Jane Doe No More (16 page)

It became clear that none of the officers involved in the case bothered to look at the actual evidence to determine the truth. I will always wonder what would have happened had the responding officers and people in charge of my case on that first night investigated it properly from day one. Would the perpetrator have been found then?

**
According to the National Center for the Prosecution of Women: “Research has shown that only 2 to 8 percent of rape allegations are false, and yet the stigma of disbelief remains pervasive.”

CHAPTER
TEN

Rumor Has It

Maureen Norris was everything Donna and John Palomba were seeking in legal representation. Maureen’s firm, Kolesnick and Norris, handled many different types of law: personal injury, criminal defense, divorce, real estate and business transactions, contracts, and leases. Maureen, who had been practicing law since 1985, knew many of the players involved in Donna’s case. While studying for the bar, Maureen had worked at the Waterbury State’s Attorney’s Office (SAO) under the regime of then–state’s attorney Frank MacDonald. Before she had even passed the bar, Maureen was hired by the firm for which she would go on to become partner.

“Originally,” Maureen said later, “I thought I was going into criminal law because I had that relationship with the state’s attorney’s office, but I ended up working for attorney Kolesnick.”

John and Donna had known Maureen for some time because Maureen had dated John’s brother for a few years prior to their calling on her. Around town, within city law circles, Maureen had already heard about Donna’s case.

“Rumors were that she had been raped,” Maureen said. “Being involved in the legal field, you’d hear things that others wouldn’t normally be privy to.”

At thirty-three, Maureen was a few years younger than Donna, but they could see things from the same woman’s perspective, which was important to Donna. Maureen’s soft-spoken demeanor was not to be taken as a weakness; she was a strong woman and even tougher lawyer, quite willing to stick her neck out where it mattered. When it came to litigation, Maureen was the type of attorney who relied on the facts to speak for themselves. As Maureen sat and listened to what Donna had gone through over the past several weeks after the rape, she knew Donna stood on a firm foundation of truth; and truth, Maureen had seen time and again inside a courtroom, had a way of rising to the surface once all the evidence was presented.

“If this can happen to you,” Maureen said on that first day she spoke with Donna, “it can happen to anybody.”

This statement was to become a mantra Maureen would chant over and over as the weeks turned into months, and Donna’s case dragged on.

As Donna explained all that had happened, Maureen thought the Moran incident was extremely strange. “It’s not necessarily that my jaw was on the floor,” Maureen later said, “when I heard what she had gone through; stranger things have happened. I just felt so sorry for her. I never had a doubt that Donna was telling the truth. It never even entered my mind that Donna could be lying about what happened to her. I had known her for a number of years. She loved her husband. She was a wonderful mother. I had been at her house. I mean, let’s be serious, Donna doesn’t even curse.”

That the police were considering Donna to be some sort of cunning, pathological liar, Maureen thought, was unbelievable, even repulsive.

“I am thinking early on that the Waterbury Police have made an assumption and that maybe I can facilitate things and get the investigation back on the right track.”

Maybe a phone call. A meeting with the right players. The Morans get a slap on the hand. Donna gets an apology, and all is forgotten. And Donna can move on.

What Maureen sensed from the initial conversation was that John and Donna were not looking to sue the city or anybody else. That was not why they had sought legal representation.

“It was the furthest thing from their minds. They wanted this investigation to get back on track.”

Maureen saw no other option but to contact the SAO and set up a meeting with state’s attorney John Connelly, so they could—with any luck—get to the bottom of what was going on inside the WPD and move the case forward from there.

“We need to find the person responsible for raping you,” Maureen told Donna. It was appalling to Maureen to think that an investigation such as this one was stalled. What message would this send to women who were raped? How many other rape victims were out there being treated by police as Donna was?

Donna agreed with Maureen. Sure, it had been upsetting and her life had been thrown once again into a tailspin, but the main issue here was that a rapist was still at large, maybe raping other women, and nothing was being done to find (and stop) him.

Their thought was that any man bold enough to commit a sexual assault during a home invasion had likely committed this type of crime before and would do it again.

State’s Attorney Connelly had a long-standing reputation as a straight player within the politics of courtrooms and public opinion. He was in his late forties, a lifelong Waterbury resident whose parents had both been blue-collar workers within the massive manufacturing and textile industries that had sustained Waterbury throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Connelly, like many other local cops and politicians, had gone to Mattatuck Community College before doing his graduate work at Trinity College in Hartford. Maureen hoped she could chat with Connelly and get this thing taken care of as a gross misunderstanding. Donna would be more than willing to move on, as long as the case was officially reopened and set back on the right track of finding the man who had threatened to kill her.

Looking back on all this, having come so close to death, I am much more aware of how fragile life is. I used to take things for granted. Every day is a gift, and I want to make the most of it. I want to be a better mother, wife, daughter, sister, Christian, and friend. There is no time to fret about material things or gossip about others. I became more in tune with my moral compass and reflected on how I felt when I behaved or acted in a certain way. I believe it made me a better person, but I have a long way to go. I realize now—but maybe not then, as I contacted Maureen in a state of panic and fear—that this is all part of a greater plan, and I try to turn over the many challenges I face to God. Some days I am better at it than others. Many wonderful things have happened. I know they are part of something much bigger than myself. So I am along for the ride . . . trying to do the best that I can for as many as I can for as long as I can. I have spent too much time in the past trying to please others or not speaking up when in my gut I knew what was going on was wrong. I learned what it was like to be discriminated against. It made me more assertive. I began to spend my time trying to do things that would actually make a difference in the grand scheme of things.

Strange as it sounds, I wouldn’t trade anything. I believe you learn most from your greatest challenges. These events, as I went through them, made me stretch and reach farther inside of my soul than I ever thought possible. And sitting there, listening to Maureen talk about contacting the state’s attorney and taking control of this thing empowered me. Maureen gave me a breath of life. Somebody believed me. I wasn’t alone.

In contacting the SAO, Maureen planned on filing a motion with the court, requesting that an Internal Affairs (IA) investigation be opened immediately based on the harassment and accusations made against Donna, and on the way the case had been handled from the first moment the police arrived at the scene. Maureen explained to Donna that they were going to crack the inner shell of the WPD open and discover what happened. Part of Maureen’s strategy included obtaining a copy of the tape recording made by Lieutenant Douglas Moran on October 15, 1993; at the time neither she nor Donna knew that it did not actually exist. Yet everyone else, especially the SAO, knew Moran had allegedly flubbed up the recording and never made the tape in the first place, according to the report Moran had filed back in October.

Involving the SAO shook up the WPD’s Vice and Intelligence Division, sending it into a frenzy of playing catch-up. As an example, it wasn’t until December 3, 1993, that investigators drew blood from Jeff Martinez to test against the known DNA that had been recovered. This meant that not until the SAO had been contacted did Captain Moran order the test. What’s more, Lieutenant Moran did not submit a supplementary report regarding “details of offense [and] progress of [the] investigation” until December 6, a full
three
days after Maureen made an appointment—a meeting set for December 10—for her and Donna to sit with Connelly. In that report, Lieutenant Moran wrote a complete narrative of the events leading up to the investigation’s current status. Most interesting was the mention of Donna’s children.

Moran wrote: “That the victim states that her two children . . . did not see or hear anything, either during the attack or subsequent police search, and she had persistently refused to allow the police to interview them.”

Moran also pointed out that an oil leak inside Donna’s home might have been the source for why she thought her attacker had an “oily smell.”

The report claimed that Lieutenant Moran and his brother, Captain Moran, interviewed Jeff Martinez on October 19, 1993, the day
after
Donna and John met with Captain Moran and Phil Post. That interview consisted of a few questions for Martinez about his employment. He was asked if he had any psychiatric problems, if he took any psychiatric medication, or if he had been treated for psychiatric issues. Moran’s report also confirmed that it wasn’t until December 3 that Lieutenant Moran ordered the blood draw from Martinez and also from the security guard who had been caught prank-calling Donna’s house the previous year.

Donna refused to be destroyed by this continuous attack on her character. Her only recourse at this juncture had been to hire counsel and meet with the SAO. She had rights and now, after talking with Maureen Norris, understood that those rights had been repeatedly violated by the WPD.