And Never Let Her Go

by Ann Rule

  Even though they were compelled to testify, the witnesses had various ways to balk. They were able to invoke the Fifth Amendment, and their attorneys could demand to know if the witness has ever been intercepted by electronic communication. (Ironically, although the government wasn’t taping them, some of the principals had been taping one another.) This session marked only the beginning of what would seem like endless grand jury testimony.

  COLM CONNOLLY had grown up in Delaware, but he didn’t really know the Capano family. He remembered Gerry vaguely from his days at Archmere, and before this case, he had heard Tom’s name mentioned—but only once—when he was working on a political corruption case. He didn’t know the man. They were from different generations.

  Connolly encountered Tom for the first time on September 10, 1996, after he subpoenaed his sixteen-year-old daughter, Christy, to appear before the grand jury. Tom had been telling friends that the blood spots found in the great room could be traced to either Christy or his daughter Katie, but he was infuriated that Connolly had called Christy as a witness. For a moment, the two men faced each other in the hall, Connolly’s face bland and Tom’s suffused with rage. “He got about a foot and a half away from me,” Connolly recalled, “looked me in the eye, and said, ‘I hope you can sleep at night.’ ”

  Connolly said nothing. He walked away—but the gauntlet had been thrown down. Tom Capano was a father prepared to fight fiercely to protect his daughter. Or was he protecting himself?

  When she took the stand, Christy Capano refused to answer Connolly’s questions and now faced contempt of court charges.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  DEBBY MACINTYRE had been seeing Tom clandestinely for fourteen and a half years and openly for one. Tom suggested that it would be prudent for them to say that their romantic relationship had begun after he separated from Kay. That would protect Kay’s feelings, and besides, the feds were already poking around in his private life enough; there was no need to give in to their salacious curiosity.

  As always, Debby did what Tom requested. She had no desire for everyone to know that she and Tom had been intimate since 1981. Except for lies of omission and her one blatant lie to her family when she joined Tom in Montreal, she had always told the truth. Indeed, when Bob Donovan interviewed her on July 23, she told him what she remembered—save for the fact that she classified Tom as only a very good friend whom she had known for twenty years.

  “I talk with Tom every day,” she said, “and see him once or twice a week.”

  “Has he ever talked about a relationship with Anne Marie Fahey?” Donovan asked.

  “Never.”

  In a way, that was true. He had never mentioned Anne Marie until after she disappeared. Asked to recall whether she had talked to Tom on Thursday night, June 27, Debby said she had. “I called him sometime between ten and eleven,” she said. “I know it was in the middle of ER. He called me back at about eleven-thirty. I called him at twelve-fifteen, but he didn’t answer and I hung up. He called me back within five or ten minutes.”

  That call had come in with an odd ring, the extended shrill that indicated that the calling party had hit *69 to return the last call made to his number.

  “How about on Friday—the next day?”

  “I saw Tom Friday morning between eight and eight-thirty at the Tower Hill track,” Debby said. “He was walking. He called me around ten-thirty to say he was playing golf that day at the Wilmington Country Club.”

  Donovan jotted down his notes in short sentences, and they continued in a staccato fashion:

  “Spoke with Tom later on Friday at approx 1730.

  “Tuesday, July 2. He called her at work around 1500 and told her that he had been out to dinner with Anne Marie Fahey.

  “Did not know that Tom was having any relationships.”

  Debby didn’t know where Tom had been for most of the day on Friday, the twenty-eighth. He might have called her several times during the day but she wasn’t sure. She said she had spoken with him on Saturday, and he had stopped by on Sunday twice. The second time, he had told her that the cops were at his house and they had searched it. “He was very upset,” Debby told Donovan. “He felt he was being set up, but he didn’t discuss what was going on.”

  It seemed strange that she hadn’t pressed him for details. Debby appeared to be so confident that no one realized that Tom ran the show and that she would never dream of insisting that he tell her what was wrong.

  As he had done for years, Tom had suggested a script for Debby to follow, and she stayed with it; it was what he wanted. They were together and everything was going to be fine. If she remembered things that frightened her, the memory never even got up to the surface of her mind before she buried it. One of the memories that would loom large with the investigating team when they discovered it was a favor Debby had done for Tom. She had buried that recollection deeper than all the rest.

  “I honestly never thought about the gun,” she would recall. “I never connected buying the gun for Tom with Anne Marie Fahey until a long time later.”

  Sometime very early in the spring of 1996, Tom had phoned to ask Debby to do something very special for him, something very “important.” He wouldn’t tell her what it was, so she hadn’t said either yes or no. But in April, Tom asked her again and this time specified what the task was; he wanted her to buy a gun for him.

  “Why?” she asked, mystified.

  “Somebody is trying to extort me,” he’d explained. “I’m not going to use it. I just want to threaten this person. I’ll give it back to you.”

  She told him she didn’t want a gun in the house. But Tom said that he was concerned about her—a single mother living alone. He pointed out that crime rates were up and that it would be wise for her to have a gun handy—just in case.

  “I told him I didn’t want to do it,” Debby recalled. But Tom begged her, telling her he really needed her to buy the gun. He didn’t say why he couldn’t buy it himself, or anything about who was extorting him, beyond saying it was a man. “I won’t use it,” Tom said. “You know I’m afraid of guns—but I need it to scare this guy off.”

  At length, Debby had agreed to do it, and as he always did, Tom gave her detailed instructions. “He told me to go to the Sports Authority,” she said, “and go to the hunting section. I was supposed to walk in the front door and turn to the left.”

  She did that, but when she asked for a gun, Debby made the mistake of saying she was buying it for a friend. The salesman told her that was against the law. She could not transfer a firearm to someone else. Embarrassed, she left the store. Surprisingly, Tom wasn’t angry. “He just said, ‘Fine. Don’t worry about it.’ ”

  A month or so later, Tom took Debby to Washington, D.C., for a lawyers’ conference, and they had a wonderful time. It was only the third trip he had ever taken her on, so each one was memorable. Then shortly after they came home, he asked her again to purchase a gun for him. “I’m afraid to do that, Tom,” she said. “I can’t transfer a firearm to somebody else. It’s against the law.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “People do it all the time. It’s nothing you should worry about.”

  He was so good at making her feel foolish, and he pooh-poohed her reservations until she finally said yes. The next day, May 13, Tom picked Debby up in front of Tatnall School and drove her to a little gun store—Miller’s—out on Route 13. He waited in the car while she went in.

  She was very nervous, but this time she knew what to say. She asked to see a small weapon suitable for self-defense. The salesman showed her a few guns, and she chose a Beretta .22 caliber revolver. She paid $180 for it and, at the salesman’s suggestion, purchased a box of bullets. He cautioned her about transferring the gun, and she signed a form saying that she would not. That worried her—but Tom’s displeasure worried her more.

  “I was afraid Tom would get mad if I didn’t do what he wanted me to,” she recalled a long time later. “I was always afraid he woul
d get so angry that he would leave me.”

  Back in Tom’s Jeep Cherokee, Debby told him how concerned she was about breaking the law. Again he laughed and told her not to be “ridiculous.”

  Tom put the gun and the bullets behind the backseat of his Cherokee and took Debby to a nearby restaurant for a BLT and a glass of iced tea. It was all so normal. He drove her back to Tatnall in time for the afternoon session, thanked her profusely for helping him out, and drove away.

  Debby had never seen that gun again. For a long time, she worried because she had broken the law, but then she had put it out of her mind—just as she put so many things that worried her out of her mind, back in recesses she seldom visited.

  ON September 6, 1996, Debby MacIntyre took another step that would entangle her in a morass of deception and distortion. At eleven that morning, Bob Donovan, Colm Connolly, and Eric Alpert came to her house on Delaware Avenue to interview her in preparation for her grand jury testimony. Now she enlarged upon what she had told Donovan in their first interview, but she still did not tell them that she and Tom had been lovers for many, many years.

  Debby remembered Thursday, June 27, mostly because it had affected Tom’s life so severely and made him confess his unfaithfulness to her. In the morning, she and Tom had had their usual phone conversation sometime between nine-thirty and ten-thirty. She didn’t hear from him again until shortly before five, when he told her he had a business meeting in Philadelphia.

  Debby explained to the investigators that she was in charge of Tatnall’s swim team and that both of her children had a swim meet that night. She had called Tom about ten-thirty, but he wasn’t home yet, so she left a message. “Tom called me back between eleven-thirty and twelve-thirty,” she said. “He sounded like he always did, except very tired.”

  Debby recalled that Tom had berated her over something about Tatnall, growing so angry that he hung up on her. When she tried to call him back, there was no answer—and she didn’t leave a message. Within a few minutes, he had *69’d, calling back to ask her why she had hung up on him. Of course, she hadn’t. “Then we both calmed down and said good night,” she said.

  Debby described the events of the next day, June 28, pretty much as she had told Bob Donovan, but she added a few details. She’d seen Tom walking at the track early and didn’t see him again until he showed up unexpectedly at eleven that night. He had come to bed with her and stayed at her home until about noon the next day. “I think he went to do some errands, then,” Debby said, “because he was going to have his kids that night—Saturday.”

  On Sunday? Tom had come to her house at one in the afternoon, upset because the police had wakened him in the middle of the night. He had been so disturbed, in fact, that he had put his hands on his head and she could see him trembling. But she had not questioned him. She never questioned him.

  At five that afternoon, Debby said, Tom came back to her house—in even worse shape—because the police had actually come into his house and searched through it. She had no idea what for. She didn’t dare ask.

  Debby told the three investigators that she hadn’t known Tom had had dinner with the girl who was missing until the following Tuesday—when Tom told her. They could see that she was very supportive of Tom and that they were lovers, but Debby said firmly that she was sure he had had nothing whatever to do with the girl’s disappearance. Could she really be so in the dark about his life when he was away from her?

  “When you visit Tom,” Connolly asked, “do you go in the front door?”

  “No,” Debby said. “He leaves the garage door open for me and I drive in and go up the stairs—or rather I did, before he moved to his mother’s.” He had always known she was coming, she said, but he had never given her a key to his house.

  “Do you know why he got a new rug in the den—that room off the kitchen?”

  “Oh, he spilled wine,” Debby said. “I asked him about it—probably sometime in July. He told me that he’d spilled wine on the carpet, and on the sofa, too.”

  She also mentioned seeing a hole in the wall, where Tom said a picture had fallen down. The investigators already knew about the hole in the great room wall. They’d examined it during the July 31 search and found nothing revealing. It was just a hole in the wall behind a picture. Beneath the plaster, the bricks had no nicks in them, no tool marks. No gun barrel debris.

  At this stage in the investigation, Connolly, Donovan, and Alpert were inclined to think that Tom Capano had erupted into a sudden and violent rage when Anne Marie tried to break up with him. The most likely weapon would have been his hands; she had probably succumbed to being beaten or strangled. She had undoubtedly bled a great deal, enough to leave such visible stains on Tom’s carpet and couch that he’d been forced to get rid of them. But no one really knew what had happened.

  Debby MacIntyre testified before the federal grand jury on September 10, giving the same information she gave Connolly, Donovan, and Alpert. No one asked her about a gun, and she certainly didn’t mention one. On a conscious level, Debby had still not connected the gun she purchased to the disappearance of Anne Marie. She still believed Tom’s characterization of the Fahey girl as an unpredictable airhead who was as likely to leave town without an explanation as anyone he’d ever known.

  Debby had managed to slip into the grand jury room without the media seeing her. No one in Wilmington linked her to the proceedings—which was a great relief for her. A few weeks later, she left for several weeks on a guided tour of the Italian and French Riviera with her church group from St. Ann’s. She had always loved to travel; it was a respite from her job and her life. The problems in Wilmington were, quite literally, half a world away.

  Back in Wilmington, the investigative team still wasn’t sure what to make of her. Was Debby part of what had happened to Anne Marie, or was she a woman deluded by love?

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  AUTUMN CAME to Delaware as swiftly as every season does, without any warning; the sweet pungent smell of burning leaves filled the chill air, and summer was only a memory. Anne Marie, who had disappeared during the first week of summer, was still missing. Kathleen had finally packed up everything in her apartment and her brothers moved it into storage.

  Tom’s rental house sat empty. The new tenants weren’t moving in until December 1 and the owners of the house gave Anne Marie’s family permission to visit the house that they believed was the last place their sister had been alive. They had never had a chance to say good-bye. They moved quietly through the empty rooms, saying little, their faces solemn.

  THAT fall, as more secret grand jury sessions were held, Wilmington and Philadelphia newspapers sued to have the affidavits for search warrants in the Fahey case unsealed. With a more pressing need, the Fahey family begged to know what was happening in the probe.

  On November 11, Colm Connolly appeared to be giving in to media pressure when he agreed that there was no longer any need to keep the affidavits sealed. After all, Tom Capano’s attorneys already knew many details of the investigation and who the witnesses were. It was almost impossible to keep a secret in Wilmington. In actuality, Connolly had caught the defense off guard; he was unperturbed about having the public learn of the growing evidence and information that painted Capano as something less than the beleaguered innocent he purported to be.

  The Fahey family had hired attorney David Weiss to represent their interests. Weiss, himself a former assistant U.S. attorney, had explained to them that much of the information unearthed by a grand jury investigation could not be disclosed. Still, it was so hard for the Faheys to wait and wonder. They retained a private detective to do a parallel investigation. Nobody on the federal investigative team resented that. It was very difficult for them not to be able to talk with Anne Marie’s sister and brothers about what they were doing, but federal law forbade it. At least, with the unsealing of the affidavits, the family could see that progress was being made. Whether the rest of the public had a right or need to know the int
imate details of the probe was questionable. It was unlikely that anyone was in imminent danger from the prime suspect, but people were fiercely curious. Seldom had there been a case on the Eastern seaboard that sparked so much speculation.

  The only faction truly upset when Judge Trostle unsealed the affidavits was Tom Capano and his attorneys. They, too, had argued to see the documents—but privately. The last thing Tom wanted was to have the whole world know what cause the government had had to invade his privacy and his home. His attorneys filed to block their release, delaying the Faheys’ chance to see them.

  While the tug-of-war over unsealing the affidavits went on, the grand jury continued to meet; Connolly, Alpert, and Donovan were relentless in their search for the truth, the intensity of which Tom Capano could never have imagined. If he was innocent of harming Anne Marie Fahey, that would come out as the people in their lives marched into the grand jury room in the federal building and answered Connolly’s questions. If he had destroyed her, that would come out, too.

  There were those, like Tom’s sister, Marian, and her husband, Lee Ramunno, who stood by Tom without flinching. But there were others, like Kim Horstman, Jill Morrison, Ginny Columbus, and Jackie Steinhoff, who remembered a friend they had cherished, a friend caught in a net not of her own making.

  Although there were no hurrahs from the three men who were quietly tracking Tom Capano, things were beginning to happen behind their wall of silence. Not everyone in Wilmington found Tom the “good Capano.” An informant had come forward, an informant who could never be identified. Indeed, the manner in which the investigators found a remarkable document could never be revealed, and even the assumption that it was one individual who came to them might not be true. When any of the three was asked how they found the timeline pages, a shadow fell over his eyes.

  “I can’t tell you that,” one said. “I can only say that none of the names mentioned in connection with that discovery is correct.”