Richard
Lapointe gently shook my hand, asked for my press I.D. and made
a joke.
"Strong like bull," he said with a wink when I asked how he's
feeling. "Smell like bull, too."
This was the benign jokester his friends told me about. But I
had come to the maximum-security McDougall-Walker Correctional
Institution in Suffield looking for the man convicted of raping
and murdering his wife's 88-year-old grandmother on a Sunday
evening in 1987.
What I found was a small shuffling man with short arms, a large
head and oversize glasses. He wears a hearing aid in each ear.
Lapointe, 64, has an intellectual disability called Dandy-Walker
syndrome, a congenital brain malformation. Lapointe is eager to
please and quick with the self-deprecating humor.
We quickly got down to the crime and the infamous three signed
confessions he made to police during a long night of questioning
two years after the murder.
"I didn't do it," Lapointe responded. "They were asking me
questions and I was answering their questions. They made a trick
question. Why would I confess to something I didn't do?"
On Monday, a Superior Court judge in Rockville — in response to
a ruling in Lapointe's favor from the state Appellate Court —
will take yet another look at this endlessly appealed saga of
what is either a wrongful conviction or a very crafty mentally
disabled murderer. The latest hearing on whether Lapointe
deserves a new trial represents a dramatic, perhaps final,
showdown in a case that has long attracted national attention.
Lapointe's lawyers say critical exculpatory evidence, including
notes from an arson investigator that suggest the crime took
much longer than police said, was suppressed during Lapointe's
1992 trial.
Lapointe, with an I.Q. of about 80, was polite and talkative,
without bitterness. There was only sadness and jokes when we
talked.
"I was a dishwasher. I did the lowest job in the building," he
explained. "I loved my job. I loved my wife. I loved my son."
The long days in prison are spent doing simple word puzzles,
playing cards and watching TV, though he told me he has no
particular show he likes. He doesn't have a prison job.
On March 8, 1987, Bernice Martin was stabbed once in the stomach
and 10 times in the back. She was sexually assaulted, bound up
and dragged about her small apartment, which was set on fire
after the attack. She died of a combination of strangulation and
smoke inhalation. The fire destroyed nearly all DNA material
from the crime scene.
Two years later, during a nine-hour interrogation, Lapointe gave
three different and conflicting confessions to police. Lapointe,
who doesn't read well, signed all of them. There is no audio or
video recording of the interrogation.
"I loved her like my grandmother. I used to visit her with my
wife. I'd run to the store with her," Lapointe said about
Martin.
His wife has long since divorced him. He has no contact with his
son. The Friends of Richard Lapointe, a band of now elderly
supporters, visit him weekly.
"Without them, I'd be dead," he said. "Without seeing people
from the outside, I wouldn't know what's going on. They all
believe and know I didn't do anything."
The Friends, who number a few dozen, have never given up because
they've never understood how a man with limited mental capacity
and physical ability could suddenly and violently murder an old
woman, all during a break from Sunday night TV watching. They
have stood by Lapointe through a series of lawyers and 18 years
of mostly bad news.
But a year ago, the state Appellate Court breathed new life into
Lapointe's claim that he didn't strangle, stab and sexually
assault an old woman. The court ruled that evidence viewed in
"the light most favorable" to Lapointe supports his alibi,
"albeit tenuously."
For years, Lapointe's supporters have excoriated Manchester
police and the state's attorney's office for relying on the
three confessions to convict Lapointe. For example, Lapointe
confessed to strangling Martin with his hands. A medical
examiner testified that she was asphyxiated by pressure from a
blunt object.
There are other questions. Gloves found at the crime scene
didn't belong to Lapointe. Although Lapointe confessed to
stabbing Martin on the couch, forensic evidence suggested that
the stabbing occurred in Martin's bedroom. He said Martin was
wearing a "pink house coat." No clothing similar to that was
found at the scene. DNA from a pubic hair found on Martin's
clothing doesn't match Lapointe's.
I asked Lapointe about the police investigators and the long
night of questioning that led to the three confessions that sunk
him. Lapointe defended the police.
"What's wrong with that? They were doing their job," he said.
"I'm not mad at them. It's their job."
But later he told me, "They just kept talking to me. I couldn't
say I want to go home. I just kept talking to them. There was
nothing wrong. I don't remember saying that I did it. Why should
I say that? I'm not stupid. ..."
"I miss working. I miss talking to people. I miss my wife, my
ex-wife. I miss my son," he said. "I have no regrets for being
here. That's not my problem. That's the state's problem. They
just said I did it. I've been trying to prove I didn't do it."
My hour visit ended and I departed with more questions about how
this frail, disabled man got here. Lapointe, a man who has lost
everything, was serene.
"Why should I be angry?" he asked before I left. "I've never
been angry in my life."