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

by Ann Rule

  Anne Marie did not expect to see Tom the next week, since he would be in Canada for the law seminar. It may have been a relief for her not to listen for the phone, wondering if he was going to start the come-here, go-away, come-here discussions again. She knew he had gone away, at least for a time.

  Chapter Ten

  THAT APRIL OF 1994, when Tom told Anne Marie that he wanted to continue seeing her, he was hardly a man alone. Not only did he have a wife, but Debby MacIntyre had been his mistress for almost twelve years. Tom had made Debby understand that his marriage was unhappy, but divorce wasn’t even a consideration. “I’m miserable in my marriage,” he told her in a soft, hopeless voice, “but I can’t leave my kids. You know that, Deb.”

  Of course she did. From the way Tom described his situation, she pictured him living a life of quiet desperation. Kay was a truly nice person, but she and Tom were so different, and Debby had seen for herself how he doted on his girls. It would break Tom’s heart to have to walk away from his four daughters.

  Debby had been caught in an unhappy marriage and she had escaped—but then, she had her children with her. She couldn’t even imagine what it would have been like to live away from them. She made sure their father saw them as often as he liked. Victoria and Steve needed their father, too, and she and her ex-husband had worked it out. They saw him every other weekend and stayed with him every Wednesday night.

  “Tom loved his girls,” Debby recalled. “I thought he would do anything for them.” She could empathize with that; she would do anything for her children.

  Tom was a highly organized man and he liked things to move smoothly, with chores and events fitting neatly into the time slots assigned to them. From his comments to Debby, it sounded as though his home wasn’t run as efficiently as he would have liked, although she knew that it was Kay who saw that the girls got to school, to their games, to doctors’ appointments, to birthday parties. She couldn’t have been doing that bad a job, but how could anyone know what went on behind the walls of someone else’s home? Tom made an appearance at the girls’ games and meets, but his career rarely allowed him to attend an entire event, while Kay was always there.

  Debby’s own life revolved around her children—who were now in junior high and high school at Tatnall—her job, and Tom. He needed her to be his friend and confidante as well as his lover; and she tried to always be there for him, to listen to whatever was on his mind and provide a safe haven from the pressures of his world. She had been with him through his years with the city, through the time he advised Governor Castle, and now when he was back in private practice. He was so pressed for time and usually late for the times they had arranged to be together, sometimes hours late. But Debby always waited for him and never chided him, even though she was often terribly disappointed.

  In all the years of their relationship, Debby had never once given Tom an ultimatum or told him she wanted to end their affair. She was so afraid that he would leave her, and she could not imagine her life without him.

  Two or three times, Tom had alluded to some woman—a secretary at his office, she believed—who had taken too much for granted, pushed too hard. Debby thought that relationship had gone on a year or two before she came into Tom’s life; she recalled her ex-husband saying something about Tom’s having trouble over a woman. It hadn’t mattered to her then, and she hadn’t listened closely. But she knew Tom was like quicksilver; if anyone tried to trap him, he would be gone.

  “I never rocked the boat,” she remembered. “I always wanted to please him, because I wanted his praise. I wanted him to love me. I thought that was the way I had to be for him to keep loving me. There were a number of times in our relationship over the years when I knew that it was wrong, I knew it was going nowhere, and that I had to try and break it off, and I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the strength to do it. I never threatened to leave him. I never, ever could say that. I was always afraid that he would leave me.”

  And she could not have borne that. One bleak October, he had left her for several weeks, but he had come back. Debby had made her peace with the way her life had turned out. “I finally came to some level of happiness,” she said, “thinking, Look at the good he’s brought me. Look at how he’s made me feel about myself. He’s always there for me.” If she and Tom were not meant to be together as a couple free to walk in the bright sunlight of public awareness, at least she knew she was special to him. And from the time she was a very little girl, all Debby had ever longed for was to be special to someone.

  One of the topics that raised Tom’s ire was Tatnall School. Debby had long since moved up into an administrative job. She ran the before- and after-school programs, and for five years the entire summer program. She was very efficient, worked long hours, and took pride in her work at Tatnall. But Tom often pointed out that she worked too much overtime and got too little pay and respect. He told her that she was always letting people walk all over her. “You are everybody’s doormat,” he said.

  “You’re right,” Debby would agree. “I do let people walk on me.”

  It became a self-fulfilling prophecy for her. Every time he told her she was too wishy-washy, she felt weaker and her achievements seemed less important. “And he treated me like a doormat,” Debby recalled. “He admitted it. He said, ‘Sometimes, I treat you like a doormat. I don’t mean to, Debby. You know that—but every once in a while, I do.’ ”

  In truth, he almost always treated her that way. As much as she loved him and depended on him, Debby often had the feeling she wasn’t smart enough, attractive enough, or worldly enough. Even though she did her best to anticipate his moods, she often irritated Tom because she had guessed wrong about what her response should be.

  Twelve years should have made her a little confident in their relationship—but she never was. Tom told Debby often that she shouldn’t be waiting around for him. She needed to have a life of her own and she should be seeing other men. He suggested that she go to bars and pick up men, and he seemed to have no jealousy about any physical relationship that might ensue. Rather, he told her he would love to hear about what she did with other men. When he talked like that, Debby felt sick. It was the ultimate rejection. He didn’t want her and was ready to palm her off on other men. Worse, he wanted the details. She tried to tell herself that he didn’t really mean it.

  But he did. There had been incidents that she tried never to think of. Sometime in the late eighties, after they had been together for several years, Tom encouraged Debby to accept a date with a former classmate who was in town from New England. “I would do what he wanted to compromise what was best for me lots of times,” she said ruefully.

  This was one of those times. At Tom’s instigation, Debby invited the man home and there was a sexual encounter, again following Tom’s instructions. Indeed, he was watching from the window. She didn’t understand why he would want to watch her with another man, or her own acquiescence in his voyeuristic fantasy. She tried to forget it had ever happened.

  About five years later, Tom set up another situation designed to end in a ménage à trois. Debby had been surprised when Tom showed up at her house with Keith Brady in tow one evening. Keith was the attorney who had replaced him as adviser to Governor Castle, four years younger than Tom and a tall, handsome man, with black hair. Tom had confided in Keith about his own extramarital affairs, telling him in particular about Debby and describing her as “a wonderful person I care very much about.”

  Tom and Keith had been golfing. They had had some drinks at the country club, and Tom poured several more at Debby’s house. It was an encounter orchestrated by Tom. At some point, he signaled to Debby and they moved to another room, where they made love. And then Tom asked her to approach Keith and do what was necessary to draw him into a sexual encounter. She didn’t want to do it, but like an automaton, Debby did as Tom asked. “I was afraid if I didn’t do it,” she said later, “he’d get angry and leave. Leave me.”

  At Tom’s insistence, De
bby performed oral sex on his friend, but Keith was as embarrassed as she was and failed to get an erection. It was a humiliating incident that would come back to haunt both of them. They tried to pretend nothing had ever happened between them. But Tom knew. It gave him a little more power over both of them.

  On another occasion, Tom urged Debby to have lunch with Keith and then bring him back to her house and seduce him so that he could watch. She did have lunch with Keith, but neither of them wanted to take it any further than that, although Keith went on being Tom’s friend—at least nominally.

  Tom’s sexual appetites had always been, at the least, unusual, and Debby had always tried to accommodate him. She had had little sexual experience before her years with Tom and wasn’t sure if he was asking for more than most men would. They were very open with each other, and she felt somewhat secure in believing that, for him, she was the female in his life, and that she pleased him.

  Both Debby and Keith Brady were mortified by their one intimate encounter, but there was no reason to think anyone would ever know about it. Keith went on to become the second in command in the Delaware Attorney General’s Office. He was married and had children. Debby wondered sometimes why Tom urged people out of their safe worlds and put them into positions where they were caught in horrible, unforgettable acts. Maybe it made him feel stronger. He often told Debby that she had no self-esteem, railed at her for being so deficient, and then set about tearing her down. When she protested, Tom backed off and insisted he was only trying to help her.

  After so many years, Tom and Debby still spoke on the phone a couple of times a day, and they were together on Wednesday nights. They had a favorite song, “Sailing,” by Christopher Cross. Maybe they liked it because it made love sound so easy, without any of the complications that it had in the real world. They couldn’t be seen together in Wilmington, but Tom took Debby to dinner in restaurants in Little Italy in Philadelphia. His favorite was a place called Villa d’ Roma. “We never ran into anyone we knew,” she recalled. “It was ‘our spot.’ It was very small, but the food was good, and I loved going there.”

  Tom was obsessed with hiding their relationship, and Debby thought it was because of his prominence in city government and because he wanted to protect Kay and his girls. Of course, it was unthinkable that they could go out to dinner in Wilmington. Every time they met accidentally in Wilmington, they had to pretend. As far as Debby knew, even Tom’s brothers had no idea that he was involved with her.

  Tom had never taken Debby on a real trip. When she traveled, she was alone with her children. She was surprised and delighted when he asked her if she would like to go to Montreal with him in April 1994. There was a law seminar he had to attend, but he assured her he would have a lot of free time, too. Tom explained that she couldn’t actually go with him, of course, on the flight; they would have to travel separately. “He went up first,” Debby recalled, “and then I came up. I lied to my family as to where I was going, which I’m not proud of. But it was wonderful. I loved Montreal. We walked all over—we had a really good time.”

  In all of their years together, Debby had never been with Tom for two days in a row. Now they were in another country, another world, and she knew he wasn’t going to go away in a few hours. “It was so wonderful,” she said.

  Coming home, there was a reservations mix-up, which meant they had to fly back to Philadelphia on the same plane. But Tom was very concerned that they might be seen together on the flight. “He told me there was a woman lawyer there whom he knew,” Debby said, “and he didn’t want to chance her seeing us together, so I had to sit in another seat, far away from him. It made me feel like, What am I doing here, anyway?”

  The flight from Montreal was so lonely that Debby had trouble hanging on to the blissful memories of their time together in Montreal. But when they got to Philadelphia, Tom asked her if she wanted to go out to dinner before they drove to Wilmington, and that made her feel better. He took her to a new place—the Panorama. It was an upscale Italian restaurant, very intimate, with the ceiling and walls draped in swaths of cloth so that it seemed as if patrons were dining in an elegant and sensuous boudoir. The maître d’ said there was just one table for two left, right near the kitchen, and led them ceremoniously to be seated.

  The food was delicious and their meal was very pleasant. Debby felt so much better about the trip; Tom wasn’t brushing her off as if she was only some woman he’d spent a couple of nights in bed with and couldn’t wait to be rid of. They smiled and talked, and it was OK again.

  And then it was all ruined when they started the half-hour drive to Wilmington and Debby realized that she had left her purse on the floor beneath the table. They were on the south side of the Philadelphia airport before she reached for her purse and couldn’t find it. She froze, certain that Tom would be absolutely furious with her when she told him.

  And he was. “I can’t believe you could do something so stupid!” he snarled. “So unbelievably dumb.”

  She begged him to let her call the Panorama on the cell phone and he nodded, his jaw set.

  “And they had my pocketbook,” Debby said. “So we turned around and went back. And I apologized profusely. By that point in our relationship, I was constantly apologizing to him about something. I was sorry . . . sorry . . . sorry. I was sorry for things that I didn’t even need to be sorry for, and I was probably getting on his nerves. He made me feel like such an idiot. He was so verbally abusive that night.”

  It was not a propitious ending for their trip, and Debby got home feeling horrible. “He was obsessed with keeping our relationship secret,” she said, “and I had left my purse with all my ID in it for anyone to see.”

  She would have felt far worse if she had known that Tom was in the first stages of an affair with a woman seventeen years younger than she was. But it had never even occurred to her that there might be any other woman in his life besides Kay. Debby believed that she and Tom had achieved such a degree of intimacy that they were almost closer than a married couple. However cruel he might be when he was in a mood, she could always take comfort in the knowledge that Tom had chosen her to have an affair with out of all the women he encountered. He might get angry with her, but he always came back.

  ANNE MARIE was seeing Bob Conner for psychological counseling every week that spring of 1994, although she didn’t want anyone to know. For that matter, few who knew her would have ever believed that she needed any therapy. She was consummately professional at her job, fun to be around, and she looked great. Her laughter often bounced off the walls of the governor’s outer office; it sounded like the laughter of a woman without a trouble in the world. She had a ribald sense of humor and could scatter profanity through her conversation and still look like an angel.

  Sometimes she dropped into O’Friel’s Irish Pub. She would stand near the bar and bellow “Keveyyy!!!” at the top of her lungs, and then laugh when the handsome redheaded proprietor popped his head out of the back room. With its brick walls and wooden floors, O’Friel’s might as well have been located in Dublin as in Wilmington; it was the headquarters for so many people in Wilmington, Irish and Italian alike. Many major political decisions had been hammered out at O’Friel’s. For the Faheys, though, it was more like home. Anne Marie felt completely at ease there, and she should have because they all loved her.

  Ed Freel liked to tease Anne Marie because she was working for the governor. “We got you after all, Annie!” he said. “You said you’d never work for us—but we got you.”

  “I said I wouldn’t work here, Ed,” she replied with a grin. “And I’m not serving beer, now am I?”

  But for Ed Freel, the governor’s office was like the family business, too, and he was pleased that Anne Marie was doing so well. She was like a little sister to him and Kevin and Bud. They had known her since she was such a little girl, and now she was five feet ten, all grown up and beautiful.

  None of them knew how unhappy and anxious Anne Marie was behind her
wide smile. She hid it so well; she had been hiding her true feelings for most of her life. She had constructed a facade that made her seem comfortable with bawdy comments, an earthy young woman who wasn’t easily shocked. Nothing could have been further from the truth. She was not nearly as worldly-wise as she liked to pretend, but she never batted an eye in public. Despite her belief that she was overweight at 133 pounds, she had a lovely figure. And yet she worried about every ounce she put in her mouth.

  Bob Conner summed up his sessions with Anne Marie in scribbled notes that were typically hard to decipher. But the same themes popped up again and again: “Codependency issues.” “Turns to conflict to avoid depression.” “Emotionally fragile—feels powerless.” “Self-esteem issues.” “Struggling with deeply held fear of abandonment, sense of aloneness, but with a core of ‘unlovedness.’ ” “So frightened of hurting others.” “Fear of rejection.”

  The Anne Marie she showed to the world was the envy of a lot of young women, who viewed her as having a wonderfully exciting life. Inside, she was fighting to rid herself of the self-image imprinted by her father’s drunken taunts. But she had had the guts to seek out help and to peel the scabs away from her blocked memories and deal with her problems. She had a great deal of inner strength and she was making progress. With Bob Conner, whom she trusted completely, Anne Marie was learning ways to assert herself, beginning to believe that she was a good person, a smart person, and that she deserved to be happy.

  And to be loved. She wanted so much to be loved.

  JILL MORRISON and Anne Marie went to the Tour Du Pont bicycle races at Rodney Square in May of 1994 and watched the cyclists who had gathered from all over the world compete. Afterward, they attended a party in the old Holiday Inn. One floor of the garage was closed off so the riders could bring their bicycles, and band music bounced off the low ceilings. It was a chance to meet the cyclists, and Anne Marie looked for some of the Spanish-speaking competitors. She tried to make them feel comfortable in a country where they didn’t speak the language, surprising them with her fluent Spanish. She loved showing off her Spanish.