Last Dance, Last Chance

by Ann Rule

  “My kids were scared and confused—very upset. There wasn’t anything I could say to help them. The things he told them weren’t true, and they were totally inappropriate for a father to say to children who were only ten and twelve. Anthony was only interested in saving himself. He had never put the children’s needs first, and he was still playing with their minds.”

  But Ralph and Lauren knew that their mother was the one who had always been there for them. The three of them had formed a bond that none of their father’s wiles could weaken. Frustrated, Anthony gradually began to plead with Debbie. That had always worked before. Debbie had always taken him back, no matter what.

  “I can’t live with my mom,” he said urgently. “She’s driving me crazy. Deb, I want to come home.”

  For the first time in twenty years, Debbie didn’t want him to come home. She never wanted to live with him again.

  “He would still work on the kids, too,” Debbie said. “He’d ask Ralph, ‘Why don’t we all go to the Buffalo Bills game?’ As if somebody could load me into a wheelchair and take me up the stadium steps. I couldn’t even get upstairs to the bathroom. Shelly’s husband teased me and said, ‘Sure, Deb, you go to the game. He can push you right up to the top row and send you over the edge,’ and we all laughed. I was actually getting to the point where I could laugh about things that used to make me cry.”

  While Anthony Pignataro worked to get back into the good graces of his wife and made certain that he was observed being an excellent father, Debbie was learning that it was quite possible to live without him. The men who tracked him were jumping over all the hurdles they had to clear before they could hope to get an arrest warrant. They knew they had an essentially circumstantial case, but a solid circumstantial case can be as strong as, or stronger than, one based on physical evidence or even an eyewitness if it is constructed flawlessly.

  Sharon Simon was still visiting Debbie or calling, Shelly and Rose and her mother were taking care of her, and Debbie was as happy as a paralyzed woman whose beloved children could not live with her could be. She tried not to think about what would happen if her paralysis was permanent. She focused on each day, thrilled when she continued to make tiny steps toward recovery. Debbie’s doctors couldn’t tell her what her prognosis was. They had never treated anyone with such profound arsenic poisoning before.

  Anthony’s mother never asked how Debbie was doing. One of Debbie’s neighbors, an older woman they all called “Virginia, the Italian Kitchen Lady” because she was such a wonderful cook, was ill. Lena stopped by Rose Gardner’s house to ask about Virginia, but she didn’t even mention Debbie, who was only a few houses down the street, struggling to feed herself and to get up on her feet.

  On one occasion, Lena picked Ralph and Lauren up from Shelly’s house. Shelly welcomed her with a smile and said, “Hi! Would you like to come in while they’re getting their stuff?”

  “Anthony’s mother looked at me as if my house was filthy,” Shelly said. “She stuck up her nose and wrapped her coat tightly around herself and took a perch on my porch. She said, ‘I do not want to wait in your house!’”

  22

  Debbie was afraid to go out in public. She had come to dread the threat of camera strobe lights flashing and reporters confronting her with questions during Anthony’s court appearances after Sarah Smith’s death. She had seen her own startled image on the television news or in newspaper articles too often, her face a bleak study in stress. The Pignataros were big news in Buffalo, and sometimes it still felt to her as if she were a character in a continuing soap opera saga. She couldn’t remember when she had last had peace in her life. She wondered if she ever would again.

  But Shelly Palombaro wouldn’t let Debbie hide in her house. As soon as Debbie could physically handle it, Shelly bundled her and her wheelchair up, loaded her into a van, and took her to Ralph’s football games. With her arms and legs still as numb as if they were asleep, Debbie felt embarrassed—like an object of curiosity in her rolling chair. And yet, it was wonderful to be able to watch her son out on the field. Whenever Shelly thought Debbie was getting too housebound, she coaxed her into going for a drive and even to Kmart or the grocery store.

  “People recognized me, I know,” Debbie said, “but they were nice. A lot of strangers stopped to say they were pulling for me. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

  Shelly had such an outrageous sense of humor that she could usually get Debbie to laugh. She hadn’t really laughed in years. When she fell down or dropped a forkful of food, they laughed instead of crying, and it felt good.

  There were tears, too. Now that she was back in her own house, Debbie promised Lauren and Ralph that they would be home with her by the holidays. She was sure of it, because she was getting a little bit of feeling back every week. She knew she was too weak to spend a whole day and night at Carmine’s house for Christmas with them. Having her children home for Thanksgiving and Christmas was her first goal, and Debbie truly believed that they would be able to come home as soon as she was stronger. She didn’t know she wouldn’t be able to keep that promise.

  The state wouldn’t let Ralph and Lauren live with Debbie, although they allowed agonizingly brief visits. The visits were over too soon. And then the kids would fight over who got to hug Debbie last.

  “It was awful,” Shelly Palombaro said. “We’d just have to peel the kids off Debbie, and they’d all be crying.”

  After they left their mother’s house, the phone would ring in twenty minutes, and they’d talk and talk for two hours. Ralph and Lauren cried and wanted to come home, and Debbie tried to calm them down so they could sleep. They did little rituals, like “I love you, Mom.” “I love you, too.”

  It made her heart hurt to know that their rooms upstairs were empty.

  The holiday season was anything but festive for Debbie Pignataro. A year before, she had been full of hope. Anthony was home from jail, they had gone through a renewal of their wedding vows, and their future seemed bright. But it had all turned ugly so soon. Now, they would soon be divorced.

  Anthony had cashed in his stocks and bonds to pay the legal expenses when he got in trouble over Sarah’s surgery. His portfolio was depleted now, and he turned continually to his mother, who was ready to stand behind him. She hired one of Buffalo’s most outstanding defense attorneys, Joel Daniels. Daniels was touched by the elderly woman who sat in his office and cried. He was a tenacious combatant, but he had a tender spot for white-haired mothers sobbing for their sons. Daniels agreed to defend Anthony in whatever legal travails lay ahead. Brian Welsh joined him as co-counsel.

  The first fight for the Pignataros would be against the Children’s Protective Service. But, oddly, Anthony didn’t seem concerned about losing custody of his children, while Debbie was terrified of what the family court might do. Anthony bent CPS’s charges to suit himself and get back at Debbie.

  Both Debbie and Anthony were listed as defendants in the family court case. But Daniels and Welsh knew that far more serious charges were hovering over Anthony’s head. They were convinced that Erie County District Attorney Frank J. Clark would attempt to indict their client in the poisoning of his now estranged wife.

  And they were right. Joel Daniels sought an order that would compel the West Seneca Police Department to comply with Judge Marjorie Mix’s subpoena instructing them to turn over all the information they had in the poisoning of Debbie Pignataro and—as rumor had it—her children. The West Seneca department balked at releasing their files, and the Erie County District Attorney stepped in to join the small police department. Their investigation was confidential, and they wanted it to stay that way.

  The matter was left in abeyance, waiting for more evidence that either of the Pignataro children had had toxic levels of arsenic. Actually, tests on Lauren and Ralph hadn’t shown alarming amounts of arsenic in their systems.

  Anthony had visitation rights with his children on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but Carmine Rago told Frank Sedit
a that he had come to see Ralph and Lauren only once between August and November, 1999. Carmine suspected that Anthony had chosen to go to Ralph’s football practices to speak to his son there—against family court Judge Marjorie Mix’s orders.

  When he could not get to Debbie directly, Anthony continued to work on their children. Ralph was a strained rope in an emotional tug-of-war. No matter how Debbie tried to protect him, Anthony always found ways to draw him in.

  “Why is your mother doing this?” he asked his son, blaming Debbie for the divorce, for failing to let him come home, for all of their troubles. “We will have no more family. You know there will be no more vacations to Florida.”

  Carol Giarizzo Bridge, the D.A.’s assistant bureau chief for domestic violence cases, talked with Patti Rago, Carmine’s wife, and learned that the children had permission from the Department of Social Services to go to the Buffalo Bills/Indianapolis Colts football game on January 2, 2000, with their father. But Ralph had come home with his mind full of Anthony’s dire warnings of what would happen to their family if his mother didn’t do as his father wanted.

  “She [Debbie] cannot say I did this, because if she does, I will go away for twenty-five years,” he had told Ralph. “If Daddy goes to jail, you will have to leave your house—but if Daddy stays out of jail, you can stay in the house.”

  It was clear that Ralph was supposed to persuade Debbie to stand by his father. If she didn’t, Anthony had painted a world that would come tumbling down for Ralph and Lauren—a world with no home, no money to live on, and no family. Ralph was smart, probably far more intelligent than his father—but he was only thirteen. No responsible adult would ever have suspended him in the middle of this struggle.

  The state wasn’t ready to indict Anthony on attempted murder charges. Some questions hadn’t yet been answered. There might be questions they could never answer. And all the time they were working on two fronts. While Frank Sedita was fighting to protect Debbie from the relentless pressure of unending hearings in family court, he was also striving to find enough evidence to arrest Anthony for attempted murder.

  Chuck Craven was determined to find the source of the arsenic trioxide that had been used to poison Debbie. Even two decades earlier, it would have been easier. Most farmers then kept poison in their barns to kill rats and mice. There was even some horse medicine that contained arsenic: one to kill worms and another called Appitone that was given to them to stimulate their appetites. But the Environmental Protective Agency had long since ordered that the age-old preparations containing arsenic be taken off the market. One thing Craven learned was that there were virtually no cases on record of suicide by arsenic. It would have taken too long and hurt too much.

  The only thing Craven really had to go on was the statement Lauren Pignataro had made about seeing her dad placing little round tins or cans around their house to kill ants. He searched hardware stores and the huge club stores for something that resembled that description, but it was winter, and the ant season in Buffalo was over.

  Since Buffalo is so close to Canada, Craven wondered whether Anthony might have gone out of the country to buy arsenic, but he didn’t make any headway with that theory.

  Craven heard about a product called Terro Ant Killer, but he found out that it had been removed from the market about a decade earlier. It had proved too toxic to sell to the general public. Several murderers, mostly female, had used Terro to get rid of spouses before the middle of the twentieth century, but it was long gone from store shelves in 2000.

  The product had been manufactured by the Senoret Chemical Company in St. Louis, Missouri, and Chuck Craven called the company to talk to the staff there. It was true that Terro Ant Killer was a thing of the past after the EPA recall, but Stewart Clark of Senoret told Craven that there was a company in San Leandro, California, that sold an ant-killing product said to contain arsenic trioxide.

  “It’s called Grant’s Labs.”

  Craven next talked to Lou Antonali, the chief operating officer at Grant’s. Antonali confirmed that they did manufacture ant killer containing arsenic trioxide. It was made of a waxy substance that contained 0.35 to 0.46 percent arsenic trioxide with a sweetener. The sweet taste attracted ants.

  “How much poison would that be?” Craven asked.

  “Well, they come in what we call hand stacks,” Antonali said. “Two hand stacks could conceivably give a 150-pound man a fatal toxicity level.”

  Craven held his breath. He then asked what a “hand stack” was—what it looked like.

  “‘Grant’s Kills Ants’ is sold in small round tins—four tins per stack.”

  Exactly what Lauren had described to Craven: “little round tins.” But all those little tins were gone when they had searched the Pignataros’ house.

  Craven found out that the arsenic trioxide used by Grant’s came from Kraft Chemical in Melrose Park, Illinois. He phoned that company and talked to an employee named Mattie Webb. When he asked her where they got the arsenic, she said it was imported from Mexico. However, most of their customers were in the Chicago area.

  “Would you sell to Canada?”

  The answer was no. It would be cost prohibitive and too much trouble to bother with customs. Mattie Webb knew of no sales at all to individuals. A single person attempting to buy arsenic would come under great suspicion. Kraft Chemical dealt only with major companies.

  Frank Sedita talked to a company in Philadelphia to see if they had sold any arsenic trioxide. No. They hadn’t had a single sale in 1999. They wouldn’t sell it to an individual, either.

  Frank Sedita tried another approach. He asked if the Pennsylvania company had any record of selling to Plastic Surgeons International, the Canadian corporation that Anthony was affiliated with. If not in 1999, then any previous year?

  No.

  As it turned out, finding an outlet for Grant’s Kills Ants wasn’t that difficult. It was right in front of them the whole time. Chuck Craven went to a Target Store in Cheektowaga, the Buffalo suburb. He headed toward the gardening and pest control section, and there it was on the shelf. There were several forms of Grant’s Kills Ants. One was an ant trap to be placed on the floor; another was a metal spike that could be stuck in the ground around shrubs and bushes (particularly peonies, which attract ants).

  The third form of ant killer containing arsenic trioxide was sold in the little round tins. Craven bought the products. He didn’t look like a detective, and he certainly didn’t tell the sales clerk why he wanted ant killer. He realized that was probably all Anthony had to do—just walk into a store and buy a product to kill annoying insects. They would never be able to trace his purchase now unless he’d used a credit card. Pat Finnerty was an expert on paper trails, but they didn’t find any purchases of ant killer memorialized on either Debbie’s or Anthony’s credit cards.

  Debbie Pignataro had told them that she usually drank Kool-Aid in the summer. It was sweet. She wouldn’t have tasted a sweet and deadly additive. Later, of course, everything tasted strange to her—that silvery metallic taste. Even chicken noodle soup tasted off to her. She wouldn’t have been able to recognize it if Anthony had put a massive dose of arsenic in her bowl of soup. She just got sicker, and she didn’t connect Lauren’s nausea to her own—not for a long time.

  Sedita, Finnerty, and Craven felt that the soup poisoning was probably the one that took Debbie out of the chronic poisoning category and plunged her into acute poisoning.

  It was time for them to move in. There was a very strong possibility that Anthony would bolt and run, perhaps even leave the country. He had confided his plans for an offshore clinic to reverse the ravages of aging to enough people to make them think he was serious. Anthony Pignataro might have an outlandish perception of himself as compared to the rest of society, but he was shrewd and intelligent. If he was free, and if he decided to leave Buffalo and West Seneca behind, he would figure out a plan—one probably financed by his mother, even if she had no idea that he was leaving.
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  On January 31, 2000, the net that hung over Anthony began to tighten, although he didn’t know it. He was too focused on trying to convince Debbie to reconcile with him so he could improve his image.

  Anthony’s probation officer, Judith White, wrote out a violation summary, attaching affidavits from Chuck Craven, Arnie Letovich, and Deborah Pignataro. When Judge Ronald Tills sentenced Anthony on August 7, 1998, two important probation conditions were imposed: (1) Anthony was to remain drug and alcohol free, and (2) he was forbidden to leave Erie County without permission of the Court and the probation department.

  He had broken both of those provisos. Arnie Letovich’s affidavit spoke of Anthony’s heroin use and his plans to move far away and open a new medical practice. Debbie’s detailed his alcohol consumption and the unauthorized trip Anthony took to Philadelphia. When he applied for the job at the Veterans’ Hospital, he had taken her and their children with him as props, she realized, to support his “good family man” image. And he’d insisted that the hotel and car rental be charged to her Visa card so that he left no trail.

  But he had left a trail. Chuck Craven had possession of four CDs from Anthony’s computer; one contained Anthony’s letter to the Veterans’ Hospital where he had hoped to get a job. That letter substantiated that he had indeed left Erie County without permission from anyone. It was helpful that Tony Pignataro had dated it.

  The arrest warrant, signed by Judge Tills, went out to “Any Police Officer, Sheriff’s Deputy, or Peace Officer in this State.

  “Whereas ANTHONY PIGNATARO…having violated the conditions of probation, you are commanded forthwith to arrest the above named ANTHONY PIGNATARO and bring this individual before this court for judgement.”

  Anthony was arrested on February 1, 2000, but Lena quickly posted $50,000 bail, so that he spent only one night in jail. When he left jail, however, he wore an electronic ankle bracelet that allowed authorities to monitor his every move.