Re: 5/17/02 - New Haven Advocate: Penny's Ghost; Blood Never Lies. Does It?
After 29 years, Phil DeLieto tells his side of the Penney Serra case.
By Paul Bass
The 'Nam flashbacks started again. So did the phone calls from people he didn't know. So did the stares, the whispers and the constant straight-up questions. The reporters started calling again.
There was no escape.
The Penney Serra murder was back in the news. And Phil DeLieto was on trial again.
Not technically on trial. No one ever arrested Phil DeLieto for the murder. His blood didn't match the killer's blood. In fact, the police arrested someone else for the murder--two someone elses.
No matter. Since the state began trying Edward Grant two weeks ago for the 1973 murder of Concetta "Penney" Serra in a downtown New Haven parking garage, the nightmare that has roiled Phil DeLieto's life for almost three decades has returned with vengeance.
DeLieto has stayed away from the Superior Courthouse since the trial began. But the press is filled again with the accusation that he might have been the real killer. He's been told he might be subpoenaed to testify in the case--the possible killer who can cast enough doubt into the minds of jurors. The star witness who can distract their attention from the blood from the murder scene that matches Edward Grant's DNA.
"I'm afraid of the way I'm gonna act in the courtroom," DeLieto said last week in an exclusive interview. "I don't want to make a scene. ... I can answer all their questions. But I'm not a dog. You're not gonna whip me. I'm gonna bite you. After 30 years, I've earned the right. If I have to explode, I will. Sooner or later, I have to let it out."
He knows an outburst would only help the defense persuade jurors that he might be the true killer who got away. He doesn't care, he says.
He's decided not even to bother getting a lawyer. Just as he resisted relatives' urging to hire an attorney back in 1973, when he was suspect #1.
"They can't hurt me. After 30 years, they can't do anything else," DeLieto says. "For years I was humble. Now something has to be done. I need some closure. Maybe just letting off some steam.
"Why is it that every time they arrest a murderer in this case, I'm on trial? I've been cleared more than last month's paycheck. Four separate investigations. Why am I still defending myself? Why am I on trial? Why must my 80-year-old mother have to wake up in the morning and cry?"
Because Phil DeLieto is useful. He's been useful to different people, for different reasons, ever since the summer afternoon when a 21-year-old woman's bloody body was discovered stabbed to death. Penney Serra's murder caused collateral damage: It tormented the life of her father, who until his death was consumed with finding the killer, and the lives of two people accused but then exonerated of her murder, Anthony Golino and Phil DeLieto.
Like a former New Havener from a different walk of life--onetime Yale professor and U.S. intelligence officer James Van de Velde, publicly accused but never charged in another sensational unsolved murder that terrified New Haven, that of Yale student Suzanne Jovin--Phil DeLieto has decided he can stay quiet no longer. He needs to tell his story.
"I don't talk to reporters."
"Why not?"
"I don't like youse. ..."
When he's not sitting out the latest Serra publicity at home, you can find Phil DeLieto at the Wagon Wheel, a restored Wild West-style saloon in New Haven's Annex neighborhood. Phil's brother Jack bought and beautifully restored the joint three years ago. Phil helps him manage it.
The first thing you notice when you go to see DeLieto there is the white Lincoln with the telephone antenna, parked across the street. A man sits in it checking out who comes and goes. He writes a note, then ducks his head.
DeLieto says the car sits there, with the young man inside, a couple of hours a day. "A little car will come by soon," he says. Other times a state police car, this one marked, sits down the block.
His guess? Drug dealers, watched by a cop.
Does he think maybe someone's watching him?
"I'm not that paranoid yet," he says. "If I thought it was, I'd go out and break the window."
You wouldn't begrudge Phil DeLieto some paranoia. After all, for years he was tailed by cops, interrogated, reinterrogated, watched.
He prefers not to talk about his inner demons, he says, even to his wife. He has generally avoided reporters (except when Mike Wallace convinced him he'd look less guilty if he appeared on 60 Minutes' 1986 segment portraying him as the murderer).
Today, though, he pulls up a stool in the Wagon Wheel's showcase pool room next to the main barroom and pulls out a pack of Lucky Strikes. The story he's kept bottled up now pours out like Budweiser from the tap.
At 51, DeLieto has put on 90 pounds since the '70s. His walrus mustache has turned salt-and pepper. He wears a washed-out blue denim shirt and jeans, and loafers.
"Vietnam," he says, "was a walk in the park compared to this."
Not that Vietnam was easy. He quit high school to sign up. He entered the Marines in 1969. He spent two years in South Vietnam. He saw horrors that to this day he won't discuss, even with his therapist at the VA hospital. "I chose to block it out," he says. But the "atrocities" flash back when he feels under particular stress. Every time the murder mystery that won't die returns to the news.
DeLieto was "rambling around," not doing much, the year he returned from Vietnam to his East Haven home. That year he met a clerk working at Andy's Market on the town's Main Street, a fun-loving gal named Penney Serra. They hit it off and started going out.
"She was a fun person, always looking at the brighter side," DeLieto remembers. "But she had a hard life. She lost her mom when was around 12."
The couple lived separately. Their favorite times, he says, were at Lighthouse Point, "playing in the water like little kids."
At one point they were engaged, he says. They broke up. They got back together. Penney's father, John, didn't approve of Phil. He and Phil would argue. Shortly before the murder, according to Phil, he and Penney got back together but hid it from her dad.
The July weekend in 1973 before Penney's murder, the couple went to Rhode Island. The defense in the current murder trial plans to suggest that she took him there to break up with him, and that he hit her and knocked her down.
DeLieto tells the story differently. He says she invited him there to spend the weekend with some of her friends. He remembers no arguments, no breakup.
"She invited me to Rhode Island to tell me she had another boyfriend, so I would beat her up?" he asks rhetorically.
Phil was working by then. He manned the grill at the State Federal Luncheonette, his dad's restaurant at Chapel and Olive streets in New Haven. He says he was busy making sandwiches for the lunch crowd around noon on July 16, when a man chased after Serra in the Temple Street parking garage and knifed her.
He left work around 4, driving his grandmother home, he says. He usually hung out there until 7 so he could drive her to bingo. At dinner he heard about a murder on Channel 8. The report didn't identify the victim.
Meanwhile, his brother Jack and buddy Ron Bayer, driving home from Hartford, heard a radio report that identified Serra. They came looking for Phil to break the news. The three say they then drove Phil home, where they found cops searching the apartment. The cops took DeLieto to a station then on Court Street in downtown New Haven. Jack and Bayer came along.
DeLieto was the prime suspect. The cops put him in a lineup before an eyewitness, a man who'd been smoking pot in the garage and caught a glimpse of a guy driving toward him. Before the lineup, though, the witness caught a glimpse of DeLieto at the station. Some suggest that was intentional, to prejudice him to ID DeLieto.
The threesome stayed until 3 a.m. They all appeared, next to one other, in the lineup, along with a group of cops in plain clothes. The eyewitness picked out DeLieto.
But the cops never got enough evidence to charge him. It wasn't for want of trying. For years he was the prime suspect.
His last name didn't help--or, in the view of some people, it helped too much. The police chief at the time was Biagio DiLieto--same last name, except for one letter. Phil's dad and Biagio were cousins. DiLieto would later become mayor.
That was a double whammy for Phil DeLieto. On the one hand, people charged--and continued to charge for years, continue to suggest during this trial--that the police chief had detectives cover up the case for his relative.
On the other hand, Phil accuses Nick Pastore, then chief of detectives, of having a motive to nail him: He says Pastore wanted to embarrass the chief so he could get the top job.
"I can understand him being upset with me," Pastore says today. "We were tenacious in our pursuit. There was no other motive than to apprehend the murderer of Penney Serra. Given the circumstance of '73, we had no other choice than to vigorously pursue." Phil DeLieto, as Serra's boyfriend, was an obvious suspect.
"Given the new forensic evidence, which we didn't have access to in the '70s, I do believe that Phil DeLieto is innocent of any complicity in the murder," Pastore now says.
But the city couldn't forget the case. Although it was an isolated murder, conceivably a crime of passion between two people who knew each other, it symbolized a scary downtown in the minds of suburbanites who stayed away from New Haven. That kept the murder--and Phil DeLieto--in the news. So did Penney's late father, John, a mechanic who devoted the last 15 years of his life to hounding law enforcement and the media to find the elusive killer.
DeLieto tried to push the case out of his mind. He didn't even attend Penney's wake or funeral. He says police warned him to stay away for his own safety.
"I wasn't allowed to grieve. I felt frustrated with everything and everybody," he says. "My way out was to go drinking. I went out drinking a lot. There were times I would lock myself in a hotel for two days to drink and sleep and get away from the world."
"I never worried for a second about going to jail," he says. But he felt trapped. He didn't want to leave town for a vacation. "I figured that would look worse." To this day, he says, he won't got to an outdoor festival in New Haven or show his face much around town. He doesn't go to the beach anymore, either.
For two years he would see a cop tailing him at least every week or two, he says. Close friends and especially his brothers Anthony and Jack, stuck by him. But other friends, he says, understandably felt uncomfortable around him.
DeLieto almost got a respite in the mid-'80s, after police charged Anthony Golino with the murder. But on the eve of his trial, a blood test exonerated him. Then 60 Minutes came to town. It, too, tried to prove that Phil DeLieto committed the murder and that his cousin covered it up. They couldn't prove it, but they succeeded in making him look guilty. As a result, DeLieto's family received a new round of threatening phone calls. And the looks and questions from people abounded once more.
In the '90s came two breaks: a breakup with his first wife. (Their three children live with her; Phil has remarried.) And a break from the state: It did DNA testing on blood believed to be the killer's, found on a handkerchief at the murder scene. The blood didn't match Phil DeLieto's. It did match the blood of Edward Grant.
"Every day, it's like I'm on trial."
But now that Grant is on trial, the spotlight has returned to DeLieto, since Grant's best defense requires showing that police bumbled the evidence and covered up for the real killer. The New Haven Register has been filled with prominent daily stories on the trial, including repeated quotes (and a front-page photo) fingering DeLieto as a prime suspect. His family has taken to not answering the phone unless they recognize the phone numbers of the callers. Often, they don't.
At least TV has left him alone, thanks to the Michael Skakel trial down in Norwalk. Luckily, Phil DeLieto muses, "I'm not a Kennedy cousin."
But he's tired, he says, of being "the scapegoat. I was handy."
First he was handy to opponents of a police chief-turned-mayor with a similar last name and distant family connection. Then he was handy to a national TV newsmagazine needing a villain for a case it couldn't solve. Now he's handy to an accused killer needing to point the finger at someone else.
Yes, Phil DeLieto says. He knows defense lawyers and reporters are just doing their jobs. "But you're grinding me and my family into the dirt while you're doing your job."
Let's just say the state succeeds in convicting Edward Grant. Maybe DeLieto can find peace then?
He doesn't bank on it. In many people's minds, he says, he will always be the man who murdered Serra.
Besides, he adds, "after 30 years, how do you stop looking over your shoulder?"
Paul Bass can be reached at pbass@newhavenadvocate.com.
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Blood Never Lies. Does It?
A Serra Courtroom Diary
By Colleen Van Tassell
Tuesday
Skipped breakfast. Circled the block around the courthouse looking for a parking space. Silly me, I remembered, this is New Haven, so I pulled into the garage on Church Street. I passed two attendants talking about the Serra trial.
"He did it," one guy said.
"Yeah, they got his fingerprint, man," his co-worker agreed. "That DNA shit's got him."
It's been shaping up as that kind of week in the trial that has New Haven captivated. The state put on its best experts to prove that Edward Grant killed 21-year-old Penney Serra in the Temple Street garage in July, 1973. It was all about blood and DNA. For decades no one knew who killed Serra. Now they've got the blood. Blood never lies.
It sounded so simple. Too simple.
Today, the state offered up the testimony of a former detective who, among other things, was responsible for the care and feeding of the prosecution's star witness--a blood-smeared handkerchief found on the 7th floor of the garage near a set of keys (that's since gone missing). The same one purported to genetically link defendant Edward Grant to the Temple Street Garage on July 16, 1973.
I'll recap in my own way here. In an effort to identify red stains of various origins found on the hanky, Det. Donald Beausejour sent it hither and yon months after Serra's murder. First it went to local and state police labs. The labs couldn't find anything conclusive. So Beausejour next sent the hanky to a lab at Yale. Nothing. Then he sent it to Pond Lily in New Haven. They were not equipped to handle it. Beausejour sent it on through the mail to the DuPont corporation in Delaware. Nothing again, so the detective drove it to an army lab in Natick, Mass. Nothing.
All the while, these kind lab techs were cutting chunks of the hanky to examine. It was beginning to look like Swiss cheese. In a last-ditch effort, Beausejour took it to nearby Olin Corp. No one from these labs would ever testify to any of their findings in court. No reports, from any lab, were written during that time.
Beausejour couldn't recall if any of the lab analysts used gloves in handling the handkerchief. I couldn't help but think that by this time this key piece of evidence had more fingerprints than a public pay phone receiver.
Beside hanky duty, Beausejour also took a statement on the afternoon of the murder from Gary Hyrb, one of three teens who were smoking herb during their lunch break the day of the murder. Hyrb said a guy in a blue car almost ran him over, stopped, then fled. He later picked Phil DeLieto (Serra's ex-fiancee) out of a line-up. He described the guy as being five-ten to six-foot tall, medium build, collar length hair, short sleeve loose fitting shirt and dark trousers. DeLieto became a prime suspect, but was never charged with the crime. (See accompanying story.)
Before prosecutors cried foul--they noted that Hyrb and DeLieto saw each other moments before the lineup; therefore the process was tainted--I couldn't help but remember the testimony of another superteen eyewitness in this trial, Timothy Woodstock of Westbrook. Woodstock had testified days earlier that the man he saw chasing a young woman out of a car was neat, had short hair, wore a golf type shirt and light green trousers. Height five-foot seven.
A completely different description. Offered days later.
I thought to myself: Were there two men involved in this? Or, was there a police cover-up, as many have suspected over the years?
After hearing about the hanky, the line-up, the hanky again, prosecutor Jim Clark asked if DeLieto went voluntarily to the station that night for a line-up.
"Yes," answered Beausejour.
That was too much for Anthony Golino, who comes every day to the trial to watch and jeer from the peanut gallery. Golino, like Phil DeLieto, was a prime suspect once in the Serra murder and has never recovered from the publicity. In fact, police arrested him, but the state had to release him because his blood type didn't match the killer's. Now Golino wants to see Edward Grant exonerated in this trial--and Phil DeLieto pegged for the murder.
"That's a lie!" Golino blurted, although barely audibly. "That's a lie--that's a flat-out lie."
Well, Judge Jon Blue's clerk heard a potty-mouth version, or so he thought. "That's a fucking lie," he reported Golino saying, to Blue. So Blue bounced Golino from the proceedings until the next day.
Another detective testified. I kind of nodded off. It was more of the same. Pretty much, he said that he found glasses in the car. They took black and white photos instead of color back then because it was cheaper. He took blood samples using Scotch tape. As was standard protocol for the Kojak generation, he didn't use gloves, either.
I came back from lunch (a fistful of leftover chicken and peanuts) only to find this little pudge of a woman on the stand. Next to her was one of those big briefcases that lawyers carry. She wore a blue suit and had serious hair. She was cute.
"State your name for the record. ..."
"Elaine Pagliaro, assistant director, Connecticut Forensics Science Labratory, assistant director acting as director ..."
Oh crap. Here comes the science.
I now know, courtesy of the Science Lady, that 45 percent of the Caucasian population has O type blood, 40 percent has A; 11 percent has B, and 4 percent has A/B.
Her testimony revealed that, from tests conducted at the state lab in the '70s, there were two types of blood found at the crime scene. Type A, Serra's blood, was on her dress, purple bra, and half slip. All the other blood, believed to be the killer's blood (found in a trail in the garage, in the car, on a tissue box in the back seat of the car and on the hanky) had traces of type O. Blood on the garage ticket (believed to be handed to the attendant by the killer with his right hand as his left was injured) was inconclusive.
In the back row of the galley, a man started snoring loudly, the kind you hear on snore guard commercials. A reporter poked him. Later in the hallway, defense lawyer Tom Ullmann remarked how odd it is that two decades-old murder cases were being tried simultaneously in Connecticut (the other one being the Michael Skakel/Martha Moxley show in Norwalk).
"I wonder if anyone's falling asleep down in Norwalk,"
remarked Ullmann. "I know I'm no Mickey Sherman but c'mon ..."
Chicken for dinner. It was rubbery.
Wednesday
God help me and all those in my remedial biology class back at Our Lady of Lourdes. A motley crew of dimwits, we smoked pot and squirted liquid into light sockets to see them smoke. I pray none of us gets called to sit on a murder trial of this magnitude: One requiring a big projector, a huge model of the garage, laptops, and laser pointers.
A man's freedom hangs on sifting through terms that science wankers beat off to, not to mention having the balls to question its certitude.
A juror in the first row looks like mom. Could mom understand this DNA stuff enough to weigh its credibility? My mom did make an astute observation about the theory that Penney could've been killed with a knife that was in her car, supplied by her girlfriend's mom, to cut sandwiches on a road trip. "Why wouldn't the mother just cut the sandwiches" instead of sending the knife with the young women, mom wondered. "That's what moms do."
Perhaps kitchen logic could sustain a murder trial. Perhaps I underestimate the jury.
10:00 in the courtroom was the same as any other during this trial. Prosecutor Jim Clark (I can call him by his first name as I've now seen the back of his head for a week now) paced. Defense attorney Tom Ullmann paced, hand on hip, revealing striped suspenders. Ullmann's socks sag. I stare at the back of his head, too. Mickey Sherman he's not, but a little bit of ankle-showing adds just enough down-to-earth appeal. Clark leans against a desk, facing the jury. Both have fans on the jury.
I spotted a chart in the corner of the room that read: "DNA is in the cell." Given that a juror fell asleep, maybe mimes could act it out.
Tony Golino returned today. He promised the judge he'd keep quiet. If Golino can't put the Serra case behind him, he's at least getting another 15 minutes in the limelight. As he settled in court, Leon Collins, a Channel 8 reporter, slid next to Golino in back of the courtroom and asked Golino for his phone number. WELI asked Golino to appear on its morning show periodically. Funny, I thought. Channel 8 has all but ignored this trial three blocks from its studios. Now, the media wants to hear Golino's story after he gets bounced from the trial.
Science Lady returned today, too. I realized the reason for Science Lady's big briefcase. It stored a couple of bombs.
Bomb number one: In Sept. 1997, Ed Grant's blood was tested--determined to be type O.
Bomb number two: there was a bit of a storage issue. Seems in the infancy of the state forensics lab, when it was located in an old facility, physical evidence was stored in a converted men's room. In "a big box." With no temperature control, Science Lady said.
Yes, highly sensitive decades-old materials that, years later, would point the genetic finger of guilt, were stored in a men's room.
"Age, heat, humidity, bacteria, moisture all may affect a sample in degradation," testified Science Lady.
Blood never lies?
I rest my case.
At least for that day.
Thursday
"Bye honey, have a nice day," Joe said, travel coffee cup in hand. "Enjoy Dr. Lee's performance on the stand ... I did." Joe's covering the Skakel/Moxley trial in Norwalk Superior Court. What are the odds of an engaged couple of reporters simultaneously covering two murder trials from the '70s? Both featuring star cameos by the famous forensic scientist Dr. Henry Lee? Better than the odds stacked against Ed Grant today.
As soon as I saw Dr. Lee on the stand, I understood Joe's choice of words.
Fresh in from testifying at the Moxley trial, Lee sat in the back waiting to be called. The celebrity sleuth looked small without TV cameras surrounding him. There were no media tents sent up outside in front of the courthouse for this trial. Serra wasn't rich enough. She wasn't possibly killed by Kennedy kin.
But Lee, who worked for the public defender in his early career before switching to the state's side, still played to the jury. Many of them ate it up.
Consider the look on a female juror's face as Lee sat down. It was watching like Darla mooning over Alfalfa, hands cupped under her chin. String one end of a strand of spaghetti in her mouth and the other in Lee's and, it'd have been an accurate recreation of Lady and the Tramp.
Lee's a star, granted. Put him on the stand, and just about everyone will believe what he says.
He even uses a big magnifying glass to read documents. For effect, I wondered?
"We literally work in the men's room," Lee said with a laugh. Illustrating that procedures were not as advanced then as they are today, Lee joked, gesturing the use of a straw, "We used to have to suck and blow blood [onto lab equipment]."
Through the use of photos provided to him 15 years after the murder by New Haven cops, Lee says he determined that Penney tried to run up the stairs, was stabbed, then slid down the steps and died.
She ran barefoot from her killer, Lee suspects. Her killer was injured on his left hand at some point and bled out on the left side of Serra's car and on the left side of the interior. And on the pink tissue box.
Lee, along with cops, state attorneys and Serra family members, went to the garage to reenact the crime.
He has changed his tune over the years. He now says that the hanky, found three levels down from the murder scene, was linked to the crime. He originally said the opposite.
Lee testified that in 1988, the state found seminal fluid on Penney's panties. Now, he says, those findings were wrong. Similar elements commonly found in semen can be caused by vaginal discharge. And, he added, by cauliflower.
"But you don't find cauliflower in panties," shot back Ullmann, trying to cut through Lee's shtick without alienating the jury.
"But you can't always leap to semen," said Lee.
After "Shecky" Lee left (he signed an autograph on the way), in walked Kenneth Kidd, a geneticist from Yale.
Then came the bomb to stink out all bombs: Just like a California DNA expert (whose research with the Innocence Project has exonerated dozens of suspects) had testified the previous day, Kidd also claimed that the chances that the blood at the crime scene came from anyone but Grant is one in four or six trillion. Grant stepped into a genetic minefield.
Another lab expert took the stand. Virginia Maxwell, whose specialty is identifying trace materials in crimes, spoke with a proper Lady Diana accent. Who wouldn't believe a scientist with a British accent who says "la-bor-a-tory"?
Her findings? That a substance on the hanky was auto paint.
When Clark handed her the much handled hanky, she asked for gloves.
Friday
Gerald Hanahan, a retired inspector, took the stand promptly at 10 a.m. Hanahan first interviewed Grant in September 1997, after the state police laboratory linked a fingerprint at the murder scene to Grant's prints, which were taken after a 1994 arrest for domestic abuse.
Grant admitted to an investigator that one of the reasons he might be in New Haven back in 1973 was to go to a local auto body shop on business (hence Maxwell's findings of paint on the hanky).
Hanahan also told the jury that Grant submitted to a blood test and cooperated with him during his inquiry.
Is Grant that dumb? I thought. Or could he, in a trillion to one chance, be innocent?
Colleen Van Tassell can be reached at CVT@newhavenadvocate.com.
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