Jane Doe No More

by M. William Phelps

  This type of crime, Neil concluded, was not going to happen with John Palomba around.

  “John’s a big guy—and he can handle himself. Our guy was well aware of this.”

  In August, Sergeant James Griffin submitted his one-page testimonial to IA. In that handwritten document, Griffin said he was at the scene on the night of the crime and “Upon arrival, I made sure the scene was secure . . . and interviewed the victim and secured evidence to be sent to the lab. I made sure that the victim had medical attention. I made an extensive search but could not find a point of entry [forced]. All physical-medical evidence was processed according to standard operating procedure . . .”

  This comment by Sergeant Griffin was extremely disheartening and dishonest. The scene was not secure, as any of the people that were there could testify (and did!). They did remove the bedsheets. I would think that standard operating procedure would be to cordon off the scene, take photographs, fingerprints, canvas the neighborhood, conduct interviews with neighbors—none of which was done. And it was Detective Kathy Wilson that suggested I go to the hospital, not Griffin. He could not even get that right. And to say there was an extensive search . . . I was astonished by Griffin’s report.

  At the conclusion of Sergeant Griffin’s report, he wrote “. . . [A] supplemental report [was] submitted [and] the investigation then was turned over to Vice and Intelligence.”

  Captain Moran had placed the onus on the Detective Bureau, and here was Griffin bouncing it right back to Vice.

  By the end of the 1994 holiday season, there was still no word from IA regarding its conclusions. Donna and John thought this was a good sign. The longer it took, the more thoroughly, one would assume, the investigation was proceeding.

  It was shortly after the New Year. Pudgie and Neil were no closer to identifying a promising suspect. But as Neil O’Leary and Kathy Wilson spoke to more men they learned had been at that stag party, something important emerged. For one, John had asked a friend to “keep an eye” on his house while he was in Colorado. It was obvious from the interview conducted by Kathy (now helping to support Neil and Pudgie’s investigation) and Neil that John was nervous about going away for the first time in his marriage and wanted to know that his friends had his back while he was away. But this kind of help-a-buddy-out call could have backfired.

  One man Neil and Kathy spoke to said, “Yeah, I was at that stag party.” He had gone with a friend. The friend said John had asked him to watch his house because he was going away and Donna was home alone.

  The thought was that if John had told one friend, and that friend had told others, just about everybody at that stag probably knew that Donna was home by herself.

  Lab results were coming in from everyone Neil and Kathy had tracked down and asked for a voluntary blood sample, and there was no match. Everyone they had tested could be eliminated.

  Then the report everyone in Donna’s camp had been anticipating finally came in. On May 3, 1995, more than a year after IA had initiated its investigation after Maureen Norris filed her affidavit, her fax machine beeped—and in came all of a page and a half from the superintendent of police, Edward F. Bergin, detailing what IA had found during its thirteen-month investigation.

  The department, Bergin’s letter to Maureen began, had “concluded its internal investigation of your . . . complaint.” Then the letter contained some back-patting for Captain Joseph Cass, the main IA investigator, “for his thoroughness and professionalism in conducting the same.” Bergin made no mention of the fact that it was odd for a captain (Cass) to be placed in charge of investigating another captain (Moran) for misconduct. (In fact, such an assignment for an internal investigation almost never produces truth-telling. That blue blood runs deep in any law enforcement department, which was why an outside agency would have been the most objective party to investigate the case.)

  “The investigation,” began the third paragraph of the superintendent’s report, “has found no impropriety on the part of either Captain Robert Moran or Lieutenant Post. It was further determined that Lieutenant Douglas Moran’s conduct toward your client was in no way improper. The criminal complaint was extensively investigated and that investigation had to, as a matter of course, investigate any inconsistencies in your client’s statements to police.”

  Maureen was stunned as she sat and read this letter.

  “I was devastated by this—because obviously they did not do an internal affairs investigation,” Maureen said later. “At that point I felt that Donna was up against a wall. It seemed like everybody in the department was trying to protect themselves and they weren’t going to do anything.”

  All Donna wanted, she had maintained throughout the IA investigation, was to be acknowledged and to prevent the same thing from happening to anyone else. She demanded the department apologize to her and take responsibility for its personnel. And it wasn’t even a public apology Donna wanted, because she was still standing behind her curtain of Jane Doe anonymity.

  Apology and accountability weren’t going to happen, Maureen now knew.

  The report from IA continued, throwing salt on a still open wound.

  “Lieutenant Moran was remiss, however, in his handling of the tape-recording equipment and I have spoken to him relative to this finding.”

  A slap on Moran’s wrist for flubbing the recording that could have answered so many questions.

  Most of Bergin’s argument in his letter centered on the fact that Vice and Intelligence “did not have initial control of the crime scene.” Therefore “. . . [A]ny allegation of impropriety relative to the initial handling of the crime scene or evidence cannot be ascribed to them.”

  Bergin maintained that Donna’s initial criminal complaint was “extensively and aggressively investigated by this department [and that] [n]umerous individuals were interviewed and eliminated as suspects.”

  Where was the response to Donna’s main reason for filing the complaint—that she had been revictimized by Moran, bullied, and made out to be a criminal?

  “Likewise,” Begin concluded, “your client’s allegations of police misconduct have been thoroughly investigated and other than the mishandling of the tape-recording device, I find no basis to conclude that any officer acted improperly.”

  Bergin encouraged Maureen to contact him personally should she have “or acquire any additional information which you wish me to consider in this matter . . .”

  Donna had been concerned all along that the IA investigation was being conducted by the WPD and not an outside agency. But she had wanted to give the system one more chance. Now Maureen sat at her desk, wondering how to call Donna and explain to her that the same system that had victimized her was standing by its actions with such a shallow, insulting report by Superintendent Bergin, who was obviously siding with his fellow officers.

  Maureen called. “Donna, listen, I received the IA report. I don’t think you’re going to like what it says.”

  “Send it.”

  Donna stood. Maureen faxed it to Donna’s office as she waited.

  I remember feeling like I had to sit down—and that it was like being stuck with a knife. There was no impropriety on the part of the officers. The idea that the superintendent concluded that my case was “thoroughly investigated,” but that he congratulated his officers, was overwhelming to me.

  We’ve pursued every possible channel that we could. We’ve gotten nowhere. We met with the state’s attorney. There were lies. There were all sorts of reasons for me to believe that things needed to change. I could not allow this to end this way.

  One of the comments that particularly upset Donna was in a supplemental report filed by the IA investigators, who, among other things, concluded that Lieutenant Doug Moran would have been “derelict in his duties” had he not investigated Donna and her allegations of rape the way he had. It almost sounded as though Mor
an was being praised for the way he had handled the investigation.

  Was it all Donna’s fault because she had unknowingly given these “red flags” throughout the night of her alleged assault and afterward? According to the IA investigation and the WPD, Donna had not acted in the proper manner after she reported the sexual assault.

  Every blow became a boost. I was like, “You have got to be kidding me.” After the initial blow of that report and the way that the “brethren” of the WPD were sticking together, I wanted to make sure, more than ever now, that this would never happen to another victim put in my position. These guys were bullies. They needed to be confronted. They thought, As long as we keep pounding her, she’ll go away—that this IA report would send me running.

  I’ll be damned. This cannot continue. If it happened to me, it happened to others. It will happen again.

  I could not allow for it to continue.

  Donna was stronger now. Each assault on her character toughened her. She was willing and able to take the WPD head-on—especially the Moran brothers—and fight for what she believed. Her integrity and honor were at stake—not to mention catching the guy who had raped her.

  Donna met with Maureen. “I won’t take this,” she said.

  “Yeah . . . it’s incredible.”

  “I want to file a suit against these officers.” Donna said, referring to the Moran brothers.

  “It’s not that simple, Donna. In order to sue them, you need to file a suit against the City of Waterbury.”

  “So be it. I’m ready.”

  When Neil O’Leary later looked back at the IA investigation and thought about it, noting how easy “it is to be a Monday morning quarterback,” there were several things he wished had been done differently.

  “It would have been more appropriate to have an outside agency conduct the IA investigation, but it just wasn’t the practice then. I am certainly not being critical of the chief of police back then; he was an extremely honorable man with a reputation beyond belief in the community. But the thing was, he was asked to have an IA investigation conducted and he did it. The outcome was something different.”

  The chief had no direct involvement during the investigation, but it happened under his watch.

  “The chief was going by what his investigators were telling him,” Neil said. “And you have to take into consideration that, at that time, there were still a significant number of people within the department who believed there was something wrong with Donna’s story—and believed as likely as not that this sexual assault had never taken place. But what happened to Donna became that she was being victimized over and over again.”

  The unprecedented aspect of Donna’s case, something that deeply bothered Neil, was that never before—even with a truly uncooperative victim—had he heard of a lieutenant sitting down with the victim of a crime (a sexual assault, no less) and going after her like Doug Moran had zeroed in on Donna.

  “It goes back to lack of training and experience,” Neil suggested. “Moran did it based on some information from some non-credible person”—the confidential informant—“who had heard that Donna was having an affair. It was no more substantial than that.”

  Had Moran listened to the 911 call carefully, walked through the crime scene with Donna, and, most important, spent a significant amount of time with her and gotten to know her personally—the things done by Neil and Pudgie—Neil said, “I think that he, even with very little training in sexual assaults, would have found that there was no way that Donna Palomba could have made this up.”

  Neil went on to explain, “What I did from that first day Pudgie and I got involved was to get to know Donna Palomba and find out what kind of person she was.”

  Neil said he spent hours just “being around Donna” to find out who she really was, how she reacted to situations, and how she handled herself around cops.

  “She may not be the person that she appears to be,” Neil said. “But that’s not what happened. I spoke to dozens upon dozens of people who knew Donna and asked those hard questions, such as, ‘Is there a dark side to Donna Palomba? Is it possible that she was leading some sort of double life?’ Maybe she’s not the angelic person everyone thinks she is. And the amazing thing I uncovered, after all was said and done, every . . . single person I talked to adored this woman, thought she was a magnificent person, a religious person, a family person, a great mother and wife . . . it was incredible how many people adored her.”

  The more time Neil spent with Donna and the more he got to know her, it became “amazing to me,” he said, “that you would not believe her.”

  If only, he concluded, “the Morans would have done the same thing, all of this would have turned out differently.”

  Or would it have?

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The King Can Do No Wrong

  Suing a municipality is nothing like challenging a traffic violation. Maureen Norris knew from the moment Donna gave her the go-ahead that this would be one of the most challenging cases she had ever tried.

  “We had to file this suit,” Maureen later explained. “But the lawsuit end of this was very difficult. We knew going in that this was going to be a very difficult, difficult case to win.”

  The City of Waterbury (like most municipalities) had what’s called sovereign immunity from most lawsuits. Immunity didn’t protect the city from suits regarding defective sidewalks or building collapses. But when dealing with lawsuits against public officials, the rules were different.

  “A suit like this, with sovereign immunity involved, goes back to the idea that the king can do no wrong,” Maureen explained. “In order to prove our case, we had to prove that they had violated a ministerial duty, as opposed to something that is discretionary.”

  “This is extremely tough to do,” Maureen told Donna.

  But Donna had gone through too much. It was time to get tough.

  “You see,” Maureen said, “most of the city’s rules are written in such a way that you cannot get around immunity. So we had to actually find rules that they had broken.”

  One of the issues in this case was that there was no city policy or procedure that outlined how any and all crimes should be investigated. The fuzzy line of discretion came into play. Cops could use their own judgment. If they said they did no wrong, then the statute was written in a way that backed up their claim of having done no wrong. And their counterparts and colleagues, of course, would stand behind whatever they claimed.

  There was no standard protocol for how to respond to a specific crime scene, for example. Sure, there were texts in place suggesting what to do. But a cop could make his or her own call on the spot. And whatever that call turned out to be was backed up by the law.

  Donna saw the failure of the system here and wanted to not only win this lawsuit, but also change the policies and procedures so that there was a standard way to respond to a sexual assault crime scene.

  “Obviously Donna was wronged,” Maureen said. “But the question we had to face and answer was, in dealing in the eyes of sovereign immunity, was Donna still wronged?”

  What became most difficult for Maureen was knowing Donna personally.

  “I knew she was going to have to go through hell . . . and that was the toughest part of this.”

  Not only would she have to endure the emotional torture, but Donna stood a good chance of losing the case against the city.

  In her detailed lawsuit, filed against “Douglas Moran, Robert Moran, Philip Post, and the City of Waterbury,” Maureen laid out Donna’s case within eleven “causes of action” and 119 paragraphs. She broke down Donna’s argument point by point, focusing on the improprieties of the WPD and its investigating officers, how they treated Donna after the attack, and how they compromised the investigation and failed to work the case properly from the moment the WPD arri
ved at Donna’s house. That perfect storm of incompetence to which Neil O’Leary alluded swirled around her case as soon as Donna got on the phone with the WPD and started to describe what had happened to her.

  As Maureen prepared for what would be a long, tedious process of depositions, Donna voiced her frustrations about the IA report to the one person she had not wanted to reach out to, but who she felt might be able to help her in some way: John Rowland, a family friend. Rowland had just been elected that year as the eighty-sixth governor of Connecticut, an office he would hold until 2004, when he became involved in a corruption and graft scandal that would ultimately land him in federal prison.

  My husband’s parents and John Rowland’s parents were very good friends. They lived in the same neighborhood. My father-in-law and Mr. Rowland (the governor’s father) had both passed. My mother-in-law was good friends with Mrs. Rowland. My brother-in-law Bill and my husband, John, went to school with John Rowland at Holy Cross. I was desperate to reach out to anybody who could help me . . . once again, with the IA report, I felt as though I was screaming fire in a burning building, but nobody was hearing me. Did this really have to come down to a lawsuit? I mean, not only were the Morans and Phil Post let off the hook, but they were congratulated for doing a great job. I could not allow this to be my legacy. If I didn’t speak out, how many more would have to go through what I went through? It disgusted me, and I wanted the governor of the state to understand what was going on in the town where he had grown up and the state in which he governed.

  Donna addressed the letter personably, “Dear John.” After wishing the governor and his family well, she informed Rowland how she had just received a copy of the IA report from her case and was finding it “difficult to explain the anger, frustration, and overall sadness” she felt “with regard to [IA’s] response.” She said it was “outrageous” that the WPD was “standing united” behind its officers. Donna mentioned how she had desperately hoped the truth would come out and the IA investigation could be conducted “thoroughly and honestly.”