And Never Let Her Go: Thomas Capano: The Deadly Seducer
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Nor was there any sign that she had been there. Tom led the detectives through the house and into the double garage beneath the dining room–great room area. They saw the pretty bedrooms he had decorated for his daughters, the lavish master bedroom, the kitchen, dining area, living room. All the furnishings were apparently brand new. But there was no indication that Anne Marie Fahey had even been in any of these rooms or that anything untoward might have happened here.
It was still Sunday, June 30—a day that seemed to be forty-eight hours long. Tomorrow, Anne Marie might walk into the governor’s office at 7:30 A.M., rested, relaxed, and with a new sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose from a weekend in the sun. That was Tom Capano’s prediction.
The detectives hoped that he was right, but like all good cops, Bob Donovan had a feeling in his gut that told him otherwise.
Chapter Twenty-two
KATHLEEN FAHEY-HOSEY had gone home to check on her babies, but she was back at Anne Marie’s apartment at seven-thirty that Sunday morning. Neither she nor Mike Scanlan had slept during the wee hours after the detectives had left to go to Tom Capano’s house. She met Mike now on the front porch of 1718 Washington Street. Besides her worry about her sister, Kathleen had another burden on her mind. Mike hadn’t seen the letters from Tom, and Kathleen knew she had to tell him what she had found. If she didn’t, somebody else was going to bring it up. There was no other way; Anne Marie would just have to straighten things out with Mike when she came home.
“Mike,” Kathleen said, “we need to talk.”
She told him about the letters and warned him that it appeared that Anne Marie had been somehow involved with Tom Capano—and it seemed to have been more than just a friendship. Her words hung suspended in the air between them for a long moment as Mike tried to assimilate what they might mean. Finally, he tapped Kathleen on the arm and said, “Let’s go up.”
If her relationship with Tom Capano was too much to take in, the most important thing, still, was to find Anne Marie. Shafts of early morning sun sliced through the windows now, but nothing had changed in her apartment. They had hoped against hope that there might at least be a message on her answering machine—some clue to where she might be.
For many years now, the orphaned Fahey siblings had formed a tight circle. If one of them was in trouble or in danger, they all were. Already they were mobilizing, prepared to do whatever they had to do to find their sister and bring her home safely. Early on, they decided that one of them would try to be in her apartment at all times. If she called, or if someone called about her, there would always be someone to answer the phone; there would always be someone waiting to welcome her back. And if someone had hurt her, he—or she—would have to answer to the family.
The Faheys dealt with what they had to. They all had long experience in working through trouble and tragedy. Frightened as they were, they didn’t panic. Robert recalled how disturbed his wife, Susan, was when there was no word from Anne Marie. “Susan had had no experience with chaos; she was raised in upper-middle-class America,” he said. “For us, chaos and turmoil were not intimidating; we had long since been forced to develop skills to cope.”
They clung together that Sunday morning, all except Brian, who got the news of his sister’s disappearance when he was thousands of miles from home. When he’d left for Ecuador, he had told a friend not to give his phone number out to anyone, “unless someone in my family dies.” Brian’s in-laws didn’t speak a word of English, and if a call from the States came in while he and his wife were away, they wouldn’t be able to understand.
When the phone rang in Ecuador on Sunday, Brian heard his wife answer it and say, “Hi, Kathleen,” and his breath slowed. “I knew it was bad news.”
ON Monday morning, everyone in the governor’s office waited nervously. Anne Marie was almost always the first to get to work, but she wasn’t there at seven. Or seven-thirty. Or eight. They didn’t really expect her to be, as much as they hoped they were wrong. Now, Anne Marie gazed from the front page of the Wilmington News-Journal, her photograph visible through the window of every newspaper vending machine along the downtown streets, a beautiful girl with huge eyes and soft lips.
One of the Faheys’ earliest decisions was to get word out to the public so that everyone would look for Anne Marie. They were in complete agreement with the authorities to release information to local newspapers as soon as possible. Sheri Woodruff, Governor Carper’s spokeswoman, helped the Faheys understand the workings of the media. Mark Daniels had taken the picture of Anne Marie to the News-Journal and asked for coverage that might elicit tips from the public. The short article about her was to be the first eight inches in what would become many miles of newsprint. Carper Staffer Is Sought, read the headline. “Anne Marie Fahey . . . was reported missing by family members at 12:15 a.m. Sunday. . . . Fahey, who works in Carper’s Wilmington Office, left without her wallet or vehicle. . . . Police have checked hospitals and with family and friends without success.”
Because she was the governor’s secretary and because she was beautiful, wire services picked up the story of Anne Marie’s disappearance. Some reporters commented on the fact that Anne Marie had disappeared exactly one week after Aimee Willard; it had become the practice of the media to link vanishings and murders, particularly when the women involved were young and lovely and lost from the same general area. But Aimee’s body, sadly, had been found within hours, and Anne Marie had been gone, according to news reports, for more than eighty.
It took Brian until Monday morning to get as far as Miami, and it was afternoon before he landed in Philadelphia. Father James, his uncle, picked him up and took him to where he’d parked his car at the Friends School. Brian then drove straight to Anne Marie’s apartment, where he and his sister and three brothers pored over Annie’s address book, dividing up the pages. “We all got on a telephone somewhere,” Brian said, “and started to call all of her friends, and then tried to come up with a list of people who weren’t in the book that might have known her whereabouts.”
Anne Marie had so many friends and acquaintances, and it helped to keep busy. They even called the family she had lived with in Spain on the faint possibility that she might have made plans to go back to the country she loved so much.
They continued to find reasons, however far-fetched, to believe that Anne Marie was OK. Maybe she hadn’t read a paper or listened to the radio or watched television. Maybe she was really getting away from it all and she didn’t know that everyone was looking for her. Their explanations began to stretch so thin that they could see one another’s eyes through the gaps in their logic. And what they were thinking was chilling.
The police had already done a door-to-door canvass of the houses around Anne Marie’s apartment and searched the park across the street, even though it had so few trees along the greensward that they doubted she could have been hidden there. It seemed more likely that she had left her apartment in a vehicle, but they could not be sure. They didn’t even know when she had vanished.
Perhaps the last to see her on the governor’s staff was Diane Hastings, the office manager. She told the investigators that she had ridden down in the elevator with Anne Marie at about 4:30 P.M. on Thursday. “I was going home and she was going home.”
“What was she wearing?” she was asked.
“Jeans and a white scoop-neck T-shirt. She was happy that she had the next day off, and she was going to read a book in the park and have a manicure, a pedicure.”
Since several of her friends recalled that Anne Marie had planned to spend Friday getting a pedicure and other beauty treatments at the Michael Christopher Designs salon, and then go to Valley Garden Park with a good book, it was possible she had spent Thursday night in her apartment, gone to the salon, and then encountered someone in the park the next day.
But a check with the staff at the salon brought the information that Anne Marie had not shown up for her appointment—nor had she called in to cancel.
The murder of Alberta Cousins launched the most massive State Police investigation Delaware had ever seen. A shell casing was found 135 feet from her body, and indentations there showed where her killer had sat as he took a bead on her, but the police had no way to find her killer—not until twenty-five years later, when a woman with a niggling conscience came forward to describe a man she had observed close to the park that day. Using a computer-generated composite image, the police found that it matched almost exactly the photograph of a man imprisoned in Florida. The man had confessed to his cell mate, saying, “I shot a woman in Delaware once.” But he had mental problems and no one had ever taken him seriously until the composite matched. By the time that happened, the convict was long dead.
FOUR decades after the massive search for Alberta Cousins’s killer, another search began in the Valley Garden Park, searchers and dogs below, helicopters above. Sweeping wider and wider, the searchers beat the bushes and looked along the open ground with little hope. Anne Marie’s car was still parked on Washington Street, and the park was much too far to walk to. She would have to have had a ride to reach it. And there was no reason at all to think that she had.
Bob Donovan entered Anne Marie’s name and description and the details of her disappearance into the DELJIS-NCIC systems at 10 A.M. on Monday morning. She was in the computer, a routine investigative tack but one that was often effective. The National Crime Information Center’s computers in Quantico, Virginia, could connect missing people with incidents outside their usual environments.
Michelle Sullivan talked to the police again and told them that she feared Anne Marie had been abducted. She recalled a remark Anne Marie had made once during a session. It had seemed out of context, but now she wished she had pursued it further. Anne Marie had said that she was afraid that someone might kidnap her.
“She came into the office and mentioned that [a friend] said that somebody could kidnap her,” Sullivan told police. “I said, ‘Well, talk to me more about this,’ and she said, ‘Oh, I don’t know—somebody could just take me away or something.’ ”
Sullivan had asked her, “Who would do this?”
“Probably a third party.”
“What do you mean—that somebody would hire a third party?”
“Yeah.”
“Who would do that?”
“Tom Capano.”
Even before this conversation, Anne Marie had told Sullivan about Capano’s stalking behavior and his incessant phone calls. Michelle Sullivan had been trying to get her to contact the Attorney General’s Office or go to the police. But Anne Marie had been adamant that she couldn’t do that; it would be too embarrassing, especially because she worked in the governor’s office. She feared the press might find out. But she told Sullivan that she had gone so far as to contact an acquaintance in the Attorney General’s Office and pretended she was asking for advice for a friend.
“Anne Marie asked her friend, ‘Somebody I know is being harassed. What would you tell her to keep herself safe?’ And then she wrote down the answers,” Sullivan told the police.
It was apparent to the detectives who were looking for her that Anne Marie had been worried about a number of things, and most of them could be linked to Tom Capano. But why would she think he would have her kidnapped?
And had he? They couldn’t ask him at the moment. Since Sunday afternoon, he had made himself unavailable to them.
ON July 1, Mark Daniels had driven to the Ristorante Panorama in Philadelphia and asked to speak to the waiters who had been on duty on June 27. It was fairly easy to establish from a credit card receipt that Tom Capano and a companion had eaten at the Panorama that night. Jacqueline Dansak’s initials were on the check, designating her as their server.
Daniels soon found that Dansak had an excellent memory. She said she remembered the couple well; they were distinctive in several ways. “They were unusually dressed for the atmosphere,” she explained. “And this couple—especially the female—she was wearing a flower-printed dress. Most of our clientele are from the Main Line . . . very fashionably dressed, bedazzled and bedecked and whatnot. Most women [who come in] wear black or something a little more jet-setty looking.”
Jacqueline Dansak had always liked to figure out couples’ relationships to each other, but she had been at a loss with this pair. They gave her so little to go on. They didn’t seem like a dating couple, nor did they look married. They clearly weren’t there on business. The man was considerably older than the woman, but not quite old enough to be her father. And there was virtually no interaction between them; it was as if they were trapped in the same elevator together, staring glumly ahead.
“They didn’t speak to each other at all,” Dansak said. “This man—the gentleman—ordered everything for the woman without even consulting her. They started off with cocktails. They had a three-course meal. I sold the special to the woman—she had swordfish. The gentleman had veal or chicken.”
Looking at the check, which had come to a total of $154, she could tell that the man had ordered a Myers’s rum and tonic for himself and a Sea Breeze (vodka and cranberry juice) for the woman.
Aside from their not speaking, Dansak noted that the woman was very quiet—“somber. She looked haggard and gaunt. Her hair was unkempt. She was very thin.”
They had barely touched their food, she reported. “They picked at it. I had to wrap it up. I asked the woman if she wanted something else—because she wasn’t eating it.”
But the woman had only shaken her head. She hadn’t seemed angry—or frightened, for that matter. She had seemed more depressed or sad, as if she wasn’t at all happy to be there.
Dansak explained the Visa receipt to Lieutenant Daniels. It indicated that Thomas J. Capano had begun to run a tab at 7:10 P.M., and the final amount was run through the credit card machine at 9:12. There was a generous tip included in the receipt.
“The gentleman pushed the check and the credit card receipt toward the woman,” Dansak recalled, also an unusual circumstance. The woman had apparently figured up the check and added the proper tip. The receipt was signed “Thomas J. Capano.”
The couple would have left shortly after nine-fifteen, although Dansak said she hadn’t actually seen them go. But she had remembered them even after they left because their demeanor was so odd; the woman looked so unhappy, and the man seemed so bossy to her. The waitress could not tell Mark Daniels what they talked about during the two hours they were in the Panorama, or even if they had talked. The woman had tried to smile at her when she approached the table, but it seemed an effort.
The man? She could remember nothing special about him more than his glasses, which had a tint to them that virtually hid his eyes. Daniels showed Jacqueline Dansak a photograph of Anne Marie; he didn’t have a picture of Tom. She said that she recognized her as the woman who had eaten there Thursday night.
So far, Tom Capano’s story of that Thursday evening seemed to be completely accurate. The doggie bags in Anne Marie’s refrigerator were from the Ristorante Panorama, and one had contained a scarcely touched portion of swordfish. The cotton dress with flowers on it sounded like the dress the detectives had seen in her apartment. Everything indicated that she had come home from Philadelphia, gone up to her apartment with Tom, who had carried the doggie bags and the gift from T
albot’s upstairs for her, and then left. She had taken her dress off, but had half folded it and tossed it over a settee instead of hanging it up as she routinely did.
It didn’t sound as if the evening had been a happy one, however. Even a waitress who didn’t know them had wondered why Anne Marie and Tom had seemed glum and had only picked at their meals. She was quite sure, though, that they weren’t having an argument; they just seemed to be at an impasse, bored, or even silently angry. But that evening was becoming more and more important to investigate, since Jacqueline Dansak appeared to be the last person—other than Capano—to have seen Anne Marie before she vanished.
On Tuesday morning, July 2, with Anne Marie still missing, the Wilmington paper noted that she had last been seen in an unidentified Philadelphia restaurant on Thursday night and added quotes from her brothers. “This is very odd . . . very confusing for everybody,” Robert told reporters. “It’s so unlike her to be out of touch for more than an afternoon, let alone a whole weekend. She’s your normal, 30-year-old single girl with a lot of local friends and family.”
Kathleen, Robert, Kevin, Mark, and Brian were spending most of their time at Anne Marie’s apartment. Mark moved in so that someone would be there constantly. He was the brother she had agonized over, loving him so much that she wept for him. Now, she was gone—and Mark would have done anything to get Annie back. They all would.
The police asked Kathleen to inventory everything in Anne Marie’s apartment to see what might be missing. She did, and the only things she could be sure of were Anne Marie’s keys, her Walkman, and the blue topaz ring that Paul Columbus had given her. Anne Marie had worn that ring with the cotton dress they’d found flung over her settee; it matched the little blue flowers in the pattern. But now it was missing, along with Anne Marie. And by the end of the day, rumors were already circulating that she had last been seen dining with a “prominent Wilmington attorney” in Philadelphia just before she vanished.