by Ann Rule
AT forty-three, Eric Alpert had been an FBI special agent for fourteen years. He had earned his law degree from the Cumberland School in Birmingham, Alabama, and had served in New York City, Buffalo, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., before being assigned to the Wilmington office. In February 1996, Alpert had been honored at the Philadelphia City Hall for his work as the coordinator of the Violent Crime Fugitive Task Force; his team had been successful in bringing in cop killers. That operation had meant long hours away from his wife, Lisa, and their children (who were five and two), and he wasn’t particularly anxious to jump into another high-pressure investigation. Still, as he read about Anne Marie’s disappearance in the papers, Alpert thought it sounded like an interstate kidnapping. Wherever she was currently, she had obviously been in Pennsylvania early in the evening of June 27 and had been taken back to Delaware.
On Tuesday, July 2, Alpert had called Bob Donovan at Wilmington Police headquarters and asked, “Is there anything we can do to help?”
There was. Donovan said the police were hoping to get pen registers on phone lines of people closely connected to Anne Marie Fahey. The devices note the time, date, and numbers called from designated phones. To obtain pen registers, the U.S. Attorney’s office would have to participate.
Another man who worked for the federal government had offered assistance to the local investigators. He was to become the prime mover in solving the seemingly impenetrable puzzle of Anne Marie’s disappearance, but he came on board with little fanfare. Assistant U.S. Attorney Colm Connolly was only thirty-two when he was tapped by his boss, U.S. Attorney Greg Sleet, to investigate what would become the biggest case of his career. He had already prosecuted more than a hundred defendants for a whole spectrum of offenses ranging from embezzlement and arson to extortion and tax evasion. One of the myriad convictions he had won involved a fraud conspiracy and money-laundering case with fourteen hundred victims; another involved a case of armed bank robbery, conspiracy, and weapons violations. Connolly had commendations from FBI director Louis Freeh and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and he was the first Delaware recipient of the Director’s Award for Superior Performance, an award given to fewer than 3 percent of all assistant U.S. attorneys. Still, when he was assigned to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Anne Marie Fahey, he had yet to work a kidnapping or homicide case. Indeed, when he came into the case, no one knew what—if any—charges might be brought against a suspect.
Compactly built, Colm had black hair and intense brown eyes, and his roots reached back to Ireland just as deeply as the Faheys’. Like Tom Capano, Colm had been president of his class at Archmere (twice). He was much younger than Tom, but he and Tom’s brother Gerry had attended the Catholic prep school at the same time and played on the junior varsity soccer team together. Connolly was remembered at Archmere for both his popularity and his brilliance. He had a B.A. degree from Notre Dame and an M.A. from the London School of Economics; his law degree was from Duke—with honors.
Where Tom had never ventured far from Wilmington, Connolly—a native of Hockessin, Delaware, just northwest of Wilmington—had lived in the Philippines, China, and England. He had wanted to be an attorney since he was seven or eight. Appointed to be an assistant U.S. attorney when he was in his mid-twenties, the youngest of Sleet’s twelve prosecutors, Colm brought a remarkable combination of intellect and intuitive skill to the job. Although he would deny it, he had the heart of a crusader and unshakable ethics. He detested prejudice, cruelty, and con games that ripped off the innocent.
It was clear he had the tenacity and talent for deductive reasoning to work a kidnapping or a homicide case. Connolly had never been hesitant about joining detectives at the most unsavory and gritty crime scenes. He was a hands-on prosecutor, part of every probe from the very beginning.
Connolly and his wife, Anne, met in law school. She was a corporate attorney for the firm of Skadden, Arps, the largest law firm in the world, working at the Philadelphia branch. She had always been someone he could talk to and bounce things off, and he could count on her for sound advice and opinions.
Colm and Anne had met Bob Donovan for the first time on a bitterly cold evening in 1992 when Colm went to pick up Anne—and their across-the-hall neighbor in the apartment house where they were living—at the train station. It was not an auspicious meeting.
That night, when Anne got off the train and hurried through the chill air to Colm’s car, she had her hair tucked into her coat collar and wore a hat that almost obscured her face. She and the neighbor ducked into Colm’s car, and he pulled out heading for home. But it wasn’t long before he saw the Wilmington Police car that was “about six inches” behind his car, making every turn he did—and then the blue lights began to whirl.
Colm was furious, and he bailed out of the driver’s door and headed back to demand to know why he had been stopped. Bob Donovan and his patrol partner, Liam Sullivan, rushed by him and went up to his car to check out the occupants.
“At that point,” Colm said, “I looked up and saw three members of the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] task force standing behind their cars and some trees. I’d had a meeting with them the week before, but I couldn’t remember their names.”
Connolly had been in the Wilmington office of the U.S. Attorney’s office for only a month, and he was notoriously bad with names. Now, he hoped they remembered his name. Luckily, they recognized him.
What had happened was that a DEA agent had misidentified the occupants of Connolly’s car as drug runners getting off the train from New York, carrying contraband into Wilmington. Bob Donovan and his partner had been called to assist the DEA in an arrest. Still fuming, Connolly went down to the Wilmington Police Department later that night and gave Donovan a piece of his mind.
“He wasn’t happy,” Donovan recalled laconically.
“Monday,” Connolly laughed, “I got a call from ATF [Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] and they said they wanted to talk to me on a case. I go over—and who’s sitting there? Bob Donovan. They wanted me to prosecute some guy he’d pulled out of the train station—with drugs on him.”
This time, Donovan had the real drug runners. Connolly did prosecute the case, and he and Donovan were friends from then on.
NOW Connolly and Donovan, along with Eric Alpert, were entering into an investigation that would consume them, not for weeks or months but for years. It wasn’t going to be easy, and they had an idea going in that it might take a while, but they were determined to find out where Anne Marie had gone.
Connolly had never operated as a boss, which was particularly important when a number of agencies were involved in a case. In this probe, Alpert would represent the FBI and Donovan the Wilmington Police. “I think it’s important to lead by consensus,” Connolly would explain later. “There was never a situation where I came in and said, ‘We’re doing this—and that’s it.’ We all made suggestions, and it never got to a place where I had to make the final call.”
Connolly and Donovan would talk to each other every single day, and on many days with Alpert as well. Their personalities and styles were completely different but they complemented one another perfectly.
The pen registers would be their first strategy. To protect the privacy of citizens, the U.S. Attorney’s office has to participate in deciding if it is imperative to attach a pen register to a phone. At Alpert’s request, Connolly filed papers with the U.S. District Court outlining why his office believed there was reason to monitor Tom Capano’s phones. There was good reason to think that Anne Marie might have been taken across a state line against her will. Her psychologist, Michelle Sullivan, and some of her friends believed she might well have been kidnapped. Both of these actions were federal transgressions.
It was enough. Pen registers were connected to Tom Capano’s phones. Connolly also asked for a toll back edit—which would allow the government investigators to scan back to see whom Tom Capano might have called for the last fifteen days—during the vital time pe
riod between June 27 and June 30 and thereafter. Pen registers would show both local and long distance calls.
Still, at this point there wasn’t a full-scale federal investigation. Connolly and Alpert discussed whether it might not be helpful to the Fahey case if they were to look into financial records—credit card billings, gas receipts, and other records that would reveal the comings and goings of Tom Capano. Obtaining such documents was routine in federal investigations, but they would need subpoenas. And if they found enough in Capano’s financial records to warrant it, Connolly could ask for a federal grand jury investigation.
But once such a probe began, federal law would forbid them from sharing what they found with anyone but each other and the Wilmington Police Department. That would mean that Ferris Wharton would be out of the loop, and so would the Fahey family and Anne Marie’s friends. As much as they might want to discuss the case, Connolly and Alpert—and Donovan, who would be the point man from the Wilmington Police Department—could not.
ON July 9, 1996, with Tom’s input, Brian Murphy drafted a statement meant to be published in the papers and read on television and radio:
The disappearance of Anne Marie Fahey remains as much a mystery to me as it does to her family and friends. I can only say I share the gut-wrenching emotions of Anne Marie’s family and pray for her safe return.
While I can do nothing to end the speculation of the public and press, I can state for the record the pertinent facts of my last meeting with Anne Marie.
I did have dinner with Anne Marie in Philadelphia on the evening of Thursday, June 27th. We returned to Wilmington. We drove to her apartment at approximately 10 pm. I walked Anne Marie into her apartment, stayed a few moments, said good night and left. I noticed nothing unusual as I left. That was the last time I saw or spoke to Anne Marie. I then drove home where I remained until I left for the office the next morning.
While Anne Marie had some problems, there was nothing out of the ordinary in either her conversation or behavior that would lead me to believe anything was amiss. I am at a complete loss to explain what caused her disappearance.
It is difficult to respond as to how others may characterize our relationship. Frankly, the nature of our relationship is and will remain a matter between Anne Marie and myself. What is relevant and important is that Anne Marie and I are good friends and parted company good friends that evening.
I was informed of Anne Marie’s potential disappearance by phone late on the evening of Saturday, June 29th, by a mutual friend. While I was concerned, I was also aware that Anne Marie had taken Friday off from work and concluded she had probably gone off with friends for the weekend. At that time, there was nothing to lead me to believe she would not be at work on Monday morning, July 1st. At approximately 3 am on the morning of Sunday, June 30th, I was awakened by four police officers at my home. Since then, I have and will continue to fully cooperate with investigators. As much as anyone else, I want to know Anne Marie’s whereabouts.
I will not be granting interviews or making further statements. I want to thank my friends who have offered their many kind words of support and encouragement and ask all concerned to pray for Ann Marie’s safe return.
Tom read it over and nodded. He told Brian that it “looked pretty good,” and he would run it by his attorneys and get back to Murphy that afternoon. But he never did. That statement would not be released for two and a half years.
Tom did make a statement that day, a much more private one. He called Robert Fahey and left a message on his answering machine, his words stumbling over one another, separated by “ummm’s” and “ahhhh’s.”
“Robert,” he said, “this is Tom Capano.
“It’s Tuesday. It’s 12:39 on July ninth. I think you know from Bud that I really want to speak to you and anybody else in your family who cares to. Bud tells me you’re maybe not really interested in speaking to me and I guess I can understand that. Robert, I don’t know what to say . . . I really do want to talk to you.”
Tom explained that he wanted to see Robert “face-to-face” because “I have some things I want to show you. I have some things I want to tell you.
“I care for Anne Marie a great deal, Robert. Apparently, from what Buddy’s telling me, that hasn’t come through and I don’t understand that. And I know I’m babbling because I’m out of my freaking mind with, uh, everything. . . . There’s one thing I want you to know. I have talked to the police twice. I have told the police I will talk to them as many times as they want. But I am not gonna talk about ancient history.
“Anne Marie has a right to privacy and I have a right to privacy and I am not going to tell them details of things we did a year ago or eight months ago or all this incredibly personal stuff they want to know from me. OK? . . . I will talk to them about Thursday night. I will talk to them about anything, but I am not going to talk about ancient history. . . . Maybe you can’t understand that. . . . I mean, do you and Kathleen want to read stuff in the newspaper? ’Cause you know it’s going to leak. It’s personal. I know I’m rambling but I desperately would like to talk to you. . . . I wanted to come see you all at that apartment but I know that Kathleen would just frankly gouge my eyes out. Ahhh, I’ll stop. Please call me, Robert.”
Robert did not call him. He didn’t believe that Tom would tell him what he needed to know and he wasn’t about to play games.
IF Tom’s affair with Anne Marie was now public knowledge, his relationship with Debby MacIntyre remained a secret. Moreover, on his instructions, she was out of town visiting one of her brothers. But Tom had always chosen women as his confidantes, and on July 15 and 19, he called Kim Horstman, talking to her as if they were longtime trusted friends. He brought her up to speed on what had happened to him, beginning with his surprise when Bud Freel came to his mother’s home. Bud’s visit and his later calls alarmed Tom. “He said Bud told him that he was there on behalf of Annie’s family,” Kim recalled, “and that he said, ‘If you have her, could you please return her?’ ”
Tom told Kim he was shocked. “Have her?” he had asked, and reported that Bud said that the family thought Tom had kidnapped her. “He said he just looked at Bud,” Kim recalled, “and he said he asked him, ‘Do you really think I would do anything like that?’ and Bud said, ‘No,’ but Tom should come home to Delaware.”
Tom also explored any number of theories about Anne Marie’s disappearance with Kim, confiding that there was a big turf war going on between the State Police and the other agencies, and they were all “screwing up the investigation.”
Kim was writing it all down, and her notes were precise. “He told me the first possible scenario was that Annie comes home. The second is that Annie is found—we find her body—and that the evidence around the body will lead the police in the right direction. And three, she’s never found, and come Labor Day, the police are going to be getting a lot of pressure from the governor’s office to indict somebody.”
At that point, Tom said that he would be “the fall guy.”
Tom wanted to know exactly whom Kim might have spoken to. The police? Mike Scanlan? He wanted to be sure the police knew the two of them had had dinner to discuss an intervention “to help Annie.”
Tom told Kim there were rumors flying around, and one was that Anne Marie had had an affair with Governor Carper when they were in Washington, D.C. He wondered if perhaps that was true. Kim was amazed. She knew nothing of the kind had ever happened. Tom also told her about a state trooper who had harassed Annie, and a neighbor who had been paying attention to her. He mentioned a man Annie had worked with five years before.
Kim sensed that he was reading from some kind of script as he made certain points over and over. Indeed, he called her back four days later and asked to review their last conversation. Tom stressed that he had been so good to Annie, helping her with money, being sure that he ordered extra food at restaurants so she would have doggie bags at home. And when he steered the conversation for the umpteenth time to the night of
June 27, Kim felt as though he was drilling her on the sequence of events.
Tom told Kim that he’d talked to Anne Marie every single day without fail. “Did you talk to her Friday?” she asked. “The day after she disappeared, did you talk to her?”
She held her breath, waiting for his answer.
“Friday? No. Oh, no, no, no, no. I was going to call her on Friday, but I went out for my morning walk, and by the time I got back, I never got around to calling her.”
On July 19, Tom called Kim just as she was leaving work at the brokerage firm. “He felt that the two of us knew Annie the best,” she said, “and if we put our heads together, we could come up with something . . . to explain where she was.”
Tom asked Kim what she was doing for the weekend, and when she told him she was going to the shore, he said, “That’s funny. I was going to invite you to spend the weekend at the shore with me.”
Kim didn’t know what to say. And then she hurriedly explained she was busy both days.
“Why don’t you go into work late on Monday?” he suggested. “And come here Monday morning and we will put our heads together and try to come up with where she is.”
“All right,” she lied. “I’ll call you when I get to the shore.”
She didn’t call him. There was something frightening about him. But Tom called Kim again several days later.
“The last thing I remember Tom saying to me,” she recalled, “is that the thing that upset him so much is that not only did he lose Annie, he was going to lose me as well, which I thought was an odd statement. It wasn’t like we were close.”
Tom had been adamant that he could not talk with the police without sacrificing Anne Marie’s—and his own—privacy. But he assured Kim that he had never hurt her. “You don’t think I would hurt a hair on her head, do you?” he pressed.
“At the time,” Kim said, “I was very skeptical. But I was afraid to say anything.”
