by Ann Rule
After they had listened to Anne Marie’s phone messages, the state and local investigators looked through the rooms of her small third-floor apartment, nodding as the people who had called them explained which things were the way they should be and which were atypical of Anne Marie Fahey.
They talked to the landlady. They looked at the green 1995 Volkswagen Jetta parked across the street where Anne Marie usually left it. They paced the sidewalk in front of the white house that was now broken into separate apartments, the night brightened a little by streetlights.
“Maybe she walked away,” Donovan said.
Kathleen shook her head. “No. She was very conscious of her safety in this neighborhood; she wouldn’t walk alone outside, especially at night.”
Brian Short, a tenant in the apartment house next door, spoke to the police. He hadn’t seen Anne Marie for a few days, he said, but he remembered seeing her sometime in the past few weeks, leaving with a middle-aged man. The man’s car had been a black “Bronco-type” vehicle.
It was nearly 3 A.M. before Jill Morrison and Ginny Columbus almost reluctantly handed Mark Daniels several sheets of what appeared to be a law firm’s stationery. His eyes scanned down the pages, and then he handed them silently to Bob Donovan.
Both men recognized the name on the law firm’s letterhead. Tom Capano. Tom Capano. He had once been Donovan’s boss’s boss. For that matter, he had also been Daniels’ boss’s legal adviser. City, county, state: everyone knew him. He was a straight shooter, a longtime and well-respected public servant. But these letters were obviously very personal. Anne Marie Fahey might as well have been saving intimate letters from the governor himself. They wouldn’t have been any more surprised.
However, the letters substantiated what they had found in the missing woman’s diary. They had a dictatorial tone to them, and had apparently been sent along with cash or checks.
The first letter had no date, but was probably several months old, as it mentioned Christmas.
Dearest Annie,
Please consider the enclosed an early—and only partial—Christmas gift. I want you to be able to join Kathleen and Patrick at the Saloon on Saturday night. When we talked about it before, it seemed to me that you wanted to go but had decided against it because of the cost. Now you can afford to do what you wanted to do. Also, since Robert has apparently changed his dinner plans to Sunday, you can be part of the celebration. Should Robert decide to have you for dinner on Saturday instead, then please use this to buy dinner (no drinks!) next week for Sherry and your hostess. Of course, you could tell Robert you’re busy on Saturday and would like to see him on Sunday. I know that by doing this I am encouraging you to go to Robert’s on Sunday. That means you will not be free to have dinner with me either at home or at the Villa d’ Roma. As much as I want to be with you on Sunday, I want you to be able to go to the Saloon because I think it will make you happy to share an evening with your family. Annie, I will miss you next week more than you can imagine. It would help a lot if we could be together on Sunday night after Robert’s. I promise to get you out of the house as early as you like on Monday morning. Please consider it. And please accept this gift in the spirit in which it is given. All I want is to make you happy and be with you. I love you . . .
Kathleen told them she had taken her husband, Pat, out for dinner at the Saloon during the first week of December 1995. Anne Marie hadn’t gone with them.
Another, dated May 2, 1996, read:
Annie, this is not a gift; it is a loan to replace your windshield. You can repay half of it when you get a check from your insurance company. The balance can be repaid at the rate of five dollars per week. Of course, if you default, there is a penalty. You will have to scrub my toilets and iron my boxers.
Please accept this. The windshield stresses you and it’s dangerous. I could do more if you would let me (like replace the Jetta with a Lexus 300 ES Coach Edition). Maybe some day.
Tom
P.S. Don’t these bills look like Monopoly money? But I got them from a bank. Honest.
A third letter was dated only five days earlier—June 25:
Annie, just add this to the balance. Consider it a consolidation loan (that’s a joke). Kidding aside, you should not be penniless for several days in case of an emergency (like an overpowering yearning for a latte).
I’d have sent more but I know you’ll have a hard time accepting even this. Please accept it in the spirit in which it’s given and don’t spend it on Jill.
Tom
The letters were directives; Capano sounded like a border collie herding sheep, heading off objections and alternatives before Anne Marie could think of them. Either the missing woman was his mistress or he wanted her to be his mistress or he was the most generous guy in Wilmington.
The investigators couldn’t ask Anne Marie what the letters meant or what her connection to Tom Capano was. She was missing. The first thing they needed to do, then, after they checked out her apartment thoroughly, was to try to contact him.
At this point they had no idea what they were dealing with; Anne Marie’s disappearance could have been the result of a lovers’ quarrel, she might have gone away on her own, or she might be dead. Detectives learn to consider the worst-case scenario. For them a body must be considered the result, first, of a homicide; second, of an accident; third, of a suicide—and only when those possibilities have been ruled out may they decide that death came of natural causes. But of course, there was no body.
If something had happened to Anne Marie Fahey, and if it had happened in her apartment, the detectives were late going in: She had been missing for almost three days. Worse, her apartment was certainly contaminated—in terms of evidence—by the comings and goings of the family and friends who were looking for her. Doorknobs, drawer pulls, and flat surfaces had been touched, and the toilet had probably been flushed. Most people don’t think the way a detective does, and quite naturally, those who were worried about Anne Marie weren’t thinking about disturbing physical evidence as they looked for clues to her whereabouts.
What was done was done. And there was certainly no overt sign that anything violent had taken place in Anne Marie’s third-floor apartment. Except for the food on the counter and a few garments that had not been hung up, everything seemed to be in order.
There was no point now in telling anyone not to touch things. Probably it wouldn’t matter anyway. Chances were that Anne Marie was with someone she knew and trusted, that she had just grabbed her keys and left on a momentary whim.
And the chances were just as good—better, maybe—that she wasn’t.
BOB DONOVAN, thirty-three, would have had a hard time working as an undercover detective. He was big, square, and his short crew cut only accentuated his strong features. He looked for all the world like an Irish cop from a long line of Irish cops. He was Irish, but he was the first police officer in his family. It was something he had wanted to do for as long as he could remember. In June 1996, he had been a Wilmington Police officer for nine years, with the first seven and a half on the road in Patrol. He had been in Detectives only a year. Detectives worked all major crimes, but the homicide rate in Wilmington wasn’t very high. (Nineteen ninety-six would show the highest number in years—twenty-two homicides; ten was average, with most of them drug or gang related.)
Bob and his wife, Karen, had two small children, ages five and one. He was home asleep at 12:30 A.M. when he was rousted out of bed by the watch commander for the Wilmington Police Department’s third watch. As one of two detectives on call for the weekend, Donovan had been available for call-out from 4 P.M. Friday and would be until 8 A.M. Monday morning. All he was told was that he was to respond to 1718 Washington Street in reference to a missing person. That was fairly unusual—missing persons complaints didn’t generally elicit night call-outs—but he didn’t ask questions. He had arrived at Anne Marie Fahey’s apartment fifteen minutes later.
There were an awful lot of cops there for a missing persons
report: Donovan’s supervisor, Sergeant Elmer Harris, and two uniformed officers from the Wilmington PD, Sergeant John Snyder and Officer Paul McDannell. Surprisingly, there were also two Delaware State Police officers, Lieutenant Mark Daniels and Sergeant Steve Montague.
Donovan, whose kindness has been extolled by any number of people caught in the face of tragedy, could display a somewhat watchful attitude at first meeting, and watch he did; he seldom missed a thing. A long time later, when he was asked what he found at Anne Marie Fahey’s apartment, he said quietly, “A room full of people.”
Kathleen told the detectives that Anne Marie had been seeing a therapist—Dr. Michelle Sullivan. Perhaps she might know something that would help. Used to late-night emergency calls, Sullivan answered on the second ring. When she heard Anne Marie was missing, she didn’t hesitate. “I’m coming right over,” she said. She was worried, too.
Dr. Sullivan told them that she knew Anne Marie well. She had not seen her, however, on Thursday; their session had been on Wednesday evening. Anne Marie was to have seen Dr. Neil Kaye, the psychiatrist who monitored her prescriptions, on Thursday afternoon. Asked if Anne Marie knew Tom Capano, Sullivan confirmed that she did—and without violating her doctor-patient ethics, told them that Anne Marie had an ongoing relationship with him.
Bob Donovan knew who Tom Capano was, although he doubted if Capano knew him. As chief of staff to the mayor, Capano had overseen the Wilmington Police Department for some time, and he was friendly with a lot of the top brass, both working and retired. He was an important figure in Wilmington.
By 3:30 A.M., Bob Donovan, Elmer Harris, Mark Daniels, and Steve Montague were driving through the dark, winding streets of the Kentmere Park neighborhood looking for Tom’s house. It was Sunday morning, and the affluent residents along North Grant Avenue all seemed to be asleep. Like its neighbors, the windows of the redbrick house at 2302 North Grant were dark.
The quartet of detectives knocked on the door. And waited. They knocked again and heard sounds from inside the house; someone was coming to the door.
Tom Capano, wearing a robe, opened the door and stared at them. He appeared to have been asleep, and smoothed his hair with a quick hand. He didn’t seem particularly startled to see them, or particularly welcoming.
They identified themselves and he looked at them sleepily, then asked them to step inside. Capano led the detectives through the foyer to a living room beyond and gestured for them to sit down on the white leather couch that dominated the room.
“Are you aware about why we want to talk with you?” Mark Daniels asked.
“Yes. I am aware.” Tom nodded. “I’ve spoken to one of Anne Marie’s friends and I understand that you’re looking for her.”
“Do you know where she is?”
Tom shook his head. “I don’t—I haven’t seen her since, ah, either Wednesday—maybe Thursday night. We had dinner at a restaurant in Philadelphia.”
“That was . . . ?”
“The Panorama. And we left there and came back to Wilmington—to my house, this house.”
Tom was very open with the detectives, answering Daniels’s questions and others that Donovan interjected—expanding on his memory of what he now believed had been Thursday night. He said he had picked Anne Marie up in front of her apartment sometime between six-fifteen and six-thirty that night. She had been wearing a light-colored floral print dress, as he recalled. They had driven to Philadelphia in his Jeep Grand Cherokee, eaten a pleasant dinner of, he thought, fish of some sort. He said he had paid with a credit card and that, as usual, Anne Marie calculated the tip for him and signed the check. Afterward, they had come back to his house—but only briefly.
“I went inside to get some things for her—food: rice, bananas, spinach, soup—and I had a gift for her. I can’t remember now if I’d left it in the house or if it was in my car.”
Tom said he had then driven Anne Marie to her apartment, but he recalled that, when they pulled up, she had gone ahead. “I had forgotten something in the Jeep and had to go back and get it. She opened the gift—but I don’t think she took it completely out of the box.”
He remembered carrying the food upstairs for her and putting it on her kitchen counter. “Oh, and she asked me to check her air conditioner. I did—and it was working fine,” he said. “I think I used the bathroom too.”
He explained that he had stayed only a few minutes and then had left for home. “I was back here by about ten.”
“Did you stop anywhere on the way?” Donovan asked.
“I think I stopped at the Getty gas station on Lovering to get a pack of cigarettes.”
“Have you talked to Miss Fahey since then?” Daniels asked.
“No,” Tom said. “I haven’t.”
“Do you have any idea where she might be?”
“Anne Marie is very airheaded, unpredictable,” he said, half smiling. “I think she’s probably just run off someplace and she’ll be back to work on Monday. She’ll come walking in right on time.”
“If she ran off, where do you think she might have gone?” Daniels asked.
“The beach, probably. I really thought she was down at the ocean with her friend Kimmie—Kim Horstman—until I talked to Kimmie earlier tonight.”
It was apparent that Tom Capano knew Anne Marie Fahey quite well. He was aware that she had planned to take Friday off from her job in the governor’s office. Everyone else was going down to Dover for the end of the legislative session and would probably be staying up all night. “She didn’t want to go,” he said, and told the investigators that she had problems at work and hated going down to Dover for the twenty-four-hour sessions that marked the virtual end of the political year.
Tom also told them that Anne Marie had had a “big fight” with her sister earlier in the week, speculating that an airheaded girl with so many problems had almost certainly simply decided to run away from her life for a few days.
Asked to describe his relationship with Anne Marie, Tom was frank. He told the detectives that he and Anne Marie had once been involved sexually but that they now had only a very close friendship.
“We haven’t done anything sexual for the past six months,” he explained. “She has psychological problems, she’s been on medication, just having a hard time dealing with it all. I’ve spent a lot of time helping her with her psychological problems.”
Asked if he thought Anne Marie might be suicidal, Tom sighed. That concerned him because he felt she was definitely suicidal. He told the detectives that she had talked a lot about committing suicide with pills in the past. The medicine she was taking currently was making her sick. “She wakes up at night with insomnia,” he added. Tom said he knew Michelle Sullivan. In fact, he was the one who arranged for her and Anne Marie to meet.
“You give Miss Fahey a lot of gifts?” Donovan asked.
Tom nodded. He gave lots of people gifts, and that included Anne Marie. “Lately, I’ve regularly been giving her food. I’ve given her money, and I recently gave her some Cézanne prints.”
“Mr. Capano,” Mark Daniels asked suddenly, “can you tell us whether or not Anne Marie is in this house at the moment?”
“No,” he said. “She is not.”
“If you knew where she was, and if she had just gone away, and she told you she didn’t want anyone to know where she was, would you tell us?”
“No, I’d respect her confidence.”
When Donovan and Daniels explained that Anne Marie was officially a missing person whose family was terribly concerned, and no one knew if she was in danger or needed help or what might have happened to her, Tom changed his mind.
“Well, under those circumstances, I would tell you. But I don’t know where she is, and so I can’t tell you.”
They had been talking in a very polite, if edgy, fashion for half an hour. Now the detectives asked if they might take a look around the house, and Tom shook his head. “My daughters are asleep upstairs,” he said. “This isn’t a good time
.” He explained that he didn’t want to frighten his four girls with strange men clomping through the house, aiming flashlights at them. They acquiesced but said they would be back the next morning—actually, later the same morning.
Tom Capano had been cooperative—up to a point. They hadn’t seen his daughters, but they took his word that the girls were in the house, sleeping upstairs. They didn’t have a search warrant or any probable cause to get a search warrant. Moreover, they didn’t know Anne Marie Fahey and they couldn’t form an opinion on whether she was the kind of young woman who would go away for the weekend without telling anyone because she was stressed out or because, as Tom Capano said, she was an airhead given to such behavior.
They did know that Tom Capano had a solid reputation in Wilmington and that there had never been a breath of scandal about him. His brothers, yes. But not Tom. Tom was the “good Capano,” and he certainly appeared to be going about his life as he normally did. He didn’t look like a man who was about to rabbit on them.
“We’ll be back later today,” Daniels said. “We’d like to talk with you more then.”
Tom nodded and walked them to the door. The lights were out in the house before they had turned the corner and headed back downtown.
IT was a warm Sunday morning at ten when the Wilmington and State Police investigators returned to the Grant Avenue house. This time, their knocks on the front door went unanswered. They went back several times over the next few hours and found no one home. Puzzled, and a little annoyed that Tom Capano seemed to be deliberately avoiding them, they went looking for him, driving past the huge old houses in the neighborhood, the Delaware Art Museum, along the Bancroft Parkway, and past the big white stucco house on the corner of Greenhill and Seventeenth where Tom’s estranged wife and children lived. They knew he drove a 1993 black Jeep Grand Cherokee and they watched for it.
