by Ann Rule
But Wilmington and all of Delaware is insular and self-contained. The idea of the government coming in and pressuring one of their own rankled some people, and indeed, the News-Journal’s headline on August 3 read: FBI Uses Typical Tactics With Capano.
Charlie Oberly, who had served as Delaware’s attorney general for three terms, was outraged for the Capanos, characterizing the FBI search of Kay’s car as “Gestapo tactics,” and calling Tom “a scapegoat.” Indeed, Tom had a groundswell of support from highly placed people who could not imagine him as either Anne Marie’s stalker or her killer.
Anne Marie’s sister, Kathleen, felt differently. “I’ve known Thomas Capano for probably 15 years,” she told a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter. “Up until six weeks ago, I thought he was a nice man. Now, I probably know more about Thomas Capano than his wife even does. And what I know of him now—he’s not a nice man. Now, looking around the apartment, I realize there are a lot of things that he gave her—things that Annie didn’t have the money for. Expensive cappuccino makers. . . . There’s this big TV in her living room. I asked her where she got it. She said she won it. I was like, ‘Oh—that’s good luck!’ Now, things make sense.”
None of her siblings were angry with Anne Marie because she hadn’t told them everything about her life; they would not have judged her. They would have helped her get free of Tom. Now, it might be far too late. But still, they paid the rent on her little apartment, and one or another of them waited there for her to return. If they let her apartment go, it was like saying she was never coming home at all.
Chapter Twenty-six
DEBBY MACINTYRE’S reaction to what was happening to Tom was predictable for a woman who had been programmed to be submissive for almost two decades. She figuratively put her hands over her ears and eyes to shut out what she could not deal with. And Tom had told her not to read the newspapers, assuring her, “They’re full of lies. And they’ll just upset you.” As always, she had obeyed.
Early on the morning of August 1, when the stories about Anne Marie’s diary and the search of Tom’s house hit the headlines, Debby was already on her way to the Philadelphia airport. “I left for Nantucket that morning,” she recalled. “I was gone for nine days.”
Certainly she had her head in the sand. She was in full-fledged denial. She didn’t want to read the newspapers or watch television news that not only gave intimate details about her lover’s affair with another woman but also suggested he might be a kidnapper and a murderer. Debby needed to believe Tom’s reassurances that nothing had changed, that he was still there for her, and that all the things people were saying about him were ridiculous falsehoods. She had never been much of a news buff, and when she returned home from Nantucket it was not that hard for her to ignore the newspapers and keep her TV turned off.
If she had allowed herself to follow the unfolding story, the investigation and the ensuing publicity would have been a nightmare for Debby. To come so close to a happy ending with Tom and to see it destroyed by his connection to a woman she never knew existed would be almost more than she could bear. Debby believed blindly in Tom. Her vision was so focused on what he told her to think that she saw nothing to the left or right of it.
Tom had admitted lying to her about seeing Anne Marie—and Susan Louth, too—but he had promised he would never lie again. They were still together, and she knew he would protect her—as she would protect him. If doubts about Tom ever began to creep into her mind, Debby blocked them. Tom hadn’t stalked Anne Marie; that was totally unlike him. He was a good man who was being hounded, and she, for one, believed in him. “I believed everything he told me,” she recalled. “And it was really only coincidence, but every time something really major happened in the case, I happened to be away from Wilmington.”
As Tom had told her so often, hadn’t he always been there for her? Hadn’t he been the one who shut her mother’s eyes? How could she not believe in him? How could she ever leave him?
THE crack in Tom Capano’s armor gradually opened wider. Little by little the federal investigation was gaining momentum. Tips were coming in, and one of the initially most promising came from an employee of the Capano & Sons construction company.
On July 1, Shaw Taylor had been puzzled by a message from a fellow employee telling him to have the Dumpsters emptied at the family firm at 105 Foulk Road. Taylor remarked to Louie’s son, Louis Capano III, that it wasn’t the regular day for emptying the Dumpsters—they were still half empty. The younger Capano called his father on his cell phone to ask him why. Louie told him to get off the cell phone at once and not to discuss the matter over the phone.
Their curiosity aroused, the two young men peered into the Dumpsters, but they saw nothing but trash there. Two of the Dumpsters held ordinary garbage and two others had construction materials from a building that Capano & Sons was gutting so that it could be tenant-fitted-out for a new renter—a bank. All the bins were barely half full. Still, in line with Louie’s orders, calls were made to Harvey & Harvey, a Wilmington waste disposal company, and the Dumpsters were emptied. The ordinary garbage went to the Cherry Island dump on the eastern edge of Wilmington, close by the Delaware River; the construction debris had to be taken to the Delaware recyclable-products landfill off U.S. 13, south of the city.
When word of their premature removal trickled down to the investigation team, their first thought was that Anne Marie’s body might have been in one of those Dumpsters. If not her body, then there was the matter of the missing couch and carpet from the great room at Tom’s house.
Cops often joke about their profession, saying, “It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.” The investigative team’s next search was truly a dirty job. For five days—from August 12 through 16—Bob Donovan, Eric Alpert, FBI evidence teams, and Wilmington Police officers spent their days at the dumps and landfill. Colm Connolly joined them when he could. They were all garbed in the white coveralls that they wore on evidence searches, which were soon less than pristine.
“We held our noses,” Alpert recalled. “I guess you didn’t really need training to do that search. At Cherry Island, the garbage was spread out, and then these huge ’dozers with metal treads went back and forth over it, crushing it before it was buried. It was all the same brownish color when they finished.”
“You couldn’t recognize that couch if you saw it,” Bob Donovan added. “Everything was broken down into small pieces.”
Then it rained and things got worse. “We sank in mud to our knees,” Alpert said, “and our boots came off. We stank. We began to feel like, What’s the use?”
It was a little better at the other site, where the construction debris had been dumped. At least it didn’t smell. But nothing looked as it once had, and in the end, the investigators had to agree that any further searching was useless. In their hearts they didn’t believe that Anne Marie’s body was there. They hoped it wasn’t. But they were quite sure that there had been something in those Dumpsters that caused Louie to order them emptied when they were half full. Was Louie somehow involved in Anne Marie’s disappearance? They didn’t know. But they believed something connected with the case had been taken to the dump before it was reduced to indistinguishable rubble.
Nobody was calling it murder, not officially. Officially, the FBI was calling Anne Marie’s disappearance “interstate kidnapping.”
THE toll back edits on Anne Marie’s and Tom’s phones had been completed, and all the calls Tom was currently dialing out were being printed on the pen register. Connolly began to chart a time line.
Only one call had initiated from Anne Marie’s phone on the evening of Thursday, June 27. At 11:52 P.M., someone had hit *69 to see who the most recent caller had been. That call was from Mike Scanlan, who had phoned from a friend’s house to invite Anne Marie to join him at Kid Shelleen’s. Phone records and her answering system showed that Mike’s call had been at 9:45. Who was in Anne Marie’s apartment at 11:52?
Tom had made numerous ca
lls on that vital night and the day after. At 12:05, he had checked his voice mail at Saul, Ewing. He had made two calls to Debby MacIntyre, one a *69. On Friday, he had called Debby several times, beginning early in the morning. He had called her from Stone Harbor later in the morning.
TOM didn’t stay another night in the brick house on North Grant Avenue. He told his friends and family that he couldn’t live there anymore, not with the memories of cops and FBI agents overrunning the place. If there were other memories there that disturbed him, he didn’t speak of them. He vacated the premises as of September 30, 1996, but, in reality, he moved in with Louie the night the search warrant was executed, and later, he moved in with his mother. There was plenty of room in the big house on Weldin Road, where he’d grown up, and Marguerite was glad to have him. He was seeing Debby several times a week and he continued to assure her that everything was fine, despite the occasional intrusion of cops and agents, who were more bothersome than dangerous.
The search warrants, however, kept coming. On August 23, eight weeks after Anne Marie Fahey had vanished, Tom was forced to submit to a search warrant that asked for samplers of his blood and his body hair. With one of his attorneys, Bart Dalton, he appeared at Riverside Hospital, where an FBI technician waited. Drawing the vial of blood was easier than taking the hair samples. Hair must be plucked—from the head, the genital area, and possibly other body sites. To be useful in DNA testing, the tag (or root) has to be present, so the hair cannot be cut. Pubic hair has characteristics different from head hair.
It was an ignominious event for Tom, one in a series. He was not accustomed to such invasions of his home, his cars, his person, and he was growing annoyed with the stubborn investigative team. But it was only the beginning. And maddeningly, the media seemed to have a line into his run-ins with the authorities. Tom had never sought publicity—even when he was a public figure. He certainly didn’t care to see his personal business on the front pages of the Wilmington and Philadelphia newspapers.
In fact, Tom had no idea how much of his personal business Colm Connolly, Bob Donovan, and Eric Alpert already knew. His credit card statements and his bank statements revealed a great deal about him, as they would for anyone: patterns of spending, personal preferences, available income. Unusual and one-time purchases stood out, too.
In checking Tom’s banking transactions, Connolly saw that Tom had cashed checks on two consecutive days for $8,000 and $9,000. It appeared that Tom might be “structuring,” a tactic drug dealers—or anyone who wanted to hide money from the IRS—often used. Any withdrawal of over $10,000 required that a CTR—a currency transaction report—be filed.
Connolly called Ron Poplos of the Internal Revenue Service and asked him for some help in following Tom Capano’s money trail. Either Tom had been preparing to launder money by deliberately structuring or he had reason to stockpile it. Poplos was game and he was a veteran of the Whitewater investigation, expert on tracking where money came from and where it went. Why would Tom have needed $17,000 in cash when he already had a cushy bank account?
Tom obviously liked to dine out often and well. It was rare for him to spend less than $100 for dinner, and not at all unusual for the bill to top $300. In one month, on one of his credit cards, he had dined at the Dilworthtown Inn, the Victor Cafe, Toscana, the Ristorante La Veranda, Panorama, Pan Tai, Kid Shelleen’s, Madeline’s, the Shipley Grill, and DiNardo’s Famous Crabs. His Visa and MasterCard statements averaged between $2,000 and $5,000 a month. He often purchased designer women’s clothing at Talbot’s, but he also bought more prosaic items, shopping at the Happy Harry’s drugstore in Trolley Square or the Sports Authority.
Tom had shopped at Happy Harry’s on Sunday, June 30. What he had purchased was not stipulated, but Alpert and Donovan showed a clerk the bill, and he described a man who sounded like Tom: he had been looking for a cleaner that would remove bloodstains. The clerk said he had recommended one of the Carbona cleaners and the customer bought it.
But Tom might have had a perfectly innocent reason to buy a cleaner that removed blood. He had four teenage daughters who visited him, and his colitis was so severe that he often bled from the rectum, staining his underwear.
The FBI lab had determined that the dark brown specks on the baseboard in the great room in the Grant Avenue house were human blood, and there was enough of it for a sampler to compare with a known DNA profile—but the investigators had been unable to find any of Anne Marie’s blood. It was desperately important to find a sample. The blood used for the tests of her potassium levels that Michelle Sullivan had ordered had been disposed of.
But then, looking over her day-planner, Eric Alpert saw something that had so far escaped notice. Anne Marie had jotted down “Blood bank.” Her family said that she had been a regular blood donor, and a search of her E-mail confirmed that she had given blood in April.
“Blood banks usually extract and save plasma,” Alpert said, “and plasma won’t work for DNA testing. But sometimes the plasma isn’t as pure as it might be. We figured if we could trace that plasma, we might be able to use it for comparison purposes.”
It was better than wading through the city dump for almost a week, but it was almost as frustrating. The Blood Bank of Delaware’s records did verify that Anne Marie had donated blood. Chris Hancock, a donor advocate, told the investigators that careful histories of donors were taken, including their social security numbers. After Anne Marie had passed her medical interview, a unit number—unique to her—was assigned to her that would stay with her blood or plasma. It was an FDA requirement. Anne Marie’s unit number for her last donation was 0387029.
But where was that blood now? Alpert found that the red cells had been shipped to a hospital. The rest of it had been used for fresh-frozen plasma, but the plasma wasn’t even in the country. It was on its way to the Swiss Red Cross, somewhere on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean. At the government’s request, Chris Hancock arranged to retrieve Anne Marie’s plasma, and it came back, still frozen: 0387029. Now it was up to the FBI lab to see if it matched the spots found in the great room in Tom Capano’s house.
Special Agent Allan Giusti was a DNA analyst in the FBI laboratory. “DNA,” he explained, “is an abbreviation for ‘deoxyribonucleic acid,’ the blueprint every living organism is made of, which is found in the form of a twisted ladder that is called a double helix.”
Body fluid stains larger than a quarter are fairly easy to match to known samplers. But minuscule amounts of body fluid and tissue can be tested too. One test, termed the PCR test, is used when the sampler is minute. It actually amplifies substances like saliva on the back of a stamp or a tiny stain of semen or blood. Starting with one DNA molecule, Giusti could chemically multiply it. “If you do that approximately thirty times, you’re increasing the starting amount of DNA by about a billion,” he explained.
The resultant pattern of dots could be matched with dots from a known donor.
Tom Capano had been forced to give blood, but he had refused to allow his daughters to give samples, indignant that the federal investigators should even ask. In August 1996, as he began his tests on the unknown blood specks retrieved on July 31, Giusti had Tom’s and Anne Marie’s blood, as well as other samples: Ruth Boylan’s, Susan Louth’s, and Debby MacIntyre’s—all people who had been in Tom’s house.
Tom, Debby, Ruth Boylan, and Susan Louth were all excluded absolutely as the source of the blood in the great room. But Giusti found that there was only one chance in eleven thousand that anyone other than Anne Marie Fahey had lost that blood. “So we had that blood match in late August 1996,” Connolly said. “But we didn’t announce it. We waited six months to make it public.”
There had not been enough blood, certainly, to prove that Anne Marie was dead. How much might have been on the missing carpet and couch, no one would ever know. But the FBI lab had found another match—not blood but fibers. The carpet samples that Bob Donovan had retrieved from the bed-and-breakfast owner matched beige carpet f
ibers vacuumed from Kay Capano’s Suburban. Under a scanning electron microscope that enlarged the samples exponentially, it was apparent that they had come from the same source. Someone had used Kay’s SUV to transport the missing carpet.
Although they still had a long way to go, Colm Connolly was confident that he had enough evidence to move forward. He sent Tom’s lawyers a letter on August 5, notifying them that their client was under investigation by a federal grand jury.
GRAND jury investigations are different from actual trials. What takes place there is secret, and witnesses may not have their attorneys with them, although they may leave the room after each question they are asked to consult with them. In Delaware, grand juries may sit for up to eighteen months. There are twenty-three jurors in all, and at least sixteen must be present at a session; twelve must agree in order to hand down an indictment. Grand juries start and stop, assembling whenever the prosecutor needs to elicit testimony. Unlike a regular jury, grand jurors are rarely required to be present day after day until a verdict is reached. Reporters can only watch the people who go in and out of the grand jury room, and speculate on why they were summoned.
On August 29, 1996, Colm Connolly was the prosecutor in the first grand jury session in the Capano case, questioning a number of reluctant witnesses, who would appear only under a subpoena. The first six witnesses summoned included Louis Capano Jr.; his son, Louis Capano III; and employees of the family construction company. Louie stayed in the grand jury room for an hour and a half and left without making any comment to reporters.
