And Never Let Her Go: Thomas Capano: The Deadly Seducer

by Ann Rule

  Washington was an exciting and somewhat intimidating spot for a young woman. Anne Marie’s internship was funded for only four months, but it would give her an up-close look at national government. Because she didn’t know anyone in D.C., she went through the “Housemate Wanted” ads in the Washington papers and found a place to share with other women her age. She worked at the OAS on weekdays and commuted back to her job at Friday’s on the weekends, a two-hour drive. As frightened as she was of change and being away from the people who made her feel safe, no one in Washington ever knew it. Anne Marie had guts. Most young women in their early twenties would have been hesitant to start a new job in a new city without having a friend along, but she lived with perfect strangers and they got along well. She had learned to acclimate to whatever living situation she found herself in, but inside she longed for a permanent home.

  With her degree in political science, Anne Marie was a natural on the political scene and she did well in Washington. But being able to return to Wilmington on weekends helped to keep her grounded. Her brothers, particularly Brian, phoned her during the week and she saw some of her family on most weekends.

  When the OAS job ended, she was torn about what career move to make next. She had some political connections—Ed and Bud Freel were heavy hitters in Delaware politics—and Anne Marie learned that one of the representatives from Delaware, Congressman Tom Carper, had a job opening in his office. She arranged for an interview and was hired as a receptionist for Carper.

  Anne Marie was the perfect employee for a congressman; she was intelligent, meticulous about details, and always smiling. She was also beautiful and hardworking. Carper was very impressed with her capabilities. Her job with him, however, looked as if it might be short-lived. After three or four months, he announced to his staff that he had decided to run for governor of Delaware and would be leaving Washington.

  Things worked out, however, when Carper returned to Wilmington and Anne Marie was hired to work on his campaign. It was late fall of 1992 and she was twenty-six years old. She worked enthusiastically to help get Carper elected governor—doorbelling, mailing, answering phones. It was what old Delaware hands called “making your bones.” Anne Marie had to earn the respect of her peers by doing the more onerous chores of a political campaign.

  Another way to make your bones and earn respect in Delaware politics was to know things. If someone was up on the latest rumors, strategies, and other inside information, and if he knew whom to share that information with, he could move up rapidly. But it took longer to penetrate the inner circles than it did to do the scut work, particularly for a female. The young women—and the younger men, too—were welcomed into the political bastions for their sweat equity factor, but nobody trusted them with anything really important.

  Nevertheless, it was a good time; Anne Marie was back in her home territory, and she had an exciting job. She was young and lovely and was at the center of a whirlwind of activity. And she hoped that if Tom Carper was elected, she might have a job on his staff.

  Her childhood friend Jackie Binnersley had bought a house on North Clayton Street and invited Anne Marie to move in with her and her roommate, Bronwyn Puller. Annie and Jackie were, of course, old friends since seventh grade, and Annie and Bronwyn hit it off immediately. Instead of sharing a house with young women she’d met through the want ads, Anne Marie was home. She moved in right before Christmas 1992.

  Anne Marie “was not shy,” Jackie remembered. “She was a funny, funny person. She always talked about her problems and we were very, very close. I mean, we slept in the same bed together several times just as friends when we were growing up. She was very particular, very neat, very organized. She wasn’t like that in high school, but when she moved in, I was a bit surprised—just some funny things she did. I’m sure we’ve all stayed at hotels; they pull a bed down and they put a mint on your pillow. She would do that and powder her sheets. When she got up in the morning, the first thing she would do was make her bed. She dusted her baseboards.”

  Anne Marie had learned to clean house from her grandmother, but a month before she moved in with Jackie and Bronwyn, Nan had died. It was anguishing for her to lose the grandmother who had taken her mother’s place. A long time later, she noted Katherine McGettigan’s death in her diary: “Nan died on November 2, 1992—the most tragic part of my life! I always believed Nan’s life would be eternal. She was the most reliable, stable, sober adult person in my life. A part of me died with Katie. I still feel numb. The world is a less fortunate place, but Heaven is dancing with her arrival.”

  Anne Marie missed her grandmother more than anyone realized; she would catch herself dialing Nan’s phone number, and then realize that it was too late. There was no one on the other end of the line any longer.

  TOM CARPER was elected to the Delaware governorship in 1992 and was inaugurated in January of 1993. Anne Marie went with him to the governor’s offices in Wilmington, in the Carvel State Building, where she became his scheduling secretary. It was a fascinating and challenging job, meant for a young woman who could keep track of dozens of details at once and still greet visitors with her wonderful smile.

  The world should have been Anne Marie’s oyster, but the ghosts of her past had come back to haunt her. She felt vulnerable and sad, especially since Nan was gone. A part of her was still the little girl whose mother was dead and whose father raged at her that she wasn’t good enough, that she was ugly and fat. It didn’t seem to matter what was reflected in the mirror; Anne Marie’s self-image was so distorted that she saw only the picture in her mind. She began to clean her surroundings obsessively, even more than she had when she lived with Carol Creighton while she was in high school. It was a way she could control the world around her and, perhaps, feel in charge of her own life.

  She tried to control her appetite too, because she believed that she was much too heavy, even though, at five foot ten inches, she weighed around 140 pounds, a perfect weight. When she could maintain rigid order in her surroundings and not give in to her hunger pangs, she was better able to quell the flurries of panic that sometimes washed over her.

  No one else knew how difficult life could be for her. But Anne Marie recognized that she needed help. Fortunately, her health insurance had provisions for therapy, and she had to pay only $17 an hour, while the insurance made a copayment of $68. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been able to afford it. She found a psychologist named Bob Conner, who listened to her, accepted her, and understood her pain. And she gradually began to make progress. After five months of counseling, she sometimes laughed with Bob, because he was a little chubby and he was encouraging her to eat more—but only in a very gentle way.

  Anne Marie, who had grown up poor and desperate in Wilmington, was now the governor’s scheduling secretary. It was a great job. And she had, at last, all the circumstances for a wonderful life. Her only real enemy was the portrait she carried of herself inside her head, and she was learning to accept the knowledge that it was distorted, and to change that image. If only she could accept herself as other people accepted her, she was going to be fine.

  Chapter Seven

  TOM CAPANO’S PLACE in the hierarchy of Delaware business and politics would become more and more entrenched during the eighties. Despite his affair with the ex-daughter-in-law of one of his firm’s founders, he stayed at Morris, James, Hitchens & Williams for eight years. There was no reason not to; he and Debby MacIntyre had agreed that it would hurt too many people if anyone got even the slightest hint of their true relationship. He was confident that no one knew about Debby.

  At first, Debby had no expectation that they would be together in any long-term way. The affair that began with a brief encounter in mid-1982 and resumed in late 1983 continued on a regular basis. She and Tom spoke on the phone every day, often several times a day, and they met once a week on Wednesday nights because that was the night that her children were with their father. If anyone had asked her at that point if she loved Tom, Debby
would probably have found it difficult to come up with an answer. She tried not to think about it, but she admitted to herself that she was growing emotionally dependent upon him. Any woman in her situation probably would have; Tom was there for her as no one else had ever been, with the possible exception of her father. But her father had always had one ear cocked for a call for help from her mother.

  Although she wasn’t planning a future with Tom, Debby was stunned when he told her that Kay was pregnant again. “I was very upset. I wasn’t planning to ever have more children,” she said, “and I guess I just assumed that he wouldn’t either.”

  Debby had occasionally asked Tom if he was still sexually intimate with Kay, because she could not understand how he could be as close as he was with her and maintain a sex life within his marriage. “I felt if you were having sexual relations with someone, you were expressing your love for someone through intercourse—or rather, intimacy. He didn’t believe that; he told me that sex could be, sometimes, sport.”

  Debby thought he was simply arguing a point. And as so many women involved in affairs do, she told herself that Tom’s marriage wasn’t based on a sexual relationship—until she learned that Kay was pregnant so soon again.

  Tom told everyone he was thrilled about his wife’s pregnancy, and bragged to Father Balducelli at St. Anthony’s when his third daughter, Jenny, was born in November of 1983, only one month after Debby’s marriage ended. Less than two years later, in August of 1985, Kay would give birth to their fourth daughter, Alexandra. Tom never seemed to mind that he hadn’t had a son, and he characterized his daughters as “the most important part of my life. Nothing else comes close.”

  If Tom’s third child came as a shock to Debby, Kay’s fourth pregnancy hurt her deeply. “Tom told me that he couldn’t stop with an uneven number—so he had to have four children. He couldn’t understand why I was upset.”

  Tom rarely had his picture taken at family gatherings without a tiny girl in his arms. All of his and Kay’s daughters were extremely pretty, with high, rounded foreheads, heart-shaped faces, and huge brown eyes.

  Even though her divorce meant she was no longer one of the wives who came to parties thrown by her ex-husband’s—and Tom’s—law firm, Debby and Kay Capano maintained their friendship, walking together, setting up play groups for their children. Debby genuinely liked Kay and admired her. They never discussed Tom. Kay never talked about her personal life, anyway, although Debby always had. Now, of course, she could not. Her personal life was Tom. But in her mind, he was somehow a different Tom than the man who was Kay’s husband. By this time he was such a necessary part of Debby’s world that she could not walk away from him. As it was, when he was with her, it was for such a small percentage of his time. Whenever she felt guilty—and she did—she was able to tell herself that she wasn’t really hurting his wife. Kay had his name, his children, and shared Tom’s life. Debby was someone no one was ever going to know about.

  Debby, who was an excellent photographer, took dozens of pictures of her children and Kay’s, at home and on the beach at Stone Harbor. Debby’s family had a beach house there, too, and they all still met at the shore. Sometimes it was a bittersweet thing for her to watch her toddlers—and Tom’s—riding in a toy car together or hugging one another. Their lives had become so convoluted.

  There were moments when Debby looked up to see Marguerite Capano studying her, her face empty of expression. As off-putting as that was, Debby was sure that no one but she and Tom knew. He himself assured her over and over that everything was fine and they had nothing whatsoever to regret. For the moment, they were there for each other.

  And how on earth could that hurt anyone?

  IN late 1984, Tom accepted an offer to work for the city of Wilmington as city solicitor. It meant a substantial salary reduction; his salary at Morris, James had risen a great deal in the nearly eight years he spent with the firm. “I did it exactly backwards,” he would say somewhat ruefully. “Most people try to get these types of public-service jobs. And the tradition is you step from a job like that into a partnership with one of the law firms. I was already a partner at Morris, James, Hitchens & Williams. I left the law firm to become city solicitor.”

  His new job in the public sector wasn’t particularly exciting. He ran the law department for the city and supervised a dozen attorneys and an equal number of support staff. His office was responsible for prosecutions in Wilmington Municipal Court, and for defending any claims that might be made against the city. Most of the cases his department prosecuted were only misdemeanors, but Tom tried to appear in court every few weeks, taking an active role, “just to have fun.”

  He planned to stay on as city solicitor for only two years, and then return to his law firm. As the good son, Tom had always leaned toward public service jobs, and he was intrigued by the political scene in Wilmington—and in all of Delaware, for that matter. He had gotten his feet wet, although he didn’t expect to stay with city government. After two years, however, Mayor Dan Frawley, for whom Tom had campaigned in 1984, offered him another city job—one with considerable cachet. He accepted it and became chief of staff of the mayor of Wilmington.

  In effect, Tom would be running the inner workings of the city. While Frawley set policy and did the public things that all mayors do, Tom was in charge of every department: public works, zoning, fire, police. “Every morning the chief of police had to call me,” he said, “and report on what incidents had occurred the night before.”

  Even though his position as chief of staff meant that he had tremendous power and respect in Wilmington and that his name appeared regularly in the media, Tom got less pay than he had received as a partner in a law firm. Still, he committed himself to Mayor Frawley and promised to stay two years as his chief of staff. Tom was more than just the man who saw that everything ran smoothly; Frawley had a tendency to shoot from the hip when he was riled or in his cups, and Tom was the soul of tact and control. In the calm, soft voice that reminded a number of women of Clint Eastwood’s, he could be counted on to defuse explosive situations.

  It was a time of two-fisted politics, when the good old boys met to debate how to run Wilmington amid clouds of cigar smoke and the smell of draft beer and Irish whiskey in the most popular bars in town. Buddy’s Bar was in, and there were Kid Shelleen’s and the Columbus Inn. Tom was at home in that world too. He seemed to have everyting—a wife, four daughters, a beautiful home in the Rockford Park section, a church where he was considered one of the staunchest supporters of the young, the elderly, and the poor, and arguably the most influential position in city government. During the St. Anthony’s festival, he could scarcely make his way through the crowd with his adorable daughters without being stopped every few feet by someone who admired him or who needed a favor. He had grown a modest beard that made him look almost professorial, and he wore glasses now.

  Kay worked as a nurse-practitioner for a group of pediatricians, and Tom frowned on that. Their house wasn’t as organized as he would have liked, and he hated the clutter of their busy lives. His mother had always stayed home and confined herself to taking care of her family, and that was the way it should be, at least in Tom’s opinion.

  As the girls grew older and were enrolled in Catholic school, there was always so much to do and so many places to go. The younger three were natural athletes, and Tom made a point of dropping in on their games, if only briefly. He had so many demands on his time, and yet as the pressures grew, he seemed only to become more adept at his personal balancing act. Marguerite still counted on him for all of her business affairs, and there had been innumerable problems with his youngest brother, Gerry.

  Gerry Capano might as well have been born twenty years after his brothers; he was in a different generation, starting junior high in the seventies. Where his brothers had drunk beer as they cruised in Brandywine Hundred and at the shore, Gerry and his friends were experimenting with marijuana and numerous other drugs. His father had died when Gerry was
at the height of adolescence, and his mother hadn’t the faintest idea of how to deal with a teenage boy on her own.

  Looking back, Tom figured that Gerry had begun using marijuana when he was attending St. Edmond’s Academy, the private school for boys. He was only in the seventh or eighth grade then; Gerry himself admitted to drug use in high school, but none of the family really knew that his consumption of illegal and bizarre substances included everything from cocaine to methamphetamines and LSD. Gerry was also an excitement junkie. The little kid with the long blond curls who everyone thought was so adorable was on the verge of running wild.

  Gerry was no student, but his brothers pulled strings and persuaded the priests at Archmere Academy to admit him. It was a bad idea, according to Tom; the curriculum was too tough for him. “He was expelled for a drug-related matter,” Tom said, “before the end of his sophomore year, and I remember it was like a wake at our house—the priests who delivered the news actually came to the house to deliver it personally.”

  Gerry transferred to Brandywine High but he was expelled from there, too, allegedly for dealing drugs. “And so I had to step in and handle it,” Tom said. “I hired who I thought was the best criminal defense attorney in town . . . and we went to Family Court expecting it to be a first offense . . . but they didn’t fool around with it. And much to everybody’s shock, we had a very strange judge. He was sentenced to Ferris School.”

  Tom had hired Jack O’Donnell, an old friend, but it hadn’t done much good in saving Gerry from being locked up. Marguerite was horrified at the thought of her baby going to such a place and she begged Tom to intervene. He managed to get his brother out of what was basically a reform school by agreeing to intensive psychological counseling for Gerry. Tom himself would have to drive his little brother to the appointments, although it “took a big chunk out of my days.”