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A FAIR-MINDED
APPEALS JUDGE
Many women who have been kidnapped,
raped, threatened, and terrorized
find themselves absolutely unable
to speak about what happened to
them. However, Sheila heroically overcame
her silence and was ready to testify
about how and why she had shot
Robert Bissett to death.
But Sheila's lawyer, John Patten, did
what most criminal attorneys do. He
refused to put his client on the stand,
or to call her husband, who, by then,
was dying of cancer, or to call any of
Sheila's many and prestigious character
witnesses.
Maybe Patten was inexperienced. Or
overconfident. Or both. Patten did
send Sheila to see Flora Colao, an
expert witness in rape trauma syndrome.
But Patten's decision not to
allow Sheila to testify meant that he'd
laid no foundation for Colao's expert
testimony; and so the judge did not
allow it.
Sheila had expected to testify. She
was "shocked" when the "defense rested."
Perhaps Sheila was so used to taking
orders, that she thought she had to
do whatever Patten told her to do. He
knew best. However, according to
Judge Ward, even if a lawyer advises a
client not to take the stand, the client
still has the right to do so—and must,
in fact, be informed of that right. Patten's
failure to do so constituted
"incompetent counsel." So did his failure
to vigorously pursue an "extreme
emotional disturbance" defense, an
omission that seems incredible when
you consider Sheila's story—the story
the jury never got to hear.
On the night of September 21, 1982
and the following morning, Sheila was
out celebrating her birthday and her
Softball team's victory. She had just
retired after 15 years on the police
force. Her usual shift was from midnight
to 8 a.m., so it was not unusual
for her to be out late. In a sense, Sheila
was always "on duty." When her husband,
Peter DeLuca, a newly retired
police captain, began to feel sick, she
drove him home. (He insisted she
return to the party, as she was "the
guest of honor.") Sheila was also keeping
a careful, protective eye on a friend,
Karyn Travelina, a schoolteacher, who'd
had too much to drink and who periodically
left the after-hours club to
make phone calls, asking Sheila to wait
for her and promising to return.
Enter, Robert Bissett, Robert Barrett,
and Eugene Murphy: three very
loud, aggressive, and drunken men in
their late 20s. They tried to pick up
Sheila and Karyn, but when rebuffed,
they turned nasty and called them
"dykes." (Sheila actually was a closeted
lesbian, married to a man who "knew
all.") Hours later, after Karyn had been
gone a long time, Sheila decided to
look for her. She walked out of the bar
and into a nightmare.
"I went to my car and I put the key
in," Sheila told me."From behind or
from somewhere, Bissett comes and
grabs me, pushes me into the car, and
says 'We're going to have some fun.
We're all going to have a party.' His
two friends are with him. I start to
struggle with him in the car, and one
of his friends shows me a knife. He
said, 'Look here, just do as we say or
we'll cut you. We'll kill you if you
don't cooperate.'They kept calling me
'bitch' and 'cunt' and 'whore.'"
The three men were drunk, snorting
cocaine, and smoking what appeared to
be angel dust. "Bissett was completely
out of control, high to the point of
aggressive, hyperactive, wired," said
Sheila. "I just followed orders: drive
left, drive right."
They terrorized Sheila by talking
about the women they said they'd had
sex with—then killed. They asked
Sheila if she'd ever had sex with three
men at once, told her they would "cut
me to make me big enough." They said
if they killed her, it would be just
another "piece of ass wiped out."
Sheila was paralyzed with fear. She
had been a victim of childhood sexual
abuse. She was a police officer, but
back then, when only two percent of
the force were women, female officers
did not draw frontline duty. They handled
kids; they were matrons. They
didn't have male partners and they
weren't trained to fight like men
against violent men.
She was forced to drive to the Bronx
Park Motel, where the men drank
more beer and watched a pornographic
movie. Fearing gang rape, she miraculously
talked Bissett into sending his
friends outside. In so doing, she
became psychologically complicit in
her own rape: another level of shame.
Outside, his friends yelled, kicked in
the window, cracked the door, and
demanded their turn. The motel manager
told his clerk to phone the room
and order the group to leave.
"This is your fault," Bissett told
Sheila. "Now, you're dead. I'm gonna
fuck you and then I'm gonna kill you."
Bissett ditched his friends, forced Sheila
to drive him to his black Ford van, and
then to an abandoned area. In the van,
"for what seemed like an eternity," said
Sheila, Bissett raped her, both orally
and vaginally. "Then all of a sudden, he
was dead weight on top of me." Bissett
had passed out. Sheila managed to slip
out of the van and escape.
"I started talking to myself, saying,
'You're alive, just forget this ever happened—block
it out. Put it behind
you—it's over; you're alive.'" She telephoned
her husband to pick her up,
but mistakenly gave him the wrong
address and ended up getting home by
herself. "I wasn't keen on talking about
it. I guess I felt disgusted and disgusting.
I just felt dirty." She thought she
could handle what happened without
telling anyone about it.
It wasn't until hours later, when she
found she couldn't stop showering, or
shaking, or crying, that she told her
husband Peter that she'd been raped.
Peter insisted that they report the
rape (which they did, although the district
attorney never pursued the
charge). But first, Peter wanted to drive
over to the crime location so they
could describe it correctly. Trembling
in fear, Sheila stuck her off-duty
revolver in her belt. Amazingly, the van
was still there. More ominously, so was
Bissett—who knocked Peter down
("He went flying out of sight."), and
then, cursing and threatening ("You're
dead now") lunged at Sheila. "I told
him to stop. He grabs my arm, and
starts pulling me back into the van. It
was as if I was being vacuumed back
in. I shot him and I shot him and I
shot him," Sheila told me. Bissett was
dead.
Self-defense. Extreme emotional disturbance.
These are the two defenses
that the jury never got to hear, noted
Judge Ward, when he overturned
Sheila's conviction on the basis of
"incompetent counsel." But what did it
take to get the judge to even review
her case
A MALE RELATIVE
WITH A LAW DEGREE
Judge Ward might never have had the
(continued an page 56)
12 ON THE ISSUES WINTER 1995