Jane Doe No More (2 page)

—M. William Phelps

June 2012

Rape is the most misunderstood and underreported crime. The first step to healing is talking about the assault. Yet hundreds of thousands suffer in silence.

Every Jane Doe is a person with hopes and dreams and talents. I want to let everyone know that he or she is not alone and invite them to become part of what is a vocal, vibrant, and visible survivors’ community.

No more blame. No more shame. No more fear.

This mission found me; I did not seek it. In a million years I would not have dreamt that I would be doing what I am doing today. And yet, I would not change a thing. This challenging journey has brought countless blessings and surprises and dared me to reach farther into my soul than I ever thought possible. I have found a greater purpose. Each day brings affirmation that something very special is in play—and I truly believe it is all part of God’s greater plan.

—Donna Palomba

June 2012

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

—MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

CHAPTER
ONE

A Stranger in the House

The darkness enveloped her that night, and it may have been the absence of light that saved her life.

The first sound thirty-six-year-old Donna Palomba could recall later was muffled, a squirrel-in-the-attic rustling. Nothing obvious or particularly loud. Still, it was enough to startle her awake. Initially she thought the sound may have come from a closet down the hall. We’ve all been there: jolted from a deep sleep by a sudden noise in the dead of night, no idea what the sound is or where it’s coming from. Donna couldn’t establish what time it was with any accuracy, only that it had to be after midnight and into the very early morning of September 11, 1993.

After collecting her thoughts and listening closer, Donna was certain she heard footsteps: the creak of her wooden stairs that led to the second floor, where she and her children slept in separate rooms.

Those are not the tiny footsteps of children,
she thought. The noise, now distinct and frightening, was definitely not the pitter-patter of a child rushing into her mother’s room to snuggle after a bad dream. Quite the opposite, actually, this was positively an intruder’s stride: heavy and obtrusive, yet stealthy.

The house was pitch dark, and since everything seems different late at night, Donna’s fear was magnified. Every sound was augmented and sustained. That internal filter between fear and reality, generally always there and functioning, was still sleeping. Alone in the house with her children, the comforting sound of crickets, and the late summer breeze outside the window, the last thing Donna wanted to hear were footsteps coming up the stairs toward her bedroom—and now it was too late to do anything about it.

Acclimating herself to her surroundings, Donna realized that someone was now quickly moving around the front of her bed.

Donna hadn’t been sleeping well earlier. Her husband, John, was away for the weekend at a friend’s wedding in Colorado. She would have gone with him had it not been for a business partner’s wife who gave birth that week. Donna had spent some time on September 10 at the hospital, smiling, laughing, and holding the ten-pound newborn in her arms. What a wonderful moment and testimony to God’s grace. Everyone was so happy. The talcum-fresh, clean smell and swollen redness of a newborn, gurgling and twisting her small balled-up fist in her mouth—it reminded everyone how such natural, everyday miracles can bring so much joy to life.

Now, merely hours later: an unfolding nightmare. It was the first time in twelve years of marriage that John and Donna had been apart. She was alone in a small community—the Overlook section of Waterbury, Connecticut—inside a big house. Her five- and seven-year-olds were sound asleep in their rooms down the same second-floor hallway. Donna had no weapon. No way to protect herself. No idea what to do.

It took a moment for Donna to register what now happened so suddenly. She had been sleeping on her stomach and did not have the opportunity to turn over before he was on her back, violently holding her down, the two of them struggling for position, man against woman—not a fair fight.

The random thoughts that popped into her head when she found herself fighting to survive baffle her to this day:
Blue jean material
. . . During the struggle she felt the scratchy crisscross-patterned fabric of denim. She kept thinking:
He’s wearing blue jeans
.
If you live through this, remember that.

She glimpsed some sort of mask concealing his identity, although she would not have been able to see him clearly in the dark anyway.

Instinct and reaction took over. Donna screamed as loud as she could. Her window was open. Maybe a neighbor would hear and come running to her rescue.

But her attacker buried his knee deeper into her back, then reached around and put his gloved hand over her mouth. Donna could smell the fabric: greasy, synthetic, musty.

She bit down on his hand.

That set him off. He took one of her arms and cranked it around her back, wrenching it up toward her long, full, curly mane of auburn hair, holding her down even tighter. Then he leaned over Donna’s back and approached her ear. It would be the first of several times he threatened her life.

“If you don’t cooperate, you are going to get hurt.”

His voice was raspy. She first thought he had a Jamaican accent. Regardless, she believed him and knew then what he wanted.

If I scream again, my kids will wake up and find us . . . Then what?

Obedience. Obey and live. Fight and die.

Donna’s senses ratcheted up. She couldn’t see, but she could certainly hear, smell. This is how she would later recall the sexual assault—through a series of sounds and scents. Like a blind person, Donna began to see with her ears and nose.

She heard him reach into the dresser drawer beside her bed (as if he knew where to look?) and pull something out. Next he placed a pillowcase over her head and secured it by tying nylons over her eyes like a blindfold. He bound her hands behind her back with the same material. She figured the nylons were the reason for his reaching into the dresser drawer.

After he finished tying Donna’s hands behind her back, he jammed his knee into her spine again to hold her down. Donna could smell mechanic’s grease and oil on him. Maybe it was tar, she considered, the same stuff they use on the roads. These simple, everyday smells were overpowering, stagnant in the balminess of her bedroom. Later those same odors would send Donna into traumatic spells of depression and anxiety whenever she encountered them in the world.

As he held her down, she felt a forceful tug on her nightshirt and panties, and then heard the fabric tearing as he cut her panties with a knife. The ripping of the fabric seemed amplified.

Then she heard a heavy clank: metal against wood.

In her mind, Donna Palomba saw her attacker placing a gun on the floor.

My husband, John, and I were married on October 10, 1981. It was one of those large Italian-Catholic weddings with bridesmaids, ushers, tuxedoes, limos, a simple, elegant gown made of satin in an off-white candlelight shade, along with all the other amenities little girls dream about all their lives. I was a twenty-four-year-old college graduate from Southern Connecticut State University looking to start a family and a career in marketing. We lived in an apartment that first year. Then John found a house he’d had his eye on for a long time a mere block from where he had grown up in Overlook, a section of Waterbury named for its commanding view over the city. John’s parents still lived there, as did his friends, cousins, several of his siblings. There was a pond a few blocks away where kids played hockey during the winter months and fished during summer. Overlook was one of those Norman Rockwell–type of blue- and white-collar neighborhoods centered on family, community, and God—a melting pot of many different nationalities, most with large families. John knew and loved everyone. His mom used to say John was the only kid she knew with three hundred close personal friends.

The neighborhood was so tight-knit that even as John and his buddies matured and went out into the world as adults, they kept their ties and got together any chance they could. The words
family
and
friend
meant something to these guys. They depended on one another. Everyone in Overlook seemed to carry on the traditions of the family business, be it insurance, roofing, financial, construction, electrical, whatever. Your grandfather started the business, passed it down to your father, and you carried the torch until your son or daughter took over.

The fact that we had kids within the first few years of the marriage kindled our spirits; we enjoyed and adored being parents, same as our fathers and mothers had before us. Our kids would go to Catholic school, same as we had, and grow up being coddled, loved, cared for. Having kids was a gift I had waited for all my life, yet I never realized or considered how much that experience was going to change me and teach me about love and the will to survive.

Believing her attacker had a gun, which he had just placed on the floor beside the bed so he could free himself up to rape her, sent Donna to an emotional place she had never been: a cage of survival and mortality. She was now only
mother,
protecting her kids, telling herself not to scream or make any noise whatsoever.

She thought,
I will give this man what he wants. God willing, I will walk away with my life
.

“As long as the children remained asleep,” Donna recalled, “and I could convince him to leave afterwards, I felt I could come back. I could heal. This man was going to rape me. There was nothing I could do to stop him. The only possible silver lining holding me together was the basic maternal instinct to protect my children and live through this for their sake.”

“Please, take anything you want,” she pleaded with her attacker. “My diamond is on the dresser. My pocketbook is in the closet. Take my money . . . please . . . please. Just
don’t
hurt me.”

Without saying a word, he tied another pair of nylons around her mouth. She was totally incapacitated at this point, bound and gagged.

The thought she had at that exact moment stung all her senses:
How can I survive this?
How am I going to convince this man that it is okay to rape me and leave without harming my children?

For the next several minutes he sexually assaulted her.

When she believed he was finished, Donna spoke through the nylons covering her mouth. She realized later that “God had placed the words in her mind.” Looking back, going through every moment of that night, she had no idea where else they could have come from. Donna simply opened her mouth, and the words were there: “Please . . . it’s okay. This is between you and me. I will never tell anyone what happened here tonight. I don’t know who you are. I know you’re a good person. I sense that from you. I’m okay. I couldn’t even identify you if I wanted to.”