Jane Doe No More (31 page)

With regard to Lou Cote’s deposition, I could not believe that he had turned against us. Detective Cote took my statement, and he saw me when my eye was still healing. I went down to the WPD that day with John. I tried to be as calm and composed as I could be, relaying as much information as I could about what happened. I wanted to come across as being strong enough to get through this. I didn’t want to be an extra burden to the detectives investigating my case. I wanted to show them that I was ready and willing to see this through and was emotionally strong enough to weather it all. Well, Lou appeared to be concerned and sensitive to both John and me as I sat there giving him my statement. Then to find out he thought the way I was acting odd. And the fact that I had remembered details was not in line with how a victim of sexual assault should act. The guy did a complete 180-degree turnaround in his deposition, and it was not the same Lou Cote we met that day.

There were no surprises from the Moran brothers during their depositions; they stood firm and strong in solidarity, willing to see the case through to an end they had already established as fact from day one. There was something immutable between these two men, even Neil O’Leary commented later, regarding their stated belief that Donna was lying. Nothing could ever change their minds. It wasn’t as though they had set out to conspire against her and frame her; it was that they believed she had lied. With the measly training they’d had with sexual assaults, according to Neil, there was no way they could see between the lines of the case and admit they had made a terrible mistake. In other words, they were too far into this now and were going to stick with their story to the end, no matter what anyone said.

As for the Morans’ depositions, I braced myself to expect anything and was more prepared. But no matter how prepared I was, it was surreal to sit in the same room across from Doug Moran (knowing what he had done to me), unable to say a word, listening as he spun his web of lies. The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) I had suffered from already was raging during those days of the depositions. I could feel my heart pounding, ears burning, and this feeling of nerves racing through my body as if I could jump out of my skin. I would rather do physical labor all day than deal with the mental torment that had become part of the norm while we prepared for trial.

The depositions dragged on for years. Yes,
years.
Detective Cote’s deposition took place in September 1995, but it wasn’t until March 12, 1998, more than two years later, that Captain Joseph Cass, IA’s chief investigator on Donna’s case, sat and talked about how IA went about investigating the WPD.

The slow, grinding wheel of bureaucracy disenchants, disenfranchises, and disheartens the innocent. Think of the people who have spent decades on death row only to later be exonerated. Justice seems to take forever when you fight. But Donna, despite all her frustration and turmoil and disbelief, had weathered the storm quite well. She was in this for the long haul. By the time Cass testified, Donna basically expected him to cover for his counterparts, to continue facilitating what she felt was the big lie.

Certain aspects of Cass’s deposition were simply absurd. For instance, Cass admitted he had never spoken to any of the responding officers other than Sergeant James Griffin. It became clear from Cass’s testimony that instead of going to the source—let’s say Donna, for example, or John—he opted to ask Captain Moran about specific items within the investigation. So Cass’s source for investigating misconduct by Douglas Moran was Lieutenant Moran’s brother, the captain.

It appeared, from listening to Cass, that he never challenged the Morans regarding anything they did. He just took their word.

This way of handling an IA investigation was inexcusable.

In the end Cass believed the case had come down to a he said–she said dilemma; and in those particular cases, the IA investigator made clear, Internal Affairs always erred on the side of law enforcement. Donna would lose every time.

By the end of 1998, Donna was itching to get the case settled and move on—she knew she would always carry with her this one night of her life, in which she had been brutally assaulted, but it wasn’t supposed to take years and years of anguish and discomfort like this. Donna was a forty-two-year-old mother of two growing kids, a career woman, a pillar, really, within her community of friends and family. She had resolved not to allow this one episode to define her. But it was, in many respects, consuming her. She couldn’t escape the thoughts of the assault and the revictimization as she went to sleep every night—the darkness itself always being a point of trauma and fear since the attack. Then every morning she woke up to the thoughts again.

An incredible moment came after the depositions concluded, when John’s relative, the woman who had supposedly started the rumor that solidified the Moran brothers’ already-established belief that Donna was lying, signed an affidavit stating that she was “aware that someone broke into Donna Palomba’s house in . . . 1993, however . . . [she] was not aware of any of the details of the crime.”

Further, she stated, “I never had, nor do I now have, any reason to suspect that Donna Palomba was or is having an extramarital affair . . . That I never, on any occasion whatsoever, said to [the informant’s mother], or any other person, that Donna Palomba was engaging in an extramarital affair or that I suspected that she was.”

The substance of the rumor that had initiated the tongue-lashing and threatening interrogation Donna had endured from Lieutenant Moran, the main reason why the WPD had not believed Donna’s account of being sexually assaulted, had never taken place, according to its alleged source. Someone had made up a rumor of a rumor, and spread them both. And to think, all the WPD had to do was interview this woman, and investigators—including Cass and his team—would have gotten the same information.

This was that rock solid evidence the Moran brothers had against me? This was that supposed 100 percent proof that I purposefully lied to the police—the “countless interviews and photographs,” as Moran had said to me during my interrogation, that proved I was lying? This unconfirmed, unsubstantiated, uncorroborated piece of
gossip
is what they had? And, as it turned out, the “family source” denied she ever said it. How on earth could this have turned the investigators to point a finger at me? It was clear that it didn’t matter what I said, they were not going to back down from their theory, even if it meant revictimizing someone who had been traumatized already, not to mention having an armed rapist out there, within the community, running free. Reading this affidavit just inspired me more to go forward and fight these people.

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

A New Lease

With the depositions behind her, by early summer 2000 Donna Palomba was determined to force change. No matter how her lawsuit against the city turned out, she wanted to fix the way in which sexual assault cases were handled by police departments (starting with the WPD) from the moment police arrived on scene. Donna’s lawsuit was aimed toward the implementation of these changes within the WPD. There needed to be a standard policy in place, something like an A to Z instructional manual for the police to follow after arriving on the scene of a sexual assault. Every police officer, Donna knew by firsthand experience, needed to know what to do.

“This was the main reason for the lawsuit,” Maureen Norris explained.

The lawsuit outlined what Donna had gone through over the years, including “mental anguish, nervousness, dizziness, nauseating feelings, sleep disturbance, PTSD, paranoia, psychological disorders, phobias, humiliation, depression, headaches, weight loss, anxiety, weakness, trembling, nightmares, loss of appetite . . . a great loss to her marital relationship and . . . psychiatric care.”

If she couldn’t transform her own case within the parameters of the law, Donna figured she could ensure that her suffering never happened to another sexual assault victim.

Knowing Dr. Henry Lee through an introduction by Pudgie Maia, and with Neil O’Leary having been a student of Lee’s some years ago, Donna saw a connection that could help affect positive change. But what if her attacker had been arrested in another state (or elsewhere in Connecticut) and his DNA was sitting somewhere, waiting to be matched up against a known source?

“It is my desire,” Donna wrote to Dr. Lee, “to donate the creation of a comprehensive website about DNA and your particular work on the subject.”

Donna wanted to publicize and advance the cause of DNA technology and the FBI’s national database of DNA samples, where “many assailants can be linked to unsolved crimes from evidence left at a crime scene.” She called DNA a “strong weapon” in the fight against rape and sexual assault.

The FBI system and database was formally known as the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (or CODIS). According to the FBI, CODIS began “as a pilot software project in 1990, serving fourteen state and local laboratories.” That changed in 1994, when the DNA Identification Act “formalized the FBI’s authority to establish a National DNA Index System (NDIS) for law enforcement purposes.” Well over 170 public law enforcement laboratories across the United States participated in NDIS as the program moved forward into the late 1990s. “Internationally,” the FBI said, “more than forty law enforcement laboratories in over twenty-five countries use the CODIS software for their own database initiatives.”

According to the FBI, CODIS (which would eventually become an important factor in Donna’s case) “generates investigative leads in cases where biological evidence is recovered from the crime scene. Matches made among profiles in the Forensic Index can link crime scenes together, possibly identifying serial offenders.”