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.”
Words were all she had left.
From him, however, utter silence.
Her heart pounded with anxiety. Without warning he placed the barrel of his gun up to Donna’s mouth through the pillowcase. The steel was hard on her teeth. With the chamber of the pistol butted up against her lips, Donna and her attacker were at an impasse. This moment—when she believed he was going to fire that weapon into her mouth and blow the back of her head against the wall—made Donna’s mind burn as though on fire, a throbbing that grew as she waited for the end of her life.
I could feel the anticipation of death growing, a slow and agonizing approach. It was paralyzing. He was finished with what he had come for. He didn’t need me any longer. I expected death to be quick and painless, though the fear of not knowing when made me shiver and sweat. This is it . . . I’m thirty-six years old, and I am going to die. My kids are going to wake up and find my bloodied body on this bed.
I needed to prepare myself for death.
After he took the barrel of the gun away from the area near Donna’s mouth, she spoke again: “Please, God, absolve me of all my sins.” The words came out shaky but swift. Donna desperately wanted to, but could not, cross herself, as she would when walking into a Catholic church, dipping a finger in the holy water font.
Her attacker had other plans. Without warning he placed the gun against her left temple. Then he snarled, “If you call the pigs, I will come back here and kill you.”
It was the first time Donna believed she might survive.
Later Donna said that at this point she felt she needed to “will ” him down the stairs and out of her house. “That sounds crazy, I know,” she would later say. “But it had worked so far. I was disoriented, however. I had no idea where he was at any given moment. He was off the bed—that much I knew.”
Yet something told her he was still standing at her bedside, staring, his gun pointed at her head, debating whether to pull the trigger or flee the scene. What could she say to this man who had just raped and threatened to kill her that would comfort him enough to leave?
“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for not hurting me,” Donna said, certain again that the words were not her own. “I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
She was sure the words sounded too desperate, shallow.
The most horrifying period of silence she would ever know settled over the room. Just silence and the subtle hum of the house pulsating and the whisper of the New England night outside her open window.
As Donna considered her options, and perhaps again prepared for death, she heard something.
Footsteps.
This time they headed down the stairs.
Then the front door of her house whined open.
He’s leaving, she thought.
An immense sense of gratitude washed over Donna. A moment ago she had believed death was her destiny. But she had survived.
The kids?
The front door shut. He was out of the house. Donna was overcome with a sense of relief, yes, but more than anything, gratitude.
This man had allowed me to live. This was all I needed. I could overcome the rape and heal. I had my life, which was enough to convince me that I had decades ahead of me to live. Minutes before, I didn’t think I was going to have a life. What will I do with this life now? I was transformed then and there. Every day, I knew, would be a gift I could not ignore.
Quickly I broke free from the nylons by stretching and slipping one hand out, leaving them on the other hand like a wristband. I pulled down the nylons covering my eyes and my mouth over the top of the pillowcase and let them slip onto my neck like a handkerchief or scarf. Only then was I able to take the pillowcase off my head.
I ran down the hall to check on the kids.
They were both still sound asleep. I knelt down beside my daughter’s bed as her boney chest moved slowly up and down—a metronome to the faint whistle coming from her nose. I dropped my head, closed my eyes, sobbed, and thanked God my children were untouched.
I wondered if he was outside, waiting to see what I was going to do. I needed to call for help.
Family, I thought. Call someone from the family . . . he told you not to call the police.
Donna went back to her bedroom and picked up the telephone.
No dial tone.
She rushed downstairs.
The phone line in the kitchen, like the one upstairs in Donna’s room—the only two phone lines in the house—was also out of service.
In an age without cell phones, Donna felt trapped inside her house with her kids, with no way to communicate with the outside world and no idea if her attacker was outside waiting for her to emerge.
CHAPTER TWO
Blindfolded
Donna had been bound, gagged, and sexually assaulted. A gun had been placed to her mouth by her attacker, but she had somehow talked him out of killing her. Throughout the entire ordeal, Donna’s children slept like angels just down the hallway. Now, though, she was downstairs in that same house, roaming around, certainly in shock, her adrenaline pumping, finally realizing that the phone lines to the house had been cut. She had no way to call out. Her attacker, Donna thought, could be just outside the door, maybe reconsidering having left her alive.
What now?
There was only one thing Donna felt she could do: run like hell out of the house to a neighbor’s. After contemplating her options for about ten minutes, Donna slipped into a bathrobe, checked on the kids one last time (they were still sleeping), locked the door behind her, and took off.
Running west on Leffingwell Avenue, Donna stopped at the first house with lights on. It was the home of her husband John’s third cousin, Cliff Warner, a man Donna knew only in passing, a friendly hello in the neighborhood.
Donna banged as loudly as she could on Cliff’s back door while peering into the house, trying to spot someone.
“Come on . . . someone answer,” she whispered.
Overwhelming anxiety. There she stood on Cliff’s back porch, knowing that her sleeping children were home alone (five houses away) while her attacker was on the loose. Donna kept looking back toward her house, that chilling warning he had given her echoing . . .
If you call the pigs, I will kill you.
/> Donna later said that Cliff came to the door, recognized her, took one look, and immediately knew something was wrong.
Donna explained the situation as best as she could: “Someone broke in . . . attacked me . . . I was raped. My God, the kids, Cliff. The kids are still there.”
Donna ran into the house behind Cliff as he picked up the phone and dialed 911.
“I’m calling from 500 Farmington Avenue,” Cliff said hurriedly after a dispatcher from the Waterbury Police Department (WPD) answered. (In Waterbury 911 calls went directly to the police department.) “We have an assault—a sexual assault, on Leffingwell Ave, um . . .”
In the background Donna yelled, “A burglary!”
The dispatcher asked where the sexual assault had taken place.
Cliff didn’t know Donna’s address off the top of his head. His voice was broken. He sounded nervous, shaken.
Donna grabbed the telephone from Cliff’s hand: “I’m the victim . . .” She came across as fairly calm at first—maybe even in control. But she had been frightened to her core, unsure whether she was even doing the right thing by talking to the police. She added, “Listen, he told me if I called the police he would be back to kill me. He cut my phone lines, so I’m at a neighbor’s. My children are okay, but they’re in the house by themselves.”
The mere mention of her children sent Donna into hysterical crying.
“Where?” dispatch asked.
Donna gave her address.
Dispatch asked her to spell out the name of her street.
She did that, adding, “But please . . . he told me—”
Dispatch interrupted, “What apartment?”
“What?”
“What apartment?”
“. . . It’s a home.”
“Okay. How old are the kids?”
“Seven and five.” By now Donna sounded as though she was out of breath. She was hyperventilating. Her voice carried one message: Get someone over there to protect her children, fast.
“Seven and five?” dispatch confirmed.
“Please, I don’t want to leave them alone . . . what . . . what should I do?”
“Okay,” dispatch said. “You were sexually assaulted?”
Donna was speaking so fast—in a manic state of panic—it was hard to follow, but she said quite clearly at one point: “It was an attempted rape . . . and . . . and . . . he burgled . . . I don’t even care . . . I just want my children safe from him.”
Why “attempted rape,” and not “he raped me,” would become an issue in the months that followed. Later Donna explained the rationale behind the ostensibly odd choice of words: “I believe part of the reason is because he prematurely ejaculated even though he penetrated me with a finger, and the other part is probably because I couldn’t bring myself to say or believe that I had been raped at that point.” And indeed, coming up with the correct words—any coherent words, for that matter—or an explanation for what had just taken place would have been nearly impossible for anyone in this same situation.
“Can you meet the police outside [your home]?” dispatch asked.
“Is George Lescadre in?” Donna asked. This seemed like a strange request to the dispatcher. But George, a detective with the WPD, was a family friend. Donna was desperate to speak to someone she knew; she felt the urgency she’d hoped to convey wasn’t getting through to the dispatcher. She was terrified her attacker would go back to her home and harm her children. She didn’t know what else to do. Getting George on the line seemed like the best idea at the time.
“George Lescadre . . . I . . . I really don’t know him,” the dispatcher said.
“He’s a detective!” Donna said, breathing heavily into the phone.
“Okay, can you hold on, ma’am?”
“Yes.”
There was a long pause. Lots of beeping and static.
Donna waited. A minute went by. To Donna it felt like forever.
“Hi, I’m Sergeant Rinaldi, can I help you?” a man’s voice said.
Meanwhile, Cliff Warner, the neighbor, emerged from his basement with an ax. As Donna repeated her request to Sergeant Rinaldi, Cliff signaled to her that he was heading up to the house with the ax to protect the kids and wait for the police.
“No, he’s not working now,” Rinaldi said.
“All right, listen,” Donna explained. “I’ve just been attempted raped and burglarized . . .” She repeated her address and explained why she was at Cliff’s, with as calm a tone as she could muster, hoping Rinaldi would take her seriously, adding, “. . . my children are home sleeping. I wanted to have . . . I don’t know what to do. The gentleman that did this said . . .”
Rinaldi cut her off, asking, “Do you know him?”
Gentleman was perhaps a strange way to refer to a man who had just brutally raped Donna and threatened her life, but she was in a state of pure panic. She really had no idea what words she was using—they were just coming from a hyperactive, fevered mind.
“What?” Donna asked.
“Do you know the guy?”
“No, I don’t know him at all. He covered my head. Thank God he left me alive. He just said that if I killed . . . if I called the cops he would kill me, and I am very afraid.”
“Listen to me,” Rinaldi said, trying to take control of the conversation. “The kids are in the house?”
“Yes!” Donna answered.
“Okay. You stay on the line with me, okay? I’m going to dispatch—”
Donna interrupted him. She sounded terrified and desperate, crying out in between her words: “But listen . . . he told me that if I called the cops . . . he would kill me . . . I don’t want to—”
“He cannot kill you. You’re not there, are you?”
“No,” Donna said through her tears.
“Well, aren’t you concerned about your kids?” Rinaldi asked, again trying to keep Donna focused.
“Of course I am.”
I had always lived my life a certain way. My devout Catholic upbringing and resilient faith had gotten me through every possible interruption and hardship: death in the family, argument with my husband, other traumatic moments. I didn’t know it then, but the night of September 11, 1993, was going to erase my identity. I became a Jane Doe the moment I stepped out of my Leffingwell Avenue house. Still, after being raped, escaping death, and having my life and my children’s lives threatened, I believed in the depth of my soul that the worst part of my nightmare was over. My attacker, I thought, had left the house and disappeared into the darkness of the night. I thought that after this 911 call ended, the police would come, begin an investigation, and ultimately find him. I would initiate the process of healing—all while being grateful for the second chance at life that God had given me.
My home had always been one of a few places I considered a safe harbor; somewhere to hide from what could be a dangerous, evil world, a carefree dwelling, essentially, protecting my family from what at times could be a dysfunctional culture filled with monsters. That all changed on this night. In fact, the local WPD, which I had previously measured on a similar scale of safety, became a space I would despise more than anything, each subsequent visit prompting an emotional reaction I did not think even existed inside me. I had no idea, obviously, that nearly fifteen years would pass—the worst of my ordeal ahead of me—before I would be able to reclaim my identity and take back my life from the police and my attacker.
The idea that her kids were not her main concern as she spoke to the WPD rattled Donna. What was Rinaldi implying with that last question? Did he think that she had left her children alone because she was worried only about herself?
Rinaldi told Donna to remain calm. He said he was going to get “some police” dispatched to her house immediately. He asked again for the address. Then, strangely en
ough, the officer said, “You’re sure, you’re sure you live in this house?”
“Yes.”
Rinaldi told her to stay put. “Hang on a second.”
There was a pause. Donna’s labored and heavy breathing took over the dead air space. She was hyperventilating again.
A minute or more went by. Rinaldi came back. “Okay, ma’am . . . we got some officers going to your house right now.”
“Yes,” she said. “Should I meet them there? I’m down the street. I locked the door. The guy’s out of the house. He’s gone.”
Rinaldi was speaking to someone in the background, repeating certain details Donna was giving him. Then, addressing her, he said, “Okay, stay where you are. There’s nothing you can do right now . . .” There was a pause. Then: “You don’t know this gentleman—he just came into your house?”
“I couldn’t get a look at him. He came in while I was sleeping, and he put a thing over my head.”
“You don’t know if he was white, black, or anything?”
“He smelled like grease . . . I don’t know if he was black. He had kind of a black accent,” she added. “That’s very vague. I wouldn’t be able to tell. My main concern is my children.”
“Okay.”
“I begged and pleaded for my life, and he was kind,” Donna said, surprising herself with her use of the word kind.
They spoke about addresses and doors being locked. Then Rinaldi explained that an officer was on the way to pick her up at Cliff’s.
“Don’t change your clothes or anything,” Rinaldi advised. Important evidence, the officer suggested, could be on her person and clothing.
“I’m all ripped,” Donna said, referring to her attacker cutting her clothing.
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