And Never Let Her Go (64 page)

For the first hour of her testimony, Wharton led her through her own life. It was odd; after almost two decades of hiding her affair
with Tom, she now told the jurors and the gallery all of the details of their relationship. Asked about buying a gun for Tom, Debby related that he had asked her several times to do him that favor. And finally, when he again asked her on Mother's Day—May 12, 1996—after they had returned from a romantic trip to Washington, D.C., she told him she would do it. Tom had made it easy by picking her up at Tatnall and driving her to Miller's gun shop.

“Do you recognize what that is?” Wharton asked her, holding up a form.

“It's a receipt for the gun and the bullets that I purchased.”

He held up another form. “That is the form,” Debby said, “that I filled out that said it was against the law to transfer firearms.”

“It bears your signature?”

“Yes.”

Debby identified a whole series of forms that she had signed and then immediately violated by turning the little Beretta over to Tom. It had cost her “around $180.”

“Did he ever pay you back for the gun?”

“No.”

For most of the evening and early morning hours of June 27–28, 1996, only Debby and Anne Marie had been in touch with Tom. Now Wharton asked Debby to reconstruct her activities during that vital time period and, in doing so, place Tom in certain locations.

“Let me ask you about the date, June twenty-seventh of 1996,” Wharton said. “Do you recall speaking to the defendant that day?”

“The first time [was] in the morning, about nine-thirty to ten-thirty . . . I was at work.”

“When was the second time?”

“About five . . . He told me he had to go to Philadelphia for a meeting and wouldn't be too late and would call to say good night when he got home about nine.”

“What were you doing that evening?”

“I was going to a swimming meet at the Arden Swim Club. I was director of the summer program at the time, and Tatnall's swimming team was swimming against Arden. I often went to the swimming meets as support, [and] both of my children were swimming in the meet.”

Debby explained that her son, Steve, didn't drive but that Victoria had driven in her own car and joined them at the meet. Afterward, she gave her children money to pick up take-out food at T.G.I. Friday's. They all ate together in the kitchen at home.

“What did you do for the remainder of the evening?”

“I was sitting in the kitchen reading the paper, finishing a glass of wine—by myself—and my children had gone to other parts of the house.” Debby said she had cleaned the kitchen, locked the doors, checked on her children in their rooms, and then gone to her own room on the second floor, at about ten-thirty.

“Did you make any telephone calls that evening?” Wharton asked.

“. . . at approximately ten-thirty, I called Tom Capano . . . at his house at Grant Avenue.”

“Did you speak to him?”

“No.”

“Did you leave a message?”

“Just saying I was home and, ‘If you don't get in too late, I'd love to hear from you. If not, I'll talk to you tomorrow. Good night.' ”

Debby said she got ready for bed then, and was in bed watching
ER.
“I was watching it as I left the message and recall seeing a close-up shot of the black doctor on the show—I think his name is Eriq La Salle.”

“ER
is on from when to when?”

“Ten to eleven.”

Debby said she had dozed off with the television on when she was awakened by a phone call from Tom. She glanced at the screen and saw David Letterman, who seemed to be in the middle of his opening monologue.

“What was the nature of that call?” Wharton asked. “What happened in that phone conversation?”

“I said, ‘Hello,' ” Debby replied, “and he said, ‘Don't you
ever
leave a message on my voice mail.' I was puzzled because I had done that many times before. I didn't understand why I couldn't leave a message on his machine. . . . He was very irritated.”

“Tell us about the rest of his conversation.”

“I talked about what I had done and the swimming meet, and he asked me if I could help him do something tomorrow morning . . . I told him that I had to go to Tatnall. The next day was payday, and that I had to distribute the paychecks.”

“What was his reaction to that?” Wharton asked.

“He got angry. Tatnall School is kind of a hot button with us. At the time I was working these two jobs that required more than enough of my time, and he felt very clearly that I was being taken advantage of by the school, and so whenever we talked about Tatnall, he would get very agitated.”

Debby testified that the call had ended badly. “I was upset by the tone of the conversation. He wanted to cut the call off and I didn't want to hang up when I was upset. [The conversation ended] rather abruptly.”

Disturbed, Debby had tried to go to sleep but had only tossed and turned for about forty-five minutes. She called Tom back but the phone rang four times with no answer. She didn't want to leave a message and make him angrier, so she hung up.

“What happened then?” Wharton asked.

“Very shortly—within a minute—the phone rang back one long ring [the ring of a *69 callback] and I picked up the phone and said, ‘Hello,' and heard nothing. Then it rang within seconds—a normal ring—and I picked up the phone and said, ‘Hello,' and he said, ‘Hello.' He said, ‘I *69'd you. Why did you hang up on me?' ”

This conversation with Tom was much friendlier than the last. It was past midnight. The longtime lovers chatted easily, and Tom asked Debby again for her help the next day. She said she would go in to Tatnall very early and try to get the paychecks handed out so that she could help him. She had no idea what he wanted her to do.

F
ERRIS
W
HARTON
believed that in all likelihood, Tom had just killed Anne Marie, or perhaps was in the process of doing so when Debby left the message on his voice mail at ten-thirty. The shrill ring of the phone would have frightened him. At that point, Tom couldn't have known that Gerry would help him dispose of her body. Was it possible he expected Debby to do that? Was that why he needed her help?

Debby testified that when she called Tom at 6:45 the next morning, he told her he no longer needed her help. And of course, he didn't; by that time he had Gerry lined up with his boat.

For Debby, that Friday had been an ordinary day; she had no idea her world was beginning to crash. She saw Tom at the track and he told her he planned to play golf later in the day. Then he called her at work sometime after ten. She didn't know he was calling from Stone Harbor; he sounded relaxed as he said, “I'm still trying to get a golf game together,” and promised to be with her by nine that evening.

Wharton produced a copy of Debby's day-planner for June 28, 1996. “What did you have planned that day?” he asked.

“Well,” she said, “I got the paychecks out in the morning.” She had gone in at six, an hour early, because she thought that Tom needed her. “At eleven I had a meeting with the parent of a pre-camper, a little boy three or four years old.”

“What's at 3:45?”

“I took my son to the dermatologist.”

“Do you recall what else you did that day?”

“I probably took prescriptions from the dermatologist to the drugstore—Happy Harry's.”

Debby testified she had stayed home that Friday evening, waiting for Tom—but he wasn't on time and she went to bed.

“Did he arrive?”

“About eleven, anywhere from eleven to eleven-thirty. He walked upstairs to my room.”

“Did he have a key to your house?”

“Yes, he did.”

Tom had also known the combination to the alarm system, something the state was now fully aware of. His eyes never left Debby's face as she testified.

“What happened when he came up to your bedroom?”

“He just said, ‘I'm sorry I'm late—fell asleep in front of the TV with the kids. Can I stay?' ”

“What did you say?”

“I said yes.”

Debby recalled that Tom had fallen asleep immediately after he crawled into her bed. He was still there Saturday morning and she noted that, for some reason, he had been driving Kay's blue Suburban. It was parked in her driveway.

Tom had left to do some errands Saturday afternoon, she said, and she didn't see him until about one on Sunday afternoon. “He just came over unannounced and walked into my house and was very upset, with his head in his hands,” Debby said. “I could see he was visibly shaken. He said, ‘I feel like I've been set up; somebody has set me up.' ”

“Did you ask him what he was talking about?”

“He said, ‘I can't tell you—not yet.' ”

Tom was sitting in the wing chair in her living room while she knelt in front of him in concern. He would tell her only that the police had come to his house at three in the morning. In five minutes, he was gone.

But Tom had come back shortly and called her out to his car. “He gave me a bag with three adult movies in it,” she testified. “He said, ‘Hang on to these; it would be embarrassing if somebody found these.' ”

“How long was he there that time?” Wharton asked.

“Sixty seconds.”

And, Debby testified, Tom had come over for a third time on Sunday afternoon—but only for five minutes. “He said that the police had come back to his house again and that he had to pack up his children and take them back to their house and then go back to the Grand Avenue house, and they searched it again.”

“Do you know whether he made any phone calls from your house at that time?”

“Yes,” Debby said. “He asked to use the phone.”

Wharton entered Debby's phone bill for June 1996 into evidence. It showed that someone had made three phone calls to New Jersey that afternoon and evening—one to the Holiday Inn in Penns Grove, the motel the Capanos owned, and the others to the motel manager's home.

“Did you make those phone calls?”

“No.”

Debby had been pleasantly surprised when Tom asked her to spend that Sunday night with him at his house. He had her drive into the garage and walk up the stairs to the great room. Although she had been worried about him, he told her nothing about why the police had come to his house twice. Indeed, it wasn't until Tom had called her on Tuesday, she said, that she knew he was the last person to have been seen with a woman whose name she had never heard: Anne Marie Fahey.

Debby told the jury that she had been shaken to realize that Tom had apparently been seeing Anne Marie for “about three years.”

“During that time,” Wharton asked, “in 1993 and 1994 and 1995, were you still seeing Tom Capano?”

“Yes, I was.”

“What was he telling you about how he felt about you during that time period?”

“He was telling me that he loved me very much.”

“Had you had some arrangement whereby you would be sort of exclusively seeing one another?”

“We were not exclusive, no,” Debby said softly. She had been so upset “because he hadn't told me about her, and I had always told him when I was going out on a date with somebody, or who I was seeing, and he hid this from me.”

Before Judge Lee called the lunch break, Debby testified about the mysterious changes in Tom's great room—the new rug, the missing couch—and his explanation that he had spilled red wine on both the original carpet and the maroon love seat.

Bob Donovan had been sitting in a spot at the prosecutors' table where he believed Debby could look at him as she testified. Indeed, for most of the morning he thought they had held eye contact. He knew how vulnerable she was and how Tom had controlled her for so many years. At some point, Donovan realized with a sinking sensation that Debby wasn't looking at him; she was staring into Tom's eyes. During a break, he walked over to Debby and said, “You're not looking at
him,
are you?”

“I am, Bob,” Debby said.

“Don't do it, Debby,” Donovan pleaded. “He's trying to get into your heart.”

“It's OK,” she said. “My heart is closed to him.”

Debby would later recall that moment. “And it was true,” she said. “My heart
was
closed to Tom. But I intended to keep on looking at him as I testified. I wanted him to realize what all his lies had done and to know that I was no longer fooled by him.”

Whether she was as strong as she felt at that moment remained to be seen. Debby's marathon testimony had just begun, and so far she had to deal only with Ferris Wharton, whom she liked and who was not going to spring any surprises. Even so, for the rest of that first day, Debby answered questions about her seventeen-year affair with Tom—five hours on the witness stand as every shred of her private life became fodder for the media. Through it all, she stared at Tom and he glared back at her, sometimes shaking his head from side to side as if to say, Debby, how
could
you do this?

He had once been so sure that she didn't have the common sense to know how to behave at the proof positive hearing that he sent her tedious letters of instruction. Now she was here on her own, and at Wharton's urging, she read those endless letters aloud for the jury. He'd told her what to say about the gun, about the cooler, about their relationship.

At 4:55 on that long afternoon, Judge Lee called a halt to the proceedings. But not to Debby's testimony; she knew that she might be on the stand all week. Yet, in a way, she had an absurd sense of freedom. She had slipped out of Tom's control, and the earth hadn't opened up and swallowed her after all.

As Tom was led away from the courtroom in chains, he turned toward the reporters who waited for a word from him. His face a forlorn study, he said, “She broke my heart.”