further inquiry concluded in September 1979 that there was insufficient evidence to indict anyone. No one else has been charged. Kassin wrote in 2023 that the killer had never been brought to justice. Reilly later supported a Connecticut law, signed in June 2023, that bars police from using deception when questioning suspects under 18.