Jane Doe No More (29 page)

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 arrived 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.”

“John, I realize this is one family’s turmoil in the midst of hundreds of other concerns you deal with on a daily basis; however, it could impact other innocent victims in the future. What has been done here is wrong and it must be addressed. I am tremendously grateful for any advice or direction you could give us in this regard.”

One part of this that became important to me as time went on, and would ultimately drive me to see this all to completion, was that through the filing of this lawsuit, I had listed police department policy and procedure changes I wanted executed as part of my settlement, so no other victim would have to endure the nightmare I had been through. I asked for improved sexual assault training to ensure that future victims were treated with respect and compassion, along with an apology and acknowledgment that I had been telling the truth all along.

As Donna waited for a response from the governor, the business of deposing each of the main players started. This lawsuit process, Maureen had warned, was going to take years, not months. The depositions alone would take a year or more. Then there was the chance that the city would want to settle out of court. Yet it all began with those grueling depositions.