The opening weeks of 1994 followed a strained Christmas holiday season for Donna and her family. By this time Donna had developed a contact inside the SAO, whom she began calling for information and any progress on her case. Based on what she was told, Donna was under the impression that a new investigator was involved, a woman who had been at the scene on the night of the attack.
Kathy Wilson had been with the WPD since January 16, 1978, promoted to lieutenant in March 1992. One of Kathy’s specialties was sexual assaults. At the time of Donna’s attack, Kathy was a desk lieutenant, even though she had appeared at the scene that night to advise Donna and other officers. As March 1994 approached, Kathy was reassigned to Vice and put in charge of sexual assaults, solely because of Connelly’s involvement.
Until Kathy Wilson was assigned, there had not been a woman involved in sexual assault investigations for the WPD for years. Kathy’s advantage was that she’d had plenty of training in how to handle sexual assaults. She had also been involved with training officers in the very delicate details of investigating sexual assaults, including how to treat victims of sexual assault.
“And how you treat them will go a long way toward their recovery,” Kathy said later, during a deposition. “If you treat them well, they will recover from rape trauma syndrome . . .”
One of the points Kathy made clear during that same deposition was that every rape victim acts differently during those crucial moments after the assault.
“Some victims cry,” Kathy Wilson explained. “Some victims are hysterical. Some victims take a very long time to answer questions, and you would almost think that they were drunk or high. But they may be in shock.” It wasn’t unusual, Kathy added as an example, to find a rape victim who was “very detail oriented when reporting her crime,” and another victim “very sketchy.”
Faced with a traumatic event such as sexual assault, Kathy reiterated, women responded differently. No two people reacted the same way.
When Kathy Wilson talked about Donna’s case later on in her deposition, however, she had some rather strong feelings, which ultimately contradicted what she had said only previously: “There [were] a lot of things wrong with this case . . . that would lead an experienced sexual assault investigator to think that things didn’t happen exactly as they were reported to the police.”
“Kathy Wilson tried to play both side of this,” Maureen Norris pointed out later.
The chief evidence for her opinion, the officer insisted, was the way Donna acted after her assault.
Those “things” wrong with Donna’s case, Kathy later testified, included what had become common talk of no forced entry into Donna’s house; that Donna had left her children alone and fled the scene; that Donna would not allow police to interview her children; that the house wasn’t disheveled and everything seemed orderly; that the jewelry taken was “costume jewelry—it wasn’t diamonds or gold”; and that Donna wasn’t “beat up,” because, Kathy added, “Absolutely every sexual assault where it has been a burglar, an unknown person, the women got beat up pretty badly.”
Red flags, Kathy suggested, abounded in Donna’s case from the moment she arrived at the scene that night. Questions about Donna’s claim were increasing inside the WPD. The more they reviewed Donna’s explanations of the night, the more certain investigators (including Kathy Wilson) felt that Donna wasn’t being completely honest. When Sullivan’s rumor came into the WPD, the entire case seemed to make sense.
While at the scene on the night Donna was attacked, Kathy made certain judgments, several of which went against what she would later explain (under oath) were often-seen behaviors by rape/sexual assault victims. Some of the things Donna said to Kathy on that night, the investigator later testified, led the WPD to question Donna’s story. For one, according to Kathy, when she suggested that Donna go to the hospital, Donna said, “There’s no sense in doing that because I didn’t see his face—I could never identify him. You’re never going to catch him. And besides, he didn’t rape me.”
But Donna was not of sound mind at this time. Her choice of words had been made under severe duress. What she meant was: He didn’t penetrate me. How does one explain the details, however, during what is a frantic, traumatic time in her life? Kathy Wilson—the so-called “expert” in this field—should have been more empathetic toward Donna and considered the linguistic challenges she faced under extremely difficult conditions.
While Donna and Kathy were upstairs in Donna’s bedroom after Donna had returned to her house, Kathy asked Donna a few questions about the actual rape itself and what had occurred.
Donna said, “He rubbed his penis up against my back.”
Kathy thought that to be a strange comment. “Mrs. Palomba,” she responded, “you have to go to the hospital because there may be a transfer of body fluids or hair, some fibers that we could collect. We really have to get you to the hospital.”
There were other behaviors that Kathy thought were unusual. One involved Kathy telling Donna not to use the restroom at the house after Donna said she needed to urinate. “Because,” Kathy told Donna, “if there is any evidence in or on your body, it will wash [it] away. I believe the hospital doesn’t like you to urinate until they get to you, where they can collect it.”
Donna then picked up her purse, Kathy claimed, “and headed for the bathroom.”
“No,” Kathy said. “Don’t go into the bathroom.”
But Donna went anyway.
“It was like talking to someone who wasn’t there,” Kathy described, solidifying her description of how a rape victim would act. “She was spacey.”
These were all behaviors Kathy Wilson would later testify as not being out of the realm of a rape victim’s post-assault actions. There was no standard, Kathy said. There was no one particular way a woman was supposed to act. Donna was obviously in a state of shock. In fact, when asked later, Donna did not recollect a lot of what had happened inside the house that night after she went back, confusing even the simplest things.
I will always appreciate the fact that Kathy Wilson urged me to go to the hospital that evening. I had limited interaction with her after Lieutenant Moran took over the case. I remember seeing her at the police department when I went there for a meeting, and she was professional and cordial but I did not know how to read her. It became apparent later on that she was trying to play both sides and never really came to my defense. In fact . . . I remember feeling sick when she said later that I appeared “flippant” the night of the crime. You would think that a female officer may have understood more, but that wasn’t the case.
Now, as the spring of 1994 commenced, Kathy Wilson was back on Donna’s case and looking at it with lenses similar to those of Lieutenant Douglas Moran. Could Donna have been making up this entire episode? Was she, in fact, caught up in some sort of daze that prevented her from revealing the truth of what actually happened? Had Donna been so traumatized by whatever went on inside her home that night that she had no idea herself what the truth was anymore?
“I didn’t make any judgments,” Kathy said later. “I didn’t treat her any different from anyone that I would have treated if I saw the rapist raping the victim.”
Regarding why the WPD did not secure Donna’s house on the night of the incident, Kathy said that because it wasn’t a murder scene, taping off the house wasn’t something that would normally have been done.
“It wasn’t a homicide,” she said. “And [Donna] said he wore gloves. So there didn’t seem to be the chance that we were going to get any fingerprints . . . The house was meticulous . . . So there wasn’t like a jumble of stuff and you might miss something.”
Another behavior that made Kathy skeptical took place when Donna came to the WPD to give her statement. She “came in and sat cross-legged on the chair . . . you know, like an Indian,” Wilson said later. “Kind of nonchalant.”
So the way in which Donna sat on a chair turned out to be, for the WPD, some sort of indication that Donna was not telling investigators the truth.
The fact that Donna requested that John be with her when she gave that first statement was another warning sign, according to Kathy, that Donna was acting abnormally. Rape victims rarely want their spouses to be with them when they talk about the rape for the first time.
I’m meeting with these people—Connelly, Wilson, and others—and I am thinking, They’re already biased because they have all this other stuff brewing that’s not even reality with regard to who I am. They have not arrested me. Yet, on the other hand, the case had been moved out of Vice and was now with the Detective Bureau, which we thought would help us tremendously.
One goal of Maureen Norris’s strategy was to get the DNA in Donna’s case retested. SA Connelly said he would look into getting famed forensic guru Dr. Henry Lee and his lab to do the testing as soon as possible.
“Originally, they were given a twenty-week deadline,” Donna wrote in her notes on the day she heard about this encouraging development. “Connelly supposedly was calling in a couple of favors to Dr. Henry Lee and is trying to speed the whole thing up.”
A problem that arose around this same time, which Donna heard about from her contact inside the SAO, was that Detective George Lescadre, Donna and John’s one friend at the WPD, who had given them his total support, was being ostracized by his colleague, Lieutenant Moran.
George had been with the WPD for close to fifteen years; he had an untarnished reputation as a dogged investigator who got things done. Sergeant Rinaldi, the cop who had spoken to Donna on the night of the 911 call, had even phoned Lescadre at his house after he hung up with Donna, to tell him what was going on. George later said that Rinaldi told him Donna “had been the victim of a crime.” It was well known that Donna was George’s brother-in-law’s cousin.
“Most people knew of my relationship with [Donna and John],” George said later.
In late January, Donna called George to ask what was going on. From what her SAO contact had said, something serious had happened. George was a respected cop, a guy who had given his life to the department. He hadn’t even really been involved in Donna’s case.
“Moran asked me to come in and talk to him about your case,” George explained to Donna. “I went in on my own time. Phil Post was there. They asked me what I thought was true or false after laying out what they believed happened.”
George told Post and Moran that he thought Donna was telling the truth. There had been no reason for him not to believe her.
Lieutenant Moran said, “She’s lying, George. I don’t believe anything she’s telling us.”
When George disagreed, Moran and Post, according to George’s recollection, laughed in his face.
“Moran seemed sure of himself, very positive in his words,” George said later, testifying about that day. “I don’t think he cared what I had to say.”
Donna also heard that as soon as SA Connelly got involved and shook things up within the WPD, Lieutenant Moran started acting nervous, running around, collecting things from the case, specifically looking for several “aerial photos” taken of Donna’s house, which Donna later claimed had never been taken.
State’s attorney John Connelly assigned one of his chief investigators to Donna’s case. He was known as Pudgie, but his real name was John Maia, an always-impeccably dressed African American man—“I’ve never seen him without a suit on”—in his late fifties, with more than thirty years of investigative experience behind him, several of those years with the WPD. Pudgie had contacts on the streets. People respected him.
“I knew Pudgie well and was very glad that he was now involved,” Maureen Norris later said. “He was one of those investigators with his ear to the ground; he knew what was going on in Waterbury. He’s the type of guy who would listen. In fact, every time I saw him, he would say, ‘I’m on it. I never forget about Donna. I’m trying. I’m trying.’”
Pudgie came from a large, well-known family in the region; he knew John Palomba and the Palomba family. Not long after the incident, quite a while before Pudgie became involved in the case, John ran into him downtown one afternoon, and they stopped for a quick chat.
“I heard what happened to your brother,” Pudgie said.
“It wasn’t my brother,” John said. “It was me, Pudgie. Donna was the one who was assaulted.”
“That’s terrible, man. Listen, I’ll do everything I can to help.”
Now Pudgie was involved, working on the case for the SAO. Once Donna heard the news of his assignment, she felt things were progressing and there was a good possibility the case was moving in the right direction. The SAO could work in tandem with any law enforcement agency in the jurisdiction. They helped not only with federal cases—drug trafficking, gambling, organized crime, etc.—but also with murders and other types of cases giving the local police department problems.
“Pudgie’s the kind of guy who is friends with everyone, streetwise, involved in athletics, and well liked,” Donna said. “He knew poor people and homeless and dignitaries alike. He always had many sources for information.”
With not much happening as the second week of February arrived, Donna contacted Pudgie, and they had a conversation about what the SAO and the WPD were specifically working on. Maureen had certainly rattled law enforcement’s cage. Thus far, however, nothing of any substance had emerged.
Pudgie said he first heard about the case from George Lescadre. I think, truthfully, George wanted Pudgie’s help. Pudgie told me that he had gotten permission from John Connelly to get actively involved—to work on the case basically. This opened up a great resource for us; someone who was not judging me, but looking to get to the truth, which is all I ever wanted.
Pudgie bore a striking resemblance to comedian Steve Harvey, with his thick and bushy mustache, athletic build, and carefree, friendly, and endearing spirit and demeanor. He also brought something very important to the table for Donna: Pudgie knew Dr. Henry Lee personally. Lee rose to fame during the infamous “Wood Chipper Murder” case in the late 1980s. He had been part of OJ Simpson’s “dream team” defense. According to his bio, over the past four decades, Lee had assisted in the investigations of more than six thousand cases, including war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia; the suicide of President Clinton’s former White House attorney, Vince Foster; review of the JFK assassination; the death of JonBenet Ramsey; and scores of other high-profile crime cases. Lee was also chief emeritus of the Connecticut State Police, founder and professor of the Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science at the University of New Haven, editor of seven academic journals, and author/coauthor of forty books and more than three hundred articles.
Pudgie and Donna discussed the possibility that Donna could one day contact the doctor. If she could get Lee to not only retest the DNA—as Connelly had said he was trying to accomplish—but also to take on her cause, Donna would have a high-profile advocate in her corner, someone who could perhaps take a look at how the crime scene was handled on the night of the assault and make a professional judgment as to if proper procedures were followed. If not, maybe Lee and Donna could make some changes to the system. One of Lee’s specialties—probably what he was best known throughout the world for—was crime-scene reconstruction. Donna was also beginning to develop a vision of somehow changing policies and procedures, so that what had happened to her would never happen to another victim of sexual assault.
Right away Pudgie made Donna feel as though the tide was turning. He told Donna, “I’ve known John forever. I think the world of him.”
This made Donna smile.
“I think what happened was that the person [the WPD’s informant] was speculating and gossiping about you,” Pudgie explained.
“Things spiraled out of control from there. One thing led to another,” he
added.
Hearing this made Donna feel comfortable.
“We’re going to ask this guy to come forward on his own,” Pudgie continued, “and tell us why he said those things about you.”
“Great.”
“I’ll give him a few days to do that, and if he doesn’t, I’ll turn his name over to you and your attorney.”
Donna wanted to cry. Someone was finally listening.
There had always been a theory among those who backed Donna that maybe the guy who pulled Neil O’Leary aside that night and told him about that rumor was perhaps the same man who had raped Donna. Or perhaps he had been installed in that rumor-spreading role to protect a cop buddy, or someone higher up. In dispersing the rumor, he was trying to throw off the scent of the investigation.
Donna asked Pudgie what he thought of that theory. Did it hold any water?
“I don’t think so. I feel it’s unrelated to the suspect. He’s probably just some ‘busybody’ who should have kept his mouth shut.”
“What about Jeff Martinez; can you tell us anything about him?” Donna asked, gravely concerned, of course, that the WPD had not investigated Jeff thoroughly enough and were simply blowing smoke about looking at him.
“The reports are thorough, Donna. They did interview Jeff. His wife was with him. He went down to the station willingly. He seemed to impress the investigators. His background checks out. He’s had only one breach of peace charge his whole life. Jeff was even willing to take a lie detector test and gave up his blood without argument.”
It was easy to trust a guy like Pudgie. Donna felt confident about the information.
Pudgie talked about another WPD detective who had been assigned to the case. Detective Sergeant Neil O’Leary, the same investigator to whom the informant had relayed the rumor at that social event. O’Leary would now be a point man for Donna. Neil had introduced himself to Donna and John on January 19, 1994. Neil said he typically investigated murders, but he was now part of the investigation because Donna’s case had been transferred to the Detective Bureau from Vice as part of the SAO’s involvement. Neil had been with the WPD since 1980. He had worked his way up the law enforcement chain the old-school way: hard work. What would help Donna’s case was that Neil had experience in DNA, having worked in the forensic lab from 1983 to 1988. He had also served in the Criminal Investigation Bureau and investigated all sorts of crimes, before moving on to the Major Crimes unit, with a focus on murder investigation. His best attribute, however, was that from the outset Neil O’Leary had no agenda. There was nothing driving Neil but getting to the truth and solving the case.
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