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

by Ann Rule

  ANNE MARIE finally told Mike a bit more about her anorexia and he was very supportive. They planned to visit Mike’s family over the Memorial Day weekend. Anne Marie both welcomed and dreaded the trip. She didn’t feel very well and knew that she was growing weaker.

  Just before Memorial Day, Tom dropped into Kim Horstman’s office at the Smith Barney brokerage firm in Philadelphia, reminding her who he was. She knew; she was the one friend Anne Marie had confided everything to. Kim had not seen Tom since she and Anne Marie went to dinner with him at DiLullo’s two years earlier. He asked to take her to dinner so they could talk about Anne Marie. “He said he was in town for a partners’ meeting and he was very concerned about Annie’s health and he wanted to discuss it with me.”

  Kim called Anne Marie and told her that she was having dinner with Tom, and she laughed and said, “That would be great. He will treat you like a queen, it will be fun—definitely go out with him.”

  Tom took Kim to the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia, and they talked about Anne Marie. “He told me that I was going to be shocked when I saw her because she had gotten so skinny,” Kim said, “and that he was very concerned that she was in serious danger.”

  Kim was frightened when she heard that, and listened carefully as Tom spoke of the possibility of doing an intervention with Anne Marie and committing her to a hospital. Kim suggested that it might be better if they went to Robert and told him how worried they were.

  “No,” Tom said quickly. “Don’t call Robert. Let’s think about it some more before we do anything. I’ve talked to a friend who specializes in eating disorders, and she recommended Michelle. I found Michelle, and I’m paying her.”

  Tom told Kim that he had given Anne Marie a slip of paper with Dr. Sullivan’s name and phone number on it, and that he had told Anne Marie that Dr. Sullivan was very highly thought of. In reality, of course, it had been Gary Johnson who had suggested Dr. Sullivan.

  Tom seemed absolutely benign as he described his offer to help Anne Marie pay for the therapy that her insurance didn’t cover. He gave Kim the impression that he was paying for all of her sessions, although it was Robert Fahey who was sending the $1,000 checks—not Tom. Tom had prevailed upon Anne Marie only once to accept $500 to give to Dr. Sullivan.

  Tom said that Anne Marie had given him a book about eating disorders and he had read it. She had given one to Robert, too, but Tom said Robert hadn’t bothered to read it. “I’m the only one who has done anything for her, Kimmie,” he said softly. “I buy her groceries—I’m constantly bringing her Gatorade and bananas to build up her electrolytes, and I try to keep her fed, and make sure she’s eating correctly.” It was all a lie.

  “What about her family?” Kim asked, surprised.

  “Nothing. I’m paying for everything. I’m in love with her. Why won’t she agree to see me again? I have more money than I can spend in a lifetime—I can give Annie anything she wants, the Lexus, the ten-bedroom house. . . . Why is she spending time with that geek when she could be with me?”

  Kim knew that Anne Marie was in love with Mike and that he was anything but a geek, but Tom was adamant. “She doesn’t take him seriously at all, you know,” he said. “It’s all just a front to look good in front of her family. She isn’t in love with him, and I don’t understand why she’s wasting her time with him.”

  Kim simply stared at Tom. She knew Anne Marie and she didn’t know him—but he seemed off the wall.

  “Am I crazy?” he asked, refilling his wineglass. “Should I back away from her?”

  “Yes,” Kim said softly. “I think you should—should back away from her.”

  Kim called Anne Marie the first thing the next morning. She didn’t tell her everything Tom had said or repeat his disparagements of Mike. But she did say that Tom Capano seemed to be crazy in love with her and didn’t understand why she couldn’t love him back.

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

  “Do you love him, Annie?” Kim asked.

  “No. No, I don’t.” Anne Marie’s voice was flat, almost dead. She sounded tired and at the end of her rope, as if even discussing it was too much effort.

  Tom asked Kim out for dinner again a week later. He said he was in town again for another meeting, and why didn’t they get together?

  Again, they went to the Ritz-Carlton. They had drinks in the lounge and then moved into the grill to eat. Once more, Tom talked about Anne Marie, warning Kim she would be shocked when she saw her. “He said that when he told Annie he was taking me out to dinner again, she said, ‘That’s fine—but the next time I want to go with you.’ ”

  Kim wondered if he was flirting with her and thought that couldn’t be; he was so crazy about Annie.

  Tom ordered the best on the menu and the finest wine. He talked about his family, explaining that his daughters were going to Europe with one of his brothers during summer vacation. “And he mentioned that his daughter had been sick,” Kim said. “His one daughter had some kind of brain surgery, and it was a very difficult time for him, but she was doing better. We talked about how his father had been an immigrant and how he made his children all millionaires.”

  Kim got the impression that Tom was once again presenting himself as a much better suitor for Anne Marie than Mike Scanlan could ever be. He argued that Anne Marie didn’t know her own mind. She was jealous of his dating someone else—so that must mean she loved him. “He mentioned he had a date with another woman who worked in Delaware, and Annie said the thought of him being with her made her sick to her stomach.”

  That didn’t sound like the straight story to Kim. Anne Marie had never mentioned being jealous of Tom. All she talked about was Mike.

  Their meal came to $130, and Tom added a $26 tip. Kim didn’t realize that, for him, this was a relatively cheap night out. If it had been $300, it would have been cheap for Tom. He routinely submitted all his bills for dinner with Anne Marie and her friends to Saul, Ewing for reimbursement, marking them as charges connected with the firm’s client, the state of Delaware. Anne Marie was employed by the governor of the state of Delaware, but she never knew Tom got his money back for their meals.

  Kim called Anne Marie the morning after her dinner with Tom, just as she had the week before. Anne Marie commented that if they decided to go to dinner again, she would like to go with them. Kim knew that Anne Marie wasn’t jealous; she felt it was more that she wanted to confront Tom on some of the things he was saying about her—and about the two of them together.

  But then Anne Marie E-mailed Tom and vetoed his suggestion that she and “Kimmie” have dinner with him, saying, “I don’t feel like sharing.” Whenever her friends came along, she knew that Tom tried to enlist them in one of his plans to make her do something. She hated being a specimen to be dissected and discussed. Poor Annie. Whatever will we do about poor, pathetic Annie? It was one of Tom’s devices.

  Chapter Nineteen

  TOM WAS HAVING a busy spring. Only a man as organized as he was could have arranged so deftly the many pieces in the mosaic of his life. He told Kim that he considered himself Anne Marie’s very best friend, the one human being in the world she could trust. He never let a day go by without some contact with her. Nor did he miss speaking to Debby every day; her problems were a little different from Anne Marie’s but she, too, needed him to see what was best for her. He felt that the Tatnall School continued to ask too much of Debby. She was often on the job from very early in the morning until far into the evening.

  Tom fully expected Linda Marandola to become his secretary at the end of May 1996. That would, of course, make her privy to knowledge about his phone calls, but he wasn’t concerned. However, the week before Linda was scheduled to start, he called her at home and was annoyed to hear that she had left a cutesy message on her answering machine. That was not acceptable.

  When Tom got Linda on the phone, he told her to change the message; it was unprofessional and childlike. Linda demurred and Tom said flatly that she
could not work for him if she didn’t change the message. Again she refused, telling him that what she had on her home machine had nothing whatever to do with her job at Saul, Ewing.

  Tom called Linda’s machine several times after that and left her messages, repeating that she was immature and childish. As she listened to Tom’s angry voice, calling her over and over, Linda realized that she couldn’t work for him. What had ever made her think that she could? Nothing had really changed; he was the same man he had always been. She called Saul, Ewing and said that she would not be reporting to work after all. She didn’t give a reason.

  When Tom’s secretary told him that Linda was not going to be taking her place, he nodded grimly and said he would call her and see what her problem was. He explained later that he had had a disagreement with Linda over the weekend and she would not return his phone calls.

  Linda still owed Tom $3,000 and that rankled him. He told his secretary that she had shared her financial problems with him and that he had lent her money. “She hasn’t paid me back,” he said, “and I’m going to fix her ass.”

  He asked for Linda’s personnel file and then had his secretary type up a civil complaint against her. On June 14, Tom filed suit against Linda Marandola, asking for $3,000 plus interest. She didn’t even try to answer the suit. There was no point; Linda didn’t have any money for an attorney and Tom had so much power in Wilmington. She allowed him to get a default judgment against her.

  MIKE and Anne Marie had plans to spend some time in Falmouth, Massachusetts, over the Memorial Day weekend, May 25–27; it would be their first real trip together. Jennifer Bartels Haughton’s in-laws had a place on Martha’s Vineyard, and Mike and Anne Marie planned to see Jennifer and her husband there. They could take the ferry from the mainland to Martha’s Vineyard, and it would be a chance for Jennifer to meet Mike, the man she had heard about in the frequent phone conversations she had with Anne Marie.

  But their plans fell through. The house in Falmouth where Anne Marie and Mike planned to stay was full, so after only one day, they headed out to visit Mike’s college roommate instead—and he lived too far from Martha’s Vineyard. On the way home, they stopped in Rhode Island to see Mike’s parents. Although Anne Marie had met them, this was the first time she was in their home. And she was the first girl Mike had brought home since high school. She was touched to see that his mother had placed pictures of Mike as a child in the room where she slept.

  Jennifer and Annie missed each other, a circumstance that would sadden Jennifer in a most profound way. And it wasn’t the best of trips for Anne Marie. She didn’t feel well over Memorial Day weekend. She had come to a point where it was almost impossible for her to eat, and she was getting weaker despite Dr. Sullivan’s careful monitoring of her electrolytes. Sullivan knew that Anne Marie was taking as many as fifteen laxatives a day and there was a very real danger that she could have a heart attack.

  Anne Marie was under siege. With so many forces attacking her, it was hard for her to fight. She was in love with Mike and afraid of losing him; she was afraid to start eating because she thought she would soon be obese; and she was fearful that she might die because she couldn’t eat. But most of all, Tom was haunting her again, despite her many attempts to keep things platonic between them. He had never meant it when he said they would only be friends.

  Returning to her job after her trip to Cape Cod, Anne Marie learned from Siobhan Sullivan that Tom had been looking for her over the long weekend. She wasn’t really surprised. “He paged me,” Siobhan recalled. “When I returned the page, he asked me if I had talked to Anne Marie, and I said no. And he asked me if I knew where Anne Marie was, and I said no.”

  Siobhan hadn’t encouraged any further questioning, but when she told Anne Marie that Tom had paged her and was asking where she was, Anne Marie was very upset. “He’s fucking stalking me,” she said angrily.

  Siobhan tried to calm her down. “Anne Marie, there is a charge. That’s a crime, there’s a law against that. We can give you protection.” She explained that she was, after all, a State Police officer and involved in protecting not only the governor but everyone in his office.

  “No.” Anne Marie sighed. “I can handle it. I just have to end it with Tom.” She confessed to Siobhan that she had been afraid that Tom might have been waiting at her house to confront her and Mike when they got back from New England. She had made the mistake of telling him she was going to Cape Cod for Memorial Day. But she hadn’t told him exactly where she was going or with whom. Tom had obviously figured out that she had gone away with Mike.

  He had been so insistent that they were going to have dinner at La Famiglia on Thursday night, May 30, that Anne Marie had stopped trying to dissuade him. They met for dinner and she tried to be pleasant, without giving him any signals that she felt more than friendship for him. But the morning after that “date,” he was E-mailing her to ask her to come to his house Sunday afternoon to make pasta. Or if she didn’t want to do that, they could have dinner at the Villa d’ Roma (the restaurant that Debby considered their “special place”). And, oh yes, Tom wanted Anne Marie to start playing golf with him.

  It had taken him only weeks to coil himself around her again. She felt the old pressure to report all of her activities to him. It wasn’t that she hated Tom—not at all; he was being so damned nice to her. But he didn’t seem to realize that he was almost choking the life out of her. She didn’t want all the things he was insistent about giving her, but she didn’t seem to have the strength to say no.

  Anne Marie was faithful in keeping her appointments with Dr. Sullivan, determined to win her fight for her health and her life. Sullivan was a strong ally. “I began speaking with her about her anger that the gifts were manipulative,” she recalled. “He might ask her to have some time with him having supper, and what might get added on to that is, ‘Oh, let me buy you a dress.’ And she found herself angry about that. She had a hard time enough saying no to going out, and she just felt like he kept piling it on and piling it on.”

  The two of them worked on exercises, using conversational ploys that would help Anne Marie be strong in her resolve.

  Tom had been currying favor with Kim and Jackie, and now he told Anne Marie that he had invited her brother Robert and his wife, Susan, along with Kim, to a Cézanne exhibit on June 15 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She was invited too, of course. It would be a grand affair, sponsored by Saul, Ewing—his firm had chosen the Cézanne function to celebrate its seventy-fifth anniversary.

  Anne Marie didn’t go to the Cézanne exhibition, but Robert and Susan did and had a good time. Susan wrote Tom a warm thank-you note. Robert had no idea that Anne Marie and Tom had been anything more than friends. Tom and Robert had known each other slightly for years, and now Tom raved about how much he liked Robert, calling him “my second-favorite Fahey.”

  Anne Marie was mortified. She didn’t want Tom pushing his way into her family. She didn’t want her family to know about Tom.

  On June 8, Anne Marie and Kim went to a wedding together. Tom had lent Anne Marie his credit card so that she could pay for her gift to the couple: twelve months of floral arrangements. She had repaid him before the wedding; on June 4, she wrote him a check for $122.50 on her Congressional Federal Credit Union account. It was another of the monetary transactions between them, the loans that she berated herself for accepting.

  AS Tom had predicted, Kim was shocked at the wedding to see how thin Anne Marie was. At the same time, she seemed very happy, happier than Kim had ever seen her. Anne Marie told Kim that she was falling in love with Mike.

  “Michael was redoing his kitchen,” Kim recalled, “and Annie said it was like they were married—because he let Annie pick out the tiles, and Annie was helping him decorate his house. Mike missed the wedding because he was swimming in a marathon the next day, but Anne Marie called to wish him luck and tell him she was thinking about him.”

  Mike had been training for the long-distance swim in Ann
apolis since January, and there was no way he could have gone with Anne Marie to the wedding and been able to compete. She understood.

  Four days later, on June 12, Anne Marie fainted in her office. She knew why she was so weak and sick, and she didn’t want to call Mike to take her back to her apartment. That would mean she would have had to explain how serious her eating problem was. She didn’t want him to know; she wanted to be well before she ever admitted all of it to him.

  Instead, Anne Marie called Tom and asked if he would drive her home. He was close by and he knew about her problem. He came immediately, scooped her up, and took her to her apartment. For him, it was a triumph, and another beachhead. He told Kim later that he had held Anne Marie in his arms as she lay collapsed on her kitchen floor, and that he had forced Gatorade into her to bring up her electrolytes.

  Maybe he did. The Tom who kept track of the insulin in case his friend needed it and the Tom who closed Debby’s mother’s eyes was good in emergencies. He thrived when he was in charge. It was his forte, and if he was called upon for matters dealing with life and death, so much the better. It was preferable to be the guy with the clear head who deftly took care of business than to be some frantic fool.

  Anne Marie insisted on returning to work that afternoon, despite Tom’s objections. She had had a moment of true awakening; she realized that she had come close to death as the cramps and nausea of severe potassium loss hit her. More than at any other time, she had chosen to live.

  Chapter Twenty

  IN MID-JUNE, summer drops over Wilmington like a collapsing balloon, humid and hot, with scarcely an interim period for anyone to adjust. On Fridays, all the roads heading south are full of beach traffic. And all the restaurants that can, including Kid Shelleen’s and O’Friel’s Irish Pub, open their outdoor decks and patios. The big old city houses seem to trap the day’s heat. In the working-class neighborhoods, people in undershirts and halters emerge to sit on their front stoops or drag lawn chairs out in the yard or parking strip to find a spot of cool.