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

by Ann Rule

  Tom was now living in Louie’s mansion in Greenville—he had left Kay. He asked Anne Marie to stay with him for a few days while Louie was away. Why she agreed, only she knew. She may have viewed it as a way to talk with him and to somehow extricate herself gently from their relationship. Anne Marie was enchanted with Louie’s house, the grounds and pool, but she was sorry she had come. Tom didn’t want to talk about detaching. And he most definitely did not want to change their relationship.

  She was trying to separate herself from him, but she didn’t know how to do it. Anne Marie felt sorry for Tom because he seemed so unhappy, and she’d been there to listen to him complain about his life—but she realized now that she had been led into something she could never have imagined. Everything had happened much too fast and it seemed to Anne Marie that in whatever direction she turned, Tom was there blocking her path, hemming her in. She began to be a little frightened of him, although she might have been hard put to give a name to her fear.

  Anne Marie had had relationships with men before, and many men had left her bereft because they weren’t ready to make a commitment. But now she was caught in something that she couldn’t understand. Being with Tom was like being in a carnival house of mirrors. Things kept changing. Just when she thought she was perceiving something one way, the light shifted and it became something else. And what seemed to be an exit or an open space was really only a cramped hallway with no way out.

  ONE of the friends Anne Marie had made in Governor Carper’s office was Siobhan Sullivan, the young state trooper who helped to provide security for the governor. Attractive, tall, and slender, with sun-streaked hair, Siobhan had been a basketball star before she joined the Delaware State Police. Anne Marie had introduced her to Tom at a function at Woodburn, the governor’s mansion, and Siobhan noticed then that the two of them seemed to be very good friends. Anne Marie often had tickets to concerts or sports events and Siobhan would tease her, saying, “Tell me where you got those,” and it was usually Tom who had bought the tickets.

  Tom was such a familiar figure in Delaware political circles that no one noticed how often he called or dropped by the governor’s suite on the twelfth floor of the Carvel building. Siobhan’s position made her a little more curious than most people and she asked Anne Marie about him more than once. “She always said he was one of her best friends—and that they talked occasionally.”

  By September of 1995, Siobhan became aware that Anne Marie’s friendship with Tom had frayed somewhat. He had begun to leave calls on Siobhan’s pager, which surprised her a little since she didn’t know him very well. “He would ask me if I wanted to go out for a beer, always when I got done work that night with the governor. He knew I coached basketball and wanted me to help his kids, coach them.

  “One night, he was quite insistent. He wanted to know if I wanted to go get a beer and talk about basketball. I said I’d had a long day and needed to get home.”

  Tom asked Siobhan if she had spoken to Anne Marie during the day, and then said, “She’s really mad at me.”

  “You have to just let her be, Tom,” Siobhan answered.

  “You know I left my wife and I’m just really lonely right now.”

  Siobhan tried to avoid a discussion about Anne Marie’s personal business by pointing out that working in the governor’s office sometimes left people stressed out. He would not be sidetracked. “Siobhan, that isn’t my fault. I tried to get Annie to take the job I set up with my brother, but she wouldn’t do it.”

  Siobhan knew about the job offer from Louie Capano, with the free apartment. Anne Marie told her that she had considered it—mostly because working in the governor’s office was very stressful, part of the job that Siobhan understood. “We had a lot of stress,” she said. “We probably had the most stress of anybody in the office. My stress would be safetywise, and Anne Marie’s stress level would be she had to make sure the schedule flowed correctly for the governor.”

  It was clear to Siobhan that Tom was checking up on Anne Marie, trying to find out where she was and who she was with. As it happened, Siobhan didn’t know. When she saw Anne Marie after the weekend, she mentioned that Tom had called her and paged her. “He was looking for you.”

  This was obviously not welcome news and Anne Marie’s cheeks flushed. Her usually cheerful voice was angry as she looked at Siobhan. “He is a possessive, controlling maniac. I’m just getting tired of him!”

  Before Siobhan could say anything else, Anne Marie stormed out of her office and went back to her own desk.

  Anne Marie was the sunshine in the governor’s office, her laugh rising distinctively above all others. It was out of character for her to show her true feelings to anyone other than Siobhan, Ginny, or Jill, but occasionally others saw behind her mask.

  “I sometimes rode the elevator down with her,” a woman who knew her only by sight recalled. “There were times when she looked so forlorn, like a different woman. She didn’t know me, so maybe she let down her guard. I wondered what she could possibly have in her life to make her that sad.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  TOM HAD, INDEED, left his wife. Kay and their four daughters had been living alone in the bishop’s residence on Seventeenth since September 1995. After twenty-three years of marriage, he had walked out. Since Kay never discussed problems in her marriage, friends could only speculate about why she and Tom had separated. Their split was shocking to a number of people in Wilmington. Tom had always been the steady, dependable Capano brother, and there were precious few people who knew about his affair with Anne Marie or even his fourteen-year relationship with Debby MacIntyre. Anne Marie and Debby still did not know about each other, and Kay appeared to be unaware of Tom’s infidelities. He was so meticulous about his secret lives that, even in a town where gossip spread like wildfire, Tom had maintained his reputation as a man who always smoothed things over for other people when they made mistakes.

  While he looked for a house to rent, Tom lived for a month in a wing of Louie’s mansion in Greenville. He still visited his daughters, and if Tom and Kay had any angry discussions, they had them in private. Tom’s world went on as it always had, only he had more freedom to come and go. He still saw Anne Marie, and he still saw Debby.

  It had been many years since Debby had any hope that she and Tom might be together as man and wife. He hadn’t told her that he was leaving Kay—not until a few days before he actually left—and she was amazed and happy when he did. Their relationship had continued since 1982 with daily phone calls and physical intimacy at least one night a week and sometimes more often. Debby loved Tom; she had loved him for a very long time. She was in her mid-forties in 1995, although she hardly looked it. She was still trim and athletic and very attractive. She and Anne Marie—and Kay, too, for that matter—were physically three completely different types. Debby had short blond hair and was tiny, Anne Marie had long brown hair and stood close to six feet tall, and Kay was somewhere in between them in height, with olive skin and dark eyes and hair.

  All three were pretty, intelligent, and had good figures. They were all Catholic. But though they looked nothing alike, they all had something very important in common. Each was principally concerned with making other people happy before she thought of herself. The three women whom Tom encircled had all grown up in homes where alcohol caused problems that made children walk softly and try, at great lengths, to please and to appease.

  Had Tom known that, or had he just accidentally homed in on women who would sacrifice themselves to make him happy?

  DEBBY had never remarried. How could she when she was in love with Tom? Virtually the only dates she had with other men were those that he urged her to go on, and she hadn’t enjoyed herself. It wouldn’t be too long before both of her children were out of the house. She had devoted her life to Tom, her children, and Tatnall School. And now it was going to be all right, after all. “When he left Kay,” Debby said, “he told me that he needed eighteen months to be a bachelor, so he would
n’t embarrass Kay by marrying again right away. But then we would get married. That was one of the happiest times of my life.”

  As well it should have been. While they still didn’t date much in Wilmington—in deference to Kay—Tom was much more available to Debby. She could call him at any time, and he called her more often. They saw each other several times a week. After being alone for a dozen years, waiting in the shadows of Tom’s life, Debby felt secure now in the knowledge that they were going to be together forever. She had waited for him this long; another year and a half would be a cakewalk.

  SEPTEMBER 1995 was a watershed point for a number of people in Wilmington. Governor Tom Carper, who had no idea that Anne Marie was involved with one of the lights of the Democratic Party, was about to play Cupid. Carper, who was a contemporary of Tom Capano, had met a young man in the spring who seemed the perfect match for Anne Marie. The governor went up to Mike Scanlan and asked him if he was single. When he said yes, Carper asked him if he was “interested in meeting a nice young lady.”

  They both forgot about the discussion for a few months, until Carper had occasion to send a business letter to Scanlan. On the bottom of the letter, he jotted down Anne Marie’s name and phone number. Tom Carper cared a great deal for Anne Marie, and he approved of Mike Scanlan as a person. He had checked Mike out before he broached the subject with Anne Marie. Mike, thirty, was a senior executive vice president of the MBNA America Bank, the massive Delaware-based credit card company. He was in charge of community relations and responsible for MBNA’s grants to charitable organizations. In fact, his life since graduation from Georgetown University had been devoted to philanthropy of one sort or another. He had worked with troubled kids in Maryland and Florida, combining training and discipline in programs that used the sea as a teacher: aquatics, marine biology, oceanography. He was like a fish himself, a champion swimmer in the backstroke on the Georgetown swim team.

  Mike was Irish and Catholic, one of seven children, and grew up in Bristol, Rhode Island. His father worked for General Mills and his mother was a librarian. But Carper knew that all those attributes weren’t what really mattered on a blind date. Mike was six feet, two inches tall, and handsome, with a wide smile. He was a nice guy who owned his own home in Sharpley off the Concord Pike, he made more than $100,000 a year, and he was still single.

  After Governor Carper told Mike about Anne Marie, and even though he wasn’t any more enthusiastic about blind dates than she was, he considered calling her. “I kept it [her phone number] and thought about it for a while, and finally got up the guts and called her.” It was arranged that they would meet on Friday, September 15. The likely spot was O’Friel’s Irish Pub.

  Mike asked around a little bit about Anne Marie, but he really knew only about her family and where she’d grown up. He got to O’Friel’s first, and he was teased unmercifully by the regulars. Former mayor Bill McLaughlin chuckled as he sipped beer at the bar, enjoying the suspense. Mike was asking, “Is she a dog? Tell me, you guys,” and Kevin Freel was making faces. Someone fed Mike the dread line “She has a really nice personality,” and he looked a little pale.

  And then Anne Marie walked in, dragging Jill Morrison along for moral support, just as Mike had brought along his friend Dan Simons. And of course, she was beautiful. And funny, and obviously a good person. They were perfect for each other; anyone could see it.

  Anyone but them. They sat together and talked, but it was like being under a magnifying glass with everybody in O’Friel’s watching. Their conversation felt stilted and awkward, and Anne Marie had that old sinking feeling that the man she was with wasn’t interested in her. She called her brother Brian later and told him that she had really liked Mike Scanlan and found him attractive, but felt she’d been brushed off.

  She hadn’t. Eight days later, they had a real date and got along fine without an audience studying them. And by October, Anne Marie’s calendar was full of dates with Mike. Her entry for the fifteenth read, “1st Night w/Mike,” and that night marked the end of a long, hurtful relationship and the beginning of one that she had longed for most of her life. Anne Marie didn’t mean that they had spent that night together, but this was clearly the beginning of a love match.

  The governor could retire undefeated as a matchmaker—he had guessed right. Anne Marie and Mike could not have been better suited. She took him to visit her family and he fit in as if he’d always known them.

  Everyone was happy for them. Almost everyone.

  Tom Capano had to be the one who chose when to walk away from a relationship. He could not permit anyone to leave him. Debby had never tried; she was too frightened of losing him. Anne Marie had made futile efforts to break up with him, but he knew her trigger points so well that she never succeeded. All he had to do was tap into her guilt, her loyalty, her distress that she might have hurt him, and she was back. She had chafed at the bonds that he began to tighten early in 1995, but usually she exploded only when she caught him tracking her movements.

  And then Tom would pull his double-reverse-psychology dialogue, telling her that she deserved so much more than a backstreet romance with a married man, with him. “You deserve your own Patrick Hosey,” he would say, referring to Kathleen’s husband, who was, indeed, a wonderful husband to her sister. “You shouldn’t waste your time with me.”

  And it had always worked. It wasn’t until Anne Marie met Mike Scanlan that she realized what she did, indeed, deserve. And Mike seemed to be her “own Patrick Hosey.” She didn’t have to slip out of town to have dinner with a married man. She and Mike could go out in Wilmington and see their friends. She could dream of living in her own house and have children of her own instead of just house-sitting and baby-sitting. She didn’t have to tiptoe around Mike’s moods; he was even tempered and good natured. He was thirty; Tom was almost forty-seven.

  But meeting Mike meant that Anne Marie still had to keep secrets. She knew that Tom mustn’t sense how much she liked being with Mike. He had never meant it when he told her to leave him and find someone she deserved. Indeed, she didn’t even mention Mike to him for a long time. But even more than that, she dreaded the thought that Mike would ever know just how involved she had been with Tom. Mike was a devout Irish Catholic, and she hated to contemplate what he might think of her if he knew about Tom. Once she met Mike, Anne Marie avoided compromising situations with Tom. She had always been ashamed of being intimate with him, and that was over for good. And now she would have given anything if she could just blink her eyes and make that part of her life go away.

  THERE were other women who had tried to make their connection to Tom Capano just go away, only to learn that getting free of him was like trying to escape from quicksand. He had been married when they met him, too, but that hadn’t kept him from pursuing them. One of the most frightened of Tom’s women was Linda Marandola. She was twenty-five, beautiful in an earthy way, with a cascade of thick dark hair, when Tom first met her in the late seventies. Like Debby and Anne Marie, Linda had found Tom very nice and quite kind, but she had no interest in him as a man. At that time, she was engaged to be married.

  Linda was a legal secretary, working for one of Tom’s friends, attorney Ted Sprouse.* Sprouse and Tom both lived on West Seventeenth Street and they often socialized, and it had seemed natural enough to occasionally invite Linda to go along with them to lunch when Tom dropped into Sprouse’s office.

  Tom was five years older than Linda, but he always made an effort to draw her into their conversations and she liked him. When he showed up at Sprouse’s office one day and her boss couldn’t take time for lunch, Tom smiled and said, “I’ll just have to take Linda, then.”

  That was the beginning of their lunches together, and it was soon apparent that Tom was very attracted to her. If she was honest with herself, Linda would have admitted she felt a spark too—but she was engaged, and he was married. He called her office and her home often, urging her to go out with him. He offered her a job at his law firm, and sti
ll she declined. But then one night Linda was attending a bachelorette party at Galluccio’s Restaurant in Wilmington and she ran into Tom, who was there by himself.

  Before the evening was over, Linda and Tom had sex in his car in the parking lot of Galluccio’s. She was horrified by what she had done. “I felt so unfaithful,” she said a long time later. She never intended to be alone with him again, but Tom began calling her continually, begging her to have an affair with him. He was very persuasive, but Linda planned to be married—and she didn’t want an affair with another man.

  More than two years later, under remarkably similar circumstances, Linda did have intercourse with Tom again, and she had every reason to feel more regret than she had the first time she gave in to him. He showed up at her own bachelorette party, which took place shortly before her wedding. It was 1980, and they were once again at Galluccio’s. Somehow Tom had found out where she was. There was a great deal of drinking that night at Galluccio’s and Linda left with Tom. He took her to his own home on Seventeenth Street, and they had sex again. Where his wife was, she didn’t know—but he assured her there was nothing to worry about.

  Linda thought Tom was a really nice guy, particularly when he arranged for her and her bridegroom to move into a large apartment in the Cavalier complex. But she was resolute that she would not have sex with Tom again—not once she was married.

  Linda married her fiancé, but her wedding day was blighted when she saw Tom sitting in the church, his face unreadable. At the wedding reception after, Tom cut in on the bridal couple and whirled Linda away from her new husband. He whispered in her ear that his heart was broken, and he wished that she hadn’t gone through with her marriage because she was the love of his life. He didn’t mention that Kay was pregnant with their first child.