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

by Ann Rule

  But he was so much better at this game than she could ever know. Tom was far from alone, and hardly grief stricken. He and Debby were together often, and there was Susan Louth and a number of other women. And he still walked into Kay’s house as if he owned it—which, of course, he did. He was a sultan who wanted his harem to be available to him at all times. Even the women who had managed to elude him occupied his mind. That snowy January, Linda Marandola had received a phone call from Tom, “out of the blue. He said he was just looking through the phone book and he saw my number listed.”

  Linda had neither seen nor heard from Tom for nine years—not since the night in Atlantic City when he had given her the gold watch and then flown into a rage because she admitted she had been seeing other men. Once again, Tom acted as if nothing had ever gone wrong between them. He told Linda that he was separated from his wife, and spoke of how difficult Christmas had been for him because he wasn’t with his family. He sounded, in fact, like a whole different person from the jealous, crazy man she remembered.

  Things had been difficult for Linda, too; she had not remarried, was laden down with debt, and she was in her mid-forties now, not the ripe Italian beauty she had been in the seventies. Even so, she declined Tom’s invitations. Undeterred, he would call her continually from January until Valentine’s Day, asking her to have dinner with him. She turned him down, still cautious when she remembered how their meetings had always disintegrated into something frightening.

  Tom’s E-mail to Anne Marie continued unabated, with one excuse or another for why he needed to consult her. His daughter Katie’s friends were throwing a surprise birthday party for her at his house—what should he serve? Would she have dinner with him on Saturday, Sunday? Where had she been when he called at ten P.M.? Could they watch their favorite show—NYPD Blue—together, or even over the phone together? Wasn’t she tired of doing her laundry at Kathleen’s? She could do it at his house.

  During the first part of February, Anne Marie answered his E-mail very carefully: “I’m not sure what I am doing tonight. I may go out with some friends. If I have to babysit all day tomorrow, I think I will stay clear of Kathleen’s house this evening. AMF.”

  Or: “Sorry I did not call you back last night. I ended up talking to Nigel [an old friend] until 10:30, then wanted to see the last part of NYPD Blue, and of course I fell asleep and woke up at 1:30. Typical Annie . . . and I am supposed to have nachos and beer with my running partners at the gym this Thursday night after we work out.”

  Tom called in his daughter Katie to warm Anne Marie’s heart, and had her send an E-mail. He explained she was learning how to use the computer. Anne Marie responded—but to Katie’s message only. She had seen Katie but she didn’t know her.

  On February 7, Anne Marie ended her E-mail to Tom with what for her would have been agonizing frankness: “Tommy, I meant what I said on Sunday night about right now only being able to offer you my friendship, and if you cannot deal with that then I understand. I’m still very much confused, and I am trying to work out a lot of personal things on my own. . . . Annie.”

  Their words filled their computer screens, full of nuance, hidden pleas, gently stubborn refusals—and emotional danger for Anne Marie. Tom attempted to draw her into his separation settlement meetings with Kay’s attorneys, and still dictated whom she should see, even as friends, and what she should feel about them. Tom answered her early morning communiqué two hours later.

  Good Morning, Annie,

  Thank you for the e-mail. Yesterday was very harsh (divorce meeting with attorneys) and I am not sure how to react. I would like to talk to you about it. I’d like to have dinner with you on Saturday night. I need to talk to you about work, and I think you need to talk about Gary Johnson, etc.

  I understand that you’re confused and want to limit our relationship now to friendship. I love you enough to accept that and ask only that we treat each other kindly and honestly. I don’t want to lose you. I also think we shouldn’t lose the closeness we’ve developed. If nothing else, you know you can tell me your fears and hopes and rely on me to support you. I still want to be there for you, which, I guess, is the surest sign that I still love you with all my heart. You cannot do all of this on your own, Annie—no one can. Let me help. Please call me when it’s convenient. I’d like to know about Saturday. You look like you could use a good meal! And you have to admit I’ve always fed you well. Te Amo.

  Tom had just pushed most of Anne Marie’s buttons. It was not for nothing that he had always been the successful mediator. Cautiously, she answered only his comments about other people. She did need a good meal, but pressuring an anorectic was the surest way to make her eat less. She did not respond to his invitation for Saturday night.

  ONE night, Anne Marie saw Tom driving by her apartment, slowing down the black Jeep Cherokee and looking up at her windows. It seemed as if he was always somewhere just out of the sweep of her eyes. She was having nightmares about him. He was calling her at all hours, and she let the phone ring and ring until her answering system picked up.

  Her tension showed in her E-mail response to him on February 12.

  Good Morning Tommy:

  I am not sure if you tried to call me last night or not, my phone is all out of sorts. I called from here this morning, and my machine clicked on, but the sound was very faint. I have a call into the phone company . . . Anyway, enough of that BS. Tommy, you scared me this weekend. Starting with Friday, and all the calls you placed. It really freaks me out when you call every half hour. I truly understand how fragile you are these days, and I feel the same way. But . . . . . . . when you keep calling that way, it makes me turn the other way, and quite frankly shut down.

  . . . I’m sorry that I am nothing but a constant disappointment to you these days; it is not fair to you. I have an idea of what I need to do, I just cannot bring myself to start the process. I apologize for being such a horrible person to you. You are the last person on this earth I want to hurt!!!! Did you have dinner on 17th last night? I thought I saw your jeep parked in front of the white Benz out in front of the house last night when I was coming home from Kevin’s. Anyway, I know we have to talk today, but I wanted to start off with this e-mail.

  Anne Marie was telling him that she had seen him driving by, but in an oblique way. And she was capitulating about a face-to-face confrontation. It is probable that they did meet that day in February, but it was not noted in their E-mail. Indeed, there would be no electronic messages between them for several weeks. Whatever Anne Marie said to Tom apparently convinced him that she did not want to date him for the time being—and probably never.

  They had come to a crossroads in their relationship. It was the first freedom Anne Marie had had for a long time from Tom’s calls, visits, and messages.

  However, he wasn’t quite finished. On Wednesday, February 14, Valentine’s Day, two men ordered a dozen red roses for Anne Marie Fahey. The first to arrive were from Mike Scanlan and she was delighted to get them. The second floral box was from Tom Capano. She didn’t want them. Despite Ginny Columbus’s cries of protest, Anne Marie dumped them into her wastebasket.

  Valentine’s Day wasn’t perfect; lately, few of her days were—mostly because of Tom. Anne Marie had gone back and forth about what to wear for her date with Mike that night, worried that if she wore a skirt, he would think that her legs were too fat. Tom had once said that Mike had told someone she looked “great” in a short skirt, and she wondered what he meant by that. Tom also reported that Mike said she had a “shitty apartment.” That hurt her.

  But then Anne Marie realized that Mike wouldn’t say anything like that, and Tom didn’t even know Mike, so where was he getting this supposed information? It was just Tom’s way of interfering. He had told her often enough that Mike was a nerd and she was a fool to waste her time on him.

  That Valentine’s Day evening, Anne Marie and Mike had dinner at Vincente’s, a restaurant on the Concord Pike near Mike’s house. They laughed and
had a good time, and for the moment it was easy for Anne Marie to forget Tom. But he was almost always in her thoughts. She was trying, now, simply to avoid him. And all that winter of 1995–96, Anne Marie was growing thinner and thinner, her skin more sallow. She told Jill that Tom tried to be helpful and gave her advice about her eating problems, but there was a hopeless tone in her voice as she said, “Doesn’t he realize I’m the way I am because of him? I can’t control him but I can control what I put in my body.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  ANN MARIE AND MIKE had so many things they wanted to do together, and her calendar for 1996 was packed with social and family events. Two weeks after Valentine’s Day, they went to the Luther Vandross concert at the Valley Forge Music Fair. She and Mike had dinner with her uncle James, the monsignor, at Toscana on February 29, and Mike and James were able to get to know each other.

  “In a roundabout way,” Mike recalled, “Annie let me know how important her uncle was [to her]—and how important he was in some big decisions in her life—and I took that to mean that dinner and us being alone [him and James] was certainly his chance to get his opinion of me.”

  They went to the Russian ballet, and to see Tommy Davidson, a black comedian whom Mike admired. He had a strong affinity for African American music and humor, and he wanted to see how Anne Marie would react. She thought Davidson was hilarious. Mike was relieved. “I’ve designed programs at MBNA around minorities,” he explained, “and not everyone is open minded. . . . I couldn’t be with someone who wasn’t open minded about that. . . . You’re dating someone and they’re trying to impress you, and you just ask them a blatant question, ‘How do you feel about that?’—they’re going to give you the answer they think you want to hear. But she had as much fun as I did, so she passed my test there.”

  Anne Marie was passing a lot of Mike’s tests, although he used the word humorously: for compatibility and similar backgrounds, for beauty and grace and kindness, for being a woman who demonstrated a remarkable gift for maintaining her friendships for decades, for their shared values. Still, she lived with the fear that she would fail in Mike’s eyes on moral grounds if he knew about Tom. She was a young woman of the nineties, and she had never pretended to be a virgin, but sleeping with a married man was much more of a sin in her own eyes than having sex with someone who was single. She and her friends sometimes discussed the fine points that defined adultery, and Anne Marie was relieved when Jennifer Bartels Haughton pointed out in one of their phone calls, “You have to be married to be an adulterer.” She knew Jennifer wasn’t just being diplomatic; Jennifer didn’t know about the affair with Tom.

  One of Anne Marie’s relatives had broken his marriage vows and it had caused a lot of pain to everyone. Adultery was a sin that Anne Marie detested—and yet she agonized because she had at least contributed to adultery. Her guilt was immense.

  She and Mike had talked about marriage—but only as a concept, carefully avoiding a premature commitment. They agreed that they both wanted to marry and have children. Anne Marie brought up the subject of adultery several times, but again as a concept. When she asked Mike what he thought, she usually tried to sound disapproving, often saying, “Why don’t they just have the guts to go out of it, tell the other person they don’t love them, and go take up with a new person?”

  Mike agreed with her and evinced disapproval too, but he didn’t realize what she was really talking about. Later, he said somberly, “I’d say, ‘Yeah, that’s a better way to do it rather than both sides living a lie.’ So I reinforced what she was thinking. . . . I had no idea what she was trying to tell me.”

  Mike did have some idea of Anne Marie’s concern about her weight, but she hadn’t spelled that out for him, either. She was so afraid of losing him. She had been very thin when they met—it seemed to him that was normal for her.

  Since the first of the year Anne Marie had been frightened by her anorexia. She realized that she was not truly in charge of her own life and health, but she didn’t know how to stop. On many days, she scarcely ate two hundred calories. She didn’t vomit, but she spent hours at the Y exercising and took laxatives at night. She and Gary Johnson had agreed that she should see Dr. Michelle Sullivan, whose office was in the Center for Cognitive and Behavior Therapy in Wilmington. She had liked Dr. Sullivan, who was a pretty and petite woman with prematurely gray hair.

  Although she enjoyed being thin, Anne Marie was concerned by the way she felt, and she had confessed her need to control her surroundings by excessive dieting and exercise to her brother Robert. He immediately said he would help her pay for therapy.

  When Anne Marie and Dr. Sullivan began their work together, on February 28, 1996, she had not communicated with Tom for more than two weeks. She vowed to keep it that way. Still, a part of her may have missed the sense of security she had felt with the gentle, nonpressuring Tom who had always seemed to be around when she was frightened, lonely, or in some kind of distress. When he’d shown her that side of his personality, she began to distrust her own judgment. She had never wanted to hurt him—even during the times she was furious with him. The child inside who had rarely had presents from her father had enjoyed the things Tom gave her, always explaining that it made him happy to give her things. That side of Tom was like a very kind father—a role he was accustomed to. And she still hoped that they could have a platonic relationship.

  But then there was another side of Tom—a self-pitying, demanding, domineering, controlling side. Anne Marie described his recent behavior to Dr. Sullivan, how he called her fifteen to twenty times in a two-hour period, how he showed up at her apartment and demanded loudly to be let in, until finally she had to relent so her landlady wouldn’t hear him. She told Dr. Sullivan that Tom was “haunting” her. Indeed, most of their early sessions dealt with how Anne Marie might find a way to be strong enough to cope with him. She had not heard from him lately. But he never really went away. He was always somewhere in the shadows, it seemed, watching her and keeping track of what she was doing and who she was with.

  ST. PATRICK’S DAY rolled round again, and Anne Marie and Jill Morrison had paid $35 apiece for tickets to a breakfast and mass sponsored by the Irish Culture Club.

  “The day before,” Jill said, “she told me she couldn’t go—didn’t want to go because Mr. Capano was on the executive committee and he would be there and she did not want to see him.”

  They didn’t go to the breakfast, but they did go to the Washington, D.C., fund-raiser President Clinton was putting on for Governor Carper’s campaign. Jill and Anne Marie got to meet the president personally, and that impressed them. The event went well and a number of people from Wilmington decided to ride back on the train together. All of it was exhilarating.

  “But before the train left,” Jill recalled, “a bunch of people went out to a bar across the street from the train station and just kind of celebrated the fact that it was a good night, a successful night for the upcoming campaign. Most of the people left on the 10 or 11 [P.M.] train. . . . It was just Anne Marie, me, Joe Farley, Brian Murphy, and Gary Heinz—so we decided to go to another bar. The five of us, when we got home, it was probably about three in the morning.”

  Tom heard about it; he seemed to know everything Anne Marie was doing, and he called her to tell her that she and Jill ought to be ashamed of themselves, “because we acted like ‘whores.’ ”

  Nothing could have been more innocent than a bunch of happy Democrats celebrating, but Tom saw whores and sluts wherever he looked.

  MARCH passed without any more calls or messages from Tom. Anne Marie felt cautiously optimistic. She liked Dr. Sullivan and suspected that she was a therapist who would one day make her feel as safe in confiding her secrets as Bob Conner had. There were two issues that she had to deal with, the two things that were the most difficult for her: her anorexia and her past inability to transform her relationship with Tom Capano into one of only friendship.

  With Dr. Sullivan’s help, Anne Marie began to
feel stronger. Ideally, in her view, she would be with Mike forever—and Tom would no longer trail her and threaten her. And, perhaps most important to her, he wouldn’t feel sad that she no longer loved him.

  Easter was approaching, a time of rebirth and renewal. Anne Marie and Mike went to services on Holy Thursday. They would not be together for Easter because Mike was going home to Rhode Island. He sent her a card that hardly seemed in the spirit of the season, but it was. It was a picture of a seal, which he explained was an “Easter seal” from the North Pacific.

  “I hope your holiday is a good one,” he wrote.

  I’ll be thinking about you. I’m sure everything will be fine. Keep strong. You’re doing good. I hope, too, that you get some time for yourself this weekend—a cup of java and the paper, a walk in the park, or sitting alone at home in the dark, one of my favorites. I will look forward to seeing you Sunday evening at the airport. Happy Easter, do be sure to have one of those chocolate or marshmallow bunnies for me. Love, Mike

  Mike knew that Anne Marie was coping with something and that she was seeing a psychologist, although she had not confided any specifics. She had told him she was working out her feelings about self-confidence and self-esteem and that she had some family problems. Mike knew that her brother Mark was battling alcoholism and that Anne Marie was terribly worried about him—and angry with him at the same time—but he never asked too many questions, sensing that she would tell him all in good time.

  Mike knew that Anne Marie had dreams for the future. Her dearest wish was to become a teacher, but she was very loyal to Tom Carper. She wouldn’t even consider leaving her job until she had seen him through his upcoming campaign for reelection. “After that time,” Mike said, “she had it in her mind that she would move on.”