by Ann Rule
Dansak told Agent Shannon that she got the impression that Capano had wanted her to leave them alone. After she served cocktails, he had ordered a bottle of wine and said he would pour it himself. He had ordered chicken or veal, and Anne Marie Fahey had ordered fish. But neither of them ate their entrées.
When she was told about the waitress’s description of Anne Marie’s glum demeanor during her meal with Tom at the Panorama, Michelle Sullivan nodded sadly. It all fit. During their last session, just the night before she disappeared, they had been working toward giving Anne Marie enough confidence to cut Tom completely out of her life. And Anne Marie was frightened of Tom, so frightened that Sullivan had encouraged her more strongly this time to report his behavior toward her to the Delaware Attorney General’s Office.
She still didn’t want to do that—not yet. But she had been making great progress toward standing up for what she wanted out of life. “And she was not suicidal,” Sullivan said. “Not at all.”
There had been no physical evidence in Anne Marie’s Washington Street apartment that would remotely indicate that she had been injured or killed there. Connie Blake had told the investigators that the glass door that closed off the stairs to her second-floor apartment and Anne Marie’s third-floor dwelling was always locked, although the two women often left the doors to their own apartments unlocked until they went to bed. They felt secure because no one could reach the stairway without a key to the door off the foyer.
Oddly, the combination had been reversed on Thursday night when Blake came home. The dead bolt on the glass door was unlocked, something that rarely happened. And of course, Anne Marie’s door was locked, with the dead bolt thrown, which Theresa Oliver had opened with her key the following Saturday night.
Connie Blake (who had once been Mayor Dan Frawley’s secretary) and Anne Marie were friends. In fact, she had once lived in Anne Marie’s apartment. When she moved downstairs, she had told Annie about the vacancy. Blake knew both Mike Scanlan and Tom Capano, and from time to time had seen each of them picking Anne Marie up. She had seen Anne Marie for the last time at about 6 P.M. on the Thursday night she had dinner with Tom. “I was in my living room and she pulled up across the street and parked her car. She was wearing a white blouse—that’s all I noticed.”
Blake did not see Anne Marie later, although she was home all evening, packing for a weekend at the shore. She watched a Pay-Per-View movie, something about an American president, as she packed. She was used to hearing sounds from Anne Marie’s apartment—someone walking, water running, the low tones of a phone conversation, occasionally a loud television program. The layout of their apartments was almost the same. “You enter the living room first,” she explained, “and walk through the dining area, with the kitchen on the right. Anne Marie’s bedroom was on the back on the left, with the bathroom on the right. I have two more rooms—a den and a dressing room.”
Blake told the investigators that the movie was almost over when she heard the sound of footsteps coming from Anne Marie’s apartment. “They weren’t high heels—just muffled walking. Someone walking through to the bedroom. It wasn’t very distinctive.”
The time? As closely as she could judge, it would have been somewhere between a quarter to and eight minutes to ten. It sounded as though there was only one person in the rooms above. Connie said she’d turned off her TV at ten and had gone to bed at eleven. She had heard nothing at all from upstairs during the night, nor did she hear Anne Marie moving about in the morning. They went to work at the same time and often chatted on their way out, but not on Friday. When she came home at noon, Blake saw that Anne Marie’s car was still parked where it had been the evening before.
ON July 30, Anne Marie’s continued absence was cast in a more sinister light. The public had no knowledge of the gears that had begun to mesh. Nor did the Fahey family. But suddenly the news media were reporting that her disappearance was now being considered a criminal case and that Tom Capano had been named a suspect. No one was saying what he was suspected of. But Anne Marie was still missing, and if any evidence had been found to indicate what had happened to her, the investigators were not revealing it.
Ferris Wharton’s official comments were more inscrutable than ever. “In a broad sense, sure, Tom Capano is a suspect,” he said. “So are other people the police are curious about. Certainly, in any circumstance, the last person seen with her is a suspect. . . . As more and more time goes by, the possibility of a benign explanation diminishes, given her close ties to her family and her job. You have to conclude foul play came into the picture. It’s just sort of an evolutionary thing. I think most people would now say it’s likely that she’s a victim of a crime.”
Charlie Oberly sprang to Tom’s defense, saying that his friend and client had been made a “scapegoat,” and a sacrifice to political pressure. “You’ve got everyone from the president of the United States on down wanting it to be solved. But they’ve been able to come up with nothing. They are branding this person without a shred of evidence, and that is terrible.”
Marian Capano’s husband, Lee Ramunno, spoke up for his brother-in-law: “Tom is a wonderful person. Honest. Decent. He has the respect of the community. It’s ludicrous that someone would suspect him. . . . He was at the restaurant with her, and when they left, he brought her home. They’ve established that the person living in the apartment underneath did not hear any struggle or noise. After that, who knows?”
The investigative team had been convinced for weeks that whatever had happened to Anne Marie, it had not occurred in her apartment. Except for the food left out and the jumble of shoes, everything there was as it always had been. And Connie Blake would almost certainly have heard any sounds of a struggle. But they had needed something to put on an affidavit to show cause why a search warrant should be granted for Tom’s house. Now they had that. The first crack in the seemingly impervious wall that Tom and his attorneys had thrown up was the credit card charge at Air Base Carpets. That, along with the missing carpet and sofa, and the statements of Anne Marie’s friends and her psychologist, gave them their probable cause.
They didn’t doubt that Anne Marie had been scared to death of Tom Capano and of what he might do next; none of the three men who had taken on the quest of finding her believed that she had gone willingly to Tom’s house. But they did believe that she had gone there.
Although Tom’s rented house was surrounded by other houses, the lots were large and the homes had thick, solid walls. In an earlier canvass of North Grant Avenue and neighboring Kentmere Place, the detectives hadn’t talked to anyone who remembered hearing a scream or an argument on the night of June 27. But memory and checks with the weather bureau verified that it had been beastly hot that night; everyone had their air conditioners turned on high. A scream or an argument would not have been heard inside the houses nearby. If Tom had, for some reason, become enraged at Anne Marie inside the house where he lived alone, no one else would have heard any sound at all above the hum of air conditioners.
IF Tom would not come to the investigators, then they would go to him—or rather, to the house where he lived. Eric Alpert drew up an affidavit listing the reasons for a federal search warrant that would allow the FBI team and Wilmington police to thoroughly search the brick house on North Grant Avenue. Once they had the search warrant in hand, Tom could not refuse them entrance.
Federal magistrate Mary Pat Trostle approved the warrant, which was immediately sealed.
The FBI trains special teams to carry out searches, teams skilled in retrieving and preserving evidence. They were authorized to search both the Grant Avenue house and Kay Capano’s Chevrolet Suburban (the vehicle that Kay told the investigators Tom had borrowed early on June 28, saying it was because he would have the girls with him for the weekend). An evidence response team from the Baltimore FBI office was on hand at eight-fifteen in the morning of July 31, 1996. Two evidence vans parked in the driveway at Tom’s house. At least two dozen expert searchers were
ready to check every room, corner, and closet. Tom was present to accept the search warrant, but he soon left.
For the moment, they had all avoided the media, which was getting precious little information from official sources. If reporters found out that something interesting was happening at Capano’s house, they would descend in droves.
Special Agents David Roden, John Rosato, and Chris Allen went first to Kay’s house to process her vehicle. It had been five weeks since anyone had seen Anne Marie. The Suburban almost certainly had been cleaned since then—but they knew that valuable evidence can sometimes be so infinitesimal that the human eye fails to see it.
When vehicles are processed, they are divided into sections and then vacuumed thoroughly. Filters are attached to the end of the hose so that whatever is retrieved from a particular section can be isolated and bagged into evidence. Often, evidence teams also take carpet samplings.
When the three special agents began work on Kay’s Suburban, they found two plaid blankets in the rear compartment. These were taken into evidence, along with sweepings from the floor and seats. All of it would be hand carried to the evidence lab so that the chain of evidence would be unbroken. When they were finished, the searchers didn’t know if they had hit the jackpot or not—but they had gleaned dozens of hairs and fibers.
Back at Grant Avenue, the FBI searchers, Wilmington Police officers, and Delaware state troopers swarmed over Tom’s rental house and his 1993 Jeep Cherokee. Kathleen Jennings and Bartholomew J. Dalton, two of the attorneys on the growing staff of lawyers who represented Tom, stood by to observe the search.
Timothy Munson, the Supervising Resident Agent of the Wilmington FBI office, was there. So were Eric Alpert, Colm Connolly, and Bob Donovan. Before the sun set, they intended to search every inch of the house and property.
Agents and police moved over the somewhat ragged yard. There were no flowers there beyond a few perennials that had come up without nurturing. They dug nine holes, prodded the lawn with metal poles in spots that seemed too high or too low, and moved a metal detector slowly over the grass. Two black Labradors, necrosearch dogs, had been brought up from Milford, Delaware, and their handlers led them around the property.
The dogs, trained to detect the odor of decomposition, showed no interest. The human searchers found nothing.
The day promised to be hot and sultry—and crowded. By ten-thirty, word of the search had gone out to radio, television, and newspaper reporters. Neither the FBI searchers nor the reporters planned to give in to the sun beating down. Kentmere Park was not a neighborhood used to police activity, and the rows of official cars and those with logos of television and radio stations looked alien along the pretty curving street. Some of the residents kept their drapes closed; others passed out iced tea and lemonade.
It was an awkward search, with reporters peering at the officers and agents over the backyard fence. If they found some sign of Anne Marie, virtually the whole world would know about it within fifteen minutes. The FBI searchers tried to ignore their audience, shaking their heads as one reporter or another called out a question. A television station’s helicopter circled overhead, its rotors making a thrub-thrub-thrubity sound that seemed to bounce off the three-story houses along the street.
Special Agent Kenneth Dougal, with twenty-eight years in the FBI, was the evidence response team leader. He entered the house first for a walk-through to see what was there. Then he assigned specific personnel to designated areas. Everything seemed very neat, but they had expected that; Ruth Boylan had cleaned the house the week before. But they weren’t looking for surface cleaning. They were looking for something minute, something that she—or anyone else who might have wiped away stains—would not have seen.
Eric Alpert had indicated in his affidavit that the investigative team would be looking for weapons, tools, and “body parts,” which could be taken literally or could mean blood. They didn’t expect to find a pool of blood or a large stain; if such a thing had ever been in Tom’s house, it was long gone. What the searchers hoped for was a speck so small that it might have been missed. They could not risk spraying with Luminol or leuco-malachite green or other chemicals that might reveal where large areas of blood had been cleaned up; it might also destroy the blood for DNA testing.
Special Agent Linda Harrison, a sixteen-year veteran with the FBI, was responsible for searching the great room off the kitchen. Ruth Boylan had said that Tom had recently changed the furnishings in that room. Squinting, Harrison used her own eyes to sweep the room for blood spots. She found them. Or thought she had. Tiny, isolated, dark brown flecks. The one on the baseboard was only two millimeters wide, but large enough to do a presumptive test that showed it was blood from some source. She found another tiny speck on the metal cover at the bottom of the radiator on the wall where the TV stood, but she dared not use any of it for testing. With cotton swabs moistened with sterile water, she lifted the dried blood, and then allowed the swabs to air-dry before she packaged them in brown envelopes and gave them to Dougal, who was photographing the room and the brown spots. Only after photographs of the specks were enlarged would other microscopic dots show up in a faint spray pattern around the ones that could be seen with the naked eye. The paint on the walls looked fresh; in case the room had been painted since June 27, the agents sawed out squares of wallboard for testing in the lab.
If this was blood, would it match Anne Marie’s DNA? At the moment it was a moot question. They had yet to find anything that they could use to determine her DNA profile. Her own passion for cleanliness had defeated them every time. There had been no blood in her apartment, and nothing from which they could extract DNA. Her toothbrush was free of her saliva; her hairbrush had no hairs wound around the bristles. Most people fail to clean the U-joints in their sinks until they are clogged with hair—but when the plumbing was dismantled, it had no hairs. Even the inside of her hats had no strands of her beautiful hair caught there. If they had found hairs with tags (roots), the criminalists might have had a chance to isolate her DNA. But Anal Annie had been true to form in her neatness.
Now the FBI search team had found what they knew in their guts was human blood. Somehow the investigators would have to find Anne Marie’s DNA. There had to be a way, even though the samplers they had wouldn’t be enough to attempt a familial match with her siblings.
They also found blood flecks in Tom’s laundry room and on the door there. And there was something else that might or might not be vital to the investigation. There were many, many cleaning compounds and bleaching agents, far more than in most households, especially a bachelor’s household. Several could be used to remove bloodstains. One, Carbona, was specifically meant for that purpose. That might be significant, but lots of people had Carbona cleaners in their cupboards.
A murmur went through the wilting reporters who waited stoically in the afternoon sun. The FBI team was carrying out a toilet. What could that mean? The search team hoped to find evidence caught in the trap. Obviously, this was not going to be a slam-dunk case, where everything came together like clockwork. At the end of the day, none of the searchers knew if the bits of hair and fiber, the minuscule dark brown speckles, the vacuum cleaners, the blood spot removers, the mops, the small ax with fibers attached, the broken fireplace poker, or any of the other items they carried away in the two vans were going to make any difference at all in an investigation already five weeks old.
Time and the FBI crime lab would tell.
ON August 1, the News-Journal had long articles about the search of Tom Capano’s house. But there was more. Somehow the Wilmington paper had gotten access to Anne Marie’s diary and printed sections of it all over the front page. For a woman who guarded her privacy so carefully, it was, perhaps, a final cruelty. If Anne Marie was out there alive somewhere, she would be destroyed to see all her secret thoughts revealed for readers to digest along with their morning coffee and rolls. Very soon, other area papers picked up the story. Everything she had written abo
ut Tom—and about Mike—was no longer secret, all of her hopes and dreams and disappointments, her essence, corroded by printer’s ink.
It was galling for the three men building a case; Colm Connolly hadn’t released anything about the investigation. But people were talking to insistent reporters, and so, much that the investigators had tried to keep hidden for the good of the probe was coming from other sources.
Ironically, Tom came off better than one might have expected. A cry went up from his defenders. Joe Hurley, perhaps the top Delaware criminal defense attorney and an old friend, said, “It’s unimaginable! I sent [Tom] a note myself—in sympathy more than anything else. This will haunt him to his grave and hurt his career—which has been exemplary.”
Charlie Oberly told the News-Journal that his client had only been trying to help Anne Marie with her problems by bringing her food and tempting her with dinners at her favorite restaurants. Far from being estranged from Tom, Oberly said, she only recently had sent him messages full of affection. “Tom was trying to boost her spirits,” he said.
Tom himself refused to be interviewed for the long article in the News Journal, but he did give reporter Valerie Helmbreck a quote, his first: “I’ve personally been devastated by this.”
FERRIS WHARTON was about to step out of the investigation—at least for the time being. Far from being resentful that the federal government was treading on state turf, he welcomed the assistance of the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI. “They have greater resources,” Wharton told the News-Journal reporter Cris Barrish. “They have the manpower, technical expertise, people with forensic expertise. The purpose is to find out what happened to her [Anne Marie] and to the extent that the FBI can resolve that situation, we’re very thankful that they can step in to help.”
