Last Dance, Last Chance

by Ann Rule

  Now Sharon would be on the other side, helping Debbie—if Debbie would let her. She wondered if Debbie would recognize her from their earlier courtroom time together. And if she did, would Debbie even give her the time of day?

  Like most women, Sharon had been through the wars of love herself, and she had also been a crime victim. “I grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and I’m a fighter. My response when I’m in danger is always immediate—and it’s to fight back.”

  Once Sharon was walking home from a visit at a girlfriend’s house when two men began to follow her. One of them jumped out and tried to push her into their car. “I scratched this guy’s face and drew blood. I saw the look on his face, and I thought, Now I’ve done it. He punched me and fractured my jaw, and I lost a tooth besides. My own instinctive response isn’t very healthy. Sometimes you shouldn’t fight back. You can only do that in certain places. If you’re in an elevator, you’re not gonna be fighting back. Every guy’s different. Fighting back might buy you some time—or fighting back might get you killed. So I tell women if you hit someone, be prepared that they’re going to hit you back.”

  Sharon McVeigh Simon got to know law enforcement well in New Jersey. Two of her uncles and a grandfather were Jersey City detectives. “It was an Irish Catholic family,” she said. “My father was one of eleven children. I was one of three girls.”

  After going to Catholic school, Sharon attended the University of Kentucky on two scholarships. “Moving to Lexington was like going to a foreign country for me. I had my bags packed every weekend to go home, but I stayed. I majored in English because that’s what my scholarships dictated.”

  Her then husband was working toward his master’s degree, and Sharon worked as a cocktail waitress in a country club in Louisville. “That was an experience because I was a Yankee—the only one who ever worked in that country club. On Sundays, they had a dance floor in the front, and they’d open up a beer garden in the back for people over 21 who didn’t belong to the country club. My job was to sit on a bar stool and pat people down for weapons!”

  Coming to Buffalo with her husband, who wouldn’t consider moving to New Jersey, Sharon graduated from the University of Buffalo with a degree in philosophy and criminal justice. “I always called my curriculum ‘head in the sky—feet on the ground.’”

  It took her a long time to finish by going to school at night. Along the way, Sharon gave birth to her two sons.

  The courses she took at the University of Buffalo were the perfect combination for the job Sharon would have in the nineties. “I didn’t know it then, though,” she said. “I also think that good cops use life experience—bad things that happen to them that they turn into knowledge. I had my share of those.”

  Initially, Sharon had wanted to go to law school. She took her first LSATs to prepare for that, “and I did terribly,” she laughed.

  She waited to take the law school aptitude test again, and volunteered at the rape crisis center in the interim. “I went through training there and did a year of volunteering, and then the coordinator’s job for the Erie County Advocate Program for Sexual Assault Victims opened up in 1979.”

  It was only part time to begin with, a fledgling program, but Sharon was hired. She realized that she was doing exactly what she was meant to do. She was a natural.

  Before long, the experimental program became a full-time job—more than full time, really. Sharon was always on call as an advocate for victims of sexual assault, and of course her hours were never nine to five. She wore a beeper and was summoned at all hours of the day and night.

  Seeing how many agencies become involved in sexual assault cases, Sharon wrote a protocol so that when a victim came into a hospital in Erie County, her office was automatically notified so the victim wouldn’t have to go through the procedures alone.

  “I lost half my volunteers the first year because I told them we had to respond. The hospitals had been disillusioned because they hadn’t always been able to count on advocates. I went to the hospitals and guaranteed that someone would show up—which meant I had to go to half the calls myself. When I started, we had two hospitals who called us; when I left, we had eleven. We had a program with credibility, and we had lots of volunteers we could count on.”

  When Sharon stopped to think about it, she realized the job was making up for a marriage that wasn’t working. She and her husband divorced.

  Sharon Simon wrote grants and gradually was able to hire other advocates for her one-woman office. “It was only me to begin with,” Sharon recalled. “When I left fourteen years later, there were six staff members, and we’d expanded to helping victims in court cases, opened a speakers’ bureau, and taught prevention programs. I was trained by the best; I traded off teaching with the FBI so I could go to their classes, and I never thought about taking the LSATs again.

  “But there came a point where I was teaching in the police academy, teaching police officers, teaching the doctors—but I realized I wasn’t learning anything, any more.”

  Sharon had handled at least 8,000 sexual assault cases when she was hired by the Erie County District Attorney’s office on November 1, 1993. Although she once said she wanted nothing to do with murder, she would be going to homicide scenes, too. She had seen the stress in sexual assault cases, and she sensed that the stress had to be so much more in homicide cases. It was.

  Sharon soon wrote another proposal on what might be done to help victims, their families, hospitals, the detectives, the medical examiners, and even the funeral homes who were called in to murder crime scenes.

  For the first two months, she learned about every facet of her new job as Assistant Coordinator of Victim/Witness Assistance. Even though she was a woman and from the D.A.’s office—not the most welcome visitor in mostly male homicide units—Sharon knew the chief and a lieutenant in homicide in the Buffalo Police Department. She introduced herself there and then visited smaller departments around Erie County.

  “Then I went to the morgue. I told them I didn’t need to see an autopsy, but they showed me around the whole place. And then they walked me out the back, and into an autopsy. It was on a baby. I didn’t lose it. That was ‘the test,’ and I managed to pass.”

  At first, Sharon went only to the hospitals and the morgue to talk with relatives of homicide victims. Later, she went into the field with homicide detectives, starting with bombings in three Erie County cities. “I was watching TV and I saw a lieutenant I knew in Cheektowaga, and he was talking about the five victims. Then my phone rang. They were asking me, ‘How long will it take you to get out here?’ I wanted to say, ‘I don’t do bombings,’ but I didn’t. I was there in ten minutes. I had to walk a path as they were escorting me to the basement of the police department where all the agencies involved were meeting. I passed by agents who had plastic evidence bags with charred hands and fingers in them. That was literally my initiation by fire.”

  Everyone was in shock—from the deliveryman who delivered the exploding packages to the relatives to the detectives to the neighbors. Her new job had begun in earnest.

  Once again, Sharon had no staff, although she worked in the same offices with Chuck Craven and Pat Finnerty. At any given time, she was responsible for seventy-five homicide cases—not in solving them, but in serving as a hand-holder, comforter, court companion, adviser, explainer, shoulder to cry on, friend to those caught in the tragic circumstances of violent crime. Some people called her once a year, and some called once a week. Homicide cases never close until they are solved, but there are often long periods when detectives have no new information. It’s difficult for family members to understand that, and Sharon tried to explain to them that the victim they loved has not been forgotten.

  In 2001, the homicide rate in Buffalo went up 69 percent, and some months Sharon spent more time in the homicide unit than she did in her own home. Still, no case affected her as deeply as Debbie Pignataro’s.

  The Pignataro case was different from anything Sharon had
handled before. She had a living victim—so far—but one who really didn’t want to know the truth.

  Sharon would never forget what Debbie looked like when she first saw her, even though weeks had passed since she was admitted to the hospital in critical condition.

  “She was totally paralyzed,” Sharon said. “At one point, I answered the phone for her because she couldn’t reach for it. I stuck it under her chin for her.

  “I was nervous,” she admitted. “I tried to explain to her why I was there, and that I could understand why it would be quite natural for her not to talk to someone from my office, but that my purpose was a little bit different. I wouldn’t be asking the same kind of questions that they did.”

  To Sharon’s relief, Debbie Pignataro was willing to talk to her. In fact, the two women quickly established a bond, cautious as it was. Listening to what Debbie had been through, and knowing what probably lay ahead for her, Sharon felt so sorry her. That touched Debbie, and for the first time, she allowed herself to talk about who might have given her poison. Carefully, she began to edge out of the safe place she had put herself in.

  It was going to take a lot of time.

  The two women were very different. Sharon had seen more of the ugly side of the world than most and had learned to deal with the cruelties of human against human. She had learned to look at a murdered body without flinching, and she was fiercely independent because she had to be. Debbie’s life had been as sheltered as it could be, considering that she was married to a serial adulterer. She had clung so tightly to her home, her marriage, and her belief that somehow she could make it right.

  Both women loved their children more than anything else in the world.

  When Sharon visited Debbie, she realized that “everything was always about Tony.” She had seen Debbie at her husband’s hearings after Sarah Smith’s death, and it was clear then that her world revolved around her husband. So, apparently, did the world of her mother-in-law, and Tony himself certainly saw himself as the central person in the universe.

  The D.A.’s personnel always referred to Dr. Anthony Pignataro as Mr. Tony Pignataro, ignoring his pretentious “Anthony” and refusing to call him Dr., fully aware that he had long since lost his medical license.

  Sharon’s assignment in the investigation was to help Debbie build some confidence and at the same time try to find information for the state about the crimes against Debbie. “And, personally,” Sharon recalled, “I wanted to help her walk through this.”

  Sharon knew that it was going to be a long ordeal, although even she could not have known how long. Initially, her most challenging goal was to help Debbie Pignataro focus on herself instead of on her husband. She had seen herself as an extension of Anthony for two decades and had always put herself second.

  “‘I just want to hear about Debbie Pignataro,’” I said. “And she couldn’t seem to grasp that.”

  “Tell me about Debbie,” Sharon would say, and Debbie would look at her, confused. Somewhere along the way, the real Debbie had gotten lost. It was almost impossible for her to verbalize who she was, what her hopes and dreams were, what she liked to do. She was “the doctor’s wife,” or “Ralph and Lauren’s mom,” and she knew how to be those people, but she had forgotten how to ask for anything for herself.

  “She couldn’t even see her life without Tony, although she always called him Anthony,” Sharon recalled. “That’s how she defined herself. She’d always start with ‘and then Anthony…Everything was described through his eyes. She started in the middle of her life, and I asked her to go back to the beginning of her life.”

  After Debbie had been told for twenty years that she was too fat, too dumb, too clumsy, and too unimportant to deserve a man like Anthony Pignataro, it wasn’t easy for her to find any self-confidence. It was harder when she was well nigh paralyzed. But Debbie began to look forward to Sharon’s visits.

  “It was a process,” Sharon said. “I’ve been trying to think if I can recall a specific time when Debbie realized that Tony was trying to kill her, but I come up with nothing. I think that’s because the first time I spoke with her in the hospital, I sensed that she knew it was him but didn’t—or wouldn’t—believe it.”

  Sharon kept asking Debbie to recall her life from birth to the present without talking about her husband. And that almost made Debbie tongue-tied. She had a very difficult time visualizing her life except in its connection to Anthony. Slowly, Debbie was able to tell about how she felt and what had happened to her. Sometimes, Sharon would interrupt and comment on how difficult and heartbreaking some events of her life must have been. The deaths of her baby girl and of her father had been tremendous losses. Both women ended up in tears.

  “That’s just too much,” Sharon said later, as she evaluated how tragic Debbie’s life had been. “You’ve gone through all this with your husband—which had to be major denial, even while you’re sitting in the courtroom and watching him being sentenced. And you said, ‘Yeah, the world’s trying to screw Anthony and us’—and it was genuine. It wasn’t the way most people blame the system. And then you went through the girlfriend—and the letter. Bad enough something like this happens…”

  She broke off. She hadn’t been able to say it aloud to Debbie. She was nowhere near ready to face it.

  Sharon voiced her own feelings about how steadfastly loyal Debbie had been to her husband and her family, always the supportive partner in the marriage. Debbie needed to hear that. Even though she was a woman in pain, her limbs frozen by paralysis, she still felt guilty, as if she had failed or somehow hadn’t done enough for her family.

  As they moved through the years to the present—late summer, 1999—Sharon asked Debbie to help her with a timeline on when she began to be sick and how her illness had progressed. Again, she focused on how this affected Debbie—that it was her story. It was easier for Debbie to look at it that way, rather than to talk about what was essentially a criminal act—a criminal act that her own husband had almost certainly committed.

  “I could tell that all this woman wanted was to be a wife and mother and enjoy and share the love that this ‘should’ bring,” Sharon remembered. “I also knew that she was trying to hold on to something that didn’t exist—at least in that marriage.”

  Almost any woman who’s ever been married can identify with Debbie’s struggle to believe in her husband. Once she said out loud that he was probably the person who had given her deadly poison, she would have to let go of all of her dreams.

  Sharon rejoined Frank Sedita in the lobby, and she remembered telling him that she felt Debbie knew it was Tony who had given her the arsenic, but that too much had happened to her for her to take it all in. “She can’t accept it right now,” Sharon said. “Not yet. You can’t ask her to.”

  For her part, Sharon Simon was horrified to learn that Tony Pignataro hadn’t been totally reviled by the medical community. Some Buffalo area doctors had even sent him letters of support, adhering to the “good old boy” system whereby doctors stick together, no matter what. Sharon’s own physician complained to her: “Doctors shouldn’t be investigated by the D.A’s office. That’s wrong.”

  Sharon changed doctors.

  Anthony was still a regular hospital visitor, and he appeared to be as doting and supportive as ever. He searched Debbie’s face to be certain that they were still clinging tightly together, still strong in their trust in each other. She didn’t know yet that he was telling other people that she was suicidal and had probably taken the poison herself.

  Debbie remained in the hospital in September as school started, her children’s world so separate from her own. She had always been the kind of mother who made sure they had a good breakfast and clean clothes to wear to school. She’d waved goodbye to them in the morning and was waiting at the door for them when they came home. She’d made sure they had helmets on if they rode bikes, and worried if they had even a slight fever. She rarely left them overnight, preferring to take them along on vacations.
Now all she could do was pray that they were safe.

  Anthony wasn’t looking after their children. He told Debbie he was too overwhelmed with emotion over what had happened to them all to take care of them. Ralph and Lauren were better off, he said, with Carmine and his wife.

  But he assured Debbie that he was going to Ralph’s football games. Ralph was still something of a football phenomenon. Anthony went out of his way to show everyone that he was a complete “football father,” proud of his son and right there to cheer for him.

  “He would run up and down the sidelines with Lauren on his shoulders,” their neighbor Shelly Palombaro remembered. “He made such a spectacle of himself that it didn’t ring true. He’d be shouting, ‘Look at Ralph, Lauren! We’ve got to call Mom and tell Mom!’

  “It was like watching some actor in a play. Several people commented about the way he seemed to know that every eye was on him, and he was showing them what a great husband and father he was.”

  As he had done before when Anthony went to Ralph’s games, he ignored the parking area for visitors. Then he drove his Lamborghini right up to where the coaches parked, despite signs that said he couldn’t park there. Every time he was told he couldn’t park where it said “Coaches Only,” he waved his hand and walked away, ignoring the rules. Now he parked his Cadillac there.

  “The rules never applied to him,” one of the other fathers said.

  Anthony didn’t live at home or oversee his children’s day-by-day activities. He lived with Lena in her big house a few miles away from his own duplex. Debbie had no more visits from Lena, and her mother-in-law’s complete reversal in attitude toward her disturbed her. Ordinarily, if Debbie was ill, she could depend on her mother-in-law for backup. Over the years, Lena had never had to work, as Caroline Rago had.