Donna Palomba was no Tawana Brawley, although there was a racial footnote to her story: Donna had said her attacker could have had a Jamaican accent, she just wasn’t sure. In any event, it’s possible that the memory of a recent, nationally covered, false rape case still lingered in the air among law enforcement.
Yet Donna had no motive besides the truth. As she sat at home after that strange meeting with Captain Robert Moran and Detective Phil Post, still getting nowhere, Donna wondered what was going to happen next in the saga that had become her life. It was clear she was being blamed, but exactly how had these police officers come to think of her as the type of person to have an affair and then invent such an extravagant plan to cover it up? This thought—the question of her character—bothered Donna perhaps more than anything.
We had been thrown into a world we knew nothing about. This consumed our lives. I went to bed with it and then woke up with it. How was I going to navigate through this foreign field? Should I hire legal counsel? John and I could not turn to anyone in our community. On top of that, I felt protecting my identity—which had not been a problem since the attack up until that point—was all I had left. I was Jane Doe. Imagine. I was just getting used to this new identity, and they were trying to strip me of it. I needed to stay unidentified. My business depended on me being in public, meeting with people. Potential clients would not take kindly to the idea of me being a “liar” who made up false rape allegations. The moment I was arrested under those charges, my name was going to be smeared across the media. I would be finished. I feared that if my name was dragged through the papers as a liar . . . a woman who made up a story, I was going to lose everything.
John and Donna waited for Lieutenant Post to review the tapes and get back to them. It had been ten days since they had met with Captain Moran and Lieutenant Post, and the WPD had not so much as called to check in. The department’s silence was overwhelming. Donna wondered if a sheriff, at any moment, was going to pull up to her door with an arrest warrant and cart her off to jail as the local media followed close behind. Moreover, during those ten days, Donna had repeatedly called the WPD and asked for Captain Moran and Phil Post, but had not received a return call.
Finally, on October 29, Donna got Post on the telephone—this after she had called and left him yet another message.
“Have you listened to the tape?” Donna asked.
“No,” Post said. “I have not.”
Why not? Donna thought. But instead of verbalizing this thought, she asked a simple question: “What is going on with the case?”
“I can tell you that you have nothing to worry about with Jeff Martinez,” Post said. “We have 99 percent ruled him out. He agreed to take a lie detector and fluid [blood] test.”
“What? Ruled out . . .? But how could you do that so quickly?” They had just told her that DNA testing took weeks, if not months.
“I assure you, Mrs. Palomba, Jeff Martinez did not attack you.”
“Has he taken those tests?”
“No, not yet. Look, he acts a little strange, but you have nothing to worry about with Jeff.”
What are they doing?
“The captain,” Post said before hanging up, “will have some information for you on Monday or Tuesday next week.”
Donna waited. The captain never called on either of those days. On November 5, Donna left Captain Moran a message to call her back as soon as he could. It was one of several messages Donna had left for the captain over the past three days. Why was she getting the runaround? What purpose did not returning calls serve?
“You must be very intuitive,” Captain Moran said as the conversation began. “I was going to call you today.” He seemed condescending, flippant.
“What is going on with my case, Captain?”
“We’ve interviewed people you know and people you don’t know,” Moran said. “Basically, Mrs. Palomba, the case is at a standstill.”
Donna could not believe this. Standstill? How could it be at a standstill if the blood work from Jeff Martinez, for one, had not been collected yet?
“Captain, what do you mean?” Donna asked.
“This brings us back to your children.”
“The children were asleep, Captain. I saw them. The officers at my house there afterward witnessed the children sound asleep. They never woke up.”
“It is totally up to you and your husband. If you don’t want us to interview them, that’s fine. I’ll wait to hear back from you on that.”
Donna was thinking about what the WPD had done to her. Now Moran expected her and John to consider putting their children in the same hands. What could a five- and seven-year-old, sound asleep through the entire ordeal, tell them?
“What about Jeff?” Donna asked.
“Oh, the glass guy,” Moran said sarcastically, almost with a laugh. “I don’t have the specifics, but I can tell you that he has been thoroughly investigated and ruled out.”
“Have you listened to the tape?”
“No.”
That was all Donna needed to hear. “Okay, fine . . .” she said and hung up.
Donna drove to her church and sat with the pastor of her parish. She needed advice about what to do. After hearing her out, the priest said, “You need to hire yourself a lawyer.”
She then sought the advice of the principal from her children’s Catholic school, who told her the same thing. Every family member she and John turned to advised them to obtain legal counsel so they at least had an advocate working on their side. Right now, they had no one.
Donna didn’t know it, but something else was happening behind the scenes at the WPD. According to a report filed by Lieutenant Douglas Moran on October 21, 1993, that tape of the interrogation he had conducted with Donna on October 15 did not exist.
“On this date,” Lieutenant Moran wrote, “it was discovered that . . . [the] tape recordings of interviews . . . with Donna Palomba . . . had not been recorded as first thought due to a switch on the tape recorder having been set in the wrong position.”
Donna would find it to be an incredulous turn of events when she heard about it. She remembered Moran turning the tape over and the actual wheels on the tape recorder spinning as she sat and watched. How could the tape not exist?
Another major piece of evidence in Donna’s case came through on November 2, but she had not been told about it. The results of the sexual assault kit came back from the Department of Public Safety Forensic Science Laboratory in Meriden, Connecticut. Lead criminalist Mary Beth Raffin signed the report, along with lead criminalist Beryl Novitch. The results were, if nothing else, clear that the evidence left behind at the crime scene told a very concrete and alarming story.
Spermatozoa—semen—was confirmed on all the vaginal swabs taken from Donna that night at Waterbury Hospital. Tests for the presence of acid phosphatase, an enzyme found in the kidneys, semen, and prostate gland, were positive on these tests, also indicating that Donna’s attacker had left behind his DNA in the form of sperm. It was not mere speculation any longer; there was plenty of DNA.
Several tests conducted for the presence of amylase (saliva) were positive; yet there was no semen found in any of the saliva samples (including Donna’s), an important factor, again backing up the fact that Donna never claimed to have been forced to perform oral sex. Her narrative of what had happened, the evidence seemed to be bearing out, was lining up.
Additionally, pubic hair had been found on several of the items submitted for testing. There was no blood found underneath Donna’s fingernails, which would have been evident had she scratched her attacker (she had never claimed to). Semen was also found on swabs taken from the T-shirt Donna had been wearing and also on her labia majora (the outer lips on both sides of the vaginal opening). There was no semen found on the panty hose used to bind Donna’s eyes, mouth, and hands, but
human hair (Caucasian) had been uncovered on those same items. The report indicated—again backing up Donna’s version of the night—that Donna’s panties had been cut “along the back crotch seam area, from one leg opening to the other leg opening.” There were “very small white stains noted on the inside of the crotch near the cut”—stains proven to be semen. There was additional pubic hair (Caucasian) found on the panties. On the back of the T-shirt, additional semen was found along with (Caucasian) human head hairs. There was no semen found on the pillows taken from Donna’s bedroom. On the sheet covering Donna’s bed, several areas contained samples of semen.
If one were to look at this evidence objectively and piece together a scenario—to re-create the crime scene—it would be consistent with the story Donna Palomba gave to police on the night she was attacked (and two days later), save for one detail: The results proved that her attacker was a white male, while Donna had said, but was not sure, that her attacker might have had a Jamaican accent. The evidence also proved that Donna’s attacker had prematurely ejaculated as he was cutting her panties (just as she had said in her statement), thus spraying semen over the back of Donna’s T-shirt, her panties, the bedsheet, and possibly himself, including his hands. He tried to penetrate Donna with his penis (without an erection) and then entered her with his fingers, which would explain how she ended up with semen on her labia majora and minora (inside vaginal walls). The evidence supported Donna’s account nearly 100 percent.
But the WPD officers investigating Donna’s case did not view this evidence in that manner. In fact, every indication was that no investigator working the case was even considering looking at the available evidence and matching it up to Donna’s story. Because even a rookie crime-scene tech and first-year detective could have pieced together Donna’s story and corroborated it with the available physical evidence.
It became clear that none of the officers involved in the case bothered to look at the actual evidence to determine the truth. I will always wonder what would have happened had the responding officers and people in charge of my case on that first night investigated it properly from day one. Would the perpetrator have been found then?
** According to the National Center for the Prosecution of Women: “Research has shown that only 2 to 8 percent of rape allegations are false, and yet the stigma of disbelief remains pervasive.”
CHAPTER TEN
Rumor Has It
Maureen Norris was everything Donna and John Palomba were seeking in legal representation. Maureen’s firm, Kolesnick and Norris, handled many different types of law: personal injury, criminal defense, divorce, real estate and business transactions, contracts, and leases. Maureen, who had been practicing law since 1985, knew many of the players involved in Donna’s case. While studying for the bar, Maureen had worked at the Waterbury State’s Attorney’s Office (SAO) under the regime of then–state’s attorney Frank MacDonald. Before she had even passed the bar, Maureen was hired by the firm for which she would go on to become partner.
“Originally,” Maureen said later, “I thought I was going into criminal law because I had that relationship with the state’s attorney’s office, but I ended up working for attorney Kolesnick.”
John and Donna had known Maureen for some time because Maureen had dated John’s brother for a few years prior to their calling on her. Around town, within city law circles, Maureen had already heard about Donna’s case.
“Rumors were that she had been raped,” Maureen said. “Being involved in the legal field, you’d hear things that others wouldn’t normally be privy to.”
At thirty-three, Maureen was a few years younger than Donna, but they could see things from the same woman’s perspective, which was important to Donna. Maureen’s soft-spoken demeanor was not to be taken as a weakness; she was a strong woman and even tougher lawyer, quite willing to stick her neck out where it mattered. When it came to litigation, Maureen was the type of attorney who relied on the facts to speak for themselves. As Maureen sat and listened to what Donna had gone through over the past several weeks after the rape, she knew Donna stood on a firm foundation of truth; and truth, Maureen had seen time and again inside a courtroom, had a way of rising to the surface once all the evidence was presented.
“If this can happen to you,” Maureen said on that first day she spoke with Donna, “it can happen to anybody.”
This statement was to become a mantra Maureen would chant over and over as the weeks turned into months, and Donna’s case dragged on.
As Donna explained all that had happened, Maureen thought the Moran incident was extremely strange. “It’s not necessarily that my jaw was on the floor,” Maureen later said, “when I heard what she had gone through; stranger things have happened. I just felt so sorry for her. I never had a doubt that Donna was telling the truth. It never even entered my mind that Donna could be lying about what happened to her. I had known her for a number of years. She loved her husband. She was a wonderful mother. I had been at her house. I mean, let’s be serious, Donna doesn’t even curse.”
That the police were considering Donna to be some sort of cunning, pathological liar, Maureen thought, was unbelievable, even repulsive.
“I am thinking early on that the Waterbury Police have made an assumption and that maybe I can facilitate things and get the investigation back on the right track.”
Maybe a phone call. A meeting with the right players. The Morans get a slap on the hand. Donna gets an apology, and all is forgotten. And Donna can move on.
What Maureen sensed from the initial conversation was that John and Donna were not looking to sue the city or anybody else. That was not why they had sought legal representation.
“It was the furthest thing from their minds. They wanted this investigation to get back on track.”
Maureen saw no other option but to contact the SAO and set up a meeting with state’s attorney John Connelly, so they could—with any luck—get to the bottom of what was going on inside the WPD and move the case forward from there.
“We need to find the person responsible for raping you,” Maureen told Donna. It was appalling to Maureen to think that an investigation such as this one was stalled. What message would this send to women who were raped? How many other rape victims were out there being treated by police as Donna was?
Donna agreed with Maureen. Sure, it had been upsetting and her life had been thrown once again into a tailspin, but the main issue here was that a rapist was still at large, maybe raping other women, and nothing was being done to find (and stop) him.
Their thought was that any man bold enough to commit a sexual assault during a home invasion had likely committed this type of crime before and would do it again.
State’s Attorney Connelly had a long-standing reputation as a straight player within the politics of courtrooms and public opinion. He was in his late forties, a lifelong Waterbury resident whose parents had both been blue-collar workers within the massive manufacturing and textile industries that had sustained Waterbury throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Connelly, like many other local cops and politicians, had gone to Mattatuck Community College before doing his graduate work at Trinity College in Hartford. Maureen hoped she could chat with Connelly and get this thing taken care of as a gross misunderstanding. Donna would be more than willing to move on, as long as the case was officially reopened and set back on the right track of finding the man who had threatened to kill her.
Looking back on all this, having come so close to death, I am much more aware of how fragile life is. I used to take things for granted. Every day is a gift, and I want to make the most of it. I want to be a better mother, wife, daughter, sister, Christian, and friend. There is no time to fret about material things or gossip about others. I became more in tune with my moral compass and reflected on how I felt when I behaved or acted in a certain way. I believe it made me a better person, b
ut I have a long way to go. I realize now—but maybe not then, as I contacted Maureen in a state of panic and fear—that this is all part of a greater plan, and I try to turn over the many challenges I face to God. Some days I am better at it than others. Many wonderful things have happened. I know they are part of something much bigger than myself. So I am along for the ride . . . trying to do the best that I can for as many as I can for as long as I can. I have spent too much time in the past trying to please others or not speaking up when in my gut I knew what was going on was wrong. I learned what it was like to be discriminated against. It made me more assertive. I began to spend my time trying to do things that would actually make a difference in the grand scheme of things.
Strange as it sounds, I wouldn’t trade anything. I believe you learn most from your greatest challenges. These events, as I went through them, made me stretch and reach farther inside of my soul than I ever thought possible. And sitting there, listening to Maureen talk about contacting the state’s attorney and taking control of this thing empowered me. Maureen gave me a breath of life. Somebody believed me. I wasn’t alone.
In contacting the SAO, Maureen planned on filing a motion with the court, requesting that an Internal Affairs (IA) investigation be opened immediately based on the harassment and accusations made against Donna, and on the way the case had been handled from the first moment the police arrived at the scene. Maureen explained to Donna that they were going to crack the inner shell of the WPD open and discover what happened. Part of Maureen’s strategy included obtaining a copy of the tape recording made by Lieutenant Douglas Moran on October 15, 1993; at the time neither she nor Donna knew that it did not actually exist. Yet everyone else, especially the SAO, knew Moran had allegedly flubbed up the recording and never made the tape in the first place, according to the report Moran had filed back in October.
Jane Doe No More Page 9