Appreciation — Marion Lavigne Madow

EAST CANAAN — The summer of 2009 may long be remembered for the exceptional number of deaths of prominent Americans: Sen. Ted Kennedy, Eunice Shriver, Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, Don Hewitt, Robert McNamara, Frank McCourt, Dominick Dunne, Jack Kemp and others. Northwest Corner residents were also saddened by the passing of several of their own most admired neighbors and by the tragic loss of young Kaelan Paton.

Barely reported was the death on July 9 of Marion Lavigne Madow at age 84 in Tolland in central Connecticut. Born in Ozone Park, N.Y., she had lived most of her life and had raised her children in East Canaan. Prior to her retirement, she was employed as a bookkeeper and office manager for Whittlesey & Hadley PC in Salisbury and later in Hartford. She was an EMT for the North Canaan Volunteer Ambulance for many years and was a life member of the Women’s Auxiliary, Couch-Pipa Post 6851 VFW.

The world took little notice of her existence until the mid-1970s when a horrifying murder in Falls Village focused national media attention on Litchfield County.  She became a reluctant celebrity because her courageous stand for justice was described in press reports, magazine articles, a television docudrama and in two books.

With her husband, Meyer “Mickey� Madow, she was the heart and soul of the astonishing chain of human events that saved an innocent teenager from long imprisonment while exposing the wrongdoing in Connecticut’s most famous miscarriage of justice. She deserves a few words here, however belated, because it is inspiring whenever an “ordinary� person, faced with a great challenge, performs nobly and heroically.

On the night of Sept. 28, 1973, Marion, Mickey and their two sons, because they responded swiftly to 18-year-old Peter Reilly’s telephoned cry for the volunteer ambulance, were the first to arrive at the scene of the Barbara Gibbons slaying. They saw Peter’s mother lying on the bedroom floor just 20 minutes or so after she had been destroyed in the most deadly assault in county history.

Within 24 hours, the state police obtained Peter Reilly’s detailed confession to the killing. Eight months later, a jury found him guilty of manslaughter. But Marion Madow was fully confident from the start that the gentle, self-effacing lad she knew intimately as a friend of the family could not possibly have taken his mother’s life.

She defied the authorities. She told Peter—who had never known his father, whose relatives were virtually unknown to him—that, no matter what might happen in the justice system, he had a home, and that he was now part of the Madow family.

Marion and Mickey, along with several other Canaan-area families, all equally sure of Peter’s innocence, spearheaded the nationally publicized movement that, within a few years, led to the youth’s full exoneration and to a grand jury condemnation of law enforcement’s behavior.

The struggle took its emotional toll. Photographs taken outside the Litchfield courthouse on the day of Peter’s conviction show Marion struck down by the enormity of the jury’s unexpected and incorrect verdict.

But there was ultimate satisfaction: full freedom for Peter and the knowledge that his case, because the eight-hour interrogation or “brainwashing� ordeal had been fully recorded, would enter the legal annals as perhaps the classic instance of powerful police tools of psychological persuasion producing a false confession from a wholly blameless crime suspect.

In the years since 1973, Peter has lived almost all of the time with the Madows, first in East Canaan, later in South Windsor and Tolland. After Mickey died on March 20, 2001, Peter became Marion’s principal caregiver in her final years.

He was never officially adopted because there was no need. The exonerated “convicted killerâ€� of the lurid headlines of 1974 was simply the brother of Arthur and Geoffrey Madow and a devoted son to Marion, his mother for more than a third of a century.    

— Donald Connery, Kent