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

by Ann Rule

  Homemade water-ice stands spring up in Little Italy. The mixture is not a snow cone. It’s less than sherbet, more than lemonade, and balm to parched throats. The vendor sloshes a dipper through a washtub full of a slush of shaved ice, lemon, sugar, and water, and then fills a waxed paper cup to overflowing.

  The Trolley Square neighborhood lures yuppies to outdoor decks, where they sip Corona and watch the traffic go by. Every hour or so a train crosses the trestle bridge in front of Kid Shelleen’s patio, and conversation stops as the cars rumble past. This had been Anne Marie’s milieu in recent years, trendy, loud, and fun, but somehow full of the past, too.

  Her apartment on Washington Street was close to downtown Wilmington and not nearly as affluent as the Forty Acres and Trolley Square neighborhoods. From her apartment, she could walk up Eighteenth Street, past Salesianum School, Baynard Stadium, the old Wanamaker’s department store, and over the Augustine cutoff into Forty Acres and Trolley Square. In June, it was a lovely walk; home owners were sprucing up their yards, watering the grass, planting flowers, pulling weeds. Everything smelled fresh and new.

  The June air in Wilmington smelled of honeysuckle and fresh-cut grass; of submarine sandwiches wrapped in waxy off-white butcher paper to keep in the juices of tomatoes, peppers, and onions; of the Delaware River; and of sweat and suntan oil. It was perhaps, of all seasons, the best time for a new beginning.

  ON June 14, St. Anthony’s festival drew its usual crowds. Anne Marie took her nephews during the day and ran into a man she had worked with in the congressional offices down in Washington. “I saw her with her nephews at the carnival,” he recalled. “I have to say I was taken aback. I recognized her, but she was not the Anne Marie that I had known—she was always very effervescent, just a happy person, generally. She was still the same happy person at the St. Anthony’s festival, but she had lost a lot of weight, and her hair was straight, lightened, and brittle looking.” She had in fact reached bottom only two days before, but was rapidly rebounding.

  That Friday night, Anne Marie and Mike had fixed Kim up with a blind date with Mike’s friend Dan, thinking how great it would be if they hit it off, too. They all met at Anne Marie’s apartment, and it was apparent to both Dan and Kim that there was no magic, but when they went to the festival, there was so much energy, light, and music that it didn’t matter.

  Kim and Anne Marie had a chance to talk when the men walked ahead through the crowd. “Oh my God,” Anne Marie whispered suddenly.

  “Who?”

  “Tom—quick, walk the other way!”

  They reversed their steps before Tom saw them. He was with his daughters.

  “She said that she had passed out at work,” Kim recalled. “She was faint at work, and she called Capano to come pick her up—she reluctantly shared that with me. She was a little sheepish about it to say that she actually called him to pick her up.”

  The two women managed to hide their concern about the close encounter from Mike and Dan.

  Anne Marie had avoided Tom at the St. Anthony’s festival, but his E-mail continued. He was still trying to lend her money, buy her things, leave food for her, be with her. When she mentioned that her apartment was roasting, he bought her an air conditioner. She was trying hard not to say anything in her cautious E-mail that might give him an idea of something else to buy her.

  She had accepted too much from Tom and admitted to herself that it had been nice, back in the days when he “treated her like a princess,” to have his presents, his continual concern for giving her what she wanted and needed. No more. And her natural tendency for self-deprecation made her feel that the trap he’d caught her in was her own fault.

  IT was June 19, and Anne Marie was having her weekly session with Dr. Sullivan. Sullivan had tried every way she knew to convince Anne Marie that she was a good person, deserving of happiness—and she had begun to succeed. Typical of anorectics, Anne Marie had one part of her body that she hated the most: her legs. They seemed immense and ugly to her.

  “Write a letter to your legs,” Michelle suggested, and Anne Marie looked at her as if she was the one in need of therapy.

  It wasn’t as silly as it sounded at first; Anne Marie needed to defuse her legs as entities that had power over her. She had begun to come back from her nadir point, she had cut way down on laxatives, was eating more, and now she had to “forgive” her fat thighs. Perhaps only another woman could understand.

  Anne Marie grinned gamely and went home to write a letter she had never expected to write.

  “I must admit,” she wrote,

  that I feel somewhat silly writing a letter to my legs.

  I have many insecurities surrounding my life, but the one most prevalent to me is the size of my legs. Below is a list of what goes through my mind on a daily basis:

  1. I cannot wear a skirt because people will see just how big my calves are.

  2. I struggle through the summer because we wear less, which means more of my body is being exposed.

  3. Every morning I wake up and talk myself out of wearing a skirt or a dress.

  4. I have complete anxiety every time Michael sees me in shorts because I think this just might be the last time. I get embarrassed for Michael if we are out in public and I wear shorts.

  5. I often look in the mirror when I get out of the shower and I yell at my legs.

  6. If I had thin legs, then perhaps people would classify me as thin.

  7. I will look at other women and say, “God, if I only had their legs, then maybe I would not be so ashamed of myself.”

  8. A day does not go by that I don’t spend some part obsessing over the size of my legs. Blah, blah, blah, blah. AMF

  Sullivan’s technique had worked; Anne Marie started laughing at herself as her painfully candid letter disintegrated into “blah’s.” Her calves were well developed after years of playing field hockey, but her legs were really quite good.

  ON Thursday, June 20, something happened near Philadelphia that frightened Anne Marie. She and her girlfriends talked about it in hushed tones. Aimee Willard, twenty-two, who was a college lacrosse star, left Smokey Joe’s, a popular Main Line bar, and headed for her home in Brookhaven. Her car was found on a Blue Route off ramp, its lights on and the engine running—but Aimee was missing. Hours later, her body was discovered in a vacant lot in north Philadelphia. Her skull was crushed and she had been raped and beaten. Aimee’s father, Paul Willard, was a Chester County, Pennsylvania, police sergeant, and the case was headlined in both Pennsylvania and Delaware media.

  Anne Marie and her friends wondered aloud how Aimee’s killer had gotten her to stop her car, and they talked about how they all had traveled the Blue Route often. The dead girl’s car had been found close to where Robert Fahey lived and to Katherine McGettigan’s old place. The apparent randomness of Aimee Willard’s murder disturbed Anne Marie particularly.

  On Friday night, June 21, Anne Marie’s brother Brian was packing for a trip to Ecuador. His wife, Rebeca, was Ecuadoran and her parents still lived there; he was going to join her for a few weeks. He had to stop by O’Friel’s to drop some things off for Jimmy Freel, with whom he coached high school basketball, and he found Anne Marie and Mike there. “They were just hanging around,” Brian said. “It looked like they had showed up there after work, and they were sitting at the bar, having a great time. They were holding hands and laughing, and I joked around with them for a little while.”

  Mike had been in Maine on business all week, and he and Anne Marie were glad to be together again. Anne Marie asked Brian if she could pick him up at the airport when he came home. He told her that of course she could, knowing how much she liked the ritual of picking up returning travelers. “I’ll call you with the time of my flight,” he promised. “What do you want me to bring you from Ecuador?”

  “Jewelry,” she said. “Pick out a piece of jewelry for me.”

  The next day, Saturday, June 22, Anne Marie and Kathleen went shopping together. They stopped
at Talbot’s and Anne Marie tried on the taupe pantsuit in a size four. It cost almost $300, but it wasn’t the cost that made Kathleen gasp—it was the sight of her sister’s ribs, stark bones glowing white beneath her skin. She hadn’t seen Annie in just a bra and panties for a long time, and she was frightened by Anne Marie’s skeletal frame. Kathleen spoke sharply, and because she too was frightened, Anne Marie snapped back. It wasn’t a real fight, not even an argument. But it was something Anne Marie mentioned to Mike when she had dinner with him and another couple that night.

  She also mentioned it to Tom sometime during the next week, and he acted as if he took it far more seriously than Mike had. He almost seemed pleased when she had tiffs with her sister or her friends. She was sorry she had said anything about it.

  On Sunday night, June 23, Anne Marie went to Mike’s house for dinner.

  On Wednesday, June 26, Kim Horstman and Anne Marie talked on the phone. They spoke of Aimee Willard’s murder, still unsolved, and moved on to happier topics. “Annie sounded great,” Kim remembered. “Really great. We talked about her eating disorder and she said that she had gained a couple of pounds, and she was very happy about that. And that she had cut the number of laxatives she was taking in half. So she felt she was getting better. And we talked about her relationship with Michael—and she felt that was going very well, and she was excited about that. It was a very upbeat conversation.”

  Later that day, Anne Marie met with Michelle Sullivan for her regular session. They spoke about her interaction with Kathleen, the fights they had had after their mother died. They probably touched upon the little argument Anne Marie and Kathleen had had in the dressing room at Talbot’s four days earlier, but Dr. Sullivan did not recall that there was any lasting animosity at all. As grown women, the Fahey sisters seemed very close.

  Anne Marie presented the letter she had written to her legs and grinned at her doctor. Sullivan warned her not to cut out all laxatives at once, while praising her for rebounding. It was a good session, a hopeful session. Things with Anne Marie were suddenly so much better. They were both tired when it was over, but it had been worth it.

  That Wednesday night, Anne Marie and Mike talked on the phone. “We were making plans for the dinner with her brother that Saturday evening, the twenty-ninth,” he recalled. “So we arranged a time to meet up. She was taking Friday off from work. She was really looking forward to having Friday off. She had some errands planned. The weather was starting to get warm, so she was in kind of that summer mood, and she needed a day to kick back.”

  When Tom learned that Anne Marie had admired the pantsuit at Talbot’s—and that Kathleen had talked her out of it—he called the store branch in Greenville and said he wanted to surprise his wife with the pantsuit. The saleswoman, Kara Sullivan, checked and told him they no longer had it in a size four. But Tom was a very good customer, and she arranged to have it sent over from Talbot’s Christiana store.

  Tom had made up his mind that he was going to bring Anne Marie back to him. Completely. When she had called him on June 12, chosen him to be the man she summoned in a real emergency, he felt sure it was a sign that he had triumphed over Mike Scanlan. Scanlan didn’t know what she was struggling with. He didn’t know about her financial worries, or that he, Tom, stepped in often to bail her out. He didn’t have the history with her that Tom had. Tom wasn’t even convinced that Anne Marie had given herself sexually to Scanlan—so he was puzzled about why she still dated him.

  But lately, there was so little that Tom could get Anne Marie to accept from him. She would not take the money he offered her; she explained that she had cut up her credit cards and did not want to be in further debt. She even wrote checks to pay back the money he had already given her, although he refused to cash them. She assured him that she was trying very, very hard to get better, and pleaded with him to let her do it in her own way. Her E-mail was more apologetic than ever before, and yet somehow more assertive.

  6/26/96: afahey@gov.state.de.us at Internet

  Hey Tommy,

  I would like to apologize for being such a downer today. I realize that your day had not been so great either, and I was not much help. I feel like some days I can handle my anorexia and other days I feel overwhelmed by the whole thing. Today has obviously been an overwhelming day. My appointment with Michelle was hard and in depth today, and quite frankly it drained all my energy. I really do appreciate you offering me the Phillies tickets, but right now I am going to focus on trying to get better. Sorry for being such a Doggy Downer today. Take care, Annie.

  6/26/96, 6:19 PM Thomas Capano at Sera-Wilmington

  Subject Lo Siento Mucho [Spanish: I’m very sorry.]

  I didn’t get a chance to read this until after 6:00 and I assume you’re gone and won’t see this until tomorrow. I hope your sister went easy on you last night. I appreciate the apology but you don’t need to worry about it. I just hope you know that all I want to do is help in any way I can. I promise to make you laugh tonight at Panorama, to order calamari and to surprise you with something that will make you smile. Please call when you get a chance.

  He must have been picturing Anne Marie’s face when he gave her the outfit from Talbot’s.

  6/27/96, 11:30 AM Thomas Capano at Sera-Wilmington

  To: afahey@gov.state.de.us.at Internet

  Good Morning,

  Called you at 11:45. Hope your day is better than yesterday. I’m crazy again today, but winding down. I left a message for you so hope to talk to you soon. Please call when you can.

  It was a Thursday again—the night that Tom kept trying to designate as their regular night to dine out together. He knew Anne Marie wasn’t going to work on Friday; she told him she was taking the day off to be kind to herself. Everyone in her office would be down in Dover, anyway, for the windup of the legislature, up to all hours as state senators and representatives fought to get their bills passed before they all went home until autumn.

  If Anne Marie called or E-mailed him back, and if she agreed to go to Philadelphia with him for dinner, Tom vowed he would make it such a perfect night that she would forget all about Michael Scanlan.

  PART THREE

  And he that does one fault at first,

  And lies to hide it, makes it two.

  WATTS, Song 15

  Chapter Twenty-one

  AS THE OFFICERS from the Wilmington Police Department and the Delaware State Police looked around Anne Marie’s tiny apartment in the wee hours of Sunday, June 30, they had only the information they could glean from her sister, her boyfriend, and her other friends. Except for the hang-up on the fourteenth call on her answering machine, the messages there were all from her family and very close friends.

  Any investigation into Anne Marie’s disappearance was in the most embryonic state. It might not even be necessary to go further with it. She could be home by morning. Still, cops tend initially to accept the darkest explanations. Mark Daniels, Steve Montague, and Bob Donovan weren’t about to wait until Monday to look for her.

  They were hampered, however, by the absence of some vital details. If she had planned to accept Tom’s E-mailed dinner invitation, Anne Marie had told no one. Tom had told Debby that he had a meeting in Philadelphia on the evening of Thursday, June 27, and that he would probably drop by her house around 9:30 P.M.

  And yet it was clear that sometime between Thursday afternoon when she walked away from the Carvel building and Saturday night when Mike and her family went to her apartment and checked on her, Anne Marie had disappeared. If she had been scheduling secretary for an insurance executive or someone in management at the Hotel du Pont, there would have been concern, of course—but not something akin to panic. Anne Marie was the person responsible for organizing the details of the life of the governor of Delaware. If she was truly missing, it might be because of something that involved the state of Delaware. This was not a missing persons report that would routinely be put on hold until the missing adult had been gone forty-eight hours. Thi
s might very well be something else entirely, something that could impact the security of the top office in the state.

  After they had listened to Anne Marie’s phone messages, the state and local investigators looked through the rooms of her small third-floor apartment, nodding as the people who had called them explained which things were the way they should be and which were atypical of Anne Marie Fahey.

  They talked to the landlady. They looked at the green 1995 Volkswagen Jetta parked across the street where Anne Marie usually left it. They paced the sidewalk in front of the white house that was now broken into separate apartments, the night brightened a little by streetlights.

  “Maybe she walked away,” Donovan said.

  Kathleen shook her head. “No. She was very conscious of her safety in this neighborhood; she wouldn’t walk alone outside, especially at night.”

  Brian Short, a tenant in the apartment house next door, spoke to the police. He hadn’t seen Anne Marie for a few days, he said, but he remembered seeing her sometime in the past few weeks, leaving with a middle-aged man. The man’s car had been a black “Bronco-type” vehicle.

  It was nearly 3 A.M. before Jill Morrison and Ginny Columbus almost reluctantly handed Mark Daniels several sheets of what appeared to be a law firm’s stationery. His eyes scanned down the pages, and then he handed them silently to Bob Donovan.

  Both men recognized the name on the law firm’s letterhead. Tom Capano. Tom Capano. He had once been Donovan’s boss’s boss. For that matter, he had also been Daniels’ boss’s legal adviser. City, county, state: everyone knew him. He was a straight shooter, a longtime and well-respected public servant. But these letters were obviously very personal. Anne Marie Fahey might as well have been saving intimate letters from the governor himself. They wouldn’t have been any more surprised.