“Listen,” Rinaldi said, “don’t wash.”
“I know.”
“Try to stay calm. There’s nothing you can do.”
“I just want my children safe.”
Rinaldi promised Donna that they were working on getting the children.
Donna was beginning to lose total control of her emotions. She had kept things in check for quite a while, but now Rinaldi was losing her. In tears, she said, “This is the most frightening thing I’ve ever . . . I’m just so grateful—I cannot tell you—that he left me alive.”
“That’s the main thing . . .” Rinaldi agreed.
For the next several minutes, Donna and Rinaldi talked about what had happened inside her bedroom. Donna explained why she believed her assailant had a gun—the sounds of metal and the fact that he had pressed what she thought was the barrel against her lips and to her temple. As soon as Donna said something important, Rinaldi repeated it to someone else in the room with him. Donna kept saying, “Oh, God . . . I cannot believe it . . .”
Interrupting, Rinaldi told her that an officer had arrived at her house.
“Are my kids okay?” Donna asked excitedly.
Rinaldi said the cruiser had just pulled up; no one was inside the house yet.
Donna asked that they not enter the house without her there. She was firm: “Don’t scare the children!” She also warned Rinaldi that there would be a guy standing in the yard with an ax, but he was not the perpetrator. He was there to protect the children. “Don’t hurt him.”
This got Rinaldi’s attention: “Pardon?”
She explained what Cliff was doing up at the house. Rinaldi understood and relayed the information.
Some time went by, and Rinaldi continued to comfort Donna, telling her that their main concern was getting the children into a safe environment.
Donna was eager to get out of Cliff’s house and up to her home. She wanted to be there when the children woke up.
“The best thing you can do right now is give me as much information as you can,” Rinaldi said. The information regarding her attacker was fresh in Donna’s mind. Looking back later, she assumed the WPD wanted to get the details from her so they could begin to search the area for the man who had attacked her.
Rinaldi asked Donna if she knew which way her attacker went when he left the house.
“No . . . out the front door, I believe.” Donna was crying now, again losing her composure. She sensed the impact this incident was going to have. The gravity of the situation was beginning to make sense to her. The thought that her kids were almost in the arms of safety was overwhelming. She was waiting to hear that the police were inside her home, protecting them.
“Do you know which way he went down?”
“My . . . my eyes were blindfolded. It took me a while to work them off.”
“Are you positive that he left the house?”
“Yes.” Donna said. She had heard him walk down the stairs and shut the door.
“He cut the phone lines?” Rinaldi asked.
“Yes.”
“How do you know he cut the phone lines?”
She explained how she couldn’t make any calls. The line was dead. It made sense that he cut the line. That’s why she left the house.
At this point Donna saw a police officer at the back door of Cliff’s house. “The police are here,” she said to Rinaldi. Then, to the officer that entered Cliff’s kitchen: “I am the victim.”
Donna handed the phone to the responding officer, saying, “My children. I need to get my children.”
“Yes,” he said to Donna, then, addressing Rinaldi, “Hello?”
“Is she all tied up?” Rinaldi asked the responding officer. There was a problem with the connection. “Is she all ripped up?” Rinaldi asked again after getting no response.
“Yeah,” the officer said.
After a few words: “This sounds real serious,” Rinaldi said.
“I know it is.”
Rinaldi explained that the kids were still in the house up the street.
“I’m going to get the key from her and head up there,” the responding officer said.
“Okay.”
They hung up.
CHAPTER THREE
Jam Sandwich
Donna was in shock. The presence of the police, lights flashing, radios squelching, the entire neighborhood, it seemed, waking up in the middle of the night, amplified the event, made it all too real. She was crying now without realizing it, wandering around Cliff’s house in a daze, wondering what was going on at her house and if her children were safe. Had the police woken them up and frightened them?
The responding officer hung up with Sergeant Rinaldi and asked Donna for the key to her house. They needed to get in.
She handed the officer the key and followed him as he walked toward the door to leave.
“Listen,” he said, “you have to stay here . . . and don’t remove any of that,” pointing to the nylons on her neck and wrist.
Donna wondered why she had to stay behind—alone. But she did as she was told. Within a few moments the officer pulled out of Cliff’s driveway and sped off, en route to her house.
Donna was now by herself at Cliff’s house. Why hadn’t they brought a second officer to stay with her? It didn’t make sense.
She walked back inside and called her cousin. The one person she did not want to call was John. He was in Colorado. Sleeping. What could he do? In a day without cell phones, to notify John, Donna would have to phone the hotel and ask the desk clerk to wake him up and tell him there was an emergency back home. News like that would only spread the anxiety and fear she felt to Colorado and ruin John’s flight home. He would be home later the next day. She could tell him then.
“I’ll be right there!” Donna’s cousin, Nick Gugliotti, said. Nick lived in Watertown, a neighboring city only minutes away.
The separation anxiety I felt as I waited at Cliff’s grew with each passing moment. I had no idea what was going on at my house, or if the police had woken my kids up. I wanted to see and hold my kids. There were all these people—the police, Nick (my cousin), Cliff, even my neighbors—waking up, arriving at my house, and I am at another location. With that playing in my mind, along with the trauma of having just been raped, feeling a sense of urgency, and not knowing where my attacker was, I felt like I could no longer stay at Cliff’s house. So I made a decision.
Inside Cliff’s kitchen, unfamiliar with the layout or where Cliff and his family kept things, Donna frantically searched through cabinet drawers for a knife. If she was going to run back to her house, she was not going to do it without having something to protect herself with. She was certain he was out there, watching her, now upset that she had involved the police when he had given her specific directions not to.
Arming herself with the “biggest knife” she “could find in the drawer,” Donna ran the five houses back to her home. Approaching the yard, she could see people mingling, neighbors looking out their windows. Police lights. The front door wide open. All this activity gave her a fleeting sense of relief that she was safe. But still, the children. Were they okay? Were they waking up wondering where she was?
A police officer approached Donna as she walked up to the front door. She asked him where her kids were.
“I need to take that knife, ma’am,” he said.
Donna’s mother- and brother-in-law, who lived nearby, had just received a call from Nick, who had explained what was happening. Now they walked up and hugged Donna.
Within a few moments, Donna was inside, running up the stairs to check on her kids.
Remarkably, the kids were still sleeping.
The house filled with people and Donna calmed down, if only slightly. She felt less threatened. Police were n
ow inside her house, going up and down the stairs, sizing up a crime scene that had grown crowded, even bustling. Meanwhile, friends and family consoled Donna.
“We checked the inside and outside of the residence,” noted a report written by the WPD about this crucial period of the night, “and did not find anything but the victim’s kids sound asleep in their bedrooms upstairs . . .”
Describing Donna arriving at the scene, the report noted that she “appeared to be a little upset and had a knife in her right hand . . .”
One of the first things Donna told police when she arrived, in describing her attack, was that she “might have heard” a noise “coming from one of the closets and then spotted a shadow.” She then described the attack in detail. In the police report the WPD said she “did not appear to have any marks . . .” Donna described her attacker as having a “Jamaican accent.” She said he “smelled of oil.” He “cut her panties, then tried to rape her, but couldn’t for some reason, then left the scene . . .” Even more interesting, when placed within the context of Donna’s ensuing case and how the next few weeks would play out, was the report’s description of Donna’s bedroom, the scene of the attack: “. . . Palomba’s pocketbook, wallet . . . were neatly on her bed. Residence appeared to be very neat.”
Upstairs, inside Donna’s bedroom, according to the report, a pair of officers collected “2 floral pattern pillow cases, 1 silver earring, gold earrings, 2 pearl necklass [sic], 1 silver heart pendant . . . 1 black panty, torn . . . 1 grey sweatshirt with writing . . .” which were all, the report added, “turned in as evidence.”
Police also took the panty hose that were tied around Donna’s neck and wrist, but not the clothing she was wearing. They confiscated more jewelry downstairs, “sheets, cases . . . ,” and also a “bat” (as in baseball), which they found on a chair in the living room.
On that night, not one neighbor was interviewed by the police. The neighborhood itself was not canvassed for Donna’s assailant. Besides those obvious items the police collected, the house was not cordoned off with yellow police tape and processed. Most important, there was no record of the WPD’s CSI unit being called in to fingerprint and photograph the house, or to search and collect trace evidence from inside or outside the house or from Donna’s body that night. Those procedures are part of crime-scene 101, regardless of circumstances. It was as if this was the first time an event of this nature had occurred for the WPD, and they were unprepared to deal with it. Why weren’t officers out scouring the neighborhood for an alleged rapist who had tied Donna up, brutally assaulted her, and threatened her life?
“Looking back,” Donna said later, “I just don’t think they knew what they were supposed to do.”
Donna was in a daze for the next twenty-four hours. She was saying and doing things out of the norm, but it was behavior that should have been expected from a victim of a sexual assault. When Nick had arrived earlier with his wife, Dawn, he was amazed when he first saw Donna.
“When I got there,” Nick said later, “the image that comes to mind when I think of what Donna looked like is a scarecrow. Donna was standing in the doorway, her arms stretched out, those nylons hanging from her wrists and her neck . . . It was a bizarre picture to see someone you love standing there that way: pale as could be and shuttering.”
Nick wanted to hug Donna, but he was told he could not because such contact could transfer evidence.
“I saw a beautiful young lady that looked terrorized,” Nick added. “One of the things, however, that was literally bungled by the police was that they allowed me to go through the house without stopping me.”
For Nick, to see his business partner, his friend, a family member, torn apart by an unspeakable crime, was gut-wrenching. Nick idolized Donna in many ways.
“She is an exceptional, unique individual,” Nick said later. “I’ve known her since she was a baby. We grew up together. We were in business together. So I’ve seen her just about every single day of her life. She is the epitome of a lady. Respected by our clients. No one in our family expected Donna to be anything but honest—she’s always been kind to a fault. So what was torturous to me was to later see what happened to Donna in the weeks after, as the police got hold of her. What they would say about Donna was so contrary to who Donna is and her life’s experience.”
While at the house, Nick said he walked upstairs to check on the kids. Then he went from room to room, looking at windows, inside closets, all over, to see if anything stood out to him. He was curious to find out how the intruder had entered the house.
As the police finished at the scene, a female officer suggested to Donna that she go to the emergency room for treatment. “I believe,” Donna recalled, “one officer might have asked to take me, but I wanted to go with Nick.”
“She didn’t even want to go at first—she was obviously in shock and couldn’t make decisions,” Nick recalled later.
Despite everything that had occurred, there seemed to be no frantic hurry to get Donna to the hospital. But by about 2:30 in the morning of September 11, 1993, Donna’s eye was swollen, throbbing badly, and tearing up. She felt as though her attacker might have scratched the actual eyeball. While she hadn’t been beaten, her wrists had ligature marks where the nylons had been tied by her attacker. Her emotional state was deteriorating rapidly as the morning progressed. As she absorbed more and more of what had happened, the idea of being a rape victim began to consume Donna. Granted, she was grateful to be alive and even touched with gratitude toward her attacker for allowing her and her children to live. But the violence and her suffering during the ordeal were now overriding everything else as she wandered about the scene of the crime. She was starting to think in terms of . . . I was raped during a home invasion. I’m a rape victim. The totality of the night hit Donna as she prepared to go to the hospital after her cousin Nick and his wife Dawn offered to take her.
“You know, you really should go,” the female police officer advised.
“I know,” Donna said. “But my kids. I don’t want them to wake up and be scared. I’m worried about the kids.”
After some time spent debating what to do, it was decided that Cliff and Donna’s brother-in-law would carry the children down the street to Donna’s mother-in-law. They would be safe there.
This female officer, Donna later said, also told her to make sure she asked the hospital to conduct a sexual assault examination.
Ultimately this advice would change the entire investigation.
This place I called home, Waterbury, Connecticut, was a community of wonderful people, close, always willing to help one another. I grew up in the north end until I was about six or seven, and then we moved to the west end. My family was super tight, both sides 100 percent Italian. My mother was born in Italy. She came over when she was five years old and met her father for the first time. Life revolved around family. Sundays were always at my grandparents, where I learned about hope, faith, and perseverance at an early age. They had a grape vine. They crushed the grapes, made wine. My noni would make bread, pasta, and sauce from tomatoes we grew and harvested. They had a three-family house with a big garden in the back. The whole family lived in the house. We lived just up the street, my mother, father, my sister, Maria, and I. Life was all about family and food—the great Italian culture. My grandfather, Nonno, emigrated from Italy to America in 1924 at age twenty-three, leaving behind his young bride, who was pregnant with their first child. He came here to make a better life for his family, and finally by 1936 he had saved enough money to bring [everyone] over.
After John and I met in college and married, life became that same Italian cliché of family, family, family. We had kids and lived among all our siblings and relatives in what was a town then centered on community. John’s family, the Palombas, were quite well-known in town. Whereas we, the Cappellas, came from north of town, the Palombas lived in Overlook, which was a mo
re prestigious area. John grew up with five siblings—two sisters, three brothers. You can look at a photo of them when they were all young kids and, with mom and dad, they truly look like the all-American family. Fred Palomba, John’s father, was a Fordham graduate; he worked for Army Intelligence as well as owning multiple businesses. My father-in-law was even mayor of Waterbury (1965–68) until he had a heart attack. The four boys worked in—you guessed it—the family business: insurance.
As we began our own life together, John worked as an insurance inspector in the family business while I worked at various marketing jobs, including one at the Republican-American newspaper in the advertising display department. We had the life. Love. Children. House. Great families. The community. The American dream, really.
Under the fluorescent lights of Waterbury Hospital’s emergency room hallway, it was clear to Nick and his wife that Donna had sustained serious injuries. She had not yet washed or changed her clothes. By now her eye was not only throbbing, but almost totally closed. There was no reason for Donna to imagine that the police were not systematically searching the neighborhood and the town for her assailant. When she left the house with Nick and Dawn, escorted to the hospital by a single police cruiser, Donna thought that additional law enforcement would take over and process the scene. She believed that everything within the WPD’s power was being done to make sure the man who had attacked her would eventually be brought to justice.
Donna was led into an examination room. The nurses explained that they would be taking a sexual assault kit from her. This entailed fingernail scrapings, swabs from her vagina, blood samples, head and pubic area combing, a saliva sample, a nasal mucus swab, and several additional and invasive—but important—procedures.
“My eye,” Donna said to the nurse. “It’s my eye that is really hurting me.”
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but we have to do evidence collection for a sexual assault kit first.”
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