Movement to Free Convicted Rapist-Killer Stirs Controversy : Courts: Richard Lapointe’s supporters contend his confession was coerced, but others, including his then-wife, disagree.

Richard Lapointe walked into the police station on July 4, 1989, and during nine hours of interrogation, confessed to raping and murdering an elderly woman who had treated him like a grandson.

For many, that would be enough to call it an open-and-shut case. But Lapointe’s treatment at the hands of the criminal justice system has become a cause celebre in Connecticut.

Today, Lapointe is prisoner No. 184163 at the MacDougall Correctional Institution in Suffield, where he probably will spend the rest of his life unless an appeal goes in his favor.

Outside prison, a dedicated group of about 20 supporters, a few famous and many of them advocates for the mentally retarded, have led efforts to free him.

As convinced as they are of his innocence, many of the people who knew Lapointe best, who spent holidays and special occasions with him, are equally sure of his guilt.

The crux of the appeal is whether Lapointe is a relatively intelligent man who willingly confessed to sexually assaulting, strangling and stabbing 88-year-old Bernice Martin, or whether he is so mentally impaired that he could not defend himself in a nine-hour interrogation and was tricked into incriminating himself.

“I’m different, you know, from the rest of the people,” Lapointe, 50, said in a recent prison interview. “I guess I’m a little slow or something like that.”

“The defendant has an average IQ. It’s 92,” Assistant State’s Atty. Rosita M. Creamer told the jury at the close of his trial three years ago. “This is nowhere close to being slightly retarded. Retarded is below 70.”

Lapointe’s story begins in 1960 as a 15-year-old growing up in one of Hartford’s roughest housing projects. He was a short, oddball kid with thick glasses; other teenagers sometimes tauntingly called him “Mr. Magoo.” He needed a hearing aid and tended to wobble when he walked.

Doctors diagnosed him with Dandy Walker Syndrome, a congenital condition in which a cyst forms on the brain from a buildup of fluid in the skull.

The doctors operated five times, using a shunt to drain the liquid that left him with an enlarged head. But the condition wasn’t caught in time. He suffered brain damage that left him with recurring headaches, dizziness and a short attention span. He was unable to finish high school.

Despite that, Lapointe led a seemingly normal life. He always had a job doing some sort of menial labor, such as washing dishes.

On Feb. 26, 1977, he married a woman with cerebral palsy, Karen Martin. Two years later, after a difficult pregnancy, Karen gave birth to a healthy son, Sean.

The family lived in a condominium in Manchester, near some members of her family. Lapointe even became the president of the condominium association. Their days were filled with routine: Richard would get up and go to work, washing dishes at a local restaurant, and Karen would take care of Sean.

On Sundays, after church, they would visit Karen’s grandmother, Bernice, who lived just a third of a mile away at a senior citizens housing complex.

At its start, March 8, 1987, was no different from any other Sunday. The family went over to Bernice’s house and spent the afternoon watching television. The Lapointes walked home afterward.

What Richard Lapointe did next is in dispute.

If you believe defense lawyers, the family got home and Karen began warming dinner. Lapointe may or may not have taken the dog out for a walk; he says he can’t remember. He watched TV while Karen got Sean ready for bed upstairs. She came downstairs, finding her husband in front of the television set. End of story.

If you believe police and prosecutors, while Karen was upstairs with Sean, Richard walked back over to Bernice’s home, finding her alone, wearing a pink housecoat. He made a pass at her, which she rejected. He grabbed her, threw her on her bed and raped her. She threatened to tell Karen, so Richard grabbed a steak knife from the kitchen, stabbed her and strangled her. Then he set fire to various areas of the apartment to cover up the crime and returned home.

About 8 p.m., Natalie Howard, who is Bernice’s daughter and Karen’s aunt, called Karen to say she was worried because she had tried calling her mother and got no answer.

At Howard’s request, Richard, who was home at the time, walked over to Bernice’s home. He said he knocked on her door but got no response, then went to a neighbor’s to use the phone to call Howard. She told him to check again.

When he went over a second time, Richard said he spotted smoke and went to the neighbor’s to call 911. He was still there when firefighters and paramedics arrived.

The crime remained unsolved for more than two years when police called Richard at home and asked him to come to police headquarters. Because Lapointe did not drive, an officer picked him up.

Police detectives Paul Lombardo and Michael Morrissey used a deceptive, though legal, method in questioning Lapointe. They told him that they knew he murdered Martin, that his fingerprints were on the knife.

Morrissey, in a separate interview with Karen, told her that police had DNA evidence linking him to the crime. None of this was true.

Over a period of nine hours, police interrogated him in a room on the second floor of police headquarters. Lombardo questioned him first, starting about 4 p.m.; Morrissey took over later. Lapointe was given breaks to go to the bathroom and to get food at the station’s snack machines.

Lapointe signed three confessions, all of which were written by police and signed by him. In the first one, he said her death was an accident and his “mind went blank.”

In the second, he said he strangled her after she rebuffed his advances. Then he said: “If the evidence shows that I was there and that I killed her, then I killed her. But I don’t remember being there.”

The third was much more detailed, with minutiae only the killer, and perhaps the police, would have known. He described what she was wearing, where he threw her clothes as he ripped them off, how he raped her, then masturbated on the bedspread, and how he stabbed her in the stomach with a knife that had a hard, plastic brown handle.

The police testified that he made other incriminating statements during the interview, including, “If I tell you everything, the whole town will know I am a sex fiend.”

During the trial, a forensic scientist testified that the killer had Type A blood. Lapointe is Type A. His defenders say that so is 40% of the population at large.

Psychological tests showed that Lapointe has a low ability to control anger. A neighbor said he could become angry and threatening at times.

There also were other incidents that prosecutors said demonstrated a pattern of sexual aggression. At age 21, Lapointe was arrested on suspicion of indecent exposure. Later, he was accused of being a Peeping Tom.

Lapointe admitted that he may have been a little drunk when he was arrested on the exposure charge, but said his pants were only ripped. In the prison interview, he said he did not know why he had been accused of being a peeper.

Lapointe’s public defenders, Christopher Cosgrove and Patrick Culligan, argued that the confessions should not have been admitted in court because his handicaps make him too trusting of authorities.

Lapointe would have said anything the police wanted him to say, they argued. The police probably fed him the details in the third confession, they said. He also was denied a lawyer. Besides, Lapointe is so simple-minded that he only confessed so that he could go to the bathroom, get something to eat and go home, the public defenders said.

Asked why someone would confess to murder so he could use the bathroom, Lapointe said: “I guess because I had to go to the bathroom so much and I was in so much pain that I just wanted to get out of there.

“The police kept on saying things, and I just kept agreeing with them.”

During the interview, Lapointe was insistent that police had tricked him. On that point he was clear.

But on specific questions about why he confessed, or why he had acted a certain way, his responses were often, “I have no idea,” or “I don’t remember.”

“He went to the bathroom by himself and when he returned, he sat right back down in the same chair and kept on talking,” Creamer, the prosecutor, told jurors.

When he said he was hungry, he was taken to vending machines at the station, she said. He chose cookies and juice.

“The defendant never asked to leave. He exhibited no hearing problems, no confusion, no problems understanding,” Creamer said during the trial.

When Lapointe wanted to call a lawyer, Lombardo said that he pushed a phone in front of him but that he did not use it. And even though the interview dragged on until about 1 a.m., Lapointe wanted to keep talking, Creamer said.

Capt. Joseph Brooks had to forcibly eject him from the police station, she said.

He was arrested the next day.

Creamer said Lapointe’s attorneys put on the “poor Richard defense.” Creamer told the jurors, “People confess all the time. Smart people do it, and dumb people do it. Retarded people do it, and geniuses do it.”

The judge, in a 40-page decision, rejected the defense motion, and the confessions were admitted into evidence.

After one hour of deliberations on June 30, 1992, a jury convicted Lapointe of murder, rape and arson.

An appeal, which contends that police elicited false confessions from him, is pending before the Connecticut Supreme Court.

His supporters are absolutely convinced of his innocence.

Richard’s father, three brothers and two sisters remain supportive but have taken a back seat in the campaign by the activist community that has rallied around him.

His supporters are a diverse lot. Robert Perske, a Lapointe supporter and a past president of the Connecticut chapter of The Arc, formerly known as the Assn. for Retarded Citizens, is their leader.

Perske has made something of a career out of following what he calls “wrong-man cases.” He tracks dozens of them, especially those involving people he believes are mentally slow.

When asked whether he could be wrong in the Lapointe case, he said, “I know him. I like him. One thing he is not is violent. He will never be that. He didn’t do it.”

Another outspoken supporter is Donald Connery, author of the book, “Guilty Until Proven Innocent,” which details another Connecticut case in which the defendant confessed.

Peter Reilly admitted murdering his mother, but a judge overturned his conviction based on the confession, which apparently was sweated out of him over 24 hours of questioning.

Playwright Arthur Miller, best known for “Death of a Salesman,” had been involved in the Reilly case and has spoken out on behalf of Lapointe. He said he believes that Lapointe’s rights were more egregiously violated than Reilly’s.

Although he has never met Lapointe, Miller says, “They asked me to help them publicize it. I know the fundamentals. I know enough about him. . . . I don’t think he’s capable of the whole thing.”

The support group, called the Friends of Richard Lapointe, held a symposium in Hartford in September called “Convicting the Innocent,” which focused on the Lapointe case and others.

The event drew attorneys, authors, psychologists and others from across the country. Stephen Greenspan, a University of Connecticut psychology professor and the president of the Academy on Mental Retardation, concluded that Lapointe’s IQ does not accurately pinpoint his intelligence. His social intelligence, meaning his day-to-day interaction with people, is much lower, he said.

Many of the people who had day-to-day interaction with him are sure he’s guilty. Karen has divorced him and doesn’t want to discuss the case.

Ruth Fiddler, the victim’s daughter, constantly replays one scene in her mind. Her mother was telling her that Richard often would stop by her house at night alone and uninvited. Her mother told her the visits made her nervous.

Fiddler said, “I’ve been so sorry ever since that I didn’t ask her more about it.”

The activist movement has succeeded in keeping Lapointe’s case alive in the news media. The family is being forced to relive the tragedy again and again, Creamer said.

“It’s distressing to me to see all this pro-Lapointe publicity, including misrepresentations about what happened during the trial,” Creamer said. “They went through the pain of her death. They went through each day of the trial.”

Fiddler said she knows that his supporters sincerely believe that they are doing the right thing, but she believes that they are misguided.

Every Wednesday, Lapointe’s supporters meet at a Burger King in Wethersfield to plan their next move.