Because You Loved Me (31 page)

Patricia Sullivan appeared in court sheepish and distressed. Her teenage daughters, one of whom was obviously pregnant, were there, too, in full support of Billy. The family had been torn apart by Billy’s arrest. One could say he had been the Sullivan family anchor. He kept everyone grounded and partly supported them. Now Billy was facing the rest of his life behind bars. What could Pat say to a jury to change any of it?

Pat’s job on the stand was to explain how tortured Billy’s young life had been. Part of her testimony was going to expose her own flaws, maybe even at risk of alienating certain jurors. But Pat surely understood her presence on the witness stand wasn’t about her; it was about helping her son, whom she believed in and stood behind, despite how his life had turned out.

Paul Garrity started off slow, having Pat describe where she lived, her children, when she moved to Willimantic and the circumstances surrounding Billy’s birth.

Next he asked Pat what she was doing “in terms of behaviors” while she was pregnant with Billy.

Pat didn’t hesitate.

“I drank every day and smoked cigarettes.”

She seemed quite saddened by this, but what else could she say?

After describing—in rather eyebrow-raising detail—Billy’s troubled childhood, Garrity led Pat into a dialogue regarding the litany of medications Billy had been on throughout his life. It was sobering for some to sit and listen to a rapid-fire exchange between Pat and her son’s attorney, exposing a list of drugs that doctors experimented on with Billy. It was clear Billy was a guinea pig of sorts, allowing doctors to try different combinations of meds on him to see what worked best. Yet, as Pat told it, his behavior got worse—not better—as time went on. He became violent and unpleasant to be around. He acted out over the slightest change in environment. One of his sisters or Pat would say something and Billy was off on a tirade.

“While he was on these medications, was it having an effect?”

“Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t,” answered Pat in a stoic manner, flatly recalling what were some of the most trying times of her life. “Sometimes they (the medications) would, [and] if they had, say, put him on two or three meds and they weren’t working, then they would add another one and another one until at one point he was on seven or eight at one time.”

Kirsten Wilson didn’t have much for the heavyset, curly-haired mother of Billy Sullivan when she took a crack at cross-examining her. But she did make a point to bring up an interview Detective Denis Linehan had conducted with Pat three days after Jeanne was murdered. Reading from a police report, the state prosecutor implied Pat had told Linehan that Billy was “doing fine” the past couple of years.

“Fine” was a relative term. Wilson was curious how Pat defined the word.

As Wilson read from the report, Pat indicated several times she couldn’t recall saying some of the things Linehan claimed she had, and believed she might have been “in shock” when Linehan questioned her.

Beyond that, Pat exited the witness stand with some dignity left, thus paving the way for Garrity and Monteith’s psychological experts.

Dr. Bernard Barile was a well-respected staff member of Riverview Children’s Hospital in Middletown, Connecticut, and had been for nearly two decades. When Billy became a part of the state of Connecticut’s psychiatric system, Barile was the doctor in charge of his case. Billy was thirteen the first time he and Barile met. Barile told jurors Billy was a “boy flooded with emotions…[and] out of touch with reality….”

Didn’t that describe millions of young boys?

Still, it was hard evidence. Billy had no reason to lie to Barile back in 1998, when Barile started treating him. He was a troubled boy who had grown up in an environment prone to producing emotional problems. In essence, Barile was saying it wasn’t Billy’s fault he had turned out the way he did.

Barile had given Billy several psychological tests and evaluated his condition over a period of twelve months. One of his methods was the infamous “inkblot,” clinically known as the Rorschach test, which, according to Barile, “showed that [Billy] is a seriously disturbed boy…with a peculiar way of seeing the world.”

Throughout his testimony, Barile seemed to back up the defense’s core argument—Billy was insane; he knew not what he did, couldn’t possibly be held accountable for his actions and needed to be locked up in an institution so he could get the help he should have gotten long ago.

There had been some question, however, whether Barile knew Billy (and, more important, his case) as well as he claimed.

“Now, in writing Billy Sullivan’s report, what documents did you read or rely on before writing your report?”

“Some of the reports from the Newington Children’s Hospital, the admission note, and I believe there’s a report from the Institute of Living. And they referenced other hospital settings that he had been in.”

“OK. What did the Newington Children’s Hospital report indicate to you? What did you read in that report?”

“The pieces that were germane for my assessment was where they described Billy as feeling not normal and also where they pointed out at the end that he would need a structured environment because he lacked internal psychological structure.”

“OK. What did you rely on in that report?”

“Well, the descriptions of him having a lower frustration tolerance and descriptions of him as having been diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder.”

“What did that mean to you?”

“This was likely a boy who has poor controls. He can’t control his emotions, is susceptible to outbursts, becoming explosive. Things of that nature.”

Everything Barile said seemed to fit into Billy’s insanity defense.

Will Delker had a different view of Barile’s opinions, and was about to expose a few facts that weighed heavily on the doctor’s credibility.

Barile’s first evaluation of Billy was quite a bit different from the opinion he now held, for example, and Delker was quick to take the doctor to task for suggesting otherwise.

“You described Mr. Sullivan,” suggested Delker, reading from a report, “as oriented…organized [and] able to think things through.”

Discharging Billy from the hospital, doctors found Billy showed “no evidence of psychotic symptoms.” Surprisingly, Barile wasn’t one of the doctors to note Billy’s condition upon discharge.

Delker had made his point. The doctor answered several more questions on cross and redirect, and was asked to step down.

On Friday, July 8, Paul Garrity and Richard Monteith called Dr. Richard Barnum, a child adolescent psychiatrist with nearly thirty years of experience and a medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. They had hired Barnum to evaluate Billy.

“I believe the murder very definitely was the product of his mental illness,” said Barnum. “If it were not for his mental illness, this would never have happened.”

A defense attorney, arguing insanity, couldn’t have asked for a more direct response. In Barnum’s paid opinion, it was simple: Billy shouldn’t be held accountable for his actions—he was nuts.

Barnum attempted to argue that at the exact time of the murder, with Nicole “pressuring” Billy on the telephone and Jeanne yelling at him, there was no way he could have made measured, sane decisions about what to do and how to handle the situation. He snapped. He felt he was being backed into a corner—and reacted to it.

“At that point, he felt…there was no other option than to complete the killing as planned,” suggested Barnum. “He wasn’t even aware, to some extent, of what he was doing.”

He was aware enough to make Nicole walk into the house to clean up the crime scene best she could, not to mention spending hours afterward hiding evidence.

After discussing the medications Billy had taken throughout his life and how unbalanced he was, Barnum said Billy was, in the simplest form of it, insane. No doubt about it.

During cross-examination, Delker did his best to poke holes in Barnum’s testimony and professional opinions, making jurors aware that Barnum offered his views of insanity in “only” two criminal cases, and here, during Billy’s trial, was testifying in court on the issue of insanity for the first time in his career.

Barnum was a bit quirky. For one, he stood during the entire duration of his testimony and, at times, did deep knee bends during bench conferences lawyers had with the judge. When asked why, Barnum said, “Since the attorneys asking questions stand, I think I should stand, too.”

Some claim successful lawyers are able to hold up a mirror to the witnesses they cross-examine, and using the witness’s own words, expose their weaknesses. Will Delker, throughout Billy’s trial, had mastered this with the precision of a sculptor. At one point, he smartly brought up Billy and Nicole’s previous failed attempts to kill Jeanne, sarcastically asking Barnum, “Those [actions] aren’t important to determine whether he was insane?”

The courtroom went silent. Everyone knew how critical a statement it was. How could Billy claim he was insane if he and his girlfriend had spent several days trying to kill Jeanne? A truly insane person rarely sets out to murder someone; instead, he or she likely makes a snap decision moments before the crime.

“I think that’s a weakness in my argument,” admitted Barnum.

In case the jury was confused by all the talk of Billy’s insanity, Delker and Wilson, on Monday, July 11, called Dr. Albert Drukteinis to explain how Billy’s actions throughout that week in August 2003 were not, perhaps, the product of a mentally ill man, but carefully thought-out choices.

Drukteinis was the trial’s final witness. Closing arguments, the judge promised, were to begin by the end of the day.

“This thing,” argued Drukteinis, “was a plot or a plan between Mr. Sullivan and his girlfriend toward a particular end.”

They had set out on a mission with the thought of completing it, in other words.

“This is not the isolated act of a deranged mentally ill person who is off in his own little world. This is something they
cooked up
together.”

In “cooking up” the perfect plan to take Jeanne’s life, Drukteinis suggested, Billy acted with a rational state of mind, carefully thinking things through, analyzing situations, drawing certain conclusions about what he should and should not do.

“There’s a rule of thumb in forensic psychology that says insanity doesn’t have conspirators.”

Will Delker and Kirsten Wilson were consummate professionals, with absolute experience in the ebb and flow of a courtroom and its proceedings. Ending the trial on this note served as a powerful blow to Billy’s attempt at proving he was crazy at the time he murdered Jeanne Dominico. The simple fact that Billy and Nicole tried to spike Jeanne’s coffee with poison, light her bed on fire and put bleach and other household-cleaning fluids in her food might have been stupid, childish and even evil, but it showed, Drukteinis explained to the jury, that Billy Sullivan knew
exactly
what he was doing—and, most important, that it was wrong.

Closing arguments were put off for a day. Billy’s lawyers decided, while cross-examining Drukteinis, to lay out Billy’s entire mental history once more for the jury. It was a brilliant move, in many respects. The longer Drukteinis stayed on the stand now, the better the chances the jury would forget how powerful his testimony actually was. On top of that, playing the sympathy card once again before deliberations could help Billy in more ways than one.

Paul Garrity and Richard Monteith had nothing short of a mountain to climb. After scrutinizing trial testimony, they couldn’t likely be satisfied that their case was going to be proven on the preponderance of the evidence (or lack thereof) alone, expert testimony included. They had to point out during their closing argument what, essentially, was running through Billy’s mind at the time he had murdered Jeanne. It wasn’t going to be easy. Billy hid evidence. Drove a vehicle. Changed clothes. Tried covering up his crimes. Spoke to police at the scene. And, of course, admitted to two people his role in the murder.

Unlike the nation’s other forty-nine states, under New Hampshire law, an insanity loophole exists, which allows jurors to develop their own basis for what constitutes a person’s alleged mental illness. This could help Billy Sullivan. If jurors truly believed he was insane when he butchered Jeanne Dominico, they didn’t necessarily have to spin it on a complicated merry-go-round of professional opinion. Nor did they have to share their reasoning behind such a decision. They simply had to agree that Billy was insane. No explanation was needed. It was a long shot, sure. But what else did Billy have left?

“New Hampshire’s insanity defense is unique among the states,” Will Delker explained later. “New Hampshire has a test requiring the jury to determine, one, whether the defendant has a mental illness, and, two, whether that mental illness caused the defendant to commit the murder. The jury has unfettered discretion in considering any and all relevant evidence on both of those points. They can consider both expert testimony and lay witnesses. This provides for a very broad and flexible standard for the jury to decide whether the defendant was insane when he committed the crime.”

Whatever the case, it was going to make for an interesting outcome.

Addressing the jury on July 12, 2005, the sixteenth full day of the proceedings, Paul Garrity apologized for going into such divergent, if not mind-numbing, detail regarding Billy’s past. He realized it was tedious testimony and perhaps complicated and prolonged the process, but a man’s life was at stake. In the end, it was Garrity’s obligation as Billy’s lawyer to present every piece of relevant information, hoping to substantiate his claims by providing testimony to bolster the argument that Billy was out of his mind when he murdered Jeanne Dominico. Sometimes, he wanted jurors to understand, that can be an extensive, tiring process.

Garrity then explained that, for perhaps the first time in his career as a trial attorney, having “done a lot of closing arguments…I can tell you this is probably the most nervous I’ve ever been, because the stakes are so high. So I hope you’ll bear with me. I’ll try to get through this as quickly as possible….”

He expressed further regret for the “torture” he said he had put the jury through the previous day, while meticulously going through what amounted to a mountain of medical reports and DCF (Child Social Services) evaluations.

“But there was a reason why we had to do it.” It was, he insisted, “to show the extent of Billy’s medical history.”

Jurors looked tired. It was the middle of summer. Many surely would have rather been poolside, sipping margaritas, watching the kids splash and yell. Having spent nearly the past month engrossed in such a brutal crime was certainly no way to spend the best days of the year.

“This was not just an ill boy,” Billy’s attorney suggested. “This was a seriously
disturbed
boy. This was a genetic problem that wasn’t going to be cured. He might have had some minor improvement in later years, but these serious illnesses weren’t going to go away.”

The implication became, as Garrity continued, that Billy had a monster buried inside of him all his life, one that he couldn’t control. But also, perhaps most important, a mental sickness he had no idea existed.

As he carried on, Garrity singled out Nicole, zeroing in on her role in her mother’s death. He indirectly suggested that Nicole begged Billy to murder Jeanne and put pressure on him to complete the task, attacking her character on all fronts: reminding jurors that she was reading a magazine when Billy committed the murder, how “evil” she seemed for the three days she spent on the witness stand and the fact that she helped Billy plan the entire crime—not once or twice—but on “four” separate occasions.

Obviously, what bothered the attorney most was Nicole’s demeanor during the moments before, during and after Jeanne’s murder.

“Can you imagine,” he said, tapping his finger on a leather-bound notebook in front of him, “knowing your mother is being killed and you’re
engrossed
in a magazine article?”

He shook his head in disgust. It was a fair criticism. Just the nature of it seemed cold, uncaring. It was incredible to think that Nicole was reading a teen magazine while her boyfriend savagely stabbed her mother to death. No matter what she said later, or how sorry she appeared to be after the fact, Nicole’s behavior showed a terrible lack of sympathy. She was merciless. How dare that girl walk into this courtroom and try to pin the entire murder on Billy?

“She’s the one that desperately wants to get out of [the house],” Garrity reminded jurors, adding, “She’s the one that’s obsessed with Billy,” pounding the table in front of him with his fist on each high note. “
She’s
the one who makes the phone call that sets this
whole
thing in motion. Everything revolves
around
Nicole Kasinskas.”

The truth hurt. There was no way to avoid it.

“You’ve got the life of a young man in your hands,” Garrity said, concluding an approximate forty-minute closing argument. “And I believe you’ll fairly and dispassionately look at
all
this evidence. We have confidence you’ll do so and we have confidence you’ll return the right verdict in this case and that would be a verdict of
not
guilty of murder,
not
guilty of conspiracy and”—he paused for effect—“
not
guilty by reason of insanity.

“Thank you very much for listening to me.”

The judge allowed the jury a ten-minute break before Will Delker took his turn at convincing the jury that Billy Sullivan was nothing more than a ruthless murderer who belonged in prison.