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Connecticut Mom Raped At Home and Shocking Attacker Is Revealed To Be Someone She Knew
After Donna Palomba was raped in her own bedroom as her children slept, police threatened to arrest her and it would take years for the surprising attacker to be caught.
In their first 12 years of marriage, John Palomba had never spent a night away from his wife.
The first time he did, his wife Donna was brutally raped in their Waterbury, Connecticut, home by a masked attacker as their two young children slept in September of 1993.
“It hurt me that there was nothing I could do. I was angry. I was very angry,” John told Dateline: Secrets Uncovered, as seen in the show's "Evil Paid a Visit" episode. “I felt that I let ‘em down. I wasn’t there. That’s what hurt, is you just felt like you let your family down.”
Donna, then a 36-year-old marketing executive, was traumatized by the attack, but that trauma only deepened when police accused her of lying about the rape.
Years later, authorities would uncover an attacker much closer to the family than they could ever have imagined.
John, who had met Donna years earlier at a college party, had always been a loving and protective partner, even instructing Donna to lock the door when he left the house.
The couple got invited to a friend’s wedding in Colorado that took place in September of 1993. After 12 years of never spending a night apart, they agreed that John should attend his friend's wedding even though Donna needed to stay behind to tend to a work obligation at the small marketing firm where she was a partner and take care of their children, then ages five and seven.
“He was a little concerned, but I assured him we would be fine,” Donna recalled.
What happened to Donna Palomba?
That Friday night, Donna and her two children attended a concert together and then returned home, where she put the kids to bed. “I just remember shutting the door and locking it and then getting the kids in their PJs, saying their prayers, tucking them in,” she said.
Donna fell asleep in her own bedroom, but was woken up after midnight by the sounds of footsteps. “It didn’t sound like little children’s bare feet,” she told Dateline. “I immediately became alarmed.”
Donna saw a shadowy, masked figure come into the room. "I could tell that the silhouette was of a man and he was wearing some type of face covering," Donna said.
When she screamed, the man leapt on top of her and clamped a hand over her mouth. “He cranked my arm up behind my back and he said, ‘If you don’t cooperate, you’re going to get hurt,’” she said.
The man pushed her face down on the bed, bound her wrists and eyes with nylons and covered her head with a pillowcase.
“I couldn’t resist at that point because I was bound, so I just remember him cutting my clothing while I was still on my stomach and then he flipped me over and he raped me,” she said.
When it was over, the man put a gun in her mouth, then placed it to her temple. He then flipped her on to her stomach, pushed the gun to her back, Donna said, and warned her that he would come back and kill her if she went to the police, before slipping back out into the night.
Donna was able to loosen her bindings and rushed to her children’s rooms, where she found them still asleep. Despite the attacker's ominous warning, she knew she needed to call the police, but all of the phone lines in the house had been cut.
Terrified, Donna made the difficult decision to leave her sleeping children and run to a neighbor’s house to get help.
Her neighbor Cliff called 911.
“My children are ok but they’re in the house by themselves,” a panicked Donna told the 911 dispatcher. “They’re 7 and 5. Please, I don’t want to leave them alone, what — what should I do?”
Cliff grabbed an ax and ran to Donna's house to stand guard until police arrived.
“It started to dawn on me that we’ve got a maniac that broke into her house and assaulted her in her bedroom,” Cliff told Dateline.
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As police arrived, Donna began calling family members. Donna’s brother-in-law Bill Palomba, John's younger brother, arrived to help take the kids to their grandmother’s house nearby.
Donna was adamant that no one call her husband John.
“I did not want to call John and I would not want to talk to him at this moment to frighten him when he couldn’t be there. That would just be torture for him,” she told Dateline.
Donna was taken to the hospital, where a sex crimes examination was performed and the DNA of her attacker was collected.
Donna decided to break the news to her husband John in person the next day when he came home from the wedding. John suspected something had happened the moment he came home and saw a new deadbolt on the front door.
“He came flying into the house and we broke the news to him and I remember him flying out of the room and just saying, ‘No!,’ and ‘How could this happen?’ It was his worst nightmare,” Donna told Dateline.
Donna believed her family had already survived the worst. "Little did I know what lie ahead," she told Dateline.
Police lieutenant threatens to arrest Donna Palomba
Donna told Dateline that during an interview about one month into the investigation, the case's lead investigator, a lieutenant, treated her more like a suspect than a victim.
“He was very abrupt and he put me in a small interrogation room with a desk, and on the desk there was a tape recorder,” she recalled. “I was confused, but I quickly became aware that something was wrong. He took out a little white piece of paper and unfolded it and began reading me my Miranda rights.”
"I was dumbfounded," Donna told Dateline.
According to Donna, the lieutenant told her that investigators had “rock solid evidence” that she had lied to the police and threatened to arrest her.
“I started crying... It was devastating," she told Dateline.
That “rock solid evidence” turned out to be just town gossip from an informant that Donna was having an affair and that she had allegedly made up the rape account after one of her children walked in on her with a lover that night. It was a rumor that Donna staunchly denied. "This is a vicious rumor," Donna told Dateline. "It is completely untrue."
No evidence ever supported the claim. Police had even found her children sound asleep inside the home when they arrived.
Outraged, Donna and John later sued the Waterbury Police Department — and won after a years-long legal battle — but authorities were still no closer to catching her rapist.
Donna Palomba's case given to a new detective, who believed her
By then the case had been transferred to Neil O’Leary, a Waterbury Police detective who would later become the police chief. He was convinced Donna was telling the truth and was intent on finding her attacker.
John and Donna long suspected the rapist may have been someone they knew, since the person seemingly knew the exact day John was out of town. O’Leary agreed.
“There was no forced entry, which led me to believe that whomever was responsible for this attack somehow had access to the key somewhere,” he said.
On the night of the attack, there had been a bachelor party at a Waterbury restaurant held by John’s friends, and many among the 50 attendees would have likely known he was out of town due to the tight-knit nature of the area.
O’Leary got a partial guest list and collected around 40 DNA samples from those in attendance that night, but none matched the DNA collected after Donna was attacked.
By the summer of 2004, the case had gone cold until O’Leary stumbled on a report of an attempted sexual assault that had just occurred and found out that the alleged perpetrator was a man named John Regan. A prominent resident in Waterbury, Regan had been accused of attacking his 21-year-old coworker, who was ultimately able to break free and flee.
O’Leary remembered the bachelor party that had taken place on the night of Donna’s attack and realized the groom was Regan’s cousin. He thought it might be possible that Regan had been at the party that night, even though he wasn’t on the guest list he had received, and called around to check.
It turned out that the detective's hunch was right, and Regan had been at the party. He agreed to give police a sample of his DNA. It was a match for the DNA retrieved during Donna's sex crimes examination at the hospital the night of her rape.
Donna Palomba and family shocked by DNA match
It was a stunning blow to Donna's husband John, who had grown up with Regan and considered him one of his closest friends.
“If I were to name like 10 friends that were closest to me, he probably would have made that list, that’s how well we knew each other,” John told Dateline.
John and Donna had even invited Regan, his wife and kids over for dinner after Regan helped John reroof his house. The Palombas had also recalled a day — a few years after the rape — in which they and their kids had spent a laid back day with Regan and others at the beach.
“It was unbelievable to think that this person that we had known could do such a thing,” Donna said.
John Regan stands trial for several crimes
In October of 2004, Regan was charged with kidnapping in Donna’s case because, by then, the statute of limitations for rape had run out. He pleaded not guilty to the kidnapping and posted bail.
About a year later, at around 5:30 p.m on October 31, 2005, Halloween night, Regan was arrested in Saratoga Springs, New York, after trying to abduct cross country runner Lindsey Ferguson from her high school parking lot. Luckily, the teen’s coach heard her screens from across the parking lot and intervened, calling 911 as Regan drove off. Another coach from the school tailed Regan's van until police could arrive to make an arrest.
Investigators found two slip knots in Regan's van along with a tarp, a syringe and antihistamine medication known to cause drowsiness.
“I think had her coaches not been in the lot and he got her into his van, she’d still be a missing person today,” said retired Sarasota Springs Police Chief Ed Moore. “This particular night, I think evil paid a visit to Saratoga in the name of John Regan.”
In May 2006, Regan pleaded guilty to the attempted kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment of the teen in Saratoga Springs and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Later that year, he appeared in court in Waterbury, Connecticut to face the charges against him there. He didn’t admit guilt, but acknowledged that prosecutors had enough evidence against him to get a conviction on three charges against him, including Donna’s kidnapping and the unlawful restraint and stalking of his coworker. He was sentenced to 15 years for his crimes in Connecticut, which were to be served concurrently with his sentence in Saratoga Springs.
In August of 2017, Donna found out that Regan, who had served nearly 12 years in prison in New York by then, qualified for statutory good time, meaning he could be released in just a few months without ever serving any time in Connecticut for attacking her.
Donna worked with authorities in New York to employ a civil management law that applies to sexual offenders. Donna went to court once again in 2021 under New York’s Sex Offender Management and Treatment Act, where a jury was asked to determine whether Regan was fit to enter society or whether he was likely to reoffend.
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Donna testified about her ordeal, and the jury determined that Regan was likely to reoffend because of a mental abnormality. As a result, he was required to live in a mental health facility or approved housing with strict supervision until a judge ordered otherwise.
“I was elated, truly,” Donna told Dateline.
Her husband John said, "It was kind of like you were closing an ugly chapter of your life, and it was time to start to enjoy all the things that you were kind of missing because of your preoccupation with the situation."
Today, Donna runs the nonprofit Jane Doe No More, which aims to empower and bring hope to survivors of sexual crimes.
