Neil already had feelings about the case, according to Pudgie. “He’s on your side,” Pudgie told Donna. “He listened to the 911 call and said he could hear the pain in your voice.”
Donna was impressed. Everything she wanted to happen was beginning to fall into place. Moran and his boys were out, and a new team was taking over.
“If Jeff’s not the guy,” Pudgie said, explaining that they were waiting on a DNA comparison, “what Neil and I are going to do is start at the beginning. Neil and I are determined to solve the case.”
My husband had told me about his encounter with Pudgie and how sincere Pudgie was in his offer to help us. It meant a lot to John and me. We also knew that Pudgie was very connected to the goings on in the city and had established a lot of sources for information. Before we met Neil O’Leary, Pudgie told me Neil was a good guy and he would help us. At that point, I didn’t trust anyone within the WPD, including Neil O’Leary. Why should I? They had accused me of being a liar. We decided that the first time I would meet Neil face-to-face, Pudgie would be there.
Donna spoke to her source inside the SAO one day soon after talking with Pudgie and learned that “the Morans,” as her source called them, had a history of complaints involving sexual assault cases.
Surprise, surprise.
There were “child sexual abuse cases,” Donna wrote in her notes of the conversation, “where the Morans somehow got involved and came at the victims skeptically and acted like they didn’t believe them.”
To hear this coming from the SAO was stunning. But it did, in some strange way, give Donna some insight into what was going on. There was a pattern. A precedent.
A funny thing began to happen as Donna went about her daily routine, and it scared the hell out of her on more than one occasion. She was driving in the town of Prospect one day on a main roadway. As she stopped for a turn, waiting for traffic to pass, she noticed Jeff Martinez driving toward her in his work truck. Jeff stared at Donna, and she back at him.
A few days later Jeff was sitting at a stoplight in a gray Cadillac when Donna, John, and their two kids crossed the street after attending a play downtown. They happened to walk directly past the front of Jeff’s caddy.
Donna looked and realized it was him.
Two weeks went by, and they crossed paths again on the road, making eye contact but not gesturing.
A day after that incident, Donna had an appointment in New Haven, a forty-minute drive from Waterbury. As she headed south on Route 69, a heavily traveled road just outside Waterbury, Donna noticed a yellow school bus behind her. She didn’t think anything of it, of course. But after the school bus made a left turn and Donna continued straight, the car in back of the bus moved up behind her and, to her great surprise and shock, Donna found herself staring directly at Jeff in her rearview mirror.
“Jeff was watching me,” Donna wrote in her notes.
She was so frightened that she picked up her car phone—at the time a bulky thing akin to a kitchen wall phone—and pretended to call someone. At an intersection ten miles outside town, Donna sped up and parked between two cars, losing Jeff for a moment, only to watch as he slowly drove by, looking in all directions, as if searching for her.
I would see Jeff driving around town in his company truck on occasion prior to my attack. I became more aware afterward and looked out for him after he became a suspect. I really felt like he was following me that day on Route 69 . . . my heart was beating out of my chest. I was scared. In my mind, I heard my attacker’s words, which seemed to echo every once in a while when fear came up and the anxiety began to take over . . . If you call the pigs . . . Was Jeff Martinez that same person? I was far from home, [with] a car phone that didn’t work, and no way of protecting myself. Watching Jeff pass by and not see me was like coming up from underneath the water after holding your breath.
Yes, I could breathe—for a moment, anyway.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Hope
Despite a tough exterior and a belief that her case was finally moving in the right direction, Donna still experienced the burden of being twice victimized. All the emotional weight of having survived a sexual assault and then having law enforcement’s finger pointed in her face was crushing. Her belief that Jeff Martinez was now following her indicated that perhaps Donna was losing control of her judgment. Yet, when she thought about it, something told Donna that Jeff could be her assailant. After all, he had not been completely ruled out.
In March 1994, six months had passed since Donna’s attack. The WPD was no closer to solving the case than they were on the day it happened. One could even argue, notwithstanding Pudgie’s and Neil’s involvement, that the case had gone backward. In a letter to John Connelly that Donna wrote (but would never ultimately send) after attending a justice system lecture Connelly had given, Donna expressed her profound desire, simply, to get on with her life. She wrote how she had taken “many steps” in that direction, and in “some cases it has worked, in others, I have a long way to go.”
Donna’s nature was to give 100 percent in whatever she set out to do. “To organize and plan my project and then to go about achieving it the best and fastest way possible,” she wrote. This was one way in which Donna dealt with obstacles and challenges. In this particular situation, however, Donna added, “I find myself feeling quite helpless . . .”
A major growing frustration Donna couldn’t shake was the DNA. Where was it? When could she expect the results? The common feeling within Donna’s camp—Maureen Norris, John, and some of those in law enforcement—was that Jeff Martinez, who had finally been asked to give a sample of his blood in December 1993, was her attacker. It all fit. Now all they had to do was wait for the results of Jeff’s blood test against the known DNA.
“I have not been given a date,” Donna wrote, “in which to expect the DNA results, and the waiting has been extremely difficult.”
Concluding the letter, Donna said she was “truly grateful” to Connelly for personally making several calls to Dr. Henry Lee in hopes of expediting the results.
“But in the meantime, each day is a battle, and I will continue to live in fear until I get some answers.”
Maureen felt that, although they were trying, they were not getting anywhere with the WPD, and the SAO, as much as Connelly had said he was facilitating things, couldn’t crack that tough blue shell around the department.
“It was a disaster over there,” Maureen said, referring to the WPD. “They—the Moran brothers—were steadfast in their determination to say that they hadn’t messed up. The police department itself was steadfast in its determination to protect them. This is what I believed as we started to head into the spring of 1994.”
What became an issue for Maureen early in her law firm’s involvement was how discouraging working with the WPD became.
“I felt they were trying to pacify us,” Maureen commented. “I almost felt like they had the attitude of, ‘Okay, let’s just pacify them here with this because Donna is not going to go away. Let’s calm them down.’”
During this time, Donna contacted the Sexual Assault Crisis Center (SACS), a service that offered free and confidential intervention, advocacy, and counseling to victims of sexual assault and abuse. With one of the counselors listening on the other end of the line, Donna shared her story of being raped and then interrogated by Lieutenant Moran and accused of making false allegations. The woman she spoke to called what Donna was going through “two-part trauma,” the rape and then the assault by the police, and offered to assist her any way she could.
I was distraught when I reached out to SACS and uncertain that they could help me. I wanted to get to a place where I felt safe again. I was having a lot of flashbacks, both of the rape and the interrogation by Moran, but somehow in my mind the interrogation was more frightening, more incredible. The people at SACS were compassionat
e and caring. I established a relationship with a counselor who would call me at a certain time and we would talk about anything I felt like. It helped—and I would encourage any woman in the same position, or a woman questioning whether she was raped and if she should report it, to reach out. I tried a support group, but it wasn’t for me. I did not feel comfortable sharing intimate details to a group of people I didn’t know, and at that point the intense feelings I was having had more to do with not being believed than anything else. I also didn’t feel right about bashing the police. With SACS, I could speak over the phone to someone anonymously and that person didn’t know who I was. I could get advice without having to put myself out there.
SACS could help. But right now Donna had to deal with being believed by law enforcement. The good news was that Donna was developing resources, building a team, preparing to dig in and fight.
A few days after she wrote the unsent letter to Connelly—unsent because it sounded “too patronizing” to Donna—Pudgie called with some welcome news.
“They are trying to push the DNA through.”
“How long will it take?” Donna asked.
“Once they begin, it will take three weeks from that date.”
“Okay,” Donna answered.
“I’m meeting today with Detective O’Leary to talk about that ‘informant.’ I’ll call you back as soon as I know something.”
On March 22, 1994, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, Pudgie Maia and Detective Neil O’Leary arrived at Donna’s house.
After introductions, Pudgie mentioned that Neil wanted to talk about the so-called informant. Neil explained that he was the investigator who had acted as the liaison between the informant’s information and those in charge of her case at the time, Vice and Intelligence—i.e., the Moran brothers. Neil described the events to Donna. He had met the man at a social function one night. Regarding the rumor, Neil explained, “He told me he’d tell me about it but only if his name was kept in the strictest confidence and that his name would never be used.”
Neil went on to say that he ran into the informant a few days after the man had met with Robert and Douglas Moran and asked him how it went.
“What did he say?” Donna wondered.
“He said he ‘didn’t care for those guys . . .’ He thought they were kind of strange and cold, and they didn’t appear to be helped at all by his information. He said he didn’t even know if what he said meant anything to them . . . One of the things he told them was that he had heard you had a boyfriend, Donna.”
“Incredible.”
It was apparent that Neil was not a fan of the Morans. He told Donna and John that the Moran brothers were “no more qualified to head the Vice Squad than I would be as a nuclear physicist. And the detectives that went to your house on the night of the attack acted improperly. They should have conducted some forensic testing that night.”
“I appreciate your honesty and integrity,” Donna said.
“Those detectives work for me, and they screwed up. Then what the Morans did is inexcusable. The superintendent and the mayor know about it, and they are appalled by what was done to you.”
Donna was still guarded, but felt she had the right guy on the job now.
“Thank you, Neil . . .”
“Things are being done at this moment to rectify this situation. Doug Moran is going to be given a desk job—I think he should be fired. I’m going to work as hard as I can on this, although, I will warn you, it is difficult to pick it up now after so much time has elapsed. I had a three-hour briefing the other day in Connelly’s office about the case, and John is extremely upset with regard to how the case has been handled.”
Neil and Pudgie stood and asked Donna and John to show them around the house. They wanted to get a closer look at things for themselves and see if anything stood out. Donna realized, while escorting both officers around, that it was the first time since her attack that she had been asked to do this by law enforcement.
After Neil and Pudgie finished looking around, Donna asked about Jeff Martinez and where that end of the investigation stood at this point. Up until now, Jeff was the investigatory white elephant in the room—that person of interest everyone had in the back of his or her mind, but didn’t want to come out and talk about with any confidence or accuracy.
With Neil nodding his head in agreement, Pudgie said, “We both feel Jeff is a strong suspect.”
“I personally know someone he works with, and my source is going to check Jeff’s work record,” Neil added.
“We’re also investigating the informant,” Pudgie said. This also was something that had never been done. The WPD had taken the man at his word.
“If it were up to me, I’d give you his name,” Neil said, referring to the informant—also correcting what Pudgie had promised some time ago. “But I cannot break a confidentiality agreement. If it’s worth anything, I’d be extremely upset with this guy too.”
Donna was reluctant to ask, or maybe a bit overly confident, but she needed to know the answer: “Could I be there when you arrest Jeff if the DNA comes back a match?”
Pudgie and Neil looked at each other.
I liked Jeff. I had good memories of all of us growing up in the neighborhood. I did not want to believe that Jeff had anything to do with it, but it was hard to dismiss how he acted toward my sister. Waiting for the DNA was very difficult. There were times when I wondered if I would be better off not knowing. The thought that it could be Jeff sickened me, and I was trying to prepare myself that it could be my reality. If it was him, I wanted to be present at the time of the arrest because I had to know why. Why would he do this to me? I wanted to look him in the eyes and let him know that I was okay and the attack was not going to beat me—that I was a survivor, not a victim.
Pudgie and Neil were startled by Donna’s request.
“That’s Connelly’s call,” Neil said.
“It’s very important to me that I be there when the arrest is made.”
“We understand, but . . .”
“Who would arrest Jeff?” Donna wanted to know.
Neil pointed to Pudgie and then back at himself. “The two of us.”
After a few moments of goodbyes and promises of staying in touch, Neil and Pudgie said they would do their best to solve the case.
“Thank you,” Donna said.
She had tears in her eyes. Her fear of being arrested finally lifted—at least for the time being—and now there were two tenacious investigators on the case who truly cared about her feelings and finding the person responsible for her attack.
John and I were grateful that Neil and Pudgie met with us at our home. We wanted to divulge as much information as we could and take them back to the night of the crime all those months ago—with the hope of closing the gap as if they could somehow go back in time and recapture what had been lost: the fingerprints and photos never taken, the neighbors never talked to, whatever else they could find. Precious time had slipped away. We were anxious and appreciative, and we wanted them to know how important it was to us that they continue the investigation. We wanted answers. We needed answers. When they left, John and I felt that these were the guys that could get the job done. They believed us. They felt our pain. And they wanted to right a wrong. They filled us with hope and made us dare to believe that we might someday know who the man was behind the mask. All those months had gone by and finally . . . finally, there was a glimmer of light that the investigation would get back on the right track.
About ninety minutes after Pudgie and Neil left Donna’s and went their separate ways, John Palomba took a call from Neil, who admitted he was feeling the gravity of the situation created by the WPD. What Donna had gone through bothered the investigator, he explained. John could sense Neil’s sincerity and pain. Neil said he felt the department owed Donna answers.
“Thanks, Neil. We appreciate that.”
“I stopped at the mayor’s office and spoke to him.”
This got John’s attention. “You did?”
“The mayor said he was going to call the head of the FBI in Connecticut and ask him to try to push the DNA through. Both the mayor and the superintendent want to meet with you and Donna, John.”
Waterbury’s mayor was Edward D. Bergin Jr., and while he shared a name, he had no relation to Edward Bergin Sr., the superintendent of police, who had named his own son Edward.
“They do?”
“I told him, however, that if you were going to be filing a lawsuit against the city, it might not be in your best interest to meet. If you want me to set something up with the mayor,” Neil suggested without pushing, “let me know.”
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