Last Dance, Last Chance

by Ann Rule

  On Valentine’s Day, he was back in jail. Still positive that Debbie would never blow the whistle on him, he had called her on February 5, despite a no-contact order by the Court.

  Debbie now had a restraining order to keep Anthony from phoning her. She had finally realized that she didn’t have to see him or talk to him any longer. Anthony knew full well the danger of someone finding out that he’d broken most of the rules of his probation, but he never doubted that Debbie would save him. His calls to her were always choreographed to draw her over to his side, and he’d pulled out all the stops to persuade her that she had to take him back.

  In his second arrest in two weeks, Anthony’s bail was set so high that even Lena Pignataro decided against bailing him out.

  Anthony was terrified of having to finish his five-year term for the death of Sarah Smith. If his probation was revoked, that was very likely to happen. Perhaps he wasn’t really afraid yet of the far more serious charges that might await him.

  Anthony was fairly certain that he could still pull Debbie back to him, but he was losing control. He had always been able to manipulate two women in his life: his mother and his wife. Now he felt his power slipping away, at least with his wife. He was aghast that she had actually reported him for calling her on the phone. The old Debbie would never have betrayed him like that.

  “You hold the cards, Deb,” Anthony had pleaded in his call. “You know I can’t do five years. Can’t I go for shock treatment instead? Can I go to a halfway house? At least, if I’m out of control, my mom will take care of you and the kids. I can’t do it. I’ll die in there if I have to go back to prison.”

  “You know what I thought?” Debbie asked, a long time later. “I thought, ‘Well, I was supposed to be six feet under, so maybe his troubles weren’t as bad as he thought. Maybe he had it coming.’”

  The family court hearings continued in the early months of 2000, meeting for a few days here and a few days there. Each time, Debbie thought that Judge Mix would let Ralph and Lauren come home to live with her. She tried to follow every directive Judge Mix gave her and to answer every question. But the children were still living with Carmine and his family.

  It was like a frustration nightmare where one escape door opens on another and another and another. Although Debbie was getting physically and mentally stronger all the time, she didn’t have her children.

  Anthony’s attorney, Joel Daniels, had attempted to use the family court proceedings in Judge Marjorie Mix’s courtroom to find out just what the D.A.’s office had uncovered about Anthony in the poisoning case. This was pushing “discovery” way beyond the point that Frank Sedita felt was either relevant or proper, and Judge Mix seemed to take forever to make a decision whether Anthony and his defense team could see all the files of their investigation.

  Judge Mix’s responsibility was to decide whether Ralph and Lauren Pignataro were neglected children. However, the judge would continually refer to Debbie’s poisoning and say, “I have to get to the bottom of this.” Solving the criminal case should not, Sedita felt, be a part of the matter of child neglect before Judge Mix. In a legal sense, it was apples and oranges.

  The D.A.’s office had been granted intervenor status, and Sedita moved again to quash the subpoena that used the discovery option of the Family Court Act to obtain criminal investigative files from the West Seneca Police Department. If the subpoena wasn’t stopped, Anthony and his attorneys would have access to all the information Sedita and the detectives had obtained in the poisoning investigation. That would grant them an “open sesame” to anything and everything the investigators knew about Pignataro.

  Sedita pointed out in an order to show cause on February 4, 2000, that Anthony was currently on probation for a conviction on criminally negligent homicide charges, and that Debbie had almost died of sky-high levels of inorganic arsenic. “She survived the poisoning but has suffered serious and permanent physical injury.”

  Judge Mix seemed unmoved.

  Further, Sedita said that a criminal investigation into that poisoning was being conducted by his office and the West Seneca Police Department. “The target of the investigation is Anthony Pignataro, respondent in the neglect proceeding.”

  Since the Pignataro children had no inorganic arsenic in their bodies, Sedita argued that there was really no need for the family court to continue on a “factually baseless petition’s” information.

  Sedita argued that Debbie should be named the legal guardian of her children and said that even the Department of Social Services agreed with that.

  “Of all persons and bodies interested in the neglect proceedings, the only persons or bodies who object to its discontinuance are Anthony Pignataro and family court,” Sedita argued, with a sense of frustration.

  All through February, Judge Mix delayed ruling on releasing the investigators’ records.

  It should have been over sooner. For six months, beginning while she was still in the hospital, Debbie had felt like a target for the Child Protective Service. On February 23, 2000, even though she couldn’t walk or even hold a little paper cup of water when her throat grew dry with nervousness, she was subjected to intense questioning on the witness stand.

  It was all happening at once. Debbie took the stand in Judge Marjorie Mix’s courtroom for two days of direct examination and cross-examination to explain why she was convinced her husband had poisoned her. She answered the questions put to her by Denis Scinta and then by Joel Daniels as well as she could.

  Judge Mix was a mother and a grandmother, but she was also a jurist given to sudden explosions of temper, and Debbie was afraid of her wrath as she sat in the witness chair. Her cousin Denis tried to tell her during breaks that it would be all right. She sometimes wondered how that could possibly be. She was grateful to have Frank Sedita on her side, and Sharon Simon was always there for her in court.

  Marlene Chemen, a senior child protection social worker who had seen the children in both Debbie’s home and Carmine Rago’s home, testified that she felt the children should be allowed to go home to be cared for by their mother and their maternal grandmother, Caroline. And then Chemen, too, was bombarded with questions by Joel Daniels about Debbie’s “mental instability.”

  Ralph and Lauren’s court-appointed guardian, Theresa Lorenzo, asked the judge to bring them to court so that they could tell her what their wishes were, but Judge Mix said she was already aware that they wanted to come home to live with their mother. “I have to strive legally to keep them from risk,” she explained as she denied the request.

  But it was Debbie who testified endlessly. She answered every question put to her to the best of her memory, telling the truth, because if she lost her children, she would have no reason to go on.

  There was no disagreement that in February and March 1999, Debbie had been unstable—depressed, anxious, grieving, angry, and hopeless. The husband who had declared his undying love in December and remarried her the day he walked out of prison had left her after only a few months to be with another woman. For the purposes of these family court hearings, she had done the worst thing possible. After Anthony left her once more, to relieve her severe stress, she had taken ten to twelve Xanax capsules. Even though she had immediately realized that she’d done something foolish and dangerous and phoned for help, her “suicide attempt” kept coming back to haunt her again and again.

  It didn’t matter that a psychiatric examination she had submitted to found her reaction “transient and expectable” given the situation. That one act of desperation, quickly over, clung to her like moss on a tree in deep shade.

  Now, as Debbie testified, the questions grew more and more daunting. Joel Daniels asked her a dozen ways who had poisoned her, while Denis Scinta and Frank Sedita objected to his attempts to slide over into the criminal case. Debbie could not prove who had poisoned her, but she answered, “I don’t believe my children did this to me, and I don’t believe my mother did this to me, and I did not do it to myself. The only oth
er person was my husband.”

  So many attorneys were in the room that it made Debbie dizzy. Denis had told her that she didn’t have to answer questions about things she didn’t remember, and so much of the summer of 1999 was obscured by a fog of pain and disorientation.

  The examination by Joel Daniels would have confused even a seasoned witness, and Debbie struggled to keep from giving the wrong answer to his rapid-fire questions. He wanted to know who had told her that her husband had poisoned her. He suggested that her cousin Denis Scinta had put the idea into her head.

  Through discovery, Daniels had Debbie’s medical records, and he went tediously—and accusingly—through all the pills and capsules she had taken over the past several years while she had five neck surgeries and was in severe pain. As the hours wore on, it was as if she were somehow guilty because she had been injured in the boat accident and then because she had been poisoned. She could not remember each incident of visits to a doctor, emergency room treatments, surgeries, hospitalizations. No one could have.

  Denis Scinta reminded the judge that Debbie needed to change position because the blood would not circulate in her legs if she sat too long in one spot. Debbie’s hand shook so much that when she needed water, her cousin had to hold the paper cup to her mouth.

  Ironically, she had been called by Anthony’s attorney, and it was her attorney, her cousin Denis, who cross-examined her. It was a relief when Daniels sat down and Denis walked toward her, smiling. Denis managed to move deftly as he questioned her so that he blocked her view of Anthony, who stared at her as if he could hypnotize her into retracting her statements. But even for Denis, Debbie could not recall much of the previous summer. She had been so sick. Her memory cleared somewhat as the questions moved on to the autumn.

  “When you went home in October,” Denis asked, “what were you able to do with your hands?”

  “Basically nothing.”

  “And how about your feet? What were you able to do in terms of walking or using your legs?”

  “They sent me home with a walker…it wasn’t a regular walker.”

  “Would you try to describe for the Court what walker you were on at the beginning of your return home?”

  “The walker was probably twelve inches higher than a regular walker, and my hands had to be strapped into it. I couldn’t grip.”

  “When you went home, were you able to feed yourself?”

  “No, I was not.”

  Debbie explained that she had been having occupational and physical therapy four times a week. She had come to the point where she could use a regular walker and could now go upstairs once a day—to bed at night and down in the morning. She could use a knife and fork and drink out of a glass with a straw. She could take a shower if she had a shower chair.

  “And could you tell the Court,” Denis asked, “why is it that you have to sit?”

  “Because I lose my balance.”

  He asked her the purpose of the braces on her feet.

  “To help me walk.”

  “Are you able to walk at all on your own—any distance?”

  “Yes, sir…I’d say ten to fifteen feet.”

  “All right. And while you’re walking, are there people there to watch you in case you become unsteady?”

  “Always.”

  “Mrs. Pignataro,” Denis Scinta asked his cousin, “I know it’s been asked and answered a number of times of you. I’m going to ask it again. Did you [deliberately] at any time during 1999 ingest any arsenic in your system?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you at any time expose your children to any arsenic that may have been in and about your system or around your house?”

  Debbie stared back at him with clear eyes. “No sir.”

  “I have no further questions.”

  There were so many lawyers. Edward McGuinness, attorney for the Erie County Department of Social Services, asked Debbie about her pain and seemed kind.

  Frank Sedita rose to ask more questions. For a moment, Debbie’s mind flashed back to Anthony’s hearings over Sarah’s death, and she remembered how intimidated she had been by Frank. But now, he was on her side. His dark eyes were serious. Try as she might, she admitted to herself that Frank still scared her a little. He was so smart and somber.

  She wasn’t sure what he was going to ask her, but she soon figured out that he was simply undoing the mass of accusations Anthony’s attorneys had flung at her.

  “Do you carry any diagnosis as a drug abuser, ma’am?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you ever been institutionalized—such as like the Buffalo Psychiatric Center, any facilities like those?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you ever had to go to any kind of outpatient psychiatric services? Just to give you some examples: Horizons, Lake Shore Behavioral Health Services, anything like that?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you a convicted felon, Mrs. Pignataro?”

  “No, sir.”

  Daniels and Welsh tensed at the defense table. They could see where Sedita was going. As long as he stayed within certain parameters, there wasn’t a thing they could do to stop him.

  “Have you ever been indicted for forgery?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you ever been indicted for falsifying records?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you ever been responsible for the death of another human being?”

  “No, sir.”

  Sedita was walking a very careful line, never mentioning that Anthony Pignataro could have answered “Yes” to all of his questions.

  He led Debbie through the spring and summer of the previous year, his questions seemingly innocuous as he asked who had cooked and cleaned and looked after the well-being of her children. “Myself…my mother.”

  And then she answered that after Anthony moved in, he had done some of the cooking. The time sequences were interesting, but Sedita didn’t comment on them. They spoke for themselves.

  “Have you ever done anything in your life to harm your children, Mrs. Pignataro?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you ever done anything in your life to harm yourself, Mrs. Pignataro?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you ever done anything in your life to harm your husband, Mrs. Pignataro?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Who are the most important people in your life, Mrs. Pignataro?”

  “My children.”

  Using simple questions that asked for short answers, Frank Sedita winnowed out the rhetoric of the defense and sliced it away. Since Debbie had come home, no one had gotten sick, and no one needed to be tested for arsenic poisoning. Debbie had had only a year in college; she had no four-year degree and no medical degree. She didn’t even know what arsenic looked like, how to obtain it, or what doses were fatal.

  “In the course of being familiar with that business [Anthony’s Cosmetic Plastic Surgeon’s International], did Mr. Pignataro at that time have a license to order drugs?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know exactly what kind of drugs he was ordering?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Now, after your husband got out of the correctional facility, he began to author a manuscript. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s the title of that manuscript?”

  “I believe it’s M.D.: Mass Destruction.”

  “From whose point of view is the book told?”

  “Mine.”

  “Who actually wrote all the words—all the words in the manuscript?”

  “My husband.”

  Judge Mix questioned Debbie directly about the time Ralph and Lauren were hospitalized to be tested for arsenic. Debbie said that their arsenic level was “slightly elevated,” but that they hadn’t needed to receive treatment.

  “All right. You made reference to the process of clearing out the toxicity in your system during one of the painful parts of you
r hospitalization…Would it surprise you if I told you that the hospital records…reflect the fact that there was a consideration that your son—Was it your son or daughter who had the highest level?”

  “My daughter.”

  “There was a possibility that your daughter might have to undergo the same process?”

  “I did not know,” Debbie said, her face worried.

  The judge asked Debbie if she knew the children were ordered to eat only hospital food, and were not allowed off their floor, or to be released to anyone but her brother.

  “I knew that, yes.”

  Denis Scinta called Anthony as a witness. And Joel Daniels leaped to his feet. “I will direct Dr. Pignataro not to take the stand, not to be sworn…The District Attorney intends to secure an indictment against Dr. Pignataro involving this case, and I will direct under no circumstances that he be sworn or answer any questions concerning the matter.”

  “Your honor,” Denis Scinta responded. “Your Honor, I might just ask of the Court—that I think I’ve heard it several times in this court proceeding—maybe more often than I wanted to hear it, but that the sword cuts both ways…The Court, when there was a discussion with Mr. Daniels, when he was directing the testimony of Mrs. Pignataro, you indicated that you would take into consideration her failure to answer any question posed to her at this hearing, and would weigh it as you saw fit?”

  “Right,” Judge Mix answered.

  Frank Sedita argued that Anthony’s refusal to even be sworn in seemed to be improper procedure. Under the Fifth Amendment, Anthony had the right to refuse to answer questions that might incriminate him, but that didn’t mean he could simply refuse to take the stand and be sworn.

  Joel Daniels would not even give his basis for argument. He said he simply refused to let Anthony be sworn in.

  “Why?” Judge Mix pressed. “Can you explain that to me, Mr. Daniels?”

  “’Cause I just believe under the posture of this case and what’s going on here and the District Attorney’s office wanting so much to question him and wanting so much to even put questions to him—”