And Never Let Her Go (44 page)

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?

A
UTUMN 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.

T
HAT
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 intimate 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.”

But suddenly, in November 1996, Eric Alpert asked for a search
warrant for the office of one of Tom Capano's law partners. The attorney himself had no idea of what was hidden there between the volumes on one of his bookshelves. He got a telephone call from the U.S. Attorney's office to say that federal officers were on their way over, instructing him to disturb nothing. He had no inclination to do so, anyway. How the papers got to their hiding place would remain as cryptic as the way the investigative team found out they were there. Special Agent Kevin Shannon reached deftly into the bookcase and extracted ten sheets of paper.

There was no date on the pages, but the times jotted down in Tom Capano's handwriting were obviously a day in his life—a significant day.

6:30—Gerry

7:00—Kay

7:15—track

7:45—DM

8:00—Louis?

8:30—calls

8:45—Louis

?—MAC Machine

9:15–10:30—drive to SH

10:30–11:00—wait for Gerry

11:00–12:00—Marian's

12:00–12:30—Mom's

12:30+—Gerry

12:30–1:30—lunch w/ Gerry

1:30–3:00—view property, discuss price and CI sale

3:00—Gerry leaves

3:30—Tom leaves

5:00—dump loveseat

5:30—17th St.—dinner

11:00—leave kids

Back in Connolly's office in the Chase Manhattan building, all three of the investigators studied the timeline. It covered sixteen and a half hours of a day, and it didn't look like a shopping list or a simple roster of errands to do. Surely they could identify the date through the process of elimination. It probably wouldn't be before June 27, and it didn't match what Debby had told them about Thursday. Friday, the twenty-eighth, was a better bet. She had seen Tom on the twenty-eighth at the track and then not again until after
eleven that night. The most galvanizing item on the list was “dump loveseat.”

They'd already established that Louie Capano had ordered the Dumpsters at his construction company emptied on July 1, when they were half full. And Tom had bought the new rug on June 29. That wasn't on this list. No, the most obvious date was Friday, June 28, and Tom had clearly kept this list as a reminder to himself about where he was supposed to be on that day—right down to half-hour segments. He must have known his house would be searched and probably expected a search of his office as well. So he had hidden his crib sheet in someone else's office.

On the second sheet of paper, Tom had made notes to refresh his memory. It seemed very important that he be able to recall whom he had spoken to on June 28 and what their knowledge of his private life was.

He had called someone (whom they later determined was attorney David McBride) to decline a golf date that afternoon.

He had called Deputy Attorney General Keith Brady “to make plans to meet for happy hour that evening so had pleasant conversation with Laura Kobosko and asked her to convey message to Keith.”

Under the Brady notes, Tom wrote, “knew of relationship with Anne Marie; knew I had concluded she was a ‘head case.' ” He also noted that Brady had helped him move carpets into his house “in October.”

The rest of the notes Tom had hidden were chilling remembrances of Anne Marie. His reminders to himself focused on several elements: her instability, her incompetence at handling money, her family problems, and how she told him her innermost thoughts. It was clear he also wanted to have an explanation ready if her blood was ever found in his house.

“On Tuesday, June 18,” Tom wrote,

called for AMF and Ginny said she had gone home because of a “problem” . . . AMF later same day advised that trip home was necessitated by blood stains on clothing from heavy menstrual flow.

AMF came to my house for dinner—got salmon from Toscana: irrational; fear of pregnancy; sexual contact.

Dinner at Dilworthtown Inn on 6/20; lobster tail . . . discussed second job (waitress at fine dining establishment); showed me check register (writes on every line; take home pay of $844;) returned to Grant Avenue.

There were more pages, details of dates, discussions, and phone calls with Anne Marie. Tom had obviously been totally obsessed with her and all the minutiae of her life. But he denigrated her and her family. His perception was that her siblings were not treating her well. Indeed, he jotted down negative comments about how almost
everyone
in Anne Marie's life was treating her badly and “driving her crazy.”

Everyone but Tom.

For June 27, Tom had written: “Appointment with Dr.; don't like him; expensive ($55 for 20 minutes.); offer ticket to Hare event (I had 12)
She
chooses Panorama instead; reservation for 7:00; call at 6:25 from office to advise on way;
very
depressed.”

From Jacqueline Dansak's description of the unhappy woman she waited on, Anne Marie hadn't wanted to be at the Panorama with Tom. She hadn't eaten anything and had seemed miserable.
When
had she told him she no longer wanted to see him, not as a lover and not even as a friend? In his Jeep Cherokee going home? At her own apartment? Or during what the three investigators believed were the very last moments of her life, in the great room off Tom's kitchen?

Some kind providence had given them a timeline. All they had to do was follow it back, decipher what Tom's abbreviations meant, and find the evidence that might be connected to the entries he had hidden so carefully. They had worked long hours of overtime and they had been lucky. Would fortune continue to smile upon them?