Jane Doe No More (6 page)

After John and I met in college and married, life became that same Italian cliché of family, family, family. We had kids and lived among all our siblings and relatives in what was a town then centered on community. John’s family, the Palombas, were quite well-known in town. Whereas we, the Cappellas, came from north of town, the Palombas lived in Overlook, which was a more prestigious area. John grew up with five siblings—two sisters, three brothers. You can look at a photo of them when they were all young kids and, with mom and dad, they truly look like the all-American family. Fred Palomba, John’s father, was a Fordham graduate; he worked for Army Intelligence as well as owning multiple businesses. My father-in-law was even mayor of Waterbury (1965–68) until he had a heart attack. The four boys worked in—you guessed it—the family business: insurance.

As we began our own life together, John worked as an insurance inspector in the family business while I worked at various marketing jobs, including one at the
Republican-American
newspaper in the advertising display department. We had the life. Love. Children. House. Great families. The community. The American dream, really.

Under the fluorescent lights of Waterbury Hospital’s emergency room hallway, it was clear to Nick and his wife that Donna had sustained serious injuries. She had not yet washed or changed her clothes. By now her eye was not only throbbing, but almost totally closed. There was no reason for Donna to imagine that the police were not systematically searching the neighborhood and the town for her assailant. When she left the house with Nick and Dawn, escorted to the hospital by a single police cruiser, Donna thought that additional law enforcement would take over and process the scene. She believed that everything within the WPD’s power was being done to make sure the man who had attacked her would eventually be brought to justice.

Donna was led into an examination room. The nurses explained that they would be taking a sexual assault kit from her. This entailed fingernail scrapings, swabs from her vagina, blood samples, head and pubic area combing, a saliva sample, a nasal mucus swab, and several additional and invasive—but important—procedures.

“My eye,” Donna said to the nurse. “It’s my eye that is really hurting me.”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but we have to do evidence collection for a sexual assault kit first.”

As they completed the kit, it seemed to Donna that “it took forever.”

What became obvious as she was being checked out was how badly her wrists had been marked up by her twisting out of the nylon restraints. And it turned out that Donna had suffered a scratched cornea and her eye needed to be patched up. It would be some time before the swelling went down and the pain went away.

Police came in, took all of Donna’s clothing, and placed it in a paper bag.

“Please come down to the police station when you’re ready,” an officer requested, “and give us a voluntary statement.”

She agreed to the WPD visit, but her mind was wandering. Just hours before she found herself sitting in the ER being poked and prodded, now a victim of a brutal crime, she had been in this same hospital visiting her friend and celebrating the new life her friend had brought into the world. The juxtaposition of good and evil was overwhelming as Donna sat, staring at the police officer talking to her, Dawn and Nick beside her for support, and the business of the ER going on around her. It was all a blur, really, life happening in slow motion.

“The birth of my friend’s baby was the reason why I wasn’t in Colorado with my husband,” Donna said later. “I stayed behind because the baby was supposed to be born. I had experienced God’s miraculous power of life and the terrible evil in the world all within a twenty-four-hour period.”

And what an innocent night it had been before the home invasion and rape. Donna believed she’d done everything right.

I remember the children and I making only one trip from the car (something John had always told me to do when I was alone so I would not go back out) into the house when we arrived home. The kids had their book bags. I had my briefcase from work and a change of clothes, leftover pizza from Pizza Hut. We all did our part in carrying everything and making it in one trip, just as John had said.

Funny thing, I also remember that we bought a cassette of the music from “Jam Sandwich,” the children’s concert we were at earlier that evening at Judson School in Watertown. The kids loved it, and truth be told, so did I. We popped the cassette in on the way home, and I remember the kids and I singing the entire way. When we left the car to walk into the house, we sang one of the songs, “Tra la la the Fracasaur,” a story about a dinosaur. I was very aware it was dark and John wasn’t with us, and singing the song put us all at ease. I still have that cassette somewhere.

Waiting in the hallway of the ER for a preliminary report of the sexual assault kit (lab results would take weeks), Donna had trouble regaining control of her thoughts. She told herself everything would be okay. She had survived. Her children were safe and with her mother-in-law. She could overcome the emotional hell that was undoubtedly her future. Yet sitting there, not allowed to take a shower, she could still smell this man who had attacked her.

“I stunk,” Donna remembered. “All the anxiety and perspiration throughout the night felt so disgusting on me. I could not wait to take a shower.”

The first round of medication that Donna was asked to ingest consisted of a massive dose of antibiotics. Her assailant was unknown. He could have the HIV virus that causes AIDS. Or hepatitis. Or any number of other diseases. The best way to combat that, according to the doctors at the hospital, was to load up on antibiotics.

Donna wasn’t going to argue.

After a while, the nurse from the ER came out and asked, “Where are you in your menstrual cycle, Mrs. Palomba?”

Donna thought about it. Through tears, she said, “Right in the middle.”

“Well, you should consider taking the morning-after pill,” the nurse said.

Donna’s assailant had left behind several samples of his DNA in the form of semen. She had been under the impression that he had not entered her with his penis, although she knew that he had tried. The sexual assault kit would ultimately determine traces of semen found in several places, including on the vaginal swabs taken in the ER that night.

A practicing Catholic who did not believe in abortion, Donna was torn. She didn’t know what to do. The morning-after pill, to her, was an abortion. Yet she was not in the right psychological state of mind to make a decision. It was too much to think about.

“Nick, Dawn,” Donna implored, explaining the dilemma to her friends, “what should I do?”

CHAPTER
FOUR

Turning Tables

Nick and Dawn, part of Donna’s extended support system of friends and both passionate, practicing Christians themselves, told Donna the best thing under the circumstances was to take the morning-after pill. She could deal with the moral and religious implications of her decision at a later time.

“Yes,” Donna told the nurse.

The last police officer at the hospital reminded Donna that she needed to go down to the WPD at some point when she felt better, to give an official statement. She agreed. The impression Donna had, again, was that the WPD was busy searching for her assailant. She had no idea at the time that little was being done to find the man who had attacked her.

In fact, quite the opposite was going on behind the scenes: Police were beginning to think that Donna had invented the entire home invasion and rape to cover up something she had done.

The red flag, according to officers later, was no evidence of forced entry into Donna’s house—no screen cut open, no door busted up, no lock tampered with. Nothing. The question became: How did her perpetrator get inside the house if he did not break in? Had Donna left the door unlocked? Had she let him in herself?

This puzzle would plague Donna for years to come: “I have gone over and over this again in my head,” Donna said later. “And I can’t imagine leaving the door unlocked. The house was built around 1910, and it was the original door. It locks upon closing, and then there is a second deadbolt lock, which I believe I turned and locked. Again, it was routine. I can’t imagine I would not have, particularly when John was away.”

What could have been an important clue early in the investigation was overlooked by the WPD. It was never unearthed because police did not interview anyone in Donna’s family. Donna’s mother-in-law, who lived just down the street, was missing her key to Donna’s house.

Donna’s parents were at their beach house in Clinton, a Connecticut shoreline town about an hour and fifteen minutes from Waterbury. They had no telephone at the beach house. They had no idea what was going on back home.

The sun was about to rise on September 11, 1993, as Donna left the hospital. Nick and Dawn dropped Donna off at her mother-in-law’s, where her kids were still sound asleep. There was no way, Donna said, that she was stepping foot back in her house at this point.

Dawn and Nick headed straight for Clinton to alert Donna’s parents.

The first thing Donna wanted to do was take a shower, which she did before lying on the couch, exhausted, the ordeal of the night having sucked the life from her.

Soon after, Nick, Dawn, and Donna’s parents arrived, just as the kids woke up. Everyone then drove to Donna’s parents’ house, where Donna said she would feel more comfortable. The dilemma became: How was Donna going to tell John what had happened once he came home later the next day? There were family members around. John’s brothers were there. John was a man’s man; he would want to go out and smash somebody’s head for hurting his wife, as would Donna’s father. Together, John and Donna’s father would want to take action.