‘I’ve been dying for 25 years’
How an ex-cop stalled his child sex abuse trial for decades
In 1995, Leonard Forte was due in a Vermont courtroom to face charges he had repeatedly raped and molested his daughter’s 12-year-old friend.
Instead, he started dying.
Forte, then a 54-year-old former detective with the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in New York, told the court his heart had failed and he was on a transplant list. He said his doctors had given him a grim diagnosis: Without a new heart, he’d be dead within a year.
A Vermont prosecutor agreed to delay the case until Forte was healthy enough to stand trial – unless his prognosis made prosecuting him a moot point.
Forte never received a heart transplant. But he also didn’t die.
Instead, he has been living as a retiree in Florida, collecting boats, taking vacations and fending off his trial by professing for more than two decades that he’s on the verge of death.
USA TODAY Network reporters used police records and social media posts to show that in the past decade, he has taken at least 11 extended trips, including RV jaunts to New York within 200 miles of the Vermont courthouse where he has said he is too ill to travel.
The 12-year-old girl who accused him of rape in 1987 is now a 45-year-old mother to her own teenagers. She has spent nearly three-quarters of her life waiting for him to appear in a Vermont courtroom. ILLUSTRATION BY CHIRASATH SAENVONG/USA TODAY NETWORK. PHOTOS: SUFFOLK COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE AND USA TODAY NETWORK
Meanwhile, in dozens of filings and phone calls to the court, Forte has stalled his case, typically by claiming end-of-life conditions that don’t come to fruition. In 2012, he said he had been removed from the transplant list because his condition was so dire. In 2014, he said he was undergoing a surgical procedure with up to an 85% likelihood of death. In 2017, he said he had been referred to hospice care and had six months to live.
“I’ve been dying for 25 years, your honor,” he stated in a phoned-in court appearance to a Vermont judge that year. “I’m sorry I’m still alive.”
The 12-year-old girl who accused him of rape in 1987 is now a 45-year-old mother to her own teenagers. She has spent nearly three-quarters of her life waiting for him to appear in a Vermont courtroom.
The prospect of a trial seems increasingly unlikely, however, and not just because Forte is now 78. The USA TODAY Network found that Vermont officials have destroyed materials key to the prosecution of Forte, including most of the original trial record. The mistaken destruction of transcripts and court audio recordings appears to be a result of the unprecedented age of the case, by far the oldest open prosecution in Vermont.
A Vermont jury initially convicted Forte in 1988 of three counts of sexual assault, which could have meant a 60year prison sentence. But Judge Theodore S. Mandeville tossed out the verdict on grounds that prosecutors would decry as sexist: ruling that the female prosecutor in the case had prejudiced the jury by being overly emotional.
A new prosecutor, Vermont Assistant Attorney General David Tartter, decided seven years later to retry the case before he agreed to Forte’s request for a health-related delay.
Tartter, who is still the prosecutor assigned to the case, agreed to be interviewed for this story but later said by email that after “further reflection” he had decided public comment might hinder his “core responsibility, which is to ensure that this case stays prosecutable.”
Another status update on the case is scheduled for Dec. 9. Forte, who has not physically appeared at a Vermont courthouse in decades, is expected to phone in.
Reporters could not reach Forte by phone, and he did not respond to a letter delivered to his address. During his most recent court conference, in June of this year, Forte stated via phone that he is “not strong enough to defend myself, but I am not guilty of these charges.” He also advised the court that he “can’t function” and is “on oxygen 24/7.”
A USA TODAY Network photographer in September documented Forte puttering around his yard in LaBelle, Fla., and repositioning a car in the driveway. There was no oxygen tank in sight. When a reporter later tried to interview Forte at the same home, his wife said he didn’t live there.
Over the years, Forte has provided to the court letters or records describing serious health problems, and in some cases the opinion of doctors that he is medically unfit for the stress of traveling and withstanding a trial. But Forte has been unable or unwilling to fulfill the court’s request that he produce a medical professional willing to testify under oath.
Court recordings and filings show that Vermont judges and court officials have for years expressed skepticism and impatience over Forte’s claims. They have sent sarcastic congratulations to one another for inheriting the case, pretended to keel over on the bench during Forte’s proceedings and yelled over his self-pitying diatribes.
In 1996, Tartter documented how Forte – who had claimed he was financially devastated by the court case and medically unable to fly to Vermont – was leading a lifestyle many retirees would envy, complete with boats docked outside his waterfront home, at least seven vehicles registered in his name and regular flights to New York.
Yet Vermont authorities have failed to order Forte back to the state to face trial, which the prosecutor has estimated would last two days.
Michele Dinko, the accuser, said in a recent interview that Tartter has expressed to her that he has little hope left of prosecuting Forte. Dinko said Tartter also told her privately that having the case loom over Forte for so many decades is its own kind of punishment.
It’s meant that she has had to live with the same punishment, she said. Forte has dismissed her in court as a “disturbed child” and claimed “she has no interest in pursuing this matter.”
Over the decades, Dinko said, she has received only sporadic contact from Tartter, who at times has asked her if she still wants to go forward with the case.
To Dinko, a registered nurse, the answer is obvious.
“If it was his child, he wouldn’t let it slide,” she said. “He wouldn’t stop.”
A stalled grand jury
The investigation into Forte began in early 1987 after Dinko revealed her story to a friend in the bathroom of her middle school in affluent Wading River, on the North Shore of Long Island, New York. The account she gave was one she would spend the next two years repeating to detectives, attorneys and courthouse audiences.
Though her trial testimony has been destroyed, police records and depositions document the account of a girl who knew so little about sex that she struggled to describe what she said Forte had done to her.
“Have you ever seen a man or a boy’s private parts?” an attorney asked her at one point.
“No,” Dinko responded. “Except his.” Dinko said that during a trip in February 1987 to Landgrove, Vermont, with her friend, the youngest of Forte’s three daughters, Forte raped or attempted to rape her on three consecutive nights. Shortly after they had returned to New York, she said, he again raped her when she was at a sleepover with her friend at his home.
Detectives Carmine Macedonio and Carolyn “Cookie” Wimmer, sex crimes investigators in the Suffolk County Police Department, also interviewed Kristine McGuire, another classmate of Forte’s daughter, who said that he had fondled her twice, including on a vacation to Florida.
The detectives claim to have been stymied from the outset.
Forte had been a detective-investigator for the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office until 1985, when he retired on a disability pension because of facial injuries suffered after skidding his work car into a tree. Macedonio and Wimmer said Forte maintained close relationships with prosecutors and at least one powerful judge. And Macedonio said the prosecutor presenting the case to a grand jury informed him that a judge had ordered her to water down her presentation.
Court records show the grand jury declined to indict Forte. Prosecutors “thwarted us every inch of the way,” Macedonio’s partner, Wimmer, said in a recent interview.
Dinko’s mother, Rosalie Salemme, sent a letter in 1988 to various New York officials in which she said Forte had been given a free pass because of his law enforcement ties. “If my daughter was pulled into a bush and raped by an assailant and he was caught, there would be some kind of punishment,” Salemme wrote. “Yet, because she was raped by a person who appears to be a respectable citizen we are still going through this nightmare.”
The dying begins
In June 1987, Vermont police had Dinko place a recorded phone call to Forte. Though he did not admit anything during the conversation, jurors later cited the call as strong evidence of Forte’s guilt. “You had a great time,” Forte told her at one point. “I treated you like gold.”
The resulting trial in December 1988 was a “credibility contest,” as Vermont District Court Judge Theodore Mandeville later described it, between the testimony of Dinko and Forte.
Forte characterized Dinko as a liar seeking to destroy him because of a petty rift with his daughter. But the jury believed the testimony and evidence against Forte and convicted him. He faced 20 years for each of the three sexual assault counts.
In October 1989, before he could be sentenced, Mandeville gave Forte a surprising reprieve. The judge took issue with prosecutor Theresa St. Helaire’s “emotional involvement” in the case, stating that her trial demeanor “can only be described as a fury seldom seen this side of hell.”
Mandeville ordered a new trial. After seven years of trying to get the conviction reinstated by higher courts, Tartter’s office decided to retry Forte.
Forte, who had moved his family to southwest Florida, bemoaned in court filings that the prosecution had caused his “total financial ruin” and that his failing health was a “direct and proximate result of the State’s ‘witch hunt’ ” against him.
He had suffered a major heart attack in 1992, had an anxiety disorder and was terrified of flying, he claimed. His New York-based heart doctor stated that Forte was a “cardiac cripple with tremendous functional limitations.”
But court records show Forte had joined an airline’s frequent flyer club and had taken multiple trips to New York City. And though Forte had been assigned a Vermont public defender after listing income of $18,000 a year and claimed to live in a mobile home, investigators found evidence to the contrary.
In 1996, Tartter detailed in court filings the four-bedroom waterfront home in Marco Island, Florida, that Forte listed as his primary residence, citing real estate listings to describe his pool, spa, 20-foot vaulted ceilings and “lovely long water views.” The filings also note a 31-foot boat – Lady Irene, named after his wife – docked outside the home, along with seven other boats Forte had registered since 1988.
A regrettable agreement
Despite Tartter’s own court statements that Forte could not be trusted, in December 1996 the prosecutor agreed to a stipulation that, he admitted later, would ultimately haunt him.
Forte had been placed on a heart transplant list and claimed that if he did not receive a donor organ within a year, he would die. A Vermont physician who Tartter asked to review Forte’s records stated that his “prospects for improvement are nil,” that “the rigors of a retrial could worsen his condition” and that “his ability to withstand incarceration would be very poor.”
Tartter agreed to delay prosecution until Forte was “medically able to withstand a trial.” He required Forte to provide health updates every six months.
Forte, who was no longer represented by an attorney after the delay, sent Vermont officials bitter, hand-scribbled missives to complain when the court asked for updates. His phone calls to court detailed a litany of terminal ailments. He insisted 17 years ago that his heart condition had reached the “endstage.” In 2012, he said his health was so poor a donor heart would be wasted on him.
“The fact that I’m alive after 22 years is just because of my determination,” he told the court in 2017.
Forte appears to have been living a much better life than the one he has documented in court filings. At least 11 times since 2009, Hendry County Sheriff’s records show, he and his wife requested extra patrols around their property while they took extended trips. Some coincided with social media posts by his wife detailing their RV trips to New York or jaunts to Disney World.
In February 2017, a Vermont judge noted that the case against Forte was “alarmingly old” and that he wanted one of Forte’s doctors to testify or he would appoint a “medical master” to reach a conclusion on his ability to stand trial.
Three months later, Forte filed records stating that he had been referred to end-of-life hospice care. In emails to Dinko at the time, Tartter wrote, “I don’t believe anything he says,” stating, “At this point, I am wondering if he is immortal.”
But he suggested that the window to prosecute Forte had closed: “It is hard to argue that maybe somehow we could try him someday.”
Dinko, now a soft-spoken single mom with straight black hair and weary eyes, said she has spent the past threeplus decades reckoning with the alleged sexual abuse. She said she doesn’t trust anybody. She gets in fights with her teenage daughter because she won’t allow her to go to sleepovers.
“It took me a long time to believe that it wasn’t my fault,” Dinko said.
But when asked if she would be willing to testify nearly 33 years after the alleged abuse, Dinko didn’t hesitate.
“I would definitely do it, just because, how dare you, and everybody else? All these years that we’ve let go by, and you lived your life like nothing happened.”