NORTHAMPTON — Prosecutors on Wednesday showed a jury a three-hour police interview in which a man on trial for attempted murder detailed his daughter’s history of illness and confessed to trying to kill her on two occasions to end her suffering from medical issues.
In the video from May 20, 2015, Christopher Conley confessed to mixing saline and Liquid-Plumr into the 7-year-old girl’s cecostomy tube — an implanted tube used to flush the intestines — and then giving her an overdose of pain medication on April 15, 2015.
The girl suffered severe damage to her intestines and bladder as a result, Assistant District Attorney Linda Pisano said in her opening statement to the jury Tuesday in Hampshire Superior Court.
But Conley’s attorney Mark H. Bluver, of Greenfield, said in court Tuesday that Conley had made a false confession. Bluver said the girl’s injuries were not the result of drain cleaner but rather of a rare but natural medical condition that doctors did not diagnose.
Pisano called Massachusetts State Police Trooper Geraldine Bresnahan to the witness stand Wednesday, as she along with Northampton Police Detective Peter Fappiano were the two who had interviewed Conley during his confession.
In the video, Conley began by telling police his family had a host of medical issues, and he was afraid his daughter would follow suit.
Conley, 37, said his daughter was born with a birth defect in her intestines and a genetic disorder and was brought to Boston to meet with doctors for her medical issues. In 2009, the girl, then 18 months old, was admitted to Tufts Medical Center in Boston for low blood pressure and a fever. Her heart rate and temperature were extremely high, he said.
“I was trying to cool her down … and she wasn’t getting cooler,” Conley said to police in the video, sobbing. “I was so afraid.”
Her temperature was still high, Conley said, so he disconnected his daughter’s central line and dipped it into her fecal matter from a dirty diaper.
“What did you think doing that to her central line would do?” Bresnahan asked Conley in the video.
“That it would end it for her,” he responded.
“I just panicked and felt that I couldn’t do anything to help her, and that they couldn’t do anything to help her, and that she was dying and it was going to be a drawn-out process,” he added later.
The state Department of Children and Families got involved because hospital staff believed her central line was being tampered with, Conley said. Bluver said Tuesday that Conley and his now ex-wife, Julie Conley, went through a battle to keep custody of their daughter.
“In the moment I couldn’t believe what I did,” Conley said to police. “I thought about killing myself a lot.”
A few years later, Conley’s daughter was diagnosed with constipation and was given a cecostomy tube to help.
“She never really recovered after that surgery,” he told police.
He said his daughter was afraid of going to the hospital since she didn’t want to be kept there forever, and started to beg him not to bring her to the hospital when she ran a fever and felt abdominal pain in April 2015. Under the guise of regular saline flushes of her tube, Conley said he mixed drain cleaner and saline and injected it into her body. He then overdosed his daughter on pain medications and went to work.
“I wanted to put her out of pain,” he told police later. “To kill her.”
Bresnahan pressed Conley in the video as to why he was “trying to play God” with his daughter’s life on two occasions.
“I was so scared and under so much pressure,” he told her. “It seemed like she would be in less pain.”
Conley told police he had done no research on drain cleaner prior to injecting it into his daughter. He also said Julie Conley had no involvement; she has pleaded not guilty to assault and battery charges and is expected to go on trial in March. Conley said he had decided to give a statement to the police because “I just can’t live with myself anymore.”
Bresnahan told Conley that doctors noticed his daughter’s infections from 2009 stopped when an observer was placed in her hospital room to monitor her central line care. Bresnahan also asked if he had tried to hurt her on other occasions.
Conley said he was frustrated with the “conservative” medical decisions of doctors at the time and felt helpless, but denied he had tried to hurt her outside of the two confessed instances.
At the end of the video, Conley is placed under arrest.
He is on trial for attempted murder, assault and battery on a child with a dangerous weapon and assault and battery on a child causing substantial bodily injury.
Judge Richard Carey is presiding over the trial, which resumes Thursday with Bresnahan’s testimony.
Michael Connors can be reached at mconnors@gazettenet.com.