And Never Let Her Go

SIMON & SCHUSTER
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 1999 by Ann Rule
All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.

S
IMON
& S
CHUSTER
and colophon are
registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.
Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 0-684-81048-4

eISBN 978-0-7432-0279-4

F
OR
A
NNE
M
ARIE
F
AHEY

who was not perfect, but who was better than most,

with no little regret that to bring her justice I have
to tell the secrets that she held so dear.

Contents

Prologue

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Part Two

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Part Three

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Part Four

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Part Five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

Chapter Forty-two

Chapter Forty-three

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Photos

I
T WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT
on June 30, 1996, but even so there was a yellow glow behind the sheer curtains framing two small windows on the top floor of 1718 Washington Street in Wilmington, Delaware. That was unusual. The young woman who lived in the third-floor walk-up was known to be an early riser, the first one to arrive at her job, and was almost always in bed well before the eleven-o'clock news flashed on the little television that sat on the radiator near her bed. If the sixty-watt bulbs behind the lacy curtains were whirling red and blue lights, they could not have signaled more alarm to those who knew her patterns.

Silhouettes moved past the windows. There were people in the room, pacing, staring out at the dark street below and the little park beyond, drinking yet another cup of black coffee. Sleep was not an option for any of those who waited there for a knock, a call, anything that might reassure them that the burgeoning dread they felt was only the result of their overactive imaginations.

Fear often begins with the slightest niggle that something taken for granted can no longer be trusted. A slice of a shadow darkens a spot that only a moment before was sunny, and a chill draft destroys what was warm and cozy. What was solid becomes suddenly fragile. It started that way for the brothers, sister, boyfriend, friends, and coworkers of the young woman who lived in that apartment. There

* The names of some individuals have been changed. Such names are indicated by an asterisk (*) the first time each appears in the book.

was nothing dramatic to go on. She had failed to return a few phone calls, she wasn't home when her boyfriend had called with a last-minute date idea two nights earlier. But gradually they realized that no one had seen or heard from her for at least forty-eight hours.

Anne Marie Fahey was thirty years old; she wasn't a teenager who had to be checked on. Why, then, did her sister and her friends feel such a sense of urgency? They didn't live in one another's hip pockets, didn't always talk on the phone every day.

Anne Marie—Annie to those close to her—led a busy life, both professionally and socially. She was Delaware governor Thomas Carper's scheduling secretary, responsible for getting him to all manner of appointments and events on time and for providing him with enough security so that she knew he was safe. She was so efficient and dependable that she'd worked for Carper since the time he was a congressman.

Anne Marie had more than a dozen close friends, a devoted family, and after many disappointments, she believed she had finally found the love she had looked for so long. She lived a life so full and complicated that it was akin to constantly juggling myriad balls in the air. Somehow, she managed it.

The day before—Friday—had passed without any real concern, although even Mike Scanlan, the bank executive she told friends she hoped to marry, couldn't seem to catch up with Anne Marie. And he was puzzled and a little hurt when she stood him up for a dinner with her brother Robert's family on Saturday night. He searched his mind for something he might have said to offend her, and couldn't come up with anything. He called Robert to say he hadn't heard from Anne Marie.

Mike—and Robert and his wife, Susan—had tried hard to explain Annie's absence with cautious rationalizations. Maybe she had gotten the date mixed up. Perhaps she had been called away to work late; almost everyone else in the governor's office was working through the night on this last weekend in 1996 that the state legislature was in session.

Those who gathered to wait in the strange quiet of Anne Marie Fahey's little apartment thought of a dozen reasons that would mean she was all right and would be coming home soon. But they all knew better. Annie never stood anyone up. She hated to hurt anyone's feelings. If there was one true thing about her, it was that she tried never to worry or offend anyone. Even if it meant that she herself suffered, she thought always of the other person. If she could see how frightened
her sister, her boyfriend, and her friends were now, she would have apologized over and over for scaring them.

A
NNE
M
ARIE
'
S
older brother Robert Fahey lived a half hour out of Wilmington. He and Susan had expected Annie and Mike for an early dinner that all of them had looked forward to, but they never arrived, nor did they call. This was so unlike Anne Marie—or Mike for that matter—that Robert and Susan began to worry. When Susan Fahey called her sister-in-law, all she got was an answering machine.

Mike Scanlan was concerned, too. He had surmised that Anne Marie had been home earlier in the day because he'd driven by her apartment and her car was there. And yet she hadn't returned any of his calls. At 9
P.M.
Mike called Annie's older sister, Kathleen Fahey-Hosey.

“Michael called me and asked me if I had heard from Anne. I responded no,” Kathleen recalled. “As soon as Michael told me they had plans and that Anne Marie didn't show, I knew something was terribly wrong. . . . She was just so happy with Michael—Michael was her future. She would never break plans on her own.”

Kathleen told Mike she would call him right back, and then she called her sister's friend Ginny Columbus—who was a coworker at the governor's office—to see if she knew of any plans Annie might have had. Ginny was instantly alarmed, too, and she called Jill Morrison. Ginny and Jill lived closer to Annie's apartment than Kathleen did, so they volunteered to go over and check on her.

When no one answered their knocks at Anne Marie's apartment, the two women asked her landlady, Theresa Oliver, if she had seen her. Theresa hadn't seen Anne Marie for a day or so, but that wasn't particularly unusual. Anne Marie's step was so light that she could come in through the front door and be up the closed-off stairs to her apartment without anyone hearing her. Now, on Saturday night, Theresa walked up to the third floor and found Anne Marie's door locked, with the dead bolt in place. She opened the door and called Anne Marie's name—but there was no answer. Fearing that she was intruding, she walked through the living room to the kitchen, peered in the bedroom, but didn't see Anne Marie.

Jill and Ginny immediately called Kathleen back. “The lights are off, Kathleen, and her door was locked,” Ginny said. “Annie's not there—but her car is parked outside.”

“OK,” Kathleen said, “I'll be right over.”

Kathleen then did something that might seem an overreaction; she called the Wilmington Police Department to report Anne Marie as a missing person. The detective on duty told her she would have to come down to the station or call from her sister's apartment. The moment she called Mike Scanlan back, he said he was on his way to pick her up. Both of them felt such a sense of urgency, although they had nothing tangible to go on.

W
HEN
Kathleen and Mike arrived at Annie's apartment and spoke with Ginny and Jill, they learned that Annie apparently wasn't with anyone they might expect her to be with. With a dull sense of acceptance, they realized that since Thursday night, June 27, Annie hadn't been in any of the places or with any of the people who made up her world as they knew it.

With Kathleen beside her, Theresa Oliver unlocked the dead bolt on the door of Annie's apartment. Kathleen called her name softly.

There was no answer.

A gush of fetid air washed over them, and they involuntarily held their breaths against the foul, rancid odor. It was initially indefinable, but then they smelled garbage and something rotting.

Kathleen rushed first toward the bathroom; all she could think of was that Annie had fallen in the shower and hit her head on something. She flung the door open, clicked on the light, and pulled back the curtain. The shower was empty. Everything in the bathroom was spotless. For some reason, she looked for Annie's toothbrush. It was there, where it always was.