Jane Doe No More (19 page)

While Donna and Kathy were upstairs in Donna’s bedroom after Donna had returned to her house, Kathy asked Donna a few questions about the actual rape itself and what had occurred.

Donna said, “He rubbed his penis up against my back.”

Kathy thought that to be a strange comment. “Mrs. Palomba,” she responded, “you have to go to the hospital because there may be a transfer of body fluids or hair, some fibers that we could collect. We really have to get you to the hospital.”

There were other behaviors that Kathy thought were unusual. One involved Kathy telling Donna not to use the restroom at the house after Donna said she needed to urinate. “Because,” Kathy told Donna, “if there is any evidence in or on your body, it will wash [it] away. I believe the hospital doesn’t like you to urinate until they get to you, where they can collect it.”

Donna then picked up her purse, Kathy claimed, “and headed for the bathroom.”

“No,” Kathy said. “Don’t go into the bathroom.”

But Donna went anyway.

“It was like talking to someone who wasn’t there,” Kathy described, solidifying her description of how a rape victim would act. “She was spacey.”

These were all behaviors Kathy Wilson would later testify as not being out of the realm of a rape victim’s post-assault actions. There was no standard, Kathy said. There was no one particular way a woman was supposed to act. Donna was obviously in a state of shock. In fact, when asked later, Donna did not recollect a lot of what had happened inside the house that night after she went back, confusing even the simplest things.

I will always appreciate the fact that Kathy Wilson urged me to go to the hospital that evening. I had limited interaction with her after Lieutenant Moran took over the case. I remember seeing her at the police department when I went there for a meeting, and she was professional and cordial but I did not know how to read her. It became apparent later on that she was trying to play both sides and never really came to my defense. In fact . . . I remember feeling sick when she said later that I appeared “flippant” the night of the crime. You would think that a female officer may have understood more, but that wasn’t the case.

Now, as the spring of 1994 commenced, Kathy Wilson was back on Donna’s case and looking at it with lenses similar to those of Lieutenant Douglas Moran. Could Donna have been making up this entire episode? Was she, in fact, caught up in some sort of daze that prevented her from revealing the truth of what actually happened? Had Donna been so traumatized by whatever went on inside her home that night that she had no idea herself what the truth was anymore?

“I didn’t make any judgments,” Kathy said later. “I didn’t treat her any different from anyone that I would have treated if I saw the rapist raping the victim.”

Regarding why the WPD did not secure Donna’s house on the night of the incident, Kathy said that because it wasn’t a murder scene, taping off the house wasn’t something that would normally have been done.

“It wasn’t a homicide,” she said. “And [Donna] said he wore gloves. So there didn’t seem to be the chance that we were going to get any fingerprints . . . The house was meticulous . . . So there wasn’t like a jumble of stuff and you might miss something.”

Another behavior that made Kathy skeptical took place when Donna came to the WPD to give her statement. She “came in and sat cross-legged on the chair . . . you know, like an Indian,” Wilson said later. “Kind of nonchalant.”

So the way in which Donna sat on a chair turned out to be, for the WPD, some sort of indication that Donna was not telling investigators the truth.

The fact that Donna requested that John be with her when she gave that first statement was another warning sign, according to Kathy, that Donna was acting abnormally. Rape victims rarely want their spouses to be with them when they talk about the rape for the first time.

I’m meeting with these people—Connelly, Wilson, and others—and I am thinking,
They’re already biased because they have all this other stuff brewing that’s not even reality with regard to who I am.
They have not arrested me. Yet, on the other hand, the case had been moved out of Vice and was now with the Detective Bureau, which we thought would help us tremendously.

One goal of Maureen Norris’s strategy was to get the DNA in Donna’s case retested. SA Connelly said he would look into getting famed forensic guru Dr. Henry Lee and his lab to do the testing as soon as possible.

“Originally, they were given a twenty-week deadline,” Donna wrote in her notes on the day she heard about this encouraging development. “Connelly supposedly was calling in a couple of favors to Dr. Henry Lee and is trying to speed the whole thing up.”

A problem that arose around this same time, which Donna heard about from her contact inside the SAO, was that Detective George Lescadre, Donna and John’s one friend at the WPD, who had given them his total support, was being ostracized by his colleague, Lieutenant Moran.

George had been with the WPD for close to fifteen years; he had an untarnished reputation as a dogged investigator who got things done. Sergeant Rinaldi, the cop who had spoken to Donna on the night of the 911 call, had even phoned Lescadre at his house after he hung up with Donna, to tell him what was going on. George later said that Rinaldi told him Donna “had been the victim of a crime.” It was well known that Donna was George’s brother-in-law’s cousin.

“Most people knew of my relationship with [Donna and John],” George said later.

In late January, Donna called George to ask what was going on. From what her SAO contact had said, something serious had happened. George was a respected cop, a guy who had given his life to the department. He hadn’t even really been involved in Donna’s case.

“Moran asked me to come in and talk to him about your case,” George explained to Donna. “I went in on my own time. Phil Post was there. They asked me what I thought was true or false after laying out what
they
believed happened.”

George told Post and Moran that he thought Donna was telling the truth. There had been no reason for him not to believe her.

Lieutenant Moran said, “She’s lying, George. I don’t believe
anything
she’s telling us.”

When George disagreed, Moran and Post, according to George’s recollection, laughed in his face.

“Moran seemed sure of himself, very positive in his words,” George said later, testifying about that day. “I don’t think he cared what I had to say.”

Donna also heard that as soon as SA Connelly got involved and shook things up within the WPD, Lieutenant Moran started acting nervous, running around, collecting things from the case, specifically looking for several “aerial photos” taken of Donna’s house, which Donna later claimed had never been taken.

State’s attorney John Connelly assigned one of his chief investigators to Donna’s case. He was known as Pudgie, but his real name was John Maia, an always-impeccably dressed African American man—“I’ve never seen him without a suit on”—in his late fifties, with more than thirty years of investigative experience behind him, several of those years with the WPD. Pudgie had contacts on the streets. People respected him.

“I knew Pudgie well and was very glad that he was now involved,” Maureen Norris later said. “He was one of those investigators with his ear to the ground; he knew what was going on in Waterbury. He’s the type of guy who would listen. In fact, every time I saw him, he would say, ‘I’m on it. I never forget about Donna. I’m trying. I’m trying.’”

Pudgie came from a large, well-known family in the region; he knew John Palomba and the Palomba family. Not long after the incident, quite a while before Pudgie became involved in the case, John ran into him downtown one afternoon, and they stopped for a quick chat.

“I heard what happened to your brother,” Pudgie said.

“It wasn’t my brother,” John said. “It was me, Pudgie. Donna was the one who was assaulted.”

“That’s terrible, man. Listen, I’ll do everything I can to help.”

Now Pudgie was involved, working on the case for the SAO. Once Donna heard the news of his assignment, she felt things were progressing and there was a good possibility the case was moving in the right direction. The SAO could work in tandem with any law enforcement agency in the jurisdiction. They helped not only with federal cases—drug trafficking, gambling, organized crime, etc.—but also with murders and other types of cases giving the local police department problems.

“Pudgie’s the kind of guy who is friends with everyone, streetwise, involved in athletics, and well liked,” Donna said. “He knew poor people and homeless and dignitaries alike. He always had many sources for information.”