Reilly says he discussed crash with supporter
Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly acknowledged yesterday that he discussed a fatal car accident with a prominent businessman and campaign supporter, but Reilly, a Democratic candidate for governor, strenuously denied that the supporter asked him to intervene in the investigation of the crash that killed two teenage girls.
Reilly, pressed by reporters after a campaign speech yesterday morning, said he spoke with Bob Davis, the founder of the multibillion-dollar Internet search company Lycos, who had hosted a fund-raiser for Reilly last June that raised $14,000. Davis is a neighbor and friend of the parents of Shauna M. Murphy, 17, and Meghan C. Murphy, 15, who died on Oct. 13 when their Land Rover crashed into a utility pole on Northboro Road in Southborough.
The Murphy sisters were seen drinking at a party before the accident, according to a police report.
''I spoke to Bob Davis about this case," Reilly said yesterday, after a speech to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. ''He never asked me to make a phone call. He never asked me to do anything. That is the truth; that is the absolute truth. He never asked me to do one thing. That's it, and that's all that happened."
Last night, Davis said that he called Reilly because Christopher Murphy, the father of the girls, was being bombarded by media requests for the autopsy reports and wanted to know whether reporters had a right to look at them. The reports are not considered a public record, and state law requires that they be released only to the next of kin.
Murphy ''was being completely barraged by the media, picking up his phone daily and having people asking for the autopsy results," Davis told the Globe in a telephone interview.
''He wanted desperately to get some clarity around whether those results were private family matters or something other than that."
''I wanted to know if those results were private and protected, and I wanted my friend to know that answer as well."
But Davis said he did not ask Reilly to call Worcester District Attorney John J. Conte, who was part of an investigation into whether the state's social host law had been violated because someone had allowed the underage girls to drink alcohol at a party shortly before the crash. Reilly's phone call to Conte has sparked criticism that Reilly was interfering in the investigation of the accident.
Reilly's admission that he spoke to Davis represents a new chapter in the scrutiny over his involvement in the investigation into the teenagers' deaths. Last week, he told a television interviewer that he ''never spoke to the family about this at all, but I did decide that those toxicology reports were their records, the records of their children, and they should be protected, their privacy should be protected."
Davis had served as the Murphy family's spokesman after the fatal car crash.
Reilly has said he knows the Murphy family and acknowledged last week that he had called Conte in mid-November to discuss the case.
Yesterday, the normally placid attorney general was visibly angry at reporters' questions regarding the controversy, which Governor Mitt Romney and Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey have seized upon.
''Another innocent person tossed into this travesty," Reilly said of Davis. ''Anybody that had anything to do with this, advancing it, making representations that were not true should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for what they put this family through."
State campaign records show that donations from 23 Southborough residents were recorded by Reilly's campaign on June 30, 2005.
Christopher Murphy, the father of the girls who died in October, gave $300. The fund-raiser was held at the home of Davis, who is currently managing general partner at Highland Capital Partners. The donations were first reported by the Boston Herald yesterday.
Last night, Davis said he has known Reilly for years, and he dismissed the idea that the fund-raising event influenced Reilly's involvement in the case. ''I certainly didn't have the fund-raiser anticipating that my neighbors were going to die," he said.
Healey, who is the leading Republican candidate for governor, told a television interviewer Sunday that Reilly had ''managed to stifle and probably obstruct a criminal investigation" into whether the state's ''social host" law was broken. And last week, Romney suggested that Reilly was trying to ''hush up" the investigation.
Under the law, it is illegal for a host to furnish alcohol to a minor or to allow a minor to drink alcohol.
But Conte has said that Reilly's call did not affect the investigation. Jeffrey B. Goldstein, an assistant district attorney in Conte's office, said that long before he learned of Reilly's call he had concluded that the charge of allowing a minor to consume alcohol should not be pursued.
Last week, the Associated Press reported that Northborough Police Chief Mark Leahy had said his investigators were eager to review a copy of the girls' toxicology reports, part of the broader autopsy reports, but that Conte's office refused to provide them. He also called Reilly's involvement in the case unusual.
Leahy subsequently told the Worcester Telegram & Gazette that he had not asserted that Conte was refusing to release the reports.
Reilly, speaking to reporters yesterday, said the allegations against him are ''a lie."
''Somebody inferred that I interfered with an investigation," Reilly said yesterday. ''Now we all know, now that the dust has cleared, I didn't do it. It's not true; it's a lie. But that lie has been written over and over and over again, and, because of that, a family has suffered."
The Murphy sisters died after attending a party with 15 or 20 other young people, according to police. The police report identifies the host of the party as Nathaniel Berberian, 20, of Northborough.
Goldstein said he recommended against prosecuting Berberian because the Murphy sisters brought liquor onto the premises, and because evidence suggested Shauna Murphy had used someone else's license to obtain alcohol.
The continuing questions about the Murphy case marred Reilly's first major speech of the new year on broad themes of his upcoming campaign.
Usually sedate, Reilly was impassioned yesterday, frequently deviating from his text and repeating key points for emphasis. He recounted his hardscrabble upbringing in Springfield and slammed Romney and Healey for ''partisanship and gridlock that is absolutely poisoning our political system right now." 