Last Dance, Last Chance

by Ann Rule

  “I object to that!” Sedita said as tensions rose in the courtroom. “That’s not true. I object to that.”

  Judge Mix noted his objection and allowed Daniels to continue.

  “I would ask this Court to understand the situation we are in. We have been looking at an investigation for a long time. The District Attorney’s office—they’ve followed him, they’ve surveilled him, they’ve talked to I don’t know how many people in West Seneca. They have done anything they could to put this arsenic into his hands, and so far they can’t do it and I’m not going to assist them in all of their investigation. We don’t think they have a case…He’s in jail now because of what Judge Tills did.”

  Edward J. McGuinness, the attorney for the Erie County Department of Social Services, agreed with Scinta and Sedita that Anthony Pignataro should at least agree to take the stand. How was the judge going to make a decision if she didn’t hear what Pignataro had to say for himself? “I take the position he is in the default position.”

  Judge Mix attempted to placate the furious lawyers by saying she would take inference by Anthony’s refusal to testify or answer questions, but she wouldn’t force him to come up to the witness stand. She wanted to move the hearing along and to avoid “the charade of his nonresponse.”

  She refused to chastise Anthony or his attorneys.

  Her stance only served to frustrate the attorneys for Child Protective Services, for Debbie, and from the District Attorney’s office. Anthony Pignataro, through Joel Daniels, had just thumbed his nose at the judicial system, and the judge wanted no further discussion of it. She told the angry attorneys they could write their arguments or testify to them at a later date.

  Anthony looked smug. He had never played by society’s rules, and he was not about to start. He might be incarcerated at the moment, but nobody was going to make him testify.

  It had been such a long, long day, and Debbie was exhausted, almost to the point of tears. She felt that Judge Mix didn’t like her at all. Maybe all the strong attorneys in the world weren’t going to make any difference.

  * * *

  Now, despite the common sense in Sedita’s argument that the case against Debbie Pignataro be dismissed, Judge Mix declared that she wanted to continue the investigation of child neglect. And she denied the District Attorney’s motion to quash the subpoena seeking their investigative files. Soon, Anthony’s attorneys would be able to learn almost every bit of the intelligence they had carefully gathered against their client.

  It was easy to understand why Anthony and his attorneys should want to keep a rich vein of information about the D.A.’s investigation open. What was baffling was why Judge Marjorie Mix was so adamant in continuing the case against Debbie.

  None of them knew how long and agonizing Debbie’s struggle to regain her children would be. Sharon Simon had feared it would be this way, but she hadn’t told Debbie; that would have discouraged her before she began. Sometimes Debbie wondered if Ralph and Lauren would ever be allowed to come back to her. Maybe she would be an old woman and they would be grown up before the state would let them sleep in her house.

  She accepted that Anthony had wanted her dead. And now, he was actually helping those who would take her children away from her. Anthony seemed to enjoy being on stage in family court. He made a big production about shuffling his legal papers and conferring with his attorneys.

  An hour after he refused to take the witness stand, Anthony was found in contempt of court by Judge Mix and fined $1,000.

  His mother would pay it for him. Lena Pignataro was always there, supporting her son. She walked with her head up, above the crowd. But she darted scathing looks at Caroline Rago and Debbie.

  “She thought that money buys class,” Caroline commented later in one of her rare criticisms of other people.

  The old family court building in Buffalo was very cramped. All of its rooms and spaces were small and confining, all smelling of old radiators and the sweat and tears of thousands of people who had passed through over the years. Those who battled out old and new hurts there were forced together physically. The waiting rooms were always packed. If Caroline went in one room, she noticed that Lena made a big show of going into the other waiting room. But Lena and Caroline still had to pass by each other in the narrow hallways, almost touching. Lena never acknowledged Debbie’s mother.

  “We used to wonder what on earth Anthony could have told her about me,” Debbie speculated. “She and I had been so close for so many years that it had to be something awful—that I was a drug addict, or cheating on him with another man, or something like that. I was the one in the wheelchair, but she acted as if I were the criminal.”

  Judge Mix seemed to think so, too. A few weeks after Debbie testified on February 23, she included her suspicions about just how limited Debbie’s capabilities really were. “Illustrative of this claim was her repeated drinking of water from a cup held to her lips by her attorney,” Judge Mix wrote. At other times in the hearing, however, “Ms. Pignataro absently put on and adjusted her glasses, held papers from which she read, and turned pages, creating a different impression.”

  And Debbie had come to a place where she could turn a page or push at her glasses despite the numbness in her fingers. But she could not manage a flimsy paper cup full of water without spilling it on herself.

  Judge Mix postponed the hearings indefinitely.

  Debbie had a supporter in Donn Esmonde, a columnist for the Buffalo News, who titled his commentary “Time to Drop Case Against Mrs. Pignataro.”

  “Anybody who thinks watching small boys pull the legs off a fly is entertaining would have enjoyed himself Wednesday in family court,” Esmonde began his scorching criticism of the seemingly endless persecution of Debbie.

  “How any of this makes Debbie Pignataro a bad parent is a mystery, unless ignoring your kids while fighting for your life is a crime…

  “If this had been a boxing match, the referee would have stopped it. First arsenic, then a lengthy session with a hostile defense lawyer…. How much punishment can one woman take?

  “Judge Mix says she wants to be sure the kids are safe. We hear that. But this system bends over backward—sometimes too far backward—to put kids back in homes with parents trying to beat crack addictions, with parents who say they’re sorry for beating a toddler to a pulp. Yet now we’ve got a woman whose worst crime against her kids was getting poisoned, possibly by her husband, and the court case never ends.”

  What Donn Esmonde saw was obvious to almost everyone. No one had ever observed that Debbie was a bad mother. On the contrary, if she had a flaw, it was that she had often given up something she wanted so that her children would be safe and happy. She was worried that she would always be crippled, but her biggest fear was that Lauren and Ralph would be kept away from her forever.

  On some days in Judge Mix’s courtroom, it seemed that that was going to happen.

  Part Six

  Last Chance…

  23

  Debbie had once persuaded Anthony to go with her to a family counselor, hoping that a trained professional third party might be able to help them rebuild their marriage. The counselor perceived quickly that Anthony was a poster boy for Narcissistic Personality Disorder as it is outlined in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual—IV, the bible of psychologists and psychiatrists. His attitudes and reactions were certainly flamboyant, but he clearly was not insane. He might have been more responsive to counseling if he had been.

  “Crazy” often gets better with drug therapy, shock treatments, and psychiatric help. But those with personality disorders embrace their approach to life and have no desire to change. Consumed by one of the half dozen widely accepted personality disorders, the narcissist sees himself as the center of the world, the most important person around, but he still seeks constant admiration, and he has almost no empathy with or sympathy for other people.

  Narcissus, a Greek god, was a handsome young man who fell in love with his own image while l
ooking into a clear pond. He was so enchanted by his own beauty that he slipped into the water and perished. The personality disorder named for Narcissus is easily seen in people who overestimate their own importance and accomplishments and boast of their achievements. They believe that they are special.

  Anthony fell perfectly within the parameters of the disorder. Trying to fit him into a successful marriage counseling plan was akin to trying to teach a pig how to roller skate. He just didn’t get it. He was constitutionally unwilling and unable to put himself into anyone else’s shoes. He saw himself as a “co-therapist” and in no need of counseling. He consented to family counseling only to straighten out his wife’s problems. When Debbie tried to say how she felt, he snickered. He simply could not see that his behavior might have any detrimental effect on her or his children.

  And, of course, he had never accepted that he had any responsibility in the death of Sarah Smith.

  When he looked into a mirror, his “pond,” Anthony Pignataro saw only a handsome man with a full head of hair, a brilliant physician, a study in perfection. It was always other people who were getting in his way and stopping him from creating his world of accomplishment as a famed surgeon. And it was always other people he blamed when he encountered roadblocks.

  Anthony was, if possible, even better looking in his forties than he had been in his twenties—at least when he wore his trademark toupee. And he was highly intelligent, but he was totally blind to his own faults. Indeed, he could see no faults.

  Now, as the first crocuses poked through the snow in Erie County in 2000, Anthony languished in the ENE section of the Erie County Holding Center—but only because, in his mind, jealous and misguided people had thwarted him.

  One of his prime enemies was Frank Sedita, who still titled his investigation “People v. Dr. Doe.” Buffalo reporters knew that something big was going to happen with the Pignataro story, but nothing was official yet. As long as Anthony remained “Dr. Doe,” the real investigation—the poisoning probe—would be harder to track. The District Attorney’s office was in no hurry to expose the intricacies of their case until they were ready.

  Sedita and his team continued to gather witnesses who recalled the seamy, shadowy life Anthony had lived after his release from jail on his first conviction. One informant was a woman named Doris Kline*. During the first months of 1999, Doris had lived with Arnie Letovich.

  She said she had met Tony several times when he came over to her house about twice a week to get heroin.

  “Did you ever see him with a woman?” Sedita asked.

  She nodded, saying that he had brought a woman with him in the spring of 1999. Doris only knew her first name: Tami.

  Asked to describe Tony Pignataro, Doris said he drove a late-model black Cadillac, and that he struck her as “nervous, paranoid, and arrogant.” She described a night when he had unbolted his toupee from the top of his head to demonstrate his invention. That had to be Pignataro; there weren’t a lot of men in Buffalo with bolts in their heads.

  “Once,” she said, “he actually asked if he could date my daughter. She’s only twenty-three, and he has to be in his mid-forties. I didn’t like that idea.”

  As for Arnie and Tony, she said they always seemed to get along well. Arnie copped the heroin, and Tony paid for it. She said she’d left Arnie in June 1999, but there was no big flaming breakup; their relationship had just kind of worn itself out. Arnie had never been physically abusive to her.

  In March 2000, Anthony Pignataro was sentenced to sixteen months to four years in prison for violating his probation. That was a minor sentence compared to what might lie ahead. Buffalo residents were beginning to follow the Pignataro saga with great interest as significant events in the case were reported by the local media more and more frequently.

  Because the grand jury was about to meet to consider the evidence in Debbie’s poisoning case, Joel Daniels still refused to let Anthony take the witness stand in the marathon family court trial, which continued endlessly. He said he wouldn’t even let his client take the stand and invoke his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination because of the criminal investigation that everyone knew was going on.

  Anthony, who looked as if he was eager to take the witness chair, listened to his attorneys and remained at the defense table. He had always considered himself to be extremely talented in persuasion, but for once he allowed someone else to hold the reins. Frank Sedita and Denis Scinta would have been delighted if he had overridden Daniels’s advice. But he didn’t.

  Debbie hoped against hope that the neglect hearings were over, but they weren’t. On March 10, Judge Marjorie Mix refused to dismiss the child neglect proceedings against the Pignataros in her court. A trial was scheduled for June 13, when both Debbie and Anthony would be defendants. Frank Sedita appealed Judge Mix’s decision to the appellate division of the state supreme court in Rochester.

  It was such a long spring.

  In a hearing on April 4, Joel Daniels argued that “Deborah Pignataro has a long sordid history as a pill-popper” and said, “She very well may be lying” when she claimed that she had not tried to kill herself with arsenic after her 15-year-old marriage collapsed. That angered Frank Sedita. He protested that Daniels was trying to interfere with an upcoming grand jury probe into the causes of Debbie’s poisoning.

  It would have been a hard time for even the most confident of women. For Debbie, still in her wheelchair, it was totally humiliating. She had taken a lot of pain pills, muscle relaxants, and tranquilizers to deal with five surgeries on her neck, the disintegration of her marriage, and her way of life since the awful day when Sarah Smith suffered her fatal lack of oxygen in the operating room. But all those pills had been prescribed by Debbie’s doctors, and many of them had disappeared down Anthony’s throat.

  Every secret corner of Debbie’s life had been poked at, probed, and held up for the world to see. All of Anthony’s mistresses, all of her perceived failures. If it hadn’t been for Sharon Simon, Shelly, her mother, and her cousin Denis—who sometimes turned to wink at her in court when it got too painful—she wondered how she could bear to face Anthony, his attorneys, his mother, and the clamoring media.

  On April 4, an Erie County grand jury began hearing evidence that might convince them to bring an indictment against Anthony Pignataro in the poisoning of his wife. All grand jury hearings are secret. Debbie had to testify once more, and now she had to do it alone. Even attorneys are not allowed behind the closed doors of a grand jury.

  On April 27, 2000, Anthony was indicted on charges emanating from Debbie’s poisoning: attempted murder in the second degree, assault in the first degree, and three counts of criminal possession of a controlled substance in the seventh degree. He had been transferred a week earlier to the Elmira Correctional Facility to begin his sentence for violating probation. He was being held in the reception area while prison officials decided where he should serve his time.

  District Attorney Frank Clark refused to comment on the poisoning case. Defense Attorney Joel Daniels remarked that “There is no case, and we’re going to fight the indictment and try to get it thrown out because we believe there isn’t any real proof, only imaginary proof.”

  Contrary to popular belief, a prosecutor’s case against a suspect does not have to have direct physical evidence or eyewitness testimony to make it viable. DNA, hair fibers, fingerprints, teeth impressions, tape recordings, and video are, indeed, wonderful tools for a prosecutor to hold. But circumstantial evidence can also be very powerful. If there are enough circumstances that point to a suspect who has a motive, a method, and a means to commit a murder, and if that suspect has behaved in such a way as to make him or her look like the only person with reason to want a victim dead, a gutsy prosecutor will take a chance. All that is needed for conviction is one pebble of circumstantial evidence following another that can be piled on top of still another until there is a wall of evidence—something that a reasonable juror can turn over in his mind
until he comes up with the only possible killer.

  Anthony Pignataro’s patterned response when his back was to the wall had always been to draw his wife and family around him like a protective cloak. While he had neglected them in his hedonistic pursuits, he used them when he needed them.

  On April 27, even as the charges against him were announced, Anthony wrote to his children:

  “Hi,

  “How are you guys. I haven’t heard from either of you??[sic] Grandma said you wrote me, but I haven’t got it yet?? I miss you both so much. Why don’t you write to me?? I think about you all the time & I miss you both. Do you think you could at least write a short note & let me know how you are doing, how’s school, sports etc. Did you guys get my letters and Easter cards?”

  He gave them his new address: Elmira Correctional Facility, Box 500, Elmira, NY 14902—0500, although he expected to be moved one more time.

  “How about sending me a picture or 2 of both of you?

  “Try to see Polo. He doesn’t get to see anyone & grandma can’t handle him on the leash so he doesn’t get out much. I know he’d love to see you both. Every day, I wait for the mail & hope for a letter from my children. Please don’t let me down! Be good and look out and take care of your mother.”

  He knew what buttons to push. Polo, their German shepherd, had been their pet since Ralph was five, but Debbie certainly couldn’t handle him. She felt lucky to be able to walk a few yards. Ralph ached for his dog, and Anthony knew it.

  After he’d gotten out of his first jail sentence, Anthony had sat in his recliner chair drinking tequila or spent time with Tami Maxell. His only interest in Ralph had been when his boy was a football star, but now he heaped guilt and pleas for love upon his children.

  Ralph wrote to his father that April 2000, and he asked him some hard questions.