LAST DANCE, LAST CHANCE - and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  The detectives asked Anthony if his wife could have taken the poison herself, and he shook his head. That wasn’t possible, he insisted. “She’s too close to her children to ever do that.”

  There was a long pause in the conversation, and then Chuck Craven asked the question that hung heavily in the air between them. The obvious question. “Did you poison your wife?” he asked, his eyes watching Pignataro’s face.

  The silence was even longer this time, and then Anthony answered in a calm voice without really answering at all: “I can see why people might think I would do that.”

  Oddly, Anthony wasn’t at all upset or offended by Craven’s question, while Debbie had been shocked and outraged when her mother-in-law asked her if she had deliberately taken poison.

  Anthony was quite matter-of-fact, and his affect was very flat—as if he were giving the time of day. But, Craven and Finnerty noted he had answered neither “Yes” nor “No.”

  They asked him for permission to search his home, and he said that, personally, he would have no problem with that—but, of course, his wife would have to be the one to give permission. They already had that, although Debbie had stipulated that it be done when the children were not there. She didn’t want them to see police going through their rooms and their possessions.

  “How would someone obtain a poison like arsenic?” Pat Finnerty asked.

  “I don’t know,” Anthony answered. “I’m a doctor, and I don’t even know where you would get it.” He mentioned an article he’d read in the newspaper about some man who had tried to kill his wife with cyanide. “He got it over the Internet. Maybe you could look on the Internet for arsenic.”

  He looked at them with a faint smile and clear eyes. He had answered their questions in a polite manner. He was now trying to help them do their jobs, offering them an idea of where they might find a source of arsenic. But it was only a guess on his part, he pointed out.

  Finnerty and Craven had already been to the Internet and, not surprisingly, nobody was selling arsenic on eBay. They could sense that Pignataro viewed himself as vastly superior to them in intelligence and the ability to do research.

  Craven and Finnerty looked back at Anthony Pignataro. He had no idea how serious they were about pinning him to the wall for what they believed he had done to the paralyzed woman who lay in bed down the hall from where they talked. And he clearly had no idea how good they were at their jobs. That was fine with them; let him see them as “dumb cops.”

  It seemed now that Debbie Pignataro was going to live. She had beaten unbelievable odds, but it would be weeks before she could leave the hospital. Craven and Finnerty had plenty of time.

  18

  On August 30, 1999, Ralph and Lauren were released from Children’s Hospital after being tested for arsenic intoxication. Ralph showed no excess arsenic in his system at all, although Lauren had ingested a bit more than average at some time over the previous several weeks. There wasn’t enough in her body to do her any harm. A few days later, Pat Finnerty and Chuck Craven talked to the children at their uncle Carmine’s house.

  Their search of the Pignataro home hadn’t netted anything unusual or ominous. As Anthony had said, the box in the garage held nothing more than the usual garden products used to kill bugs and snails. A careful reading of the labels didn’t reveal any arsenic in the ingredients.

  One fascinating item, however, was a manuscript they found lying on the coffee table in the living room, almost as if someone had wanted them to read it. It was well over a hundred pages long, typed single-spaced: a book in progress titled M.D.: Mass Destruction. A cursory glance indicated that it had been written by Debbie Pignataro and that it was a kind of protest about the way her husband had been treated after the Sarah Smith case.

  They had Debbie’s permission to remove any item, and they took it with them. Finally, Anthony had two readers who were very interested in the book he was sure would vindicate him. With Frank Sedita, he actually had three new readers.

  In their uncle’s home, the two detectives asked Ralph and Lauren about their family and what they recalled of the summer that was almost over. Any good cop hates to question children, always wishing that there were some other way to gather intelligence. But the Pignataro children were the only constant witnesses to the way things had been in their home.

  Ralph was hesitant, protective of his mother, silent about his father, and very cautious about revealing family secrets. He was only 12, and he had been through so much in the past year: first his father’s arrest and imprisonment, then a too brief period of happy reconciliation before his parents separated for a few months. His father had come back, but then his mother had grown so ill.

  Ralph was obviously intelligent and responsible, mature beyond his years. But he really didn’t want to say the wrong thing, and at his age he wasn’t even sure what the wrong thing would be. He looked as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.

  Lauren was more open, a pretty, bubbly little girl. She told them about how she got sick sometime in July. Her dad had made some soup for her mother. “I ate some of it,” she said, “and I got sick and threw up at practice.”

  Lauren had a very small amount of arsenic in her system compared with the massive dose Debbie had ingested—but it was there. Anthony had said he didn’t know where to get arsenic. Debbie said to Chuck Craven that they had had problems with carpenter ants. But arsenic isn’t an ingredient in the kind of bug-killing spray effective against carpenter ants.

  Lauren remembered that her daddy had put some little round tins out around the house to “kill ants.” She had seen him placing them in various spots, and he had explained to her what they were for.

  Prosecutor Frank Sedita was doing his own research on arsenic poisoning. In early September, he called Dr. Jahangir Koleini, the family practice physician who was the Pignataros’ family doctor. Dr. Koleini had seen Debbie, of course, during July and August when she was admitted to the hospital, and said that Debbie was still complaining of pain when she left the hospital on July 25. That was not the typical post-pancreatitis pattern. She should have felt much better at that point because pancreatitis is an acute situation. Dr. Koleini had felt uneasy enough to try to convince the Pignataros to put Debbie back in the hospital for further tests, but Anthony didn’t believe that was necessary.

  Although he didn’t share his thoughts with Pignataro, Dr. Koleini told the prosecutor that he was thinking that there might be “something toxic” involved. In his conversations with Anthony, Debbie’s physician had found him “not too concerned” about her condition, whether it was her pancreatitis or even that she had been poisoned with arsenic.

  Sedita spoke with Dr. Samie, too. Samie said she had agreed with Drs. Koleini and Snyderman that something “unusual” was going on. In fact, Dr. Samie had gone so far as to call the Pignataros on Saturday, August 7—three days before Debbie was hospitalized in crippled and critical condition. Anthony had told her only that his wife was “not herself.” Samie said she had then suggested that an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) test be done at once. Anthony had agreed to that willingly enough and the results were normal. Another MRI on Sunday showed nothing more than the residual effects of Debbie’s neck surgeries.

  Sedita asked if the MRI could have shown arsenic in her system, and Dr. Samie said it could not.

  Frank Sedita was getting total validation of the written medical records on Debbie Pignataro—directly now from the doctors involved. Dr. Samie explained that arsenic poisoning is often misdiagnosed initially as Guillain-Barré syndrome because the two conditions present very similar symptoms at the beginning.

  Dr. Samie recalled the time when Pignataro was told that Debbie was suffering from arsenic poisoning. His first reaction had been to say, “Somebody must be doing this to me—because of what I went through before.”

  He was alluding to the investigation into Sarah Smith’s death. And, as always, he saw events almost exclusively as how they affected him. />
  A few days later, Anthony had said to Dr. Samie, “You know that she has done this—tried to kill herself—before.”

  None of the doctors believed that Debbie Pignataro had deliberately poisoned herself. Now, when Sedita asked Dr. Samie about the expected progression of arsenic poisoning, the doctor was not optimistic. She explained that first the gastrointestinal system is affected, and then arsenic affects the nerves, where it can cause terrible damage. In Dr. Samie’s opinion, Debbie’s prognosis remained poor because she had suffered such severe damage to her nerves. She felt either that Debbie would lose the use of her hands forever, or that she faced a very long period of recovery before she could hope to regain normal use of them.

  Dr. George Jackson, division head for the Criminalistics Department of National Medical Services, helped Sedita interpret the lab results from tests on Debbie’s hair. Dr. Jackson, who has a Ph.D. in toxicology, explained that the hair samples, clipped carefully by Chuck Craven and Pat Finnerty on August 26, had been divided into three segments. As hair grows, the markings left by heavy metal will stay, and if more poison is ingested, other marks will be left closer to the hair root.

  Segment 1 of the samplings was considered to be hair growing from the root between August 10 and August 26, measuring 0.4 centimeter. Segment 2 would have grown between June 30 and August 10: 0.4 centimeter to 2.3 centimeters, and Segment 3 was hair grown from May 31 to June 30. It was 2.3 centimeters to 6.4 centimeters long.

  The rule of thumb for normal hair growth is about 1 centimeter a month. Jackson pointed out that the most dramatic increase in the arsenic level in Debbie’s hair was in the segment that had grown between August 10 and August 26. This corresponded to the dramatic worsening of Debbie Pignataro’s symptoms and to the fact that her urine had tested positive for arsenic on August 11, showing the highest level ever recorded by the New York State Health Department.

  The date of Debbie’s most significant poisoning had been narrowed down to a two-week period—probably less than that. It had taken a while for the chelation therapy to “catch” the arsenic in her system and gradually remove it.

  Meanwhile, Debbie’s agony was terrible to watch. She was prescribed as much painkilling medication as possible, but it wasn’t enough. Even the sheets of her hospital bed hurt her feet. Her hands and feet got worse instead of better, and she began to accept the awful possibility that she might never walk again or be able to feed herself, hold a pencil, or comb her own hair. The nurses who cared for her felt helpless; there was so little they could do for her.

  Frank Sedita, Pat Finnerty, and Chuck Craven met to go over the progress of their case. It was building steadily. They had made headway in both circumstantial and physical evidence. They knew now that if human beings are given arsenic in boluses big enough to produce acute symptoms, their hair will develop a crude “calendar” that gives macabre information.

  After two series of tests on Debbie’s hair—both without marks and with hair that showed the presence of arsenic—the Medical Services lab had been able to measure the exact amount of arsenic there. Debbie’s hair before June 1999 showed that her baseline (normal) level of arsenic was 4 micrograms per liter. In June, when Anthony began to sleep over often in the family home and eat with them, it increased to 6.4 micrograms per liter. However, in July, when Anthony moved in completely and took over as the cook, it jumped to 18.9 micrograms per liter.

  From all they had learned in their intense research into arsenic, they could deduce that Debbie had initially been suffering from chronic arsenic poisoning, ingesting small doses at a time since sometime in June. Certainly she was nauseated all the time, but she hadn’t lost feeling in her extremities or developed the staggering walk until early August.

  Just before August 10—when she was hospitalized in critical condition—damage to her hair showed arsenic present at 81.5 micrograms per liter! As Sedita pointed out, this was sixteen times her original baseline figure. Human blood didn’t leap from 4 to 81.5 micrograms per liter of arsenic without a good reason. There was only one conclusion: Debbie had been poisoned both chronically and acutely.

  There was something diabolical and coldly plotted in that picture. They looked at their records of Tony Pignataro’s probation to see what was happening with him in July. They knew that he’d asked permission to go to Florida to work with his brothers in the fast food business in the early summer—and been denied. They also knew that Debbie had gone into the hospital on July 21, stayed for four days, shown significant improvement, and gone home on July 25—home to her husband’s cooking.

  When acutely ill patients go to the hospital, improve fairly rapidly, and then have a relapse when they return home, an analytical mind sees the correlation. Something in Debbie’s home was making her sick.

  While talking to the various physicians who had treated Debbie, Frank Sedita learned that Anthony had not simply ignored his wife’s condition. Although he certainly had no bedside manner with her and he hadn’t talked with her about the funny taste in her mouth and her constant vomiting, he had sought a surgical remedy for her condition.

  On August 2, Anthony had called Dr. Michael Rade and said that his analysis of Debbie’s biliary scan (a CAT scan to find the source of her digestive problems) proved to him that Debbie had a nonfunctioning gallbladder. Anthony then practically demanded that Dr. Rade operate on her immediately. Rade didn’t agree with Anthony’s diagnosis and refused to operate.

  “If she’d had that surgery in the weakened condition she was in,” Sedita suggested, “she probably wouldn’t have survived. And even on autopsy, it’s not likely that they would have found any arsenic in her system—it’s not a usual test they do. But that plan didn’t work—if it was a plan on Pignataro’s part.”

  Sedita, Finnerty, and Craven had known for a long time that they were dealing with a very calculating mind. All of their scenarios came full circle—back to Anthony Pignataro. Because Debbie’s poisoning was both chronic and acute, Sedita would have ammunition to rebut what he fully expected Anthony’s defense would be—that Debbie herself had taken arsenic in a long, slow suicide plan.

  It didn’t make sense that she would have taken lots of little doses, then taken some big gulps, and then gone back to the small amounts. They had all learned how painful arsenic poisoning was. Who would ever choose to die that way—with agonizing symptoms—over a period of months?

  Anthony’s other prime suspect was Dan Smith, but any defense attorney would have a very difficult time if he tried to accuse the gentle young widower of poisoning Pignataro’s wife so he could get revenge on the man who had killed his wife. Even if Dan was that kind of man, he had been living many states away from western New York.

  No, they were dealing with someone who was perfectly willing to plan ahead and wait and watch while his (or her) target withered away and died. Who—other than her husband—might have a reason to want Debbie Pignataro dead? She was a sweet woman obviously devoted to her home and her family, and she didn’t have any enemies—not unless one of Anthony’s girlfriends wanted him enough to kill his wife to get him.

  Frank Sedita went over the motivation that Anthony might have. Again, any wish to have Debbie dead all seemed to come back to him. Debbie had a $100,000 life insurance policy, and her husband was the beneficiary. It wasn’t a huge amount of money for an insurance policy, but a check of Anthony’s bank records had showed them that his checking account was tapped out. For months he had been trying to get out of New York State and move to Florida. They assumed he would then cross the Caribbean to some out-of-the-way spot where he could set up practice as a doctor again. A wife with ties to the States would only get in his way. And he had at least one woman waiting in the wings for him: Tami Maxell.

  “But he can’t divorce Debbie,” Sedita said. “If he did, his mother would cut him off from his dad’s estate—which is considerable.”

  As awful as it was to contemplate, poisoning Debbie might have seemed the only way Tony Pignataro could b
e free of the constraints of his marriage and still inherit his share of Dr. Ralph’s estate from Lena.

  19

  Debbie Pignataro was probably the one who could give the investigators the best read on her husband, but she seemed oddly loyal to the man who had put her through so much. She appeared to be more confused than angered that someone had poisoned her. It may have been that she couldn’t bear to look at it head-on.

  In September, Frank Sedita and Sharon Simon, the victims’ advocate, went to Mercy Hospital, but Frank stayed in the lobby while Sharon went up to visit with Debbie.

  Sharon empathized with women in a way no man could ever hope to. She hadn’t grown tough during her years of dealing with victims, and she considered Debbie a victim—perhaps someone who had been a victim for a very long time.

  “I know they call me Ms. Morgue, Dr. Death, or Morticia,” Sharon recalled with a laugh. “I’m ‘the one who talks to dead people.’ I’m the one whose beeper sounds at the most impossible times, calling me out to a murder crime scene.”

  Like most professionals who work with the saddest events of life, Sharon had become used to the black humor they need to keep from crying. Her job required that she had to spend a lot of time at homicide scenes, morgues, and funeral parlors as she comforted the survivors of murder victims.

  “When Frank Sedita called me, he had such a serious tone in his voice that I wondered what was wrong,” she said. “I went down to meet with him and our District Attorney, Frank Clark. I’d heard about the Pignataro case, and now they wanted me to work on it with them.”

  Sharon Simon hasn’t had an easy life herself, which may have a lot to do with how she identifies with victims. She had been married for twenty-three years—happily, she believed—when she was served with divorce papers in 1992. She was grateful that her two sons, Yuri and Damien, were grown when her marriage crumbled. They stood by her, but she lost the home she had lovingly restored with countless hours of hands-on work. Sharon knows how to communicate with women where they live, but she empathizes with men, too. It was Sharon who had sat with Dan Smith throughout the painful hearings about Sarah’s death. She had seen Debbie then, but had never spoken to her.