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

by Ann Rule

  “Who? Louie?”

  “No. Tom. If I took the job, it would be Tom who was controlling where I worked, and where I lived. Everything.”

  Jill would always remember how many times the word “control” came up in Anne Marie’s conversation. Thirty-one thousand dollars a year wasn’t a lot of money, and they did have to pay for their own apartments—but they were free. Once they walked out of the Carvel building, they could do what they wanted and go where they wanted. The way Anne Marie talked about the job with Louie Capano—a job Tom had obviously arranged—made it seem like she would be a prisoner.

  Jill had said so many times over the last few months, “I think Tom’s in love with you.” And Anne Marie had always shaken her head and smiled. Now Jill figured love had nothing to do with it. Annie was always doing things that other people wanted her to do, giving up little pieces of herself to make other people happy. But there was something almost scary about Tom Capano.

  After their drink, they split up so they could go home and change for a dressy affair that was part of the continuing bike race festivities. Jill was supposed to pick Anne Marie up, but when she called to say she was on her way, Anne Marie didn’t answer the phone. “I kept calling,” Jill said, “and it got to the point where I was angry—like, we had plans—but I was concerned, too, and I called every fifteen minutes.”

  And then, despite Anne Marie’s protestations that she would not let Tom Capano run her life, Jill knew what had happened. She knew that Annie was with him. She didn’t return any of her calls that night.

  Deliberately playing detective, Jill called Tom the next morning on some pretext of campaign business, and then casually asked if he had seen Anne Marie that morning. He said, “She left for the beach very early this morning.”

  Well, that was clear enough. Jill had been right. And she didn’t want to be right.

  Chapter Thirteen

  DESPITE HER CHAFING AT the invisible bonds that went with seeing Tom, Anne Marie stayed with him. In her view, she was the only thing that kept him from falling into a pit of despair, and she couldn’t desert him. If he was sometimes possessive and unreasonable, she blamed it on the burdens he carried. She had made a pledge to be there for him, and she honored it. While the world saw Tom as powerful and capable, she knew that he was a lonely man full of pain. He conveyed that to her often enough, whenever she did something he disapproved of.

  There were many things that Tom didn’t like. He hated her stuffy little apartment and reminded her often that she could have had a lovely apartment for free in north Wilmington if she had only accepted Louie’s job offer. He told her how to dress. Tom didn’t like to have her wear clothing that was too red, too bright, too tight, too short.

  “You look like a whore when you dress like that,” he said frequently. As if a woman whose face was like a blossoming rose with a thick, clean-smelling halo of hair could look like a prostitute. If he hadn’t said it with such venom, it might have been funny. But Tom was never funny when he criticized Anne Marie.

  Too late, she realized she had told him too much about herself. He knew she thought her legs were too big, and that she hated having large breasts. He knew she starved herself when she was frightened, and he knew all about her brother Mark, her searing memories of her childhood, her work at the governor’s office, and all the secret things she worried about. He could use them against her if he wanted.

  Tom particularly disapproved of Anne Marie’s friends and failed to see why she felt it necessary to spend so much time with them. Didn’t he take her to wonderful places that made evenings out with the girls pale by comparison? And of course, he did; they went to Philadelphia for meals at Le Bec-fin, Victor’s, the Saloon, Pamploma, and Panorama. As always, he selected the wine and the entrée. Claiming he was hopeless at figuring percentages (an odd deficiency in a bond lawyer), he routinely slid the check across the table to Anne Marie so that she could calculate the tip. He let her sign his name to the credit card slip.

  Anne Marie’s overwhelming concern about her weight continued; it was impossible for her to enjoy food, no matter how much it cost. Going out to eat was stressful for her, but Tom enjoyed dining out in fine restaurants, so, of course, that was what they did.

  THE summer of 1995 was almost upon them, and Kim Horstman and Anne Marie were planning to rent a communal house once again. There had never been any question that they would. But it would take at least a half dozen partners to swing a place at the shore; rents were going up. Anne Marie talked with a man in the governor’s office who had located a house to rent, and he figured they would need five other men and maybe three or four women besides Kim and Anne Marie.

  That was fine with Kim; it was a big place, and not everyone went down to the shore every weekend. But Anne Marie was very worried. She said Tom wouldn’t want her to stay in a house at the ocean where there would be other men present. “I think he would be very much against that,” she told Kim.

  Kim stared at her. They always met men at the shore; that didn’t mean they were going to sleep with them, or even date them. Anne Marie admitted then that Tom had “flat out” said that he didn’t want her in any house at the shore.

  The two old friends arranged to join in the rental in New Jersey anyway, but the summer was basically ruined. They rarely went. And Kim took to calling Tom “Capano,” refusing to add the “Mr.”

  “We were not that comfortable in that house,” she recalled, “because we didn’t know any of the other people. But also there were fights about it between Capano and Annie. They would fight because she was going to this house at the shore, and we didn’t know where we would be sleeping—or if we would be sleeping on the floor. And there were five or six single guys at the house, so it was always a problem for her because she was given a hard time from Capano.”

  They had originally met at the shore and all their other summers had been wonderful, but Kim and Anne Marie found that nothing seemed to be working out in the summer of 1995. It was because of Tom, of course; he was effectively caging Anne Marie. Even so, the two old friends made a valiant effort to spend the first weekend of June at the ocean. They agreed to meet at a mutual friend’s house on the way down, and Anne Marie promised she would be there at noon on Saturday.

  Kim remembered that day. “She wasn’t there at one, and she wasn’t there at two. And I kept calling her and I would get her answering machine. And finally, at maybe four or five, she called me at the Fords’ house to say that Capano had just left, and they had had a huge fight because he did not want her going to the shore. And he brought over wine and salmon, and things for her apartment, and then this fight ensued and she was too exhausted to make the trip.”

  Kim tried to understand what Anne Marie was going through. Anyone on the outside looking in would have told her to flee, but it wasn’t that easy. “She was in love with him,” Kim said, “but she was confused. Because he was married with four children, she didn’t think the relationship could really go anywhere.”

  That wasn’t the only reason Anne Marie vacillated about Tom; she had seen how he felt about his four daughters, and she knew she would always come in a distant second to them in Tom’s mind. And there was their age difference. It might have seemed romantic at first to be courted so passionately by an older man, but now that he had crowded her into a tiny world where she could scarcely breathe, she saw how little they really had in common. He wasn’t interested in socializing with her friends, and she had trouble visualizing him with them, anyway. Tom tried very hard to be in sync with music, fashion, and the patois of people in their twenties, but he often came off only as trying too hard. He belonged to a different generation and it showed. But most of all, Anne Marie knew that her family would be extremely upset at the idea of their little sister and Tom Capano.

  On the other hand, Tom was still pressing her with his arguments about why she should forget everyone but him. He “was buying her,” Kim said. “He was explaining to her what he could offer her in this
life. He could offer her anything she wanted, so that confused her—about the social status, and whether this was something she really wanted, having the comfort level of not having to worry about money anymore.”

  And that was a far bigger thing for Anne Marie than it would be for most young women. She had always worried about money, about where she would live, and even about what she would eat. She was still the little girl who had been afraid that her classmates would look down on her if they knew she lived in a house without lights and hot water.

  Tom kept Anne Marie continually off balance. When he was pleased with her, he listened sympathetically as she spoke of her fears and insecurities, and he told her how wonderful she was. He offered her a world without any anxieties. But when she displeased him, he could be as cold as death.

  Then again, he could be so nice. Jackie Binnersley Steinhoff, recently married, was hoping to open a coffee shop in Wilmington in the late summer of 1995, a place where she could serve breakfast and lunch five days a week to the business community, and do a lot of catering, too. Jackie told Anne Marie that she wasn’t too comfortable dealing with the legal aspects and wasn’t sure how to incorporate. Anne Marie mentioned Jackie’s problems to Tom and he immediately offered to help her. He and Anne Marie met with Jackie over lunch and Tom gave Jackie advice on everything from her menu to leasing versus purchasing equipment. He told her the risks inherent in running a small business and did all the paperwork for incorporation without charge. He even promised to send catering business her way since his law firm was right next door to where Java Jack’s would be. Jackie realized he had given her thousands of dollars’ worth of legal help for free.

  She was grateful for Tom’s advice, but a little put off by the way he seemed to take over. “When I opened in August, he was adamant about it—he wanted to be the first customer,” Jackie said. “He wanted to come down and set up a time to go over my books, which I felt was a little odd—a little invasion of my privacy.”

  But then she remembered that he had been so nice about giving her legal help for nothing, and Jackie wasn’t as annoyed. He was being Tom; he didn’t seem to have the same sense of personal boundaries that most people had—especially with young women. One habit of Tom’s really bothered Jackie; he always kissed her on the mouth when he walked into Java Jack’s every morning at nine, and she hated that. She tried to be in the kitchen or wearing gloves to avoid the contact. But that was just the way he was; he was one of those people who seemed unaware that they were invading others’ personal space.

  IN July 1995, as Tom put more and more pressure on Anne Marie, she started seeing another counselor. Bob Conner had been dead for six months and she knew she needed help—although it wouldn’t be easy trying to bond with another therapist. She began seeing Gary Johnson every other Tuesday afternoon. She was starting all over, but it would be a long time before she would feel safe enough to discuss the married man who had taken over her life.

  Tom continued to maintain his links to Anne Marie’s girlfriends. If he couldn’t locate her or was worried about some aspect of their relationship, he was quick to call Jackie, Kim, Ginny, Jill, or any other of her friends to glean information. She was such a private person that it sometimes set Anne Marie’s teeth on edge to know that he was doing that.

  In July, Tom discovered a new way to keep in touch with Anne Marie. He began to send E-mail through the computer system at Saul, Ewing, Remick and Saul to her desk at the governor’s office. His first try took six days to draw a response, but finally Anne Marie sent back a short reply. It was another connection, one that would have been impossible a decade before. He sent her trivia questions and she answered, usually correctly. It was all very light on the surface, unless she failed to respond as quickly as he liked. Along with his calls, his surprise drop-ins at her apartment, and their dates, his E-mail helped Tom to keep track of Anne Marie. Tom had no idea that E-mail had any life beyond the immediate time it was sent and retrieved; he knew virtually nothing about computers.

  AT first, Anne Marie hadn’t realized that Tom was manipulating her emotions as if she were a puppet—but as much of a romantic as she was, she was also very bright. She had begun to see a frightening pattern. Tom had done so many nice things for her, but there always seemed to be a payback. The biggest payback was her loss of freedom and being aware that she could not make even a simple plan to do something with her friends without Tom’s entering into it. In the summer of 1995, she pondered more and more often about what her life would be like without Tom. But even as she did, she felt disloyal—torn between gratitude for all he had done for her and her own need not to be controlled.

  Even so, when Tom told Anne Marie he was taking her on a vacation in August of 1995, she tentatively agreed to go. He had chosen a luxury resort in Virginia called the Homestead. “The Homestead is the kind of place I always wanted to go to,” Tom recalled. “But my kids are beach people. It’s in the mountains; therefore it’s cooler. It’s something I had wanted to do, but also to be with her alone and away from everything, for . . . four days . . . we went [there] to work on our relationship.”

  Tom repeated a pattern that Anne Marie had seen many times before. He had been insistent that she should go to Virginia with him, but a night or two before they were supposed to leave, he abruptly took back the invitation. He was very solemn when he told her why he had decided against going. And once more he said that he thought it was time for her to move on without him. “Therefore, I told her we should not be going to the Homestead,” he recalled. “We had a major discussion and she was very tearful, and she cried and cried and cried on my shoulder, [and said] that she wanted us to go and wanted us to work on our relationship.”

  His perceptions may have been skewed; Anne Marie was already thinking that it was time to move on. It’s questionable whether she really cried. She was an emotional woman, who might well have wept over the end of an affair. But as it turned out, it was not the end. Tom changed his mind again and they went to the Homestead after all.

  Tom remembered that they had had an idyllic time during their four days there. He said he had taught Anne Marie to play golf, and that they had massages every day and strolled around the grounds. He had prevailed upon her to dance with him, because he loved to dance, although she hated it. She didn’t think she was graceful enough and she felt foolish, but he got his way as he usually did.

  On the drive back from Virginia, Tom took the long way home—even though she hated car trips. “She said herself she wasn’t very good company in a car,” he said. “She liked to look at the scenery . . . and on the way down, we really didn’t talk much. We just played tapes.”

  On the way back to Delaware, they did talk. Anne Marie carefully pointed out how many things they differed on. It began with something as prosaic as the fact that she liked Pepsi and Tom drank Coca-Cola. She began to write down their differences, calling it the “Coke/Pepsi list.” He thought it was all in good fun, and it may have been. It may also have been a very subtle and safe way for Anne Marie to show Tom how ill suited they were for each other.

  In retrospect, she was probably trying to ease out of the hold Tom had on her. The list covered everything from food preferences and sleep habits to his being Italian and her being Irish. She was a Gen-Xer and he was a baby boomer; money bored him, and she was very conscious of every penny. For three pages, Anne Marie wrote down their differences in her distinctive hand with round letters and fancy capitals. And somewhere, hidden within the dozens of unimportant things, she noted very important things.

  “She wrote down that I’m academic,” Tom said, reading from the list a long time later as he was questioned by a friendly inquisitor. “She was nonacademic. . . . I was observant, and she described herself as ‘spacey.’ She wrote that I had a double standard and that she did not have two standards. I do have a double standard. I think there are things men should do and women shouldn’t. It’s that simple.”

  Anne Marie put down the thing about Tom th
at bothered her the most, sheltering it between the silly things. “She wrote down quite correctly that I’m a homebody,” Tom said. “I don’t like to travel and she loves to travel. She wrote down that I’m a control freak. She was in control of the pen, so she wrote that,” he said with a laugh.

  Tom was asked: “She didn’t write down anything opposite, under her name?”

  “No, she didn’t, which is interesting. . . . I remember getting into sort of a jocular argument about [that]. ‘How can you say I’m a control freak when you usually do everything you want?’ And she never wrote anything—I might have made some suggestions, you know, to complement that—but she never wrote anything down, and that’s odd, so to speak.”

  Anne Marie bent her head over the pages as Tom drove his Jeep Grand Cherokee toward Wilmington. She noted the things they did have in common: “Bread (from DiFonzo’s), Sinatra, music in general, National Public Radio, pasta, Italian food, movies on the VCR, reading, restaurants, finer things, children, wine, people . . .”

  It wasn’t nearly enough.

  And Tom’s memory of their trip as being idyllic warred with what Anne Marie told Kim Horstman. “She said it was a disaster,” Kim recalled. They had fought for most of the trip, and Anne Marie said she had just wanted to have it over with and get home.

  It wasn’t too long after that trip when Tom told Anne Marie that he was thinking seriously about leaving Kay. She was horrified. She knew she could not live with the responsibility of taking a man away from his wife. She was having enough trouble with her Catholic guilt about being involved with a married man. But mostly, she didn’t want to be with him any longer. He would put so many walls around her that she could never get out.

  In one of her moments of strength, Anne Marie told Tom that he had to make up his mind whether or not to divorce his wife based purely on what he wanted. He was not to consider her as part of the equation. If he left Kay, she warned, it couldn’t be because of her. He always nodded, but she wondered if he really heard what she was saying.