by Ann Rule
Her brother Carmine came to visit often and urged, “Fight hard, Deb! Keep trying to move your fingers, your toes, your arms, and your legs!”
But days went by, and then weeks, and Debbie couldn’t make her limbs work at all. She gritted her teeth and closed her eyes with the effort of trying to connect with nerves that wouldn’t work. “It was so odd,” she remembered. “Even though my arms and legs were numb, I always felt unbearable pain there. It was constant.”
And then the worst thing of all happened. The Child Protective Service of Erie County served both Debbie and Anthony with a petition that said Ralph and Lauren were neglected children. “ADJUDGED that above named children are neglected children…”
Debbie was humiliated and horrified. Even though so many events in her life had made her feel like a failure, the one thing Debbie had always known was that she was a good mother. That anyone would consider her a neglectful mother was more than she could bear. She was terrified to read the words at the top of one of the documents from Family Court of the State of New York:
Notice: YOU ARE HEREBY NOTIFIED THAT IF ANY OF THE WITHIN-NAMED CHILDREN REMAIN IN FOSTER CARE FOR FIFTEEN OF THE MOST RECENT TWENTY-TWO MONTHS, THE AGENCY MAY BE REQUIRED BY LAW TO TERMINATE PARENTAL RIGHTS.
That meant that the state could take her children away from her and give them to someone else. Debbie knew that even if she never got over being paralyzed, her children would need her. And she needed them. She read the terrible notice with tears running down her face.
Fortunately for Debbie, her cousin Maria, who was Ralph’s godmother, was married to Denis A. Scinta, a well-respected local attorney who specialized in family law. Denis promised Debbie that it would be all right—that no one who heard the whole story, not even a judge, would ever conclude that she wasn’t a proper mother.
There was nothing she could do about it at the moment. On her own, she couldn’t even move her little finger. And it would be a while before she could hope to return to rehab.
Anthony continued to visit her, although as the arsenic leached from her system and her mind cleared, she found herself questioning why he came and why he wasn’t angrier that the state was trying to take their children away.
Why wasn’t he raging and stomping his feet? He could move and shout, but he didn’t seem worried about what would happen to their children. Sometimes she thought he only needed to be sure that she would never suspect him of poisoning her. And those were the times when Debbie remembered how often he had lied to her.
On September 14, 1999, Anthony sat beside her bed acting as he always did now—the perfect, concerned husband. Suddenly, Debbie’s cousin Denis walked into the room. She was happy to have Denis and his wife, Maria, back in her life. If anything good had come out of her illness, it was that Debbie’s extended family had returned to her life. Over the years, Anthony had discouraged her from seeing her relatives, preferring to celebrate holidays with his family.
Denis strode in, and he seemed very angry when he saw Anthony. His voice was steely as he said, “Anthony, leave. Get out of here and don’t come back!”
Anthony turned pale, but he stood up and hurried out. Debbie turned to Denis with a question on her lips. Before she could ask why her cousin was so angry, her mother, her cousin Maria, and her brother Carmine and his wife walked in. They were all there to show their support when Debbie heard devastating news.
Denis, who was usually quite jovial, was deadly serious. “Deb, Tony sent his girlfriend a card while you were in the intensive care unit. While you were dying, he wrote to her, ‘If you knew how much I missed you, you would be with me.’”
It may have seemed cruel, but Denis wanted desperately to convince Debbie that Anthony would destroy her if he could. “You have to choose. If you care about your kids, you’ve got to make up your mind. It’s either Tony or the kids. And you can’t trust Tony.”
With tears in her eyes, Debbie looked at the serious faces of the people who loved her the most, and she knew Denis was right. There was no contest; Ralph and Lauren came before anything else.
“He won’t be back, Denis,” she said. “I don’t want him here any more.”
Then, something miraculous happened. “In the month of October, I’ll never forget this,” Debbie recalled, “I was lying in my hospital bed, and I moved one of my fingers. I lifted one of my legs. I was screaming out to the nurses, who then started screaming for the doctors that ‘Deb is moving her fingers—she’s moving her legs!’ Everyone was ecstatic. Even the nurses were crying.
“I fought as hard as I could to regain my functions, but I knew I had a long way to go,” Debbie remembered. “I was transferred to the rehab floor once again, where I worked so hard every day to try to walk again, to try to feed myself.”
It was Debbie’s women friends who rallied around her—not just Rose Gardner, but also Shelly Palombaro, who had become a close friend. Shelly would become the person who made the difference in Debbie’s being allowed to live at home again, rather than languish in a nursing home designed for the elderly.
Shelly and Rose were very different, but they were both extremely loyal friends. Rose was very proper, wore her dark hair pulled tautly back from her un-madeup face, and had a very soft, precise voice. She was devoted to her religion, and she was stubborn. Shelly spoke loudly and firmly, wore her hair in sometimes outrageous styles in wild colors, with lipstick to match, but she was stubborn, too.
Like Sharon Simon, they understood that Debbie didn’t need anyone judging her or giving her advice. Both Rose and Shelly could understand why Debbie still clung to a relationship with Anthony, even though it was probably a relationship that had never really existed beyond Debbie’s hopes. Although they didn’t like him, Debbie had loved him for such a long time.
“He was her husband,” Rose said. “For all those years, she wanted to believe in him.”
Debbie’s survival was a miracle; nobody denied that. She should have died her first week in the hospital. That she survived was very impressive, even to toxicologists who usually based their conclusions on scientific theories. Nobody could have that much arsenic in their system and live. But Rose had been faithfully saying the Novena of the Little Flower of St. Therese, a special Catholic prayer. St. Therese has been elevated to a doctor of the Church, and Rose prayed to her for Debbie’s recovery. Rose had also enrolled Debbie in a prayer chain so that she would be prayed for constantly by the Carmelite Sisters.
By the beginning of August, when her hold on life was the most fragile, Debbie had scores of people who didn’t even know her praying for her. Rose considered her recovery a miracle, and no scientists spoke up to disagree with her.
Like Rose, Shelly insisted upon visiting Debbie in the hospital. “I only knew her from the boys’ football games,” Shelly recalled, “and I can’t explain why I had such a strong need to go to her. She was just a customer in my shop, but when she came to my house a week before she went to the hospital I just knew something was wrong. I had to go see her in the hospital.”
Actually, Shelly probably knew Anthony better than she did Debbie. Her terrific figure was partly Anthony’s handiwork. “He gave me breast implants,” Shelly said. Although she had an uneventful recovery, she had never cared much for Anthony. She cut his hair, but there was always something about him that grated on her. During that fall of 1999, while Debbie was still in the hospital, Shelly watched Anthony once during a football game played in a drizzling rain.
“There was something wrong with him,” she said. “I didn’t know if it was alcohol or what—but he was on something. I actually called the West Seneca Police because he was acting so strange, and I knew that part of his probation said that he couldn’t drink or do drugs. They told me, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’re watching him. Let him hang himself.’”
Shelly was a little surprised at their response, but then she realized she wasn’t the only one keeping an eye on Anthony.
One of the coaches in the league where Ralph p
layed football remembered a game night when it poured down rain; it might have been the same night that Shelly watched Anthony.
“I had mentioned loudly that the sidelines were so muddy that I needed some boots,” the coach said. “Anthony was on the sidelines within hearing distance, and he waved to me, and said, ‘Here!’ and tossed me his plastic water bottle. He must have thought that I said ‘I need some booze’ because as I took a sip from the water bottle, I realized I was drinking straight whiskey! He always had a plastic bottle with him on game day.”
Both Rose and Shelly had happy marriages, but Shelly had survived a rough first marriage and she felt a lot of empathy for Debbie.
Rose and Shelly bolstered her spirits. They told her that her house was fine and they were looking after it. Shelly even packed up her hairdressing salon and took it to Debbie’s hospital room.
“They weren’t taking care of her the way she always did,” Shelly said. “The nurses were wonderful to her, but they didn’t have time to fix her up. Debbie was always very into her hair, and having her nails done nicely, and of course now she couldn’t use her hands.”
“She even came to the hospital and dyed my hair for me,” Debbie remembered. “She did my nails and my makeup.”
These attentions may not have been life saving, but they gave Debbie a boost when she had begun to feel like a useless lump lying in bed day after day with little hope. The sight of Shelly and Rose cheered her.
If they believed she was going to make it, she could believe that, too.
It wasn’t until the last few weeks in October that her nurses, Teena Wise and Jackie Keller, could get Debbie into a wheelchair to maneuver her into the shower.
“I couldn’t move or stand, so they’d have to grab me under the arms to get me on my feet,” she recalled, “and the pain was so excruciating that I’d start screaming, ‘I don’t want to! I don’t want to!’ It just hurt everywhere, and it hurt to be touched. But somehow we’d make it to the shower down the hall, and then they’d have to drape me with towels so I’d be decent enough when they wheeled me past my guard.”
One night on the 11-to-7 shift, the nurses on duty had given Debbie all the medication that they could, and nothing seemed to touch her pain. “They came in, and they started crying. They were telling me, ‘Debbie, we don’t know what to do. We don’t have anything else to give you.’ I knew I had to let it ride.”
Debbie remembered when one of her physical therapists suggested that she use other ways to function. They could attach instruments to her wheelchair to help her feed herself, and a sliding board to help her from the chair to the bed. She didn’t want to resort to that—it would be like admitting she would always be paralyzed.
“With the help of my wonderful physical and occupational therapists, my nurses and doctors, I overcame many obstacles,” Debbie said. “Finally, I was able to walk with braces on my legs and a walker—just a few steps at a time. I was almost able to pick something up and put it in my mouth to eat. I was able to turn over in bed. You don’t know how important those things are until you can’t do them. With every little step, the staff was right there to cheer me on.”
After two and a half months in the hospital, the time came for Debbie to leave. By the third week of October 1999, she had progressed as far as she could in the hospital rehabilitation center. She wanted desperately to go home to her own house. She was running out of health insurance. She had two choices: to go to a senior rehabilitation center (basically a nursing home) or go home with 24-hour care. She couldn’t begin to afford full-time nurses, and she could not possibly live alone. She would need help in the most ordinary of tasks that other people take for granted, along with regular shots and injections, and her mother didn’t think she could do that all by herself.
There was no question about Ralph and Lauren coming home. To add to Debbie’s misery, the Children’s Protective Services Agency of the Erie County Department of Social Services was moving ahead with their efforts to take away her custodial rights to Ralph and Lauren.
Debbie realized to her horror that perhaps she had inadvertently helped to bring their investigation into her capability as a parent down on herself. She had called her pediatrician and asked to have Ralph and Lauren tested for arsenic poisoning. Now, both she and Anthony were the objects of scrutiny. Her children were under a court order to stay in their uncle’s home. Despite all the physical pain, the worst pain Debbie endured was emotional. She was being kept away from her children. They wouldn’t be living with her when she went home, and the house would seem so empty without them, and without Anthony—or rather the hopes she had always had to have him be a real dad and a real husband.
It seemed such a ridiculous situation to anyone who knew Debbie Pignataro and her abiding love for her two children, but for now Ralph and Lauren were ordered to stay with Carmine and his wife. Still, in October 1999, Debbie believed that they would be allowed to come home to her if she could only recover enough to take care of them. Surely the CPS investigation would be over soon.
She could not have been more wrong.
But, for the moment in October, Debbie’s biggest hurdle was trying to figure out a way she could go home and continue convalescing there. She had finally gathered the emotional strength to tell Anthony not to visit her any longer. He certainly wouldn’t be there at home, and she knew in her heart that even if he was, he wouldn’t take care of her. Beyond that, she had begun to accept that it was indeed Anthony who had fed her the poison that had almost killed her and had left her in the condition she was in. She didn’t want to be around him any more.
So, just before Halloween 1999, Debbie was virtually helpless, and no one knew how far she would come back or whether she would ever improve beyond this point. After twenty-six years, Caroline asked to be laid off her job at Krasner’s department store so she could move in and take care of Debbie. But they still needed one other person.
“I’ll take care of you,” Shelly Palombaro said firmly.
“You can’t, Shelly,” Debbie protested. “You’ve got a husband and a family, and you work all day. There’s no way you could take care of me, too.”
“Yes, I can. And I will.”
Porches and windows were decorated with jack-o’-lanterns, and the air smelled of smoke rather than the flowers of summer, as Debbie was driven down her street for the first time in two and a half months.
“I arrived to an empty house,” Debbie said, remembering how strange it seemed. The hospital bed took up most of the living room. Shelly and Caroline got Debbie settled in her wheelchair, combed her hair, and fixed her makeup. She hadn’t told Ralph and Lauren that she was coming home for fear something might happen to delay her homecoming.
“They were at Carmine’s house, and we wanted to surprise them, Debbie said. “Carmine and Patti made up this story about having to stop by our house to pick up some of Ralph’s football equipment.
“When they arrived, I was sitting in the wheelchair, and they were so happy. Mom was home! No matter what condition I was in. They were just so happy that I was home.”
Shelly had promised to take care of Debbie, and she did. For six months, Shelly arrived at Debbie’s house every morning at 6 A.M. “She got me dressed, did my hair, put on makeup…She came back every four hours to help me,” Debbie said.
“I brushed your teeth for a long time, too,” Shelly reminded her, laughing. “You couldn’t hold a toothbrush.”
When Debbie first came home, her physical therapist had her crawl up the stairs on her hands and knees. She made it, but then she didn’t know how to get down, and neither did the therapist. Shelly was irate, and she demanded that Debbie be assigned another therapist. She got someone whose approach was calmer and more in keeping with her physical capabilities.
But upstairs was out of the question. Debbie’s whole world was the living room/dining room, the kitchen, and the little downstairs bathroom. Although Caroline Rago had given up her home and her job to move in with Debbie, t
here were still many things she was hesitant to do. Shelly helped Debbie with the most intimate chores—things that nurses do routinely. When Debbie was embarrassed, Shelly taught her how to laugh instead. Sometimes the two of them went into hysterical giggles.
Without Shelly, Debbie would have been lost. She wasn’t exactly a quadriplegic, but neither her arms nor her legs worked very well. They were numb and unpredictable.
“One time, I thought I had Debbie safe, standing in front of her kitchen sink with her braces on, and I thought she could hold on,” Shelly said. “I turned my back for a moment, and she fell right over backward. I felt terrible.”
Shelly gave the intramuscular shots that Debbie needed. But once Shelly had to be away for four days, and Caroline had to do it. She didn’t think she could. She was terrified—but she did it. “I was so afraid I’d hurt her,” Caroline recalled.
Ralph and Lauren couldn’t understand why they couldn’t come back home full time, but the court order said they had to stay with Carmine and Patti. “I could only see them one hour per week,” Debbie said. One hour…
Anthony never came to see Debbie after the day Denis Scinta threw him out of her hospital room. Oddly, he didn’t fight his banishment. It was as if he was waiting for the ax to fall and didn’t want to draw attention to himself.
“Anthony went to court and got visitation rights with Ralph and Lauren,” Debbie said. “Sometimes the kids were with me and he came to pick them up. If he stepped inside the door, he was in the same room with me because my hospital bed was right there. But we barely spoke—maybe we said a few words about the kids.”
Debbie was shocked when she learned from the children that Anthony was working on them, trying to get them to believe wild stories and to believe his excuses for himself that were far beyond their ability to handle.
“He was telling them that the person who gave me arsenic was someone in Sarah Smith’s family. And then he told them that his mistress’s ex-boyfriend did this to me,” Debbie recalled. “Finally, he even accused a neighbor from across the street!