Last Dance, Last Chance

taken Debbie to the hospital in the third week in July and had agreed with her doctor’s tentative diagnosis of pancreatitis. But tests didn’t back that up. After she returned home, Pignataro had almost insisted that she undergo gallbladder surgery. A cholecystectomy is not a dangerous operation for most people, but, in Debbie’s weakened condition, she probably would have died. Indeed, the D.A.’s team had lined up Debbie’s doctors as witnesses who would testify that she would have been unlikely to survive.
    “We now think,” Clark said, “he was lobbying for that surgery with her physicians because he thought she wouldn’t survive it. Then her arsenic poisoning would never have been discovered. And if she had died in surgery, we think he believed that would be vindication in the death during surgery of [Sarah Smith].”
    Carol Bridge added, “Then he could say, ‘Look, this could happen to anybody. I was a doctor practicing my trade, and it happened to me. ’”
    Pignataro’s motives were many and interwoven, the prosecutors said, designed to take care of a number of his problems. First and foremost, he wanted his medical license back. Whoever had to be sacrificed to accomplish that didn’t matter. As always, he wanted the very best out of life for himself.
    Rumors and misinterpretation of lab tests had abounded, making the lay public believe that Ralph and Lauren Pignataro had been poisoned, too. But they never had, save perhaps for the small amount of chicken noodle soup that Lauren had eaten. The prosecutors stressed that the children had only the normal level of arsenic in their systems.
    Many people had asked them why a medical doctor would try to kill his wife with arsenic and hope to get away with it.
    Frank Sedita pointed out that tests for arsenic poisoning are not normally given in autopsies. “Historically, when defendants are prosecuted for arsenic poisoning, they usually have racked up a number of victims—not just one.
    “This is the first arsenic case I know of,” Sedita told reporters, “where there is only one victim; there are usually multiple victims before anyone gets suspicious.”
    And that is true. In fiction and in true crime, the prototype of an arsenic poisoner is the “Black Widow,” a woman of a certain age who feeds arsenic to a series of husbands and boyfriends, or to the poor and helpless aged placed in her care. When the whole history becomes known and there are too many bodies, too many insurance payoffs, and too many instances of a weeping widow, then the poisoner falls under suspicion.
    The Erie County prosecutor’s staff had built a very solid circumstantial evidence case against Anthony Pignataro—one that almost any reasonable person might agree with—but they knew that Debbie Pignataro and her children didn’t wish a vendetta on her husband and their father. They just wanted him to go away and let them live their lives.

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    B ut, of course, Anthony Pignataro didn’t go away. As meek as he was in front of Judge Rossetti, he was already working to assure himself of a relatively light sentence. He had heard the judge say that letters and documents could make a difference in his sentence, and he figured that Debbie and their children would be the most impressive if they were to come forward and plead for him.
    He was barely chastened when Family Court Judge Marjorie C. Mix finally made a ruling on the issue of the alleged neglect of Ralph and Lauren by Debbie and Anthony Pignataro. Judge Mix announced her decision only six days after Anthony pleaded guilty to poisoning Debbie. Although Debbie was found innocent of the charges, Mix convicted Anthony of child neglect.
    “You are a miserable human being,” she intoned, “who failed everybody. You have done something that is so wrong. You have destroyed your life and inflicted incredible physical and psychological pain on your wife.”
     
    Bleak revelations kept surfacing. After Anthony pleaded guilty, Debbie got a phone call from a neighbor who asked to come talk to her.
    “She sat down and started to cry,” Debbie said. “She begged me for forgiveness. She said that Anthony had called her all the time and finally convinced her that I had deliberately poisoned myself. He wanted her to wear a wire and try to get something on me. She was so sorry, but all I could think of was how she had been brutal to me.”
    The woman said that Anthony was now asking her to find out how much time Debbie was going