Jane Doe No More (18 page)

“We’ll handle it,” Post said.

The supposed genesis of this nasty rumor—Sullivan’s mother’s friend—turned out to be a relative of John Palomba, a woman who had a well-documented history of medical and psychological problems.

***
A pseudonym.

****
A pseudonym.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

No Two Victims Are Alike

During their December 10, 1993, meeting with state’s attorney John Connelly, Donna and Maureen understood that they were up against a machine. Connelly admitted that the tape from Donna’s “interview” with Lieutenant Moran on October 15, 1993, did not exist. There was a malfunction of some sort, Connelly explained. The conversation between Moran and Donna had never been recorded.

Was this by design or an honest mistake?

Donna wondered what in the world was going on.

How could police be so inept and do so much harm to me for simply reporting what had happened? We heard that the tape recorder had malfunctioned. Then we heard that Lieutenant Moran was some sort of technological guru for the WPD. None of it made sense. And I should note here that John and I were together in all of this. He was standing by my side—no matter what. The stress of everything became palpable. I had been judged and condemned. I could not believe this. We still didn’t know where the rumor came from—and maybe that was a good thing. I was beginning to feel the anxiety and all sorts of symptoms from the post-traumatic stress of the rape and its aftermath. It was as though I had fallen off a cliff. But then I was able to brush myself off and climb back up. I got near the top again, and I believed that someone was there to rescue me. I was relieved. As I got closer, however, I realized this person was Lieutenant Moran, who slowly peeled my grip away, finger by finger, until I fell again. This time I fell harder, the impact was greater, and I could not get up.

When the police won’t believe you, who do you turn to? Nobody was listening to us.

Leaving the State’s Attorney’s Office, Donna and Maureen talked about submitting the paperwork to begin the process of requesting an Internal Affairs investigation. This wasn’t an action that a phone call could facilitate. Maureen would have to sketch out the case from Donna’s perspective, provide statements, and make good cause for her argument.

While Maureen began that procedure, Donna felt the best thing for her to do was to write John Connelly and thank him.

SA John Connelly was the decision maker on where the case would go from that point. During the meeting I got the sense that he was torn as to what to do and he was assessing my credibility. I remember during the meeting, when Maureen or I suggested that Connelly get the tape recording of the interrogation from the police (before he told us something had happened to it), he said something like, “That’s
my
decision!” I got the feeling he had a big ego and wanted to let us know that he was in charge. But I needed to thank him, regardless. Butting heads was not going to get us anywhere.

The reason for the letter to Connelly, Donna later said, was to thank Connelly and to let him know how much she appreciated his help. She wanted to motivate Connelly to take action. It seemed Connelly was on the case, asking officers about lab results and a total review of the case file. The other catalyst to Donna’s letter was Connelly’s remarks during a phone call to Maureen that he would try to get a female investigator assigned to Donna’s case, and that he was going to “speak to the informant” himself and judge if the information was credible.

“Your involvement and concern about the case,” Donna wrote, “has truly helped me to feel better in a lot of ways. Putting my life back together is an ongoing challenge, but knowing there are those who want to get to the truth . . . really helps. I sincerely thank you for your effort.”

Maybe requesting an Internal Affairs investigation could even be avoided. After all, Donna and Maureen felt, wouldn’t the SAO and WPD consider the fact that if Donna was willing to take her case all the way to the SAO that she was likely telling the truth? Would she risk everything by taking matters this far? The WPD had offered her a way out, sort of a plea deal, by suggesting to her that she tell them what they wanted to hear to make it all go away. Donna had emphatically said no. By this point Maureen had done a good job of explaining to Connelly exactly what Donna had been through, every detail, every fact. Would Donna go through so much effort if it was all some sort of cover-up for an extramarital affair?

The opening weeks of 1994 followed a strained Christmas holiday season for Donna and her family. By this time Donna had developed a contact inside the SAO, whom she began calling for information and any progress on her case. Based on what she was told, Donna was under the impression that a new investigator was involved, a woman who had been at the scene on the night of the attack.

Kathy Wilson had been with the WPD since January 16, 1978, promoted to lieutenant in March 1992. One of Kathy’s specialties was sexual assaults. At the time of Donna’s attack, Kathy was a desk lieutenant, even though she had appeared at the scene that night to advise Donna and other officers. As March 1994 approached, Kathy was reassigned to Vice and put in charge of sexual assaults, solely because of Connelly’s involvement.

Until Kathy Wilson was assigned, there had not been a woman involved in sexual assault investigations for the WPD for years. Kathy’s advantage was that she’d had plenty of training in how to handle sexual assaults. She had also been involved with training officers in the very delicate details of investigating sexual assaults, including how to treat victims of sexual assault.

“And how you treat them will go a long way toward their recovery,” Kathy said later, during a deposition. “If you treat them well, they will recover from rape trauma syndrome . . .”

One of the points Kathy made clear during that same deposition was that every rape victim acts differently during those crucial moments after the assault.

“Some victims cry,” Kathy Wilson explained. “Some victims are hysterical. Some victims take a very long time to answer questions, and you would almost think that they were drunk or high. But they may be in shock.” It wasn’t unusual, Kathy added as an example, to find a rape victim who was “very detail oriented when reporting her crime,” and another victim “very sketchy.”

Faced with a traumatic event such as sexual assault, Kathy reiterated, women responded differently. No two people reacted the same way.

When Kathy Wilson talked about Donna’s case later on in her deposition, however, she had some rather strong feelings, which ultimately contradicted what she had said only previously: “There [were] a lot of things wrong with this case . . . that would lead an experienced sexual assault investigator to think that things didn’t happen exactly as they were reported to the police.”

“Kathy Wilson tried to play both side of this,” Maureen Norris pointed out later.

The chief evidence for her opinion, the officer insisted, was the way Donna acted after her assault.

Those “things” wrong with Donna’s case, Kathy later testified, included what had become common talk of no forced entry into Donna’s house; that Donna had left her children alone and fled the scene; that Donna would not allow police to interview her children; that the house wasn’t disheveled and everything seemed orderly; that the jewelry taken was “costume jewelry—it wasn’t diamonds or gold”; and that Donna wasn’t “beat up,” because, Kathy added, “Absolutely every sexual assault where it has been a burglar, an unknown person, the women got beat up pretty badly.”

Red flags, Kathy suggested, abounded in Donna’s case from the moment she arrived at the scene that night. Questions about Donna’s claim were increasing inside the WPD. The more they reviewed Donna’s explanations of the night, the more certain investigators (including Kathy Wilson) felt that Donna wasn’t being completely honest. When Sullivan’s rumor came into the WPD, the entire case seemed to make sense.

While at the scene on the night Donna was attacked, Kathy made certain judgments, several of which went
against
what she would later explain (under oath) were often-seen behaviors by rape/sexual assault victims. Some of the things Donna said to Kathy on that night, the investigator later testified, led the WPD to question Donna’s story. For one, according to Kathy, when she suggested that Donna go to the hospital, Donna said, “There’s no sense in doing that because I didn’t see his face—I could never identify him. You’re never going to catch him. And besides, he didn’t rape me.”

But Donna was not of sound mind at this time. Her choice of words had been made under severe duress. What she meant was:
He didn’t penetrate me.
How does one explain the details, however, during what is a frantic, traumatic time in her life? Kathy Wilson—the so-called “expert” in this field—should have been more empathetic toward Donna and considered the linguistic challenges she faced under extremely difficult conditions.