In her closing argument, Maureen set her well-proven claims against the police department into one amazing, revealing, and startling metaphor, depicting Doug Moran as “a man [who] sat there picking the wings off a grasshopper.”
The image was remarkable: A bully pushing around a defenseless woman half as strong, who had been traumatized to the point of, Donna once wrote, “depression, overwhelming feelings of sadness, tension, nightmares and interrupted sleep, a growing rage and bitterness toward people in town and my accusers, a constant feeling of worry and dread.” Donna had written out the differences in her life pre- and post-rape on a sheet of paper. Before her ordeal, Donna had “enjoyed being alone, could relax easily and quickly, [she was] more carefree and friendly, less apprehensive, trusting, more social, able to spend quality time with her children, energized and excited to do new things.” Post-rape became the polar opposite—an endless well of dealing with “anguish and trust issues, feeling unsafe all the time, stomach cramps from nerves, nausea and digestive problems.”
Additional notes Donna wrote in her trial steno pad summed up the toll the post-rape trauma caused by the WPD had taken on her: “I’d give anything to go back the seven years—my children will never be five and seven years old again—they are now fifteen and twelve and I wonder about all I have missed.”
In looking back on it all, Donna ruminated, “Why [would] anyone put herself through this if she was not telling the truth? . . . What I wish is that I could go back seven years—I would give anything to go back . . .”
Donna and John held each other as Maureen spoke to the jurors, the passionate lawyer making the argument that a victim of rape—at the scene of that crime—should be treated with the utmost sincerity and compassion, regardless of what a cop thinks took place. To accuse a woman of lying about what was done to her, weeks after she was allegedly raped at gunpoint, while she was ostensibly and progressively handling the post-attack trauma well and making progress toward healing, was to stomp on her emotional security for the rest of her life. Donna would never be the same—no matter what happened in court. Doug Moran had intimidated and terrorized Donna, Maureen suggested. He had made up his mind and went after her for no apparent reason, finding only the pieces of the evidence puzzle that fit conveniently into his claims, no matter where that evidence came from. Because of this, as the psychologist who had evaluated Donna had testified, Donna would be scarred for life.
“Their lives have value,” Maureen stated emphatically, speaking about victims of rape in general. “Please let your verdict reflect that.”
Cheryl Hricko was unabashed in her closing comments to the jury. She went straight at Donna’s reaction after the crime: what Donna said, how she said it, and the way in which she presented herself. All of Donna’s behavior, Hricko opined, pointed to a woman who had made up a story to cover up an affair.
One of the points Hricko keyed in on early was the idea that because Maria Cappella, Donna’s sister, let Jeff Martinez into her apartment, he could not have been all that intimidating or threatening.
“Why would you let this gentleman in your home at that particular point in time? And if he is proven to already be sexually aggressive at the front door, then why is he invited in and asked if he’d like [something to drink]?”
This might have been a good point had it been the least bit relevant to Donna’s rape allegations. On top of that, what did Jeff Martinez have to do with Doug Moran’s hostile, slanderous interrogation of Donna?
Hricko hammered Donna’s behavior during the minutes, hours, and days after the assault, right down to when Donna called her attacker a “gentleman” on the 911 call. “Endearing terms such as ‘gentleman’ . . . are just not associated with a brutal attacker such as this man . . .”
How could this be significant to an investigation, Maureen asked herself while listening to her adversarial counterpart, if these people had no idea how Donna customarily spoke? What if Donna used the word “gentleman” as common, everyday practice? The city was taking literally a term used in the heat of the moment—when any human would be searching for words in a terrified, scrambled mind. That one point infuriated Maureen and Donna.
Meanwhile the notion that this was the first weekend John Palomba had gone away by himself in twelve years of marriage was now considered an indication of Donna’s guilt, according to Hricko, who suggested that because John was away, it was the perfect opportunity for Donna to have an affair.
“If you look at the children’s room from the point of view of Donna’s bedroom,” Detective Neil O’Leary explained later, talking as an experienced investigator, making an important point that not one investigator looking at Donna’s case had ever considered, “you could see down the hallway and just about into the kids’ rooms. So the children had an almost straight eye line into Donna’s bedroom from their rooms. If the theory is that she had an affair and one of the kids caught her, you’d have to ask yourself as an investigator—which no one did—why in the heck would she leave her door open, for one, and unlocked, for another? It would be unthinkable to have your lover in your room, your children there down the hall, and your bedroom door open and unlocked!”
And because Donna had gone back to work within a week’s time, Hricko said, the WPD believed that behavior was inconsistent with someone suffering from a brutal rape.
Hricko went on so long that at one point the judge said, “Miss Hricko, you are going to have to wrap it up.”
Given all the evidence the WPD had uncovered, Hricko concluded, it was absolutely reasonable for Doug Moran to question Donna’s account. He would have been negligent if he had not.
Days passed. The jury seemed to be deadlocked. In actuality, however, several interesting scenarios were being played out in the jury room as the jurors discussed Donna’s case. Immediately, everyone believed that Donna had been raped and that she had not lied about her attack. There was no question about Donna’s story, or her character. The problems for the jury began with the actual jury verdict form itself. The form made it difficult and confusing for jurors to choose individual counts associated with the case.
“If it was a matter of guilt or innocence, like on TV,” one juror later said, “it would have been all over. Deciding on damages made us all not want to be there . . . it felt like we were in prison.”
On Wednesday, January 31, 2001, nearly five days after the jury was given the case, John and Donna Palomba stood and hugged each other tightly as the jury found the city, Doug Moran, Robert Moran, and Phil Post responsible, ruling against the WPD. The jury awarded Donna $190,000 in damages, a far cry from the $2.5 million dollars Maureen Norris had asked for during the proceedings.
“We had no doubt,” that same juror added, “that Doug Moran was a liar. There was a difference of opinion on the experts . . .”
As a whole, according to one juror who later spoke about the deliberation process, the jury “was offended by the $2.5 million-dollar amount. It was way too high.”
Some of the jurors did not want to give Donna any money at all.
Still, Donna won. Ultimately, within its verdict, the jury of two men and four women agreed that Douglas Moran and his brother, Robert, the former captain (who had by now retired from the WPD), were “negligent for injuring Donna and traumatizing her [and] not properly investigating her 1993 rape claim.”
Outside the courtroom Donna told reporters: “We tried very hard to settle this without going to trial. The case was really not about money—it was about change!”
Donna also said she wasn’t done with the WPD. She was going to do everything in her power to see that the department made changes in the way it dusted for fingerprints and photographed rape scenes in the future. In addition, she felt there should be a qualified, specially trained police officer in sexual assaults at every scene and available to handle all rape complaints.
“It’s a disgrace wh
at happened,” John Palomba said bitterly as he walked with Donna out of the building and reporters crowded around them.
“Today is a victory for all victims who have been abused by police,” Donna said.
Maureen made one of the last press comments, and put Donna’s case into perspective as she said, “Look, if you’re raped, you’re raped! No one asks for that.”
The question for Donna now was: Where to go from here?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Still Jane after All These Years
Donna had demanded an apology and change in policy from the WPD. In the short term she ended up with neither. The WPD flat out refused to acknowledge that Donna had won her case. The city paid the damages, and Donna received her share after expenses and fees for the lawyers and experts. But she was still reeling from the realization that it was business as usual for the WPD. Nothing had changed.
In April 2001, Donna decided to go public with her story—in her own way, that is. She reached out to John Murray, the editor of the Waterbury Observer, a monthly paper Donna respected. As they talked, Murray encouraged Donna to tell her version of the events and get her agenda out there for the people to read and decide upon for themselves.
That front-page story, simply and appropriately titled “Survivor,” said it all, with the subtitle putting Donna’s struggle into perspective: “One woman’s eight year triumph to overcome rape, and a confrontation with Waterbury Police . . .”
Now it was Donna’s turn.
“She was crushed at the [other local newspaper’s] trial coverage,” Murray wrote in the opening of his article, “which rehashed rumor, and overlooked key facts that won the case.”
My trial had lasted about a month. There were twists and turns, but toward the end it became apparent that I was winning. The court reporter from our [local paper] covered the police beat, and she came to the trial sporadically and sat with the defense. Her reporting was skewed toward the defense, and she didn’t bother to cover the trial on the day Neil O’Leary testified. I would come home from court knowing that we had a good day and read the paper the next morning and become sick to my stomach. Here I was, trying to clear my name and set the record straight, and the biased reporting just added to the swirl of misinformation and innuendo in our community. Anyone following the story would have to scratch their heads when the verdict came back that the officers were found negligent based on the printed word. It was maddening. I had my surgery and six-plus weeks of radiation facing me, but it nagged at me. Then I thought, wait, there is a monthly alternative paper in town. I called John Murray, the publisher of the Waterbury Observer, and asked for a confidential meeting, and he obliged. I met with John, and we worked together for the next two months. This was my opportunity to tell the world the unadulterated truth of what had happened.
Donna remained Jane Doe in the article, but Murray explained for his readers who Donna was within the community. John and Donna were given the names Rachael and Bob for the story.
The nine-page article about Donna’s ordeal left no stone unturned. Murray wrote about the entire case, from a moment-by-moment account of Donna’s rape to the trial against the city seven years later. For the first time, Waterbury citizens had an idea of the toll the case had taken on Donna and her family. Her story—still without the ending of her attacker being brought to justice—was finally out in the public domain in its entirety.
Probably more important to Donna than the story being published was that the Observer, to its credit, published the changes Donna wanted within the WPD in a sidebar space taking up about three-quarters of the page. The boldface-type accompaniment to the main article outlined those thirteen pivotal points of change in policy and procedure Donna had wanted implemented based on her research and personal experience.
Regarding the local newspaper’s coverage of the trial, Maureen Norris’s colleague, Robert Kolesnick, had one of the more controversial quotes of the piece, saying, “We don’t try our cases in the press. But the [local] paper’s coverage raped her all over again.”
Equally important to Donna was a column Murray published in the same edition of the paper in which her story ran. Murray titled it “RAPE” and outlined the many misconceptions and facts surrounding the ubiquitous crime. The main theme of the column was that many victims of rape are often afraid to come forward and report the crime—and a case such as Donna’s doesn’t help that.
“Silence is killing us,” Murray wrote, quite appropriately, near the end of his column. “It’s time to talk.” He quoted a survivor of rape who had said that when a victim of rape comes forward to tell her story, “It helps take away the power of this experience, and its subsequent shame . . .”
What appalled Donna most was the fact that Doug Moran was still on the job as the year 2001 ended. More than that, Robert Moran had retired years before and had been appointed by Governor John Rowland, a friend of the family, to a cushy job as vice chairman and chief of operations for the Connecticut Board of Parole. Sure, Donna had won her civil court case. She had come out and told her story. But when one looked at the results, the fact remained that the same situation could still happen under the current WPD regime.
The anxiety of my attacker being someone in the community that knew me became overwhelming as time passed after my civil trial. Neil O’Leary and Pudgie Maia, still investigating my case, were still convinced the crime was premeditated and my attacker knew John was away for the weekend.
Everywhere I went, now that my case had become public, I was still Jane Doe. However, around town many people knew exactly who I was post-trial. This became a test for me to deal with. I didn’t know if my rapist was someone from my business world, or my personal or social life. I was convinced that he was someone close—and, as time went on, that was the most terrifying part of it all.
Neil O’Leary was still with the WPD and certainly qualified to solve the case. He went up against his fellow officers during my trial, and I knew he wanted a resolution. Neil cared about John and me deeply. He was being ostracized at work. But then you had others inside the WPD, many of whom were still unqualified, essentially, to solve my case—and I had to ask myself: Besides Neil and a few others, since winning the lawsuit, was the WPD even interested in solving it?
Donna’s instincts about her attacker were accurate. Yet neither she nor John had any idea just how close the assailant was.
Pivotal in identifying the man who raped Donna was Neil O’Leary, who became a captain within the WPD near the end of 2001 and, by 2003, the chief of the Waterbury Police Department.
Regardless of what anybody else inside the department thought of Donna’s win in court, the chief of police was now on her side and determined to solve the case.
Neil had never forgotten about Donna.
One of the first initiatives Neil implemented as the new chief was an overhaul of the policy and procedure manual for the WPD, much of which was based on Donna’s case and the recommendations she had wanted to make all along. Donna offered her assistance on the sexual assault portion of the manual, and Neil allowed Donna to consult with his staff and make suggestions.
I feel a bit of redemption sneaking back into my life. A sergeant from the WPD I had been working with on the manual asked me to come into the WPD one day in November 2003. Something remarkable happened. Something I will never forget as long as I live. Something that changed my outlook and feelings. When I arrived at the WPD, the officer said, “Although you have never received an apology from the officers who were negligent, I want to, on behalf of the entire Waterbury Police Department, apologize for what happened to you.”
I was brought to tears. I felt as if nothing could bring me down from the high I was on heading into the mid-2000s. My world was coming back together.
During the spring of 2001, as Donna prepared to go under the knife and then receive radiation therapy to eradic
ate the cancer growing inside her, the never-ending drama, corrupt practices, and controversy surrounding the city of Waterbury once again exploded as Mayor Giordano’s secrets of sexually assaulting two young girls were finally exposed.
Waterbury was known then as one of the worst places in America to live, according to several surveys done by popular magazines. The city did not need any more bad press. This largely blue-collar town, situated in the western hills of a rather exclusive portion of the state, had enough boarded-up buildings, closed businesses, and jobless claims to blemish its face already. But as news came in that the mayor was not only possibly involved in corruption by receiving kickbacks for favors, but also implicated in the most horrendous crime a human being could commit—raping a child—a new low entered the political arena in Waterbury. When these allegations rose to the surface, articles began to circulate around the country trashing a city that seemed to be steeped in garbage already.
When Giordano was brought in and charged with sex crimes against children, the city was suffering from a seventy-five million dollar budget deficit. Broke didn’t even begin to describe the city’s financial status.
Waterbury alderman John Sarlo had worked for three mayors, all of whom had been indicted for various crimes against the city and/or its people. Sarlo was devastated, like most everyone else, by Giordano’s unforgivable crimes.
Jane Doe No More Page 21