Involving the SAO shook up the WPD’s Vice and Intelligence Division, sending it into a frenzy of playing catch-up. As an example, it wasn’t until December 3, 1993, that investigators drew blood from Jeff Martinez to test against the known DNA that had been recovered. This meant that not until the SAO had been contacted did Captain Moran order the test. What’s more, Lieutenant Moran did not submit a supplementary report regarding “details of offense [and] progress of [the] investigation” until December 6, a full three days after Maureen made an appointment—a meeting set for December 10—for her and Donna to sit with Connelly. In that report, Lieutenant Moran wrote a complete narrative of the events leading up to the investigation’s current status. Most interesting was the mention of Donna’s children.
Moran wrote: “That the victim states that her two children . . . did not see or hear anything, either during the attack or subsequent police search, and she had persistently refused to allow the police to interview them.”
Moran also pointed out that an oil leak inside Donna’s home might have been the source for why she thought her attacker had an “oily smell.”
The report claimed that Lieutenant Moran and his brother, Captain Moran, interviewed Jeff Martinez on October 19, 1993, the day after Donna and John met with Captain Moran and Phil Post. That interview consisted of a few questions for Martinez about his employment. He was asked if he had any psychiatric problems, if he took any psychiatric medication, or if he had been treated for psychiatric issues. Moran’s report also confirmed that it wasn’t until December 3 that Lieutenant Moran ordered the blood draw from Martinez and also from the security guard who had been caught prank-calling Donna’s house the previous year.
Donna refused to be destroyed by this continuous attack on her character. Her only recourse at this juncture had been to hire counsel and meet with the SAO. She had rights and now, after talking with Maureen Norris, understood that those rights had been repeatedly violated by the WPD.
This revictimization was beginning to affect my relationship with my children and husband. I was unable to concentrate on anything else but what was happening. It consumed me. The idea of my kids being dragged into the case was disturbing and horrifying. I was alarmed that there was a chance my children would have to be questioned and asked things about their mother that no child should have to even think about. I could not believe that the WPD was not going to let up . . . but it was clear they were preparing to dig in for the long haul. We figured they might admit their mistakes after we contacted the SAO and offer an apology and get back to the business of searching for the man who had raped me. But it was clear when Lieutenant Moran began to backtrack and do what he should have been doing from day one that they were going forward and sticking to their accusations against me.
Donna was looking forward to her meeting with state’s attorney (SA) John Connelly. Walking into the building, she and Maureen felt confident that they were about to make serious progress.
After formal introductions, they sat down. It didn’t take long before Maureen and Donna realized that things were about to get much worse for Donna, and the WPD was not planning on backing down. Yet it was the extramarital affair allegation and the rumor’s original source that would set Donna on a mission to reclaim her life and identity, which she felt the WPD was trying to strip from her.
All Connelly would say was that “a citizen in the community” had reported to the WPD that he had “heard” Donna was having an affair.
“Apparently,” Connelly explained, looking somberly at the two of them, “somebody gave information to police that they are using as part of the investigation.”
“What do you mean?” Maureen asked.
Donna looked on, not saying anything, not quite believing what she was hearing.
“Well,” Connelly continued, “this person said, ‘With regard to the Palomba case, things may not be as they seem, or as Donna said they were.’ This informant heard that perhaps Mrs. Palomba was having an affair and one of her children woke up, and she made this all up to cover up the affair.”
I was speechless—and quite sickened by this statement. This could not be my reality. Gossip and innuendo were controlling the ebb and flow of the investigation, causing the police to accuse me? Instead of Lieutenant Moran looking into this allegation about me, I realized as I sat listening to the state’s attorney that the WPD had relied on a rumor as a fact to go after me.
Who was this person? Who was talking to the WPD and giving investigators inaccurate, misleading information about Donna and a supposed affair?
The WPD’s source for the information wasn’t a “confidential informant,” as the SAO had explained to Donna at one point, but a man who knew several of the investigators involved in Donna’s case.
“A cop wannabe,” Maureen called him.
Al Sullivan*** was a forty-one-year-old former acquaintance of John Palomba’s who did not know Donna personally. Sullivan had grown up in the same Overlook neighborhood as John; he knew Donna (and John, for that matter) only “casually,” he later told police. He had not even met Donna until his high school years and had “been in her company,” he admitted, “probably less” than ten times throughout his entire life. Sullivan said later under oath that he had only found out where Donna worked by reading that “Today’s Woman” article in the local newspaper weeks before her attack. Previous to that, Sullivan said, he hadn’t known much of anything about Donna’s life.
Sullivan was not a transient looking to trade information with police for some sort of personal gain or help with a legal problem (motives for most snitches). He had a steady job with good pay. He owned a thirty-three-foot boat. He was married. He went to church. He was a member of the Elks Club. He raised money for charity. He had known the current mayor of Waterbury for twenty years. And he also had friends inside the WPD, including Neil O’Leary and Pudgie Maia, two names that were about to become synonymous with Donna’s case. Sullivan had other friends inside the department that he saw occasionally, including the chief and Inspector Jake Griffin, the chief of detectives. What had brought Sullivan to the WPD in 1993, the circumstance that had set this unsubstantiated rumor in motion, was Sullivan’s needing a gun permit because of recent problems with break-ins and hoodlums smoking crack near a building he owned. While at the WPD, Sullivan ran into a few of his old buddies, and they got to talking. Some time after that, Sullivan bumped into Detective Neil O’Leary at a social event, where Sullivan mentioned he had some information about Donna’s case.
When deposed later about his involvement, Sullivan admitted he had heard about Donna being sexually assaulted “a few days” after the incident. When asked who told him, Sullivan claimed he couldn’t recall. His reaction to learning about the assault was “shock,” he said. “I grew up there [Donna’s neighborhood] when I was a little kid. That was a pretty secure place.” Sullivan later explained that not long after Donna was assaulted, “rumors,” as he put it, began to circulate throughout town. People talked about Donna. Someone had leaked that Donna was the Jane Doe written about in the newspaper, and people in the neighborhood speculated as to what had happened. No one really knew for certain that Donna had been sexually assaulted, just that there had been a break-in and the person had gone up into her bedroom while she was at home alone and John was out of town.
Sullivan routinely spoke to his sick mother about Donna’s attack (he went over to his mother’s house nearly every day to tend to her medical needs). Several days after the incident, while Sullivan was checking his mother’s medication and oxygen level, she asked him if he knew anything more about “the Palomba case.” Everyone in Sullivan’s family understood that he had contacts within the WPD and was “in the know.”
Sullivan told his mother, “Not particularly. I haven’t heard much of anything.”
“Well,” she said, “I have been talking to [Margaret,**** a friend and fellow nei
ghbor], and she knew a lot more than I knew. She described a lot of different things, a lot of things that I didn’t know and I had no way of knowing. That Johnny was gone for the night—there was no sign of forced entry, and she [Donna] smelled oil.”
Sullivan said he listened with half an ear. Every day he went over to his mother’s house after that, however, he heard “more and more” about Donna’s case. His seventy-two-year-old mother, who had undergone a quadruple bypass and was suffering from a viral infection and, quite frankly, dying, was getting information from somewhere, Sullivan concluded. It seemed to him that secret details of Donna’s sexual assault—which only the police should have known—were being passed around the neighborhood quite freely.
One day not long after Donna’s attack, Sullivan’s mother mentioned that she had heard from her friend, who was calling her every afternoon to keep her company, that there might have been more to the break-in than what at first appeared. “Donna ran out of the house and down the street . . . [that night] and the family had discussed that she was having an affair, possibly with her [business] partner, and that she was using the story to cover it up because maybe the kids walked into the room.”
And there it was: the rumor that had added fuel to a fire already burning about Donna inside certain circles of the WPD. Two old ladies, sitting around killing time, talking about a rumor rolling through the neighborhood, were now driving the investigation into what had happened inside Donna’s house on September 11, 1993.
Gossip—nothing but speculation—was governing Donna’s destiny.
Sullivan knew of this vicious rumor not long after the attack. The question was: What was he going to do with the tale?
“The first few days,” Sullivan later said, “I just didn’t pay any attention to it. It’s kind of rumory garbage. So I just passed it off.”
But then his mother talked about what Sullivan described later as “specifics,” details about Donna’s case that were obviously, to him, coming from inside the family or the WPD.
“They came up with this whole scheme,” he said, speaking of his mother and her friend, “of [Donna having] had an affair . . . there was no forced entry . . . it was like the first time ever that Johnny was away . . . this kind of stuff.”
Those details, Sullivan recalled, made him take notice. He thought maybe he should turn over what he now knew to the police. It started to “bother” him, he later claimed. But Donna had a blemish-free reputation among neighbors and family members and friends. Yet Sullivan thought, “Anything is possible. Anybody could do anything. So it [was] possible . . .”
Sullivan’s mother kept pressing the issue, asking him if it could be true. “I really don’t know . . .” he finally answered.
His mother took it one source deeper, claiming that someone in one of the families was saying this same thing.
Not long after Sullivan heard this rumor from his mother, he ran into Detective O’Leary at a social event in town. Sullivan asked the detective to take a walk with him outside.
“Any progress being made in the Donna Palomba case?” Sullivan asked O’Leary.
“We’re kind of stuck.”
Sullivan never mentioned if O’Leary questioned how he knew Jane Doe’s name. He thought about what he knew for a moment, then decided to just come out with it: “Well, I don’t know if you’re going to believe all this, Neil, but . . .”—and he explained what his mother’s friend had told his mother about Donna having an affair and one of Donna’s kids maybe catching her in the act and Donna making up this elaborate story of being raped to cover it all up. He told O’Leary that his mother’s friend had “formed the conclusion” based on several “clues” she’d figured out.
What were those clues? There were two: John was away, and there was no forced entry into the home.
Concluding, Sullivan told O’Leary, “This is what the family said.”
According to Sullivan, O’Leary responded, “I’ll put you in touch with someone involved in the investigation.”
A few days later, O’Leary phoned Sullivan to tell him he was sending a few detectives to interview him.
“I’ll tell them exactly what I told you,” Sullivan said. “But you have to keep me out of it—it is all just rumors.” Sullivan explained that he was getting the information “fourth hand.”
One of the investigators who went to interview Sullivan was Phil Post. Sullivan explained what he had heard, telling Post emphatically, he later claimed, that it was nothing but rumor and speculation and he had no evidence to back it up.
“We’ll handle it,” Post said.
The supposed genesis of this nasty rumor—Sullivan’s mother’s friend—turned out to be a relative of John Palomba, a woman who had a well-documented history of medical and psychological problems.
*** A pseudonym.
**** A pseudonym.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
No Two Victims Are Alike
During their December 10, 1993, meeting with state’s attorney John Connelly, Donna and Maureen understood that they were up against a machine. Connelly admitted that the tape from Donna’s “interview” with Lieutenant Moran on October 15, 1993, did not exist. There was a malfunction of some sort, Connelly explained. The conversation between Moran and Donna had never been recorded.
Was this by design or an honest mistake?
Donna wondered what in the world was going on.
How could police be so inept and do so much harm to me for simply reporting what had happened? We heard that the tape recorder had malfunctioned. Then we heard that Lieutenant Moran was some sort of technological guru for the WPD. None of it made sense. And I should note here that John and I were together in all of this. He was standing by my side—no matter what. The stress of everything became palpable. I had been judged and condemned. I could not believe this. We still didn’t know where the rumor came from—and maybe that was a good thing. I was beginning to feel the anxiety and all sorts of symptoms from the post-traumatic stress of the rape and its aftermath. It was as though I had fallen off a cliff. But then I was able to brush myself off and climb back up. I got near the top again, and I believed that someone was there to rescue me. I was relieved. As I got closer, however, I realized this person was Lieutenant Moran, who slowly peeled my grip away, finger by finger, until I fell again. This time I fell harder, the impact was greater, and I could not get up.
When the police won’t believe you, who do you turn to? Nobody was listening to us.
Leaving the State’s Attorney’s Office, Donna and Maureen talked about submitting the paperwork to begin the process of requesting an Internal Affairs investigation. This wasn’t an action that a phone call could facilitate. Maureen would have to sketch out the case from Donna’s perspective, provide statements, and make good cause for her argument.
While Maureen began that procedure, Donna felt the best thing for her to do was to write John Connelly and thank him.
SA John Connelly was the decision maker on where the case would go from that point. During the meeting I got the sense that he was torn as to what to do and he was assessing my credibility. I remember during the meeting, when Maureen or I suggested that Connelly get the tape recording of the interrogation from the police (before he told us something had happened to it), he said something like, “That’s my decision!” I got the feeling he had a big ego and wanted to let us know that he was in charge. But I needed to thank him, regardless. Butting heads was not going to get us anywhere.
The reason for the letter to Connelly, Donna later said, was to thank Connelly and to let him know how much she appreciated his help. She wanted to motivate Connelly to take action. It seemed Connelly was on the case, asking officers about lab results and a total review of the case file. The other catalyst to Donna’s letter was Connelly’s remarks during a phone call to Maureen that he would t
ry to get a female investigator assigned to Donna’s case, and that he was going to “speak to the informant” himself and judge if the information was credible.
“Your involvement and concern about the case,” Donna wrote, “has truly helped me to feel better in a lot of ways. Putting my life back together is an ongoing challenge, but knowing there are those who want to get to the truth . . . really helps. I sincerely thank you for your effort.”
Maybe requesting an Internal Affairs investigation could even be avoided. After all, Donna and Maureen felt, wouldn’t the SAO and WPD consider the fact that if Donna was willing to take her case all the way to the SAO that she was likely telling the truth? Would she risk everything by taking matters this far? The WPD had offered her a way out, sort of a plea deal, by suggesting to her that she tell them what they wanted to hear to make it all go away. Donna had emphatically said no. By this point Maureen had done a good job of explaining to Connelly exactly what Donna had been through, every detail, every fact. Would Donna go through so much effort if it was all some sort of cover-up for an extramarital affair?
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