Shadows of Death (True Crime Box Set)

by Katherine Ramsland

  At a three-hour hearing before the Delaware Board of Pardons, Bailey's sister and his foster sister requested leniency. He’d had a hard life, they said. One of 23 children of a poor family, Bailey was just 10 when his parents died and he’d been sent through a series of institutions. He’d also been physically abused. Their request was denied.

  Bailey’s last day was spent in the execution trailer. He requested a steak-and-potato dinner for his last meal, topped by ice cream. Outside, opponents of the death penalty kept vigil alongside reporters from several countries who were covering this unique event. A few death penalty supporters trickled in.

  On January 25, 1996, Bailey climbed the 23 steps to the platform, surrounded by armed guards. He was asked if he had any last words and he shook his head. He let one of the two hooded hangmen place a black hood and rope over his head. Two men checked and rechecked the paraffin-coated knot. Then one pulled a lever and Bailey’s body dropped through the trapdoor. It spun around six times.

  Death by hanging was abolished in Delaware in 2003.

  A Terrible Secret

  ON A COLD NOVEMBER 13th in 1996, a police dog sniffed around outside a Comfort Inn motel in Newark. A maid had discovered blood inside a room and they’d found a bag with bloody sheets. They were also aware that a young woman had given birth the night before, but there was no sign of a baby.

  The dog alerted on a trash bin. Inside was a gray garbage bag. Police restrained the dog and carefully opened the bag. It was what they’d been searching for: a tiny baby boy, deceased.

  The infant, full-term, weighed just over six pounds. The state medical examiner determined from skull fractures and bruising on the brain that someone had handled this child roughly. The boy had been shaken and subjected to blunt-force trauma. In addition, he’d still been alive when placed inside the bag, so he’d suffocated.

  The homicide made headlines around the world, especially as this story developed.

  The child’s parents, Brian Peterson, Jr. and Amy Grossberg, were just teenagers. They were what people called “good kids.” From well-heeled Wyckoff, New Jersey, they’d been raised in stable, affluent homes. They’d been given everything. They could have put the child up for adoption. How could they kill their own baby?

  These two had met during their sophomore year in high school and had been viewed as quite the couple. Everyone expected them to get married, but they’d gone on to separate colleges. Amy, getting into the University of Delaware, had insisted that having Brian over at Gettysburg College, 100 miles away in Pennsylvania, would not adversely affect their relationship. They had continued to see each other and talk on the phone regularly.

  Now, they faced a murder trial. They were arrested and charged with murder in the first. A possible death sentence hung over their heads.

  Everyone wanted to know why.

  They pleaded not guilty. They were allowed out on bond, with electronic ankle bracelets to monitor their movements. Initially, they stood by each other. Amy insisted she’d never hurt anything or anyone. The baby was stillborn, they claimed. Or at least they had thought so. What did they know? At 18, they were just kids. Not knowing what else to do, they’d left the corpse in a bag and fled.

  The news was full of stories of infanticide during those days – kids who just didn’t know what to do about a pregnancy until it was too late. Emphasis was placed on affluent kids who just couldn’t be bothered, and Amy and Brian fit that mold. They became the poster kids for this type of crime. Despite a gag order, they were bombarded by questions from the media.

  Then on March 9, 1997, the “great love” evaporated. Brian became paranoid that Amy might be cutting a deal. She’d made a statement, which was aired, that she thought she was just five or six months pregnant, the birth had been a surprise, and she’d had no hand in what happened to her child.

  So, Brian made a preemptive move. In a Wilmington courtroom, he pleaded guilty to reckless manslaughter.

  His attorney spoke for him as Amy’s attorneys listened. "After the baby was born,” she said. “The infant didn't show any signs of life, and he believed the baby was dead. He did not assist the baby or confirm it had died." Amy had urged him to get rid of it, so he’d placed the baby in a plastic bag and took it out to a trash bin next to the motel. He’d never intended the child any harm. He agreed to testify against his former girlfriend at her trial. For his part, he faced a maximum of 10 years in prison.

  Reporters were left to speculate about what had actually happened. Amy’s attorneys had said the medical examiner was wrong, that the child had been stillborn. Whatever had crushed its skull had happened during the police search. Babies are fragile.

  In June 1997, Amy gave an interview to Barbara Walters. They were not allowed to discuss evidence or the case, but Amy’s parents wanted the world to see that her daughter was a caring individual who’d never had any emotional problems. Both insisted their relationship with their daughter was “special” and very close. She confided in them. They thought she’d gained a little weight, sure, but it was just that “freshman 15.”

  Yet certain things contradicted Amy’s story. On November 12, she’d begun to feel the strong thrust of labor pains. She’d been scared. She’d told her parents nothing about her pregnancy and had managed to successfully hide it from them. It wasn’t difficult for a girl like her to place a tight wrapping over her expanding abdomen and wear loose clothing. Even two weeks earlier, no one had noticed.

  In the middle of the night, Amy called Brian in Gettysburg. She left a message that said, “I hope my biggest fear isn’t coming true.” At this point, this educated young honor student could not have been entirely ignorant about her condition. Even if she was, why not get to a hospital rather than wait at least two hours for her boyfriend and have him take her to a motel?

  Brian got the message, got into his Toyota Celica, and drove to Delaware. He arrived around 3:00 AM. He picked Amy up and they checked into room 220 at the nearby Comfort Inn. There, Amy gave birth. Shortly thereafter, Brian got rid of the baby.

  They parted and returned to their dorm rooms, apparently pledged to tell no one what had transpired. Brian lay on his bed. His friends would later say that he’d seemed agitated. He told them only that he was concerned about a sick relative.

  But that day, Amy experienced medical complications that sent her to an emergency ward. It wasn’t difficult for the nurses to see that Amy had been pregnant and had recently delivered. The hospital contacted the police and then Amy’s parents.

  They were stunned. They called Brian and demanded to know what had happened. Peterson broke down. He told a dorm counselor about the birth, and then told police. He couldn’t recall exactly where it had taken place, but he knew it was a motel near Amy’s college. The bill had been $52.

  Brian told them enough for them to figure out where to go to retrieve the infant’s body. (Some stories hold that a cleaning woman who saw the bloody sheets contacted the police.) He insisted that he’d tried getting Amy to go to a hospital, but she had refused.

  The bag in which the tiny body was found matched bags that turned up in a search of Amy’s dorm room. This suggested that she’d taken the bag with her, having decided to kill her baby as a way to get rid of what she had called her “problem.” But it wasn’t actual proof of premeditation.

  As she awaited her trial, Amy insisted that she hadn’t realized she was pregnant because she hadn’t felt sick and hadn’t gained weight. However, a close friend of hers denied this statement. Amy, she said, had changed her style of clothing over the summer from the fitted shirts she usually wore to baggy attire. She’d also gained noticeable weight. Some people suspected she might be pregnant. Friends speculated that Amy’s mother’s emphasis on image had influenced Amy’s decision to hide a shameful pregnancy. In fact, according to People magazine, several attorneys who’d quit the case thought Sonye Grossberg’s overly idealized view of her daughter had blocked them from forming a defense.

  Some peopl
e actually called these kids victims who did not deserve to get the black marks with which the media had smeared them. They’d just been caught up in an unfortunate situation and made a bad judgment call.

  In her own defense, Amy claimed that she’d been too ill that night to know what was happening when she gave birth. Essentially, she said, Brian had acted alone, making the decision to wrap the child and dump it. In April 1998, she made a deal with the prosecutor. She admitted that she had unintentionally caused the death of her child. The plea was identical to Brian’s, but a slightly harsher sentence made it clear that the state held her more accountable.

  Brian spent just a year and a half in prison, and Amy had another six months beyond this. They parted ways. Brian married someone else and moved to Florida. Amy went to Hackensack, New Jersey, and opened a business. Both continued to deny any fault and have put the incident behind them.

  If I can’t Have You, No One Will

  GERRY CAPANO PROBABLY NEVER IMAGINED that he’d have to stand against his entire family in order to speak the truth. But nightmares will have their way. He knew what he’d seen and there was no pushing that terrible image from his mind. He’d tried to avoid it, but it was with him whether he was awake or asleep. Everything else added up as well. One day, he feared, he’d have to tell someone.

  But at first, he tried hard to say nothing. He kept the terrible secret. He might have succeeded had he lived a more upstanding life. Yet his crimes, which were leveraged against him, were nothing compared to this situation. Gerry hadn’t even realized what it meant when Anne Marie Fahey, his brother’s former mistress, went missing. But eventually, he’d started to see that things were not as he’d initially believed. Correction: things were not as he’d initially wanted to believe.

  A lot of people had been worried about Anne Marie over the past two years, how thin she’d gotten and how different her personality had become. As the child of an alcoholic, she’d developed a number of problems herself, which reached deep into her childhood. She was seeing a therapist for anxiety and depression, as well having as difficulty sleeping. Whenever friends or relatives tried to advise her, she’d withdrawn. Clearly, she was keeping secrets.

  When Anne Marie, known to friends as Annie, vanished on June 27, 1996, alarm bells went off for her family. A day went by. Then two days. Now three. Her fiancée, Michael Scanlan, said he hadn’t heard from her. (This incident had happened in the days before cell phones, with which people kept caught up many times throughout the day.) Still, Anne Marie was about to marry him. She’d missed a dinner date and hadn’t called to explain why. In fact, she hadn’t called at all, for any reason. She’d also missed work at her job as the appointment secretary for Thomas Carper, the governor of Delaware. It was unlike her not to have called in.

  Annie’s sister, Kathleen, told one of her brothers to call her therapist. She knew something was desperately wrong. But that call would have to wait until morning. She had to act now. It was late, she realized, after 10 PM, but she was tired of waiting. Annie had finally been persuaded to give up a destructive relationship, but this had been months ago. She’d improved considerably since then and had been excited about getting married to Michael. Nothing was making sense.

  Kathleen and Michael went to where Anne Marie had an apartment in a house at 1718 Washington Street in Wilmington. They noticed at once that her Jetta was parked there. Kathleen wondered if Annie had hurt herself in her apartment and hadn’t been able to call for help.

  They entered and talked with the landlord. He hadn’t seen her, but that wasn’t unusual. She kept to herself, and he didn’t pry into his tenants’ affairs. When Kathleen explained her concerns, he was quick to encourage them to go up to the third floor and look.

  They unlocked the door with Kathleen’s spare key and entered. The apartment was dark. It was also filled with a terrible odor. Kathleen switched on a light. Her heart was in her throat.

  “Annie?” she called out. There was no response.

  Fearing that her sister was dead, Kathleen looked in the bedroom and ran to the bathroom. Anne Marie was not there. But what was the source of this awful stench?

  The bedroom was in disarray, which was uncharacteristic of Annie, the perfectionist. It had the appearance of someone looking for something, without regard to what was being handled. A bag was ripped open and boxes were strewn about. The bed was rumpled, which she’d never have left in that condition. A dress lay on a settee, as if someone was preparing to put it on, and an expensive pants suit from a high-end store was still in its box. Kathleen recalled arguing with Annie about this very item, because it had seemed foolish for her, on her $31,000 salary, to purchase it.

  In the small kitchen, they found the source of the bad smell: rotting fruit and vegetables. They were mystified. It appeared that Anne Marie hadn’t been home in days. Then Kathleen’s heart sank. She saw her sister’s purse. Her car was here, her purse was here, but she wasn’t.

  “Let’s get the police,” she said.

  As they waited, Kathleen looked around without touching anything. Her heart beat fast and she fought the urge to be sick. She and Michael both knew the signs looked bad. Annie hadn’t just gone somewhere. It looked to them like she’d been lured or forced away, although surely someone in the apartment building would have heard a struggle. An item caught Kathleen’s eye. It was a letter, seemingly from a man, but it hadn’t been signed. Was Annie having an affair? She had a history of bad judgment in men. It was certainly possible that she was at it again.

  AS A SEARCH COMMENCED, more letters turned up that appeared to be from the same man. Clearly, he had a romantic connection with Anne. These letters also offered a lead, once the police were involved. They’d been written on stationary that denoted a prestigious law firm, from a managing partner, Thomas Capano, who’d served as council for former Governor Michael Castle. He was married, with four children. He was also much older than the thirty-year-old Annie by 17 years. These letters could be from someone else in his office. One bore a date, June 25, just two days before Anne Marie was last heard from. It mentioned money given to her.

  Kathleen also found a diary. She wasn’t yet ready to pry this much.

  A call to Anne Marie’s therapist turned up slightly more information: she hadn’t seen the young woman, but she asked an odd question: would anyone abduct her? Without breaking confidentiality, she seemed to be offering a possible direction for investigators.

  Kathleen told investigators what she knew. Anne Marie’s original therapist, on whom she’d deeply depended for issues emerging from a dysfunctional family, had been killed in a car crash. Thereafter, she had developed an eating disorder, avoiding food. It was as if she’d decided that, in a chaotic world where terrible things could happen (such as her mother’s death when she was 9), she could control one thing: her weight. Reportedly, she’d begun using laxatives – as many as 15 a day – to lose weight. Often she went without eating for days at a time. At five-foot-ten, she weighed just 137 pounds. She liked how she looked, but others thought she was skin-and-bones.

  Detectives agreed that something was amiss and began asking questions. A resident in the apartment building on the second floor had heard footsteps in Anne Marie’s apartment around 10:00 on the night she was last seen. So she’d been alive then. Unless someone else had been in her apartment.

  The next step was to talk with Anne Marie’s friends. One of them admitted that Annie had been seeing Tom Capano ... still. Friends say Fahey had a taste for the good things in life and Capano indulged it, showering her with gifts well beyond her reach. Capano, says a friend, made Fahey "feel safe and secure." However, she’d broken it off months ago. At least, that’s what her friends who’d known about it believed. She didn’t put it past Annie to take his calls and even see him again if he pressured her to.

  Yet last fall, some eight months earlier, Governor Carper had introduced her to Michael Scanlan, a successful credit-company official close to her age. Soon, she told a frien
d that he was “the one.” This relationship helped her realize that she had to say good-bye to Capano. He wasn’t pleased.

  "He just went nuts,” said this friend. “He'd call at 10, 10:30, 11, 11:15. It was total obsession, not love." That’s how he’d been, even with her. He’d been jealous and possessive, controlling her every move, including what she ate and wore. And she had obeyed. It was as if the structure of his commanding presence had relieved her of the responsibility for making her own decisions. She’d been in love. But then she’d realized how unhealthy the relationship was.

  The question was, had Capano accepted her decision? Dominating men tend to want to make such decisions themselves. Reportedly, Capano had grown depressed and begged Annie to reconsider. He’d moved out, separated from his wife. He needed her, he’d said.

  This friend of Annie’s, who apparently knew quite a lot more than even her sister, contacted Capano to ask if he’d seen her. He said he thought Annie was with her. He’d taken her to dinner in Philadelphia a few nights ago, given her a gift, and dropped her off at her place around 10: PM, but hadn’t talked with her since. He admitted that she’d told him that she had no intention of resuming their affair. She was engaged to another man. He’d been sad, but he’d accepted this. He still cared about her, knew about her disorder, and wanted to be sure she was taking care of herself.

  Capano said that he was sure Annie was fine and would report to her job on Monday. As to her current whereabouts, he didn’t know. He hadn’t talked with her since the dinner. When he learned about the missing persons report that the Faheys had filed, he added one odd statement: “I wonder if they’ll be looking for me.”

  This case eventually inspired several books, a documentary, and a miniseries. Later, when an intern in Washington, DC, Chandra Levy, disappeared in May 2001, many commentators drew parallels. I wrote that story, myself, for the Court TV website, and during the Levy investigation, I was asked many times to comment on the similarities. I wouldn’t do it, since the obvious implications accused a politician (who was never charged) in what turned into a tragic murder case.