As they completed the kit, it seemed to Donna that “it took forever.”
What became obvious as she was being checked out was how badly her wrists had been marked up by her twisting out of the nylon restraints. And it turned out that Donna had suffered a scratched cornea and her eye needed to be patched up. It would be some time before the swelling went down and the pain went away.
Police came in, took all of Donna’s clothing, and placed it in a paper bag.
“Please come down to the police station when you’re ready,” an officer requested, “and give us a voluntary statement.”
She agreed to the WPD visit, but her mind was wandering. Just hours before she found herself sitting in the ER being poked and prodded, now a victim of a brutal crime, she had been in this same hospital visiting her friend and celebrating the new life her friend had brought into the world. The juxtaposition of good and evil was overwhelming as Donna sat, staring at the police officer talking to her, Dawn and Nick beside her for support, and the business of the ER going on around her. It was all a blur, really, life happening in slow motion.
“The birth of my friend’s baby was the reason why I wasn’t in Colorado with my husband,” Donna said later. “I stayed behind because the baby was supposed to be born. I had experienced God’s miraculous power of life and the terrible evil in the world all within a twenty-four-hour period.”
And what an innocent night it had been before the home invasion and rape. Donna believed she’d done everything right.
I remember the children and I making only one trip from the car (something John had always told me to do when I was alone so I would not go back out) into the house when we arrived home. The kids had their book bags. I had my briefcase from work and a change of clothes, leftover pizza from Pizza Hut. We all did our part in carrying everything and making it in one trip, just as John had said.
Funny thing, I also remember that we bought a cassette of the music from “Jam Sandwich,” the children’s concert we were at earlier that evening at Judson School in Watertown. The kids loved it, and truth be told, so did I. We popped the cassette in on the way home, and I remember the kids and I singing the entire way. When we left the car to walk into the house, we sang one of the songs, “Tra la la the Fracasaur,” a story about a dinosaur. I was very aware it was dark and John wasn’t with us, and singing the song put us all at ease. I still have that cassette somewhere.
Waiting in the hallway of the ER for a preliminary report of the sexual assault kit (lab results would take weeks), Donna had trouble regaining control of her thoughts. She told herself everything would be okay. She had survived. Her children were safe and with her mother-in-law. She could overcome the emotional hell that was undoubtedly her future. Yet sitting there, not allowed to take a shower, she could still smell this man who had attacked her.
“I stunk,” Donna remembered. “All the anxiety and perspiration throughout the night felt so disgusting on me. I could not wait to take a shower.”
The first round of medication that Donna was asked to ingest consisted of a massive dose of antibiotics. Her assailant was unknown. He could have the HIV virus that causes AIDS. Or hepatitis. Or any number of other diseases. The best way to combat that, according to the doctors at the hospital, was to load up on antibiotics.
Donna wasn’t going to argue.
After a while, the nurse from the ER came out and asked, “Where are you in your menstrual cycle, Mrs. Palomba?”
Donna thought about it. Through tears, she said, “Right in the middle.”
“Well, you should consider taking the morning-after pill,” the nurse said.
Donna’s assailant had left behind several samples of his DNA in the form of semen. She had been under the impression that he had not entered her with his penis, although she knew that he had tried. The sexual assault kit would ultimately determine traces of semen found in several places, including on the vaginal swabs taken in the ER that night.
A practicing Catholic who did not believe in abortion, Donna was torn. She didn’t know what to do. The morning-after pill, to her, was an abortion. Yet she was not in the right psychological state of mind to make a decision. It was too much to think about.
“Nick, Dawn,” Donna implored, explaining the dilemma to her friends, “what should I do?”
CHAPTER FOUR
Turning Tables
Nick and Dawn, part of Donna’s extended support system of friends and both passionate, practicing Christians themselves, told Donna the best thing under the circumstances was to take the morning-after pill. She could deal with the moral and religious implications of her decision at a later time.
“Yes,” Donna told the nurse.
The last police officer at the hospital reminded Donna that she needed to go down to the WPD at some point when she felt better, to give an official statement. She agreed. The impression Donna had, again, was that the WPD was busy searching for her assailant. She had no idea at the time that little was being done to find the man who had attacked her.
In fact, quite the opposite was going on behind the scenes: Police were beginning to think that Donna had invented the entire home invasion and rape to cover up something she had done.
The red flag, according to officers later, was no evidence of forced entry into Donna’s house—no screen cut open, no door busted up, no lock tampered with. Nothing. The question became: How did her perpetrator get inside the house if he did not break in? Had Donna left the door unlocked? Had she let him in herself?
This puzzle would plague Donna for years to come: “I have gone over and over this again in my head,” Donna said later. “And I can’t imagine leaving the door unlocked. The house was built around 1910, and it was the original door. It locks upon closing, and then there is a second deadbolt lock, which I believe I turned and locked. Again, it was routine. I can’t imagine I would not have, particularly when John was away.”
What could have been an important clue early in the investigation was overlooked by the WPD. It was never unearthed because police did not interview anyone in Donna’s family. Donna’s mother-in-law, who lived just down the street, was missing her key to Donna’s house.
Donna’s parents were at their beach house in Clinton, a Connecticut shoreline town about an hour and fifteen minutes from Waterbury. They had no telephone at the beach house. They had no idea what was going on back home.
The sun was about to rise on September 11, 1993, as Donna left the hospital. Nick and Dawn dropped Donna off at her mother-in-law’s, where her kids were still sound asleep. There was no way, Donna said, that she was stepping foot back in her house at this point.
Dawn and Nick headed straight for Clinton to alert Donna’s parents.
The first thing Donna wanted to do was take a shower, which she did before lying on the couch, exhausted, the ordeal of the night having sucked the life from her.
Soon after, Nick, Dawn, and Donna’s parents arrived, just as the kids woke up. Everyone then drove to Donna’s parents’ house, where Donna said she would feel more comfortable. The dilemma became: How was Donna going to tell John what had happened once he came home later the next day? There were family members around. John’s brothers were there. John was a man’s man; he would want to go out and smash somebody’s head for hurting his wife, as would Donna’s father. Together, John and Donna’s father would want to take action.
Throughout the morning of September 11, a Saturday, people stopped by the house as word spread among family members about what had happened. For the kids, shielded from the violent crime, it was like Christmas—all the family gathered around, doughnuts, coffee, sweets, people talking. The only thing missing was the festive spirits. Donna’s brother-in-law went over to her house and installed new deadbolt locks on the front and back doors at some point that morning.
Around noon the drugs Donna had t
aken at the hospital began to affect her. She was vomiting violently, hour after miserable hour, her mother there beside her, holding Donna’s hair back as she spent most of her time staring into the toilet. “I could not keep anything down.” It was a combination of the morning-after pill and the antibiotics. Donna spent the day in the bathroom. After the vomiting stopped, she decided the family needed to get together and talk about how she was going to break the news to John.
Throughout that day, WPD Detective George Lescadre popped in to Donna’s mother’s house to see how Donna was doing. George wasn’t officially involved in the investigation. He explained, however, that he had gone over to Donna’s house earlier that Saturday morning to have a look around. That first time he stepped inside Donna’s mother’s house and said hello, it appeared to George as though someone had died. Donna’s mother, father, and sister were devastated; they had a look of deathly despair. George picked up on this immense feeling of hopelessness coming from everyone but Donna.
“It looks like somebody died around here,” George said to his friend. “Donna, you are going to be okay.”
“I know . . . I know, George,” Donna said. “I’ll be fine. You have to talk to them.”
George was encouraging and reassuring, telling everyone that in time everything would be fine. He also had no reason not to believe that his colleagues at the WPD were doing everything they could to find Donna’s attacker.
That Sunday evening John made it back to Connecticut and drove directly home from the airport. Donna had spoken to him briefly over the phone before he left Colorado, not telling him anything about what had happened, doing her best to hide her emotions. But there was no hiding from it any longer. John was in town.
The first thing Donna’s husband noticed were the new deadbolts on the doors; he couldn’t get into his own house without knocking. Walking in, putting down his luggage, John worked his way into the kitchen, where everyone was gathered, and he knew immediately that something was wrong. Donna sat at the kitchen table. She wore sunglasses to cover her eyes. That sense of desolation, which George Lescadre had picked up on earlier, infused the air.
“What’s going on here?” John asked. He looked around the room. It was odd to John that George Lescadre was there. The police? Family? Donna sitting at the table wearing sunglasses.
“We’re all fine, John,” Donna began. “But we had a break-in . . .”
“What . . . when?” John looked around at everyone for an answer. “What happened?”
“Friday night. I didn’t tell you because you were away and it didn’t make sense. The kids are fine. I’m okay, John.”
“What did he want?”
Silence.
“What happened, Donna?”
Donna hesitated, then explained. “I was raped, John.”
John turned and stormed out of the room. He was angry and confused and mumbling to himself. “I cannot believe this . . . the first time I am away and this happens . . . what the hell!” It was clear he was mad at himself. “How could this happen?”
It was important that John process the information in his own way. Donna knew him well enough to understand that he would need time to accept what had happened and return to being the husband he had always been.
“Throughout this time,” Donna said later, remembering that Sunday evening when her husband returned and she broke the news to him, “we believe a major investigation is going on behind the scenes. I am confident that I will heal quickly, emotionally and physically. I am grateful to be alive and feel as though God has spared my life for some reason.”
There was Donna’s gratitude, again, and her knowledge that she would heal. And that John would too. The family would go on and maybe be stronger. Part of that healing, however, included getting Donna’s attacker off the street so he could not harm another woman. This concern became a major focus for Donna—the welfare of other women. If this guy had attacked her so brutally, in a way that appeared so calculated and planned, how many other women had he done the same to?
A couple days passed before Donna and John headed down to the WPD so Donna could find out where the investigation was. She had not heard a word from the WPD, but she remembered that the officers on the scene had requested she provide a voluntary statement. There was never any question in her mind that she was going to do exactly what the police had asked her to. Donna had waited the extra days because she needed to see several doctors in the wake of her attack and get rechecked and retested. She also needed to regain her strength and composure. She wanted to feel comfortable and have a somewhat clear head before sitting down and talking about what had happened to her that night.
On Monday I had doctors’ appointments, follow-up visits. We went down to the WPD on Tuesday to just reiterate everything we could, to make certain that they had every detail from us. I wanted to make certain I wasn’t leaving out anything that might be important. I had gone over the night of the rape in my head again and again. I needed to relay that information to the WPD. John wanted to give them a layout of our house and talk about how my attacker might have gotten in without breaking in. It was hard to fathom, you know . . . that I had been attacked and raped like this. I was still trying to get my head around what was a surreal situation, and accept it. I was thirty-six years old. I had two children. A wonderful husband. A nice home. We both had great jobs. Our world had been shattered overnight, just like that. I thought this was the beginning to a road of healing and forgiveness and justice. Yet that was all about to change as I learned what was happening behind the scenes with the WPD.
Detective Lou Cote greeted Donna and John as they walked into the WPD. The Waterbury Police had been formed under the supervision of Samuel Warren on July 28, 1853. Warren was the department’s first police chief, overseeing twenty-five men on the force at that time. The department went through a multitude of changes throughout the century-plus leading up to the early 1980s, when it began to put its resources into fighting the drug war, which had hit Waterbury hard. By 1990, however, the focus was on computers and how they could help crime fighting efforts. According to its website, the WPD used its first desktop computer “network” in 1990, “allowing for local criminal history record checks, active arrest warrant checks, and the booking of prisoners.” Computers were a major aid in criminal cases such as Donna’s. They allowed for repeat offenders, for example, to be easily recorded and tracked. “Prior to this time,” the department website continued, “police officers working the booking desk would have to record the name of each arrestee, go to the Records Division, and manually check paper-based files to determine if the arrestee had a prior criminal history. The police officer would then have to travel to the second floor and manually check the files of the Detective Bureau to determine if the arrestee had any outstanding local warrants.”
Of greater importance to what would transpire in Donna’s case over the next decade, in February 1992, after what was a long fight inside the Connecticut Supreme Court, was a ruling handed down concerning the “rank of Detective” within the WPD. Before the Supreme Court ruling, becoming a detective was “a promotion and not an assignment.” After the ruling a candidate would be required to take “a competitive civil service examination.” As far back as 1902, the gold badge position had been something of an assignment by the superintendent. Thus, “a dispute over the issue ensued between the Board of Police Commissioners and the Superintendent, who wished to maintain the position as an assignment, and the Civil Service Commission and the Police Union, who wished the position to become a permanent rank requiring competitive civil service examinations.”
The year 1993, leading up to the day of Donna’s attack, had been a busy one for the WPD, with gang-related warfare breaking out in the streets. The major problem was a rift between rival Hispanic gangs, the Latin Kings and the Los Solidos. The WPD had formed a new tactical unit on May 26, 1993, the Gang Task Force.
/> What did all this mean for Donna Palomba as she and her husband walked into the WPD on September 14, 1993? First, the WPD was certainly able and capable of an investigation such as the one Donna assumed had been initiated moments after her 911 call reporting the home invasion. Furthermore, the experience and technology within the Detective Bureau of the WPD should have been sufficient to solve Donna’s case.
It was 3:20 p.m. when Donna and John sat down with Detective Lou Cote inside the WPD. Cote came across as friendly, but also a bit indifferent. He didn’t discuss one theory in any more depth than another. He was there to collect information, Donna believed, so that the investigation could move forward. Cote did not mention if the WPD had any suspects or if there was a search ongoing. Cote simply sat Donna down and asked her to give a thorough account of what had happened, beginning when she had arrived home that night.
Donna explained the attack in as much detail as she could. Some of the more revealing sections of the account would give detectives plenty of information to go on—clues, in other words, to help them begin looking for a possible suspect or suspects.
I was laying [sic] on my stomach and I looked toward the door of my bedroom and I saw the shadow of a body coming into my room and turning toward me. At that point I saw his image lurching toward me, and his head was covered with what appeared to be some type of black mask or something, and he jumped on top of me.
Donna mentioned gloves made of a “thick type material . . . not leather or rubber.” As she talked about the more physical moments of the crime, tears came to her eyes, but she remained strong. One of the important factors about this statement was that Donna’s story never wavered or changed. Certain words she chose to use might have differed, but the substance of her account of what had happened stayed the same. Moreover, she gave explicit details regarding what the man smelled like, what he wore, what he said, the type of accent she believed he had, and the fact that she believed he had a gun, which he placed to her mouth and temple.
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