Last Dance, Last Chance
Page 1
Praise for Ann Rule’s Brilliant New York Times Bestsellers
EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE
“Affecting, tense, and smart true-crime…. Rule digs up details…that form a case study of the classic American con man crossed with the more exotic strains of the sociopath.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Ann Rule has outdone herself….”
—The Orlando Sentinel (FL)
“Rule, in classic form, meticulously re-creates the…lives of her characters.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Troubling but absolutely riveting…. A sober, nonsensational account of Sheila’s murder, the mind-boggling series of events preceding it, and the nail-biting sequence of twists and turns in the investigation of the crime…. As usual, Rule excels at painting psychologically perceptive portraits of all the characters in this stranger-than-fiction but nevertheless real-life drama.”
—Booklist
…AND NEVER LET HER GO
“Most people like to think they recognize evil when they see it. But as this gripping story makes clear, most people are wrong. Much more than the profile of a handsome, insidious killer and the young woman he murdered,…And Never Let Her Go is also the story of three close-knit families and how 30-year-old Anne Marie Fahey’s death strengthened or destroyed them…. In Rule’s capable hands, [this is] the raw material for a modern-day tragedy.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[A] truly creepy true-crime story…. This portrait of an evil prince needs no embellishment.”
—People
“In her selection and treatment of the Fahey murder, [Rule] might have created her masterpiece.”
—The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
“Even crime buffs who followed the case closely are bound to gain new insights…. The courtroom scenes of Capano are especially compelling.”
—The Orlando Sentinel (FL)
“[Rule] tell[s] the sad story with authority, flair, and pace.”
—The Washington Post
“[A] compassionate portrayal of the victim and a chilling portrayal of her killer…. This is a true page-turner.”
—Booklist
BITTER HARVEST
“A must-read story of the ’90s American dream turned, tragically, to self-absorbed ashes.”
—People
“Impossible to put down…. A tour de force from America’s best true-crime writer.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[A] tension-filled, page-turning chronology and analysis of a psychopath in action…. It is Rule’s expert attention to detail that makes this Medea-incarnate story so compelling…. [A] gripping saga of sin and murder most foul.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
EMPTY PROMISES
And Other True Cases
Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 7
“Fascinating, unsettling tales…. The shortest article here is deeper, and tells us more about the nature of crime, than a whole stack of full-length books written by less talented competitors. Among the very small group of top-notch true-crime writers, Rule just may be the best of the bunch.”
—Booklist
A RAGE TO KILL
And Other True Cases
Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 6
“Her telling of the [Seattle] bus-crash saga is filled with those trademark touches that make Rule’s readers feel like they were there.”
—The Seattle Times
“Gripping tales…. Fans of true crime know they can rely on Ann Rule to deliver the dead-level best.”
—The Hartford Courant (CT)
THE END OF THE DREAM
And Other True Cases
Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 5
“[The] stories take on a poignancy that goes far beyond mere cops-’n’-robbers stuff. Without resorting to psycho-babble, Rule tells us—through exhaustively detailed interviews with lovers, friends, and families—what led three such talented men to such tragic ends.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Rule’s true-life crime stories read better than most fiction murder plots.”
—St. Petersburg Times (FL)
Books by Ann Rule
Every Breath You Take
…And Never Let Her Go
Bitter Harvest
Dead by Sunset
Everything She Ever Wanted
If You Really Loved Me
The Stranger Beside Me
Possession
Small Sacrifices
Ann Rule’s Crime Files:
Vol. 8: Last Dance, Last Chance and Other True Cases
Vol. 7: Empty Promises and Other True Cases
Vol. 6: A Rage to Kill and Other True Cases
Vol. 5: The End of the Dream and Other True Cases
Vol. 4: In the Name of Love and Other True Cases
Vol. 3: A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases
Vol. 2: You Belong to Me and Other True Cases
Vol. 1: A Rose for Her Grave and Other True Cases
The I-5 Killer
The Want-Ad Killer
Lust Killer
The names of some individuals in this book have been changed. Such names are indicated by an asterisk (*) the first time each appears in the narrative.
An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Copyright © 2003 by Ann Rule
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-2406-6
ISBN-10: 0-7434-2406-9
POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
For my grandchildren: Rebecca, Matthew,
Olivia, Tyra, and Cooper
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the people who lived Last Dance, Last Chance and were kind enough to revisit some tragic years in western New York with me: Debbie, Ralph and Lauren Pignataro, Caroline Rago, Denis Scinta, Shelly Palombaro, and Rose Gardner; Sarah Smith’s family: Dan Smith, Sandy Smith, Barb Grafton, and Russell Grafton; Erie County, N.Y., District Attorney Frank Clark and his staff: Frank A. Sedita III, Carol Giarizzo Bridge, Charles Craven, and Sharon McVeigh-Simon.
To the dozen detectives who solved the other cases in this Volume Eight of my Crime Files. Many of them have retired, but I remember the following investigators and salute them for their brilliant and dogged work: Lt. Austin Seth; Sergeant Ivan Beeson; Benny De Palmo; Ted Fonis; Wayne Dorman, Seattle Police Department Homicide Unit; Sheriff Harold Sumpter; Grays Harbor County Detective Ted Forester, King County Police Department; George Ishii, Western Washington Crime Lab, and Dr. Donald Reay, King County Medical Examiner. Special thanks to K. Casey and Pat Jacque.
It takes a lot more than one woman working at a computer to nurture a book from the selection of interesting cases and carry the idea into bookstores. I am ever grateful for my friendly and talented team at Pocket Books: My publisher, Louise Burke; my editor, Mitchell Ivers, and his assistant, Joanna Goddard; Art Director Paolo Pepe; Managing Editor Donna O’Neill; Production Supervisor Stephen Llano; my publicist, Louise Braverman; and my “Legal Eagle,” Felice Javit.
And I have my own “staff” of friends and family in Seattle who help me with every book. “First Reader” Gerry Brittingham Hay, and Mike Rule, Leslie Rule Wagner, and Andy Rule, who help with everything from my newsletter to getting a manuscript to the airport.
Three
decades later, my original—and only—literary agents, Joan and Joe Foley, are still with me and I appreciate them more every year. My theatrical agent, Ron Bernstein, is responsible for getting most of my books on television and actually bringing me to the bright lights of Hollywood now and then!
More than a year has passed since the Snohomish County Critical Incident Response Team raced to New York City from Washington State to assist New York police officers as they dealt with Post Traumatic Stress after September 11. My admiration for that team—Dave Coleman, Phil Nichols, Joe Beard, and Chuck Wright—knows no bounds.
Contents
A Note on Liars
Last Dance, Last Chance
The Accountant
The Killer Who Begged to Die
The Beach
The Desperate Hours
A Note on Liars
In a sense, all my stories are about liars. Some of the killers I write about have lied all their lives, and some have lied only to throw their victims off balance so that they became vulnerable. Once a lie is successful in giving the murderer what he or she wants, it grows and multiplies, burnished and perfected until it works every time. It’s a sad irony that the more honest a potential victim is, the more innocent, the more likely such a person is to become prey. Honest people don’t expect to be lied to, because they wouldn’t lie to someone else. That doesn’t matter at all to dedicated liars. They only smile.
“Last Dance, Last Chance” is about a world-class liar, if there is such a thing. “The Accountant,” “The Killer Who Begged to Die,” “The Beach,” and “The Desperate Hours” are all about repeat offenders whose ability to twist the truth made them as believable as preachers in the pulpit—and as evil as the dark forces any minister decries.
All their crimes were examples of conscienceless cruelty. Perhaps more shocking is the fact that they were so often forgiven and were offered so many chances to start over. In the end, each reverted to type; they were as dangerous as a rabid lion in the street.
LAST DANCE,
LAST CHANCE
Prologue
As I begin my twenty-first book and look back over three decades of writing about true-crime cases, I have come to a place where I am no longer surprised by the unusual requests I receive in phone calls, letters, and e-mails. Hundreds of people send me suggestions about cases for book topics, and a third of them actually offer me stories from their own lives. Predictably, most of them are victims’ survivors. Very rarely does a convicted killer’s family look for an author to write a book. Many long-time readers can spot the characteristics I look for in a criminal case, and I appreciate that, but I can choose only a small percentage of the suggestions presented to me. Try as I might, I can write only two books a year. Back when I was the Northwest correspondent for True Detective magazine, her four sister magazines, and the Justice Stories in the New York Daily News, I could report on many more cases. My accounts were much shorter, naturally, but I was able to write two crime stories every week.
Fortunately, I saved copies of all of them, and some stand out sharply in my memory. In the true-crime files that follow, I came to know many of the people involved very well. Sometimes I knew them before the path to crime escalated to violence, and sometimes it was long after. The victims’ parents or siblings often became my friends through my membership in our Washington State support group: Families and Friends of Victims of Violent Crimes and Missing Persons. For twenty years I was a familiar visitor in various homicide units from Seattle, Washington, north to Bellingham, and south to Eugene, Oregon. The detectives I met shared their investigative techniques and their gut feelings about murder with me.
This book is different from all the others. To my great surprise, in the long title case—Last Dance, Last Chance—I heard from both the would-be killer and the victim, albeit two years apart. I probably wouldn’t have remembered the first call from the convicted man if an alert reader hadn’t sent me an e-mail. She wanted to tell me about a story in her city that she thought would make an interesting book. It sounded interesting—even more interesting when she gave me the name of the accused, which sounded vaguely familiar. I dug deep into a box of newspaper clippings, letters, and my own notes scribbled on fading yellow legal pads and found something that matched my recall. I finally located what I sought—notes on a phone call from a physician in Buffalo, New York. He had called to persuade me to write a book that would unveil the shabby treatment he felt he had received from the New York State Department of Health. They had taken away his license to practice medicine for reasons, he said, that were entirely prejudicial.
I remember that he was very well-spoken, with a deep authoritative voice, and that I felt some sympathy for him as he told me his life was in ashes. I explained to him that I wasn’t an investigative reporter and didn’t write the kind of book he wanted. I suggested that he contact a reporter in Buffalo who might be interested in exposing the roots of a medical scandal.
He seemed to understand, and he even introduced me to his wife, who was listening on an extension. Although he knew I couldn’t write his book for him, he insisted on sending me the biography his wife had written about his tragedy. A few days later, I mailed him the eight-page handout I have put together for aspiring writers. He sent me the manuscript of his biography, which was more than a hundred pages long, single-spaced, and full of details about his life, especially about his career in medicine and its disastrous ending. Titled M.D.: Mass Destruction and written from the point of view of the doctor’s wife, the manuscript was ponderous, although the spelling and grammar were correct. His wife obviously idolized the doctor, and she went on for chapter after chapter about how wonderful and kind he was, how brilliant and dedicated. The story wasn’t for me, and I have to admit that I didn’t read it all: it was overwritten, overwrought, and very one-sided.
It wasn’t a true crime case at all. At most, it dealt with civil matters and possible medical malpractice, and I had a book deadline to meet. I was so involved with writing The End of the Dream that I promptly forgot all about the New York doctor.
If someone had asked me six months later the name of the Buffalo physician who called me, I probably wouldn’t have remembered it. But when someone told me the name—Anthony Pignataro—it certainly had a familiar ring. Curious, I reread the manuscript he had sent me and realized that it had to be the same heartsick doctor who had lost his license to practice medicine in 1998. By 2000, he appeared to have even more problems in his life.
When I heard about the charges against Dr. Pignataro, I contacted the District Attorney’s office in Erie County, New York. The Pignataro case was being handled by the chief assistant D.A. in charge of the Special Investigation Unit: Frank Sedita. I told Sedita about my short correspondence with Dr. Pignataro. Because I knew that Pignataro had read my books, I sent Sedita two volumes that I thought might have significant ties to his current investigation: Everything She Ever Wanted and Bitter Harvest.
Frank Sedita eventually passed them on to Deborah Pignataro, Dr. Pignataro’s estranged wife.
And one day, she called me. She told me of an all-too-true scenario that seemed almost unbelievable.
This story began quite routinely as a civil matter, but it became an incredibly tangled spiderweb of pretense, deception, deadly plots, and tragedy. Once again, just as I had been when I researched And Never Let Her Go, I was drawn back to a place where I had lived long ago. This time it was western New York State, where I spent two years when my then husband was assigned to an antiaircraft battery in the middle of the Tuscarora Indian Reservation. We lived in a small trailer a few miles from the tiny village of Youngstown, New York, in the farthest northwestern corner of New York State.
My first child was born in Niagara Falls at Mt. St. Mary’s Hospital. Army pay for second lieutenants was $300 a month, so we rarely had money enough to go to Buffalo, the closest big city in the area. I remember seeing Guys and Dolls and High Society in a luxurious Buffalo theater, and then driving home a
cross Grand Island, hungry because we couldn’t even afford to buy hamburgers and Cokes after the movies.
Erie and Niagara Counties were wonderful in the summer and fall when the fruit trees of western New York were laden with apples and peaches, and bitterly cold in the winter when the wind roared inland from Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. At 28 degrees below zero, the waves near the shoreline froze into giant icy “doughnuts.” Before living there, I hadn’t realized that moving water could freeze. But Buffalo gets so cold that Lake Erie turns to ice even as it crashes against the shoreline.
Just as I never thought of Dr. Anthony Pignataro after our brief phone meeting in 1998, I never expected to return to Buffalo or Niagara Falls or the thin eastern belt of Ontario where the land barely separates Lake Ontario from Lake Erie. But the twists and turns of our lives are nothing if not unpredictable.
In 2002, I went back to the place where I had lived as a very young wife. Fittingly, it was winter. The bitter cold was still a shock, although Buffalo natives barely acknowledged it. They did acknowledge the blizzard that brought ten feet of snow and virtually paralyzed the city at the end of 2001. When I arrived two weeks later, the billowing drifts had diminished, but they were still there.
Going back to my own early days was the only way I could explore the labyrinth of lies that defined the story of Anthony and Deborah Pignataro. Their falling in love and getting married once seemed like the happy ending to a dream romance. Sadly, it wasn’t.
Part One
Debbie
1
It was so hot,and the air was heavy and muggy with humidity. Even rain didn’t cleanse the air; it only became thicker and harder to breathe. The woman who lay on the couch had been sick for so long that she couldn’t remember feeling well. Sometime earlier—last week or maybe last month—she had been able to walk. But now her feet and legs had become leaden stumps, unwilling to accept any messages from her brain.