by Ann Rule
When Linda returned from her honeymoon, Tom wrote and called her, telling her that he loved her and still wanted her. He asked her to get divorced and said he wanted to divorce his wife so they could be together.
Linda had promised herself that she would never tell her husband about Tom Capano. She was horrified that Tom wasn’t at all deterred by her status as a married woman. He didn’t see any reason why they couldn’t continue to meet. Despite her telling him that she wasn’t interested, he called and wrote to her many times over the next few years. He still wanted her to come to work for him and he continually proclaimed his love for her.
His letters were bizarre—almost delusional—as he wrote of his belief that they were meant to be together. Yes, there had been two brief physical encounters and Linda was everlastingly sorry for that, but they had never had any kind of permanent commitment. He was still married and Linda knew now that his wife was about to have a baby. She couldn’t understand why he continued to stalk her. But he would not stop calling or writing.
When Kay Capano gave birth to their daughter Christy in August of 1980, Linda received a letter from Tom that frightened her. “He said that he wished it had been me who gave birth to his child, not Kay.”
Linda refused to see Tom, and she told him that hot summer of 1980 that she didn’t want him to call her anymore. That was when he turned vicious. He told Linda that if he couldn’t have her, he couldn’t stand to be around her. She would be sorry for rejecting him; he didn’t want her living or working in the same state with him. He said that he “controlled Delaware” and that she had no choice. She would have to quit her job and move. He set deadlines for when he expected her to do as he ordered.
When she did not, Tom tracked her. She started to get hang-up calls, fifteen or more a day. He phoned her to say he knew where she parked. At night, she had to walk past the law offices of Morris, James, Hitchens & Williams to get to her car and she knew he was watching her. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of Tom staring at her through the window. He was such a moody man, his eyes almost black and the planes of his face all shadowed as he watched her sullenly.
Frustrated and furious, Tom contacted a man he had represented in a landlord-tenant dispute. The man owed him, but Tom offered a barter instead; he had heard that Joe Riley was a wiseguy and he needed something done for him.
Meeting in Tom’s office, Riley, who had been convicted of threatening bodily harm to someone almost twenty years earlier, saw a man who looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week. Tom said he had “a problem” with a woman. He told Riley that he was “crazy” about a woman who wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He confided that he loved her and couldn’t live without her. She had told him off and he couldn’t eat or sleep thinking about it. He wanted Riley to find someone to knock her over the head or have her run over by a car. “I want her hurt very bad,” Tom said. He wanted her punished, physically punished. “Her name is Linda Marandola.”
Riley was in his sixties and had seen the other side of the law in his day, but he had never met wiseguy qualifications. His rap sheet was short and he had long since become a police informant. He was getting a little long in the tooth, and he wasn’t enthusiastic about breaking some poor woman’s legs.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” Tom said. “I haven’t told anyone about Linda.”
“Maybe you feel guilty about what you’re thinking of doing,” Riley said. He warned Tom that if they ever found out, the Bar Association wouldn’t look upon what he wanted to do very favorably.
“I can take care of that,” Tom said confidently.
It was September 1980, and Riley found himself a guest at Tom’s house, eating dinner with Kay and Marguerite. Kay had given birth to their first daughter only a month before. As far as the women knew, Riley was one of Tom’s political acquaintances; he brought a lot of people home to dinner.
Joe Riley didn’t say much, but he looked at Tom’s pretty young wife, his mother (a widow less than a year), and he asked himself what the hell the guy was thinking of. A few days later, he went to Tom’s office. “You got a nice wife, a nice home,” he began. “You sure you wanta do this thing?”
Tom said he was sure. He wanted to get even with Linda for rejecting him.
Riley believed he meant it, and he wasn’t about to be part of it. He went to a retired FBI agent, whom he had once worked for as an informant, and told him about what Tom Capano wanted. They agreed that Riley would be wired so he could tape Tom’s requests. Riley would always claim that he only wanted to knock some sense into the young attorney.
They met again, and as the tape wound, Tom repeated that he wanted “to hurt that bitch.”
“You want her killed?” Riley asked.
“No,” Tom answered. “I couldn’t live with that. Just badly beaten or run over.”
They left the matter at that, but first Riley agreed to make some threatening phone calls. Tom asked him to tape the calls so that he could listen to Linda’s response to the harassment. Riley was playing both ends against the middle; he apparently had no problem with making a few phone calls. There was money in it, and it wouldn’t really hurt the girl.
When Linda refused to quit her job or leave Delaware, Tom had flexed his muscles. Tom had arranged to have Linda and her husband evicted from the Cavalier Apartments. She began to believe that he did have great power, and it scared her enough to know that she didn’t want to live in “his” state any longer.
In that September of 1980, the young couple moved to Penns Grove, New Jersey, but Linda still refused to give up her job in Wilmington. Despite his threats, Tom did not own Delaware or even close to it. Not then—but he had connections.
It wasn’t that hard to find Linda’s phone number in New Jersey, and Riley did tape his first call to her. When Linda answered, he told her that he was someone who knew all about her trysts with Tom Capano. He was fully prepared to go to her husband and tell him that she had cheated on him, and with whom, if she didn’t come up with some money.
There was a long silence and then Linda said firmly, “I don’t know what you are talking about, sir,” and hung up on him.
That didn’t leave much on the tape for Tom to gloat over. But Riley had made many more tapes of Tom talking about the calls he wanted to have placed to Linda. He also had tapes he’d made of Tom’s conversation after he had lost track of Linda. (Hounded by Riley, Linda convinced her husband that they had to move again, although she was able to keep the real truth from him. He knew only that she was being harassed by a “former client” of her boss. They moved in with her father-in-law in New Jersey.)
Tom wanted to know every detail of how many times Riley had called Linda at home and at work, or her husband at his DuPont office. He took, apparently, grim satisfaction in knowing that Linda was being driven half crazy by her mysterious caller’s threats to expose her two intimate incidents with Tom to her husband.
But Tom didn’t know that Joe Riley had gone to the FBI agent–turned–private investigator with his tapes. And one of the private investigator’s clients was the Board of Censure of the Delaware Bar Association. It should, perhaps, have been the end of Toms’s career, but he received a slap on the wrist instead. A lot of women claimed then—and still claim—that Wilmington was a bastion of good old boys, and that Tom was in the thick of them. Perhaps. His pursuit of Linda Marandola was treated as a man/woman thing, and he walked away from it unscathed. No one thought to let Linda know that it was Tom who had been behind the threatening phone calls. All she knew was that the calls from the stranger had stopped.
It was, perhaps, one of the many times in Tom Capano’s life that helped him maintain his belief that he was above the law.
Sometime in 1981, Tom Capano finally lost interest in punishing Linda. Riley didn’t know why—but that, of course, was when Tom had fixed his gaze on another woman: Debby MacIntyre. But he didn’t forget Linda. Six years later, she was more than startled when he called her office
on business and “acted as if we were long-lost friends.” It was 1987 and Tom was chief of staff to the mayor of Wilmington. Linda was separated from her husband by then, and at loose ends. She wondered if Tom had really been as mean as he seemed; maybe he really had cared for her, and he had just been desperate when he wrote her bizarre letters and threatened her when she refused to see him.
Linda had no way of knowing, of course, that Tom had tried to have her legs broken and that it was he who had hired the blackmailer to phone her. Given their changed circumstances, Linda gave Tom a second chance and met him in the parking lot of a motel in New Castle. He seemed contrite about scaring her with his passion and she felt he had changed.
A month later, in April, they went to Atlantic City together for her thirty-third birthday. The trip started out well enough. Tom gave her a gold watch that he had had engraved with both their initials, and Linda was touched by the gesture. But their overnight trip turned ugly when Tom began to question her about other men. When Linda told him that she was dating a few men, he reacted with rage. It didn’t matter that he had been out of her life for six years and that they had just resumed dating. He seemed to expect her to remain celibate when she wasn’t with him. He called her a slut and a whore, and Linda wondered why she had ever thought he had changed. Grateful when she was safely back in Wilmington, she swore she would never have anything to do with Tom again.
In 1987, Tom had a wife and a mistress. And neither Kay nor Debby knew about his liaisons with Linda. If either of them had known about Linda Marandola’s ordeal, they might have made different life choices. But of course, they had no idea. Debby knew only what Tom had told her—that some legal secretary had tried to seduce him back in the late seventies.
Anne Marie had even less information. She was fifteen when Tom tried to order a hit on Linda Marandola, and in college when the disastrous trip to Atlantic City took place.
She had no idea how hard it could be for a woman to walk away from Tom Capano. Even in the mid-1990s while Anne Marie was dating Tom, she was unaware that he was pressuring another pretty young woman, Tedra Scopelli,* to let him set her up in an apartment. Tedra had small children and the offer of a free apartment was very tempting. Tom promised to take care of her, pay for her children to go to private school, and even arrange for her to have a job with his brother Louie.
But like Anne Marie, Tedra Scopelli had felt an invisible cage rising around her and declined Tom’s offer. But he still called her often enough to make her nervous.
Chapter Fifteen
IT WAS OCTOBER 1995, and soon after he and Kay separated, Tom had gone looking for a house to rent. He found one within easy walking distance of the home he had shared with his wife and four daughters. For that matter, the redbrick two-story house at 2302 North Grant Avenue was very close to Debby’s house on Delaware Avenue, and only a three-to-five-minute drive from Anne Marie’s apartment. It was in a very good neighborhood, across the street from his old boss, former governor Tom Castle.
Tom signed a six-month lease and agreed to pay rent of $2,000 a month for the unfurnished place. The house had been freshly painted a month or so before, and it had a double garage, five bedrooms, and five bathrooms, so that Christy, Katie, Jenny, and Alex could each have her own room. Living all alone may have seemed a little strange to Tom after being married for twenty-three years, but he intended that his daughters would stay over with him at least one night every weekend, and he planned to have visits from both Debby and Anne Marie, although, certainly, on different nights.
He didn’t want his daughters to be hurt by the separation, and he figured having them with him on weekends would help them all remain close. Their friends would be welcome, too; Tom thought of himself as a buddy and a counselor to all of the kids. As he liked to say, his daughters came before everything else in his life. “I’m an overprotective father,” he often commented.
Now more than ever, he would have to choreograph the comings and goings of his visitors. He couldn’t risk having his daughters show up when Anne Marie was there—or when Debby was visiting. It was all a matter of timing, and Tom had always been methodical about scheduling his life.
As for the family home, Tom dropped into the house on Seventeenth almost every day, walking in unannounced as if he still lived there. Even Debby told him she didn’t think that was fair to Kay. “I wouldn’t blame her for changing the locks,” she said.
“I own that house,” Tom answered. “I can go there anytime I want.”
IT was October 1995, and the curving roads that snaked by the Grant Avenue house were covered with red and yellow leaves. Most of the surrounding homes were made of stone or brick, and they had the patina of old homes purchased with old money. The ambiance suited Tom. He could not see himself in an apartment, although he could have lived free at the Cavalier complex.
Furnishing such a large house wasn’t a problem; Tom furnished it at no cost with stuff from some of the model units at Cavalier; and his brother Joey and his friends Brian Murphy and Keith Brady helped him move everything in. Tom had no knack at all for decorating; the white leather sectional and the entertainment wall with its huge television set took up most of the living room, blocking the fireplace and a doorway. A number of the pictures he hung were of dogs. He had a huge California king-sized bed in his room and another TV and VCR. The furniture in the girls’ rooms was a little spotty to start with, although they all had new mattresses and new bedding.
Tom furnished the great room off the kitchen with a couple of reclining chairs and a deep maroon–colored couch with an embossed pineapple pattern. Joey and Keith carried in the beige Berber carpet for that room. The house had lovely hardwood floors, and one condition of his lease was that Tom would cover at least 75 percent of them with rugs or carpeting. He put a low-cost Oriental-type rug in the living room, and planned to use the beige wall-to-wall carpet in the dining room/great room area. Located above the garage, that room was cozier and more convenient than the living room. There too, of course, Tom had a television set and a VCR.
When she first saw the way he had furnished his house, Debby looked at Tom’s handiwork and wisely kept her mouth shut. “It was awful,” she said. “But that was Tom. He had no taste in clothing, no taste in decorating, and he didn’t care. He thought it looked fine.”
They were in an interim time, Debby believed. They could move to her house or buy a house when their plans for the future were solidified, but for the moment, the Grant Avenue house was perfect for Tom’s needs. He made arrangements to have a cleaning lady come in every other week or so, mostly to vacuum and clean up after the girls.
TOM led both Debby and Anne Marie to believe that he had left his wife to be with them. Debby was happy about it, and Anne Marie was devastated. Even during the time when she was entranced with him, Anne Marie could not cope with the thought that she might break up such a sacred vow as marriage. She had fought against loving Tom because that went entirely against her Catholic beliefs.
But by September 1995, Anne Marie was a long way from being in love with Tom. She had been trying to get away from him for months, and he always seemed to draw her back as if he had an invisible wire that never let her get too far. She hated that. She hated his calling her friends to check on her, and his phone calls, his incessant E-mail, his drop-in visits. Sometimes she saw him driving by on the street below her apartment, probably checking to see if her car was there.
She had been disenchanted with Tom before September, but now Anne Marie had met Mike Scanlan, and she remembered what normal dating could be like. Without realizing what a Pandora’s box she was opening, Anne Marie told Tom that she didn’t want to see him any longer except on a platonic basis. Tom did not take it well. He would not accept it at first. Then he raged at her that he had broken up his home and left his wife—all for her. And now that he had done it, she was telling him she didn’t want him? How could she be so cruel?
It was no use arguing with Tom, or pointing out that she had
been fair. Anne Marie had told him he must never consider her when he made any decisions about his marriage, but he hadn’t listened.
Anne Marie confided in Kim Horstman once again, telling her that Tom was obsessive about her. He was calling her fifteen to twenty times a day, leaving messages on her answering machine that she had to talk with him. Why wasn’t she returning his calls? It was vital that they get together to work out their problems. And then there was his E-mail. Whenever she turned on her computer, Tom’s E-mail rolled down the screen. He was sending it into the governor’s computer system so he couldn’t say exactly what he meant, but Anne Marie caught the hidden messages there.
She hadn’t told Tom about Mike Scanlan, but with his connections all over New Castle County he had a way of finding out things. By October, Anne Marie and Mike were dating often. There were nine notations on her calendar: dinners, drinks, parties.
On October 8 the pope came to Baltimore, and Mike took Anne Marie to the Mass he held at the Camden Yards stadium. “I asked her in the beginning of that week,” Mike recalled, “and she was kind of surprised—thought I was joking—but she was pretty overwhelmed by it. She has an uncle, a monsignor, and she said several times, ‘Oh I wish James [were here]. James would love this!’”
After the pope’s visit, Anne Marie had even more dates with Mike. They went to Holidazzle, a fashion show fund-raiser for children with mental disabilities, and to a friend’s house for dinner afterward, on October 9. The Faheys usually got together for Sunday dinner, and soon Mike had a standing invitation. “And I usually made it,” he said with a grin. Anne Marie’s siblings were always vigilant where she was concerned, but Mike walked the Fahey gauntlet and was stamped approved.
Mike had his family for dinner the day after Thanksgiving, a tradition for him, and Anne Marie was invited. “I wasn’t sure she’d show up,” he said. “She knows how tough her family was on me, so I think it was—I thought it might be—‘get-back time,’ but she came over and had a great time.”