by Ann Rule
Anne Marie had told D’Amico that Capano had “gone crazy” and grabbed her, accusing her of ruining his life. She said that she was going to tell him that they no longer had any relationship, even though she was frightened that he might harm her.
TOM had had an appointment for some dental surgery for weeks. He kept that appointment on Tuesday morning, July 2, and then left for the shore. He was under a lot of stress, and he probably felt more secure in the comparative privacy of his mother’s huge brown house at Stone Harbor. Two fake owls were anchored on the deck off the second story to scare away the seabirds before they left their droppings. Standing beside them, all you could hear was the roar of the sea, perhaps a comforting sound in Tom’s mind compared to the detective’s questions in Wilmington.
FEW people in Wilmington knew Charles Freel by his given name; he was Bud Freel to everyone. Bud, of course, was one of the owners of O’Friel’s Irish Pub, former owner of Buddy’s Bar, and more important, a Wilmington city councilman and director of the Office of External Affairs for the Delaware State Department of Transportation. Bud had been Tom Capano’s good friend for over twenty years; they had worked closely together on many Democratic campaigns. Bud was also very close to the Faheys. Anne Marie was like a little sister to him.
Bud had been in Dover at the Legislative Hall when his brother Ed called him on Sunday afternoon with the news that Anne Marie was missing. Ten hours later, in the early hours of July 1, the legislature closed up shop for the summer. And just before dawn, Ed told Bud that he had learned that Tom Capano was the last person to have seen Anne Marie before her disappearance.
With no motive beyond friendship, Bud had called Tom’s house and left him a message of concern. “I knew he had been friends with Anne Marie,” he said, “and I told Tom I was thinking about him and I felt bad. If there was anything I could do, to let me know.”
Tom called Bud back Monday evening. “It was a very brief call,” Bud recalled. “He just said that I was going to hear a lot of shit about him in the next couple of months—and not to believe it. And that he was going to need my support. And he basically hung up.”
Bud Freel was equally concerned about the Fahey family. On Wednesday morning, July 3, he went to Anne Marie’s apartment to talk with her brothers and sister, hoping he would find them there without the crowds of people who were coming by out of compassion or curiosity. “They were asking me questions,” Bud recalled, “and I basically couldn’t answer. So while I was there, I offered to talk to Tom.”
Bud was caught between two sides of a mystery involving people he cared about, a situation that wasn’t likely to happen anywhere but Wilmington, where everyone was somehow connected. Anne Marie’s family was searching desperately for any nugget of information they could find about her disappearance, and a dark cloud was forming rapidly over Tom’s heretofore impeccable reputation. They weren’t talking to one another; Bud was the natural link. He decided to drive to Stone Harbor and talk to Tom. “My hope,” Bud recalled, “was that he would come back and cooperate with the police and do whatever he could to help.”
Back in Wilmington, flyers with Anne Marie’s pictures had just begun to blossom in store windows. The search for her was omnipresent there, but the Atlantic Ocean made all of it seem very far away. It was July 3 when Bud pulled up at Marguerite Capano’s house on the beach and walked in through the sliding glass doors on the ocean side. One of Tom’s daughters was sitting on the couch with a friend, and Bud asked where her father was. She pointed to the den in the back of the house. He found Tom talking on the phone. Bud Freel was an imposing man, standing well over six feet, with a physique that was reminiscent of a professional wrestler’s; no fat, just substance. He could fill a doorway. Tom looked a little startled when he saw Bud looming over him, but he only raised his eyebrows in a silent question.
Bud waited until Tom was off the phone. Not a man to edge his way in, he started with the hard questions. “I asked him if he had any information or knew anything about the whereabouts of Anne Marie,” he recalled, “and he said he didn’t.”
Bud suggested that Tom might talk to the police anyway and Tom replied that he already had—twice. “I answered their questions,” Tom said. “I let them search my car. I don’t know what else I can do.”
The two men talked for three hours, going over scenarios of what might possibly have happened to Anne Marie. But first, Tom tried to convey to Bud how good he had been to her. He said he had always thought only of what was best for Annie. But he was not as reluctant as Kim was to reveal the private secrets of their relationship. He told Bud they had once been lovers, but now they were only very good friends—he had become Anne Marie’s best friend.
“All the police were interested in,” Tom complained, “were all the dirty little details—how often we had sex, and where we had sex, and they wanted to know all the intimate things she told me. Bud,” he said in an anguished voice, “I can’t violate her trust like that.”
“Tommy,” Bud said earnestly, out of his own concern for what might have happened to Anne Marie, “just go back and sit down with them. You answer their questions—and the ones you don’t want to answer, you tell them you’re not going to. This thing is going to steamroll—it’s an interesting story for the media, her being the scheduling secretary for the governor. This isn’t going to stop, and before you know it, we’ll have Hard Copy here in Wilmington, Delaware.”
Tom sat in an overstuffed chair, his legs crossed, as they talked. He smoked a number of cigarettes, but he seemed calm as he explained to Bud that he too was “pretty upset.” Still, he didn’t think letting the police have at him was the answer. He turned their conversation back to the reasons why Annie might have left. Maybe she’d just gone to the beach for a whole week. Maybe she’d just wanted to get away by herself. Maybe she’d decided to go to the eating disorder clinic he’d told her about.
“We would explore each one of them,” Bud Freel recalled, “and in the case of the first two—why would you go away and not take your money and your credit cards? And in the last one, I said—even though those places have rules of confidentiality, if they saw her picture in the paper, wouldn’t they have contacted a family member?”
Tom would then agree that Bud was probably right. But they were going round and round about his coming back and cooperating with the investigators. When Bud finally left to drive back to Wilmington, he didn’t feel that he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do.
Tom called the next morning—July 4—and asked Bud what was going on. Bud told him what was in the News-Journal, about the massive search of Brandywine Park with all of the people who had turned out to help.
Then Tom got around to the main reason for his call. He said that Charlie Oberly was not happy with him for talking to Bud. His lawyer was upset.
“Why would he be upset if you’re talking to me?” Bud asked, perplexed. They were old friends, searching for a way to find another friend.
“He wants me to ask you if you were wired,” Tom said.
Bud erupted, insulted that Tom would even think of such a thing. “I did a lot of shouting and cussing,” he admitted. “I summarized everything I told him the day before. He was hurting himself, hurting his kids, his family, if he didn’t get his butt back to Wilmington and talk to the police.”
Bud finally calmed down and asked Tom what he could do to help him. “It was at that point,” Bud would recall, “that he asked me if I would talk to the Faheys about talking to him. It was important, he said, for them to know how good he had been to their sister.”
Tom wanted to talk to Robert Fahey, but he asked Bud to act as an intermediary. And Bud did, calling Robert on July 5. Robert told Bud that he did not want to meet with Tom, but he would take a phone call from him. He said he would be home from five to five-thirty that night, waiting for Tom’s call.
It never came. After three calls to Tom in one day, Bud finally heard from him at 9 P.M. “I’m not going to call Robert at t
his time,” Tom said, “because I’m going to come back on Monday and talk with the police.”
Bud believed him. He spoke with Tom again sometime over the long Fourth of July weekend. For some reason, Tom hadn’t gone out to buy a Wilmington paper, but instead asked Bud to tell him what was being written.
Deputy state attorney general Ferris Wharton had commented on the missing persons case, but not officially. He was speaking as the chief prosecutor in New Castle County—although there certainly was no case as yet that would necessitate prosecution. Wharton, who had an impressive record of convictions in high-profile homicide cases, was native born and familiar to most Wilmington residents. Tall and lanky with straight brown hair that was forever flopping over his forehead, he seemed almost shy outside a courtroom, but he was a powerful force in front of a jury. Fortyish, Wharton was still an athlete; he worked out at the Y, played basketball, and every summer spent his vacations riding in a bicycle convoy across Iowa—which he found was not nearly as flat as everyone thought.
Wharton had the look of a Gary Cooper or a Jimmy Stewart. He was the kind of an attorney whose easy, quiet presence made people feel somehow calmer, a nice guy with a keen mind—unless they happened to be the subjects of his cross-examination. Then his questions could lure them into snares they never saw coming. Wharton sometimes watched basketball tournaments from a bar stool at O’Friel’s. Like Bud Freel, he knew both the Faheys and the Capanos, if not as well, and like everyone else, he wondered what could have happened to Anne Marie.
“Each day, you become more and more pessimistic about the outcome,” he told a News-Journal reporter, phrasing his statements cautiously. He was still talking about a missing persons case, but everyone was growing edgy. The whole town seemed to know that Anne Marie had been seeing both Tom Capano and Mike Scanlan, and Wharton was not about to comment on that. “Everybody who had contact with her, in a very broad sense,” he said, “is a suspect. . . . The complete spectrum of options is out there. She’s missing.”
MONDAY was the eighth of July. It was the day Tom had promised Bud Freel that he would come back to Wilmington to talk to the police. Anne Marie had been missing for eleven days. Tom called Bud to say that he was meeting with his attorneys in the morning and would probably talk to the police that afternoon.
But he didn’t. Instead, he called Bud in the evening and repeated his tirade about the police and their sick, prurient interest in his sex life. He could not bring himself to sit still for that. The police were trying to set him up, and he wasn’t going to go in and let them do it.
Bud was exasperated. “You know, Tom,” he began, “I just don’t get it. Anne Marie’s been missing now for more than a week. They just want to sit down and ask you some questions in hopes there might be something that you know, and you might not even realize you can be helpful to them. If you’re not willing to do that, I have nothing else to say to you.”
It was their last conversation.
WHEN Tom finally came back to Wilmington, he turned to his good friend, Brian Murphy, for companionship. Tom and Brian had been friends for twenty years, ever since they played on the Wilmington Rugby Club team with Dan Frawley. Later, Murphy became the city’s public information officer and reported to Tom when he was Mayor Frawley’s top aide. Tom had lent Murphy $15,000 to pay his daughter’s tuition at Ursuline Academy. He was a generous creditor who rarely called in his loans to male friends.
Tom and Brian Murphy ate dinner together in Little Italy and Tom confided that he was very frightened. He showed Murphy some threatening letters he had received, letters that accused him of hurting Anne Marie. They were unsigned. Tom told Murphy that he had no idea what had happened to her. It was obvious that Tom didn’t want to be alone in his house on Grant Avenue, so Murphy went home with him. They sat in the two La-Z-Boy recliners in the great room and watched late-night television with the lights off so no one driving by could see them. They sipped Sambuca until it grew light outside. Murphy suggested that Tom make a public statement telling everyone what he had told him. An innocent man shouldn’t have to worry about anonymous threats.
JULY 8 was a very important day in the investigation of the disappearance of Anne Marie Fahey; although the public was not yet aware of it, the federal government moved quietly into the picture. Although the media said President Clinton had given that directive, that wasn’t true. Clinton had called to talk with Governor Carper, but not to offer federal aid in the probe. It was a call about a friend. Whenever the White House wanted to talk to Carper, it was Anne Marie who was contacted to schedule conferences. The president—who had shaken Anne Marie’s hand only three months earlier—phoned Carper to offer his sympathy to the Fahey family. And his promise of federal aid in the search for Anne Marie was couched in politically savvy terms. He had added the phrase “should that [federal aid] be necessary or appropriate.”
It wasn’t really up to the president. In truth, the federal government routinely assists state and local law enforcement agencies in a variety of ways. And the reverse is also true. It isn’t necessary to have a presidential proclamation to bring federal law enforcement into the picture—but Clinton’s offer made a great news lead for the media that were following the case avidly.
Still, when he read the news about Clinton’s call to Carper, Tom was unnerved. He didn’t know Robert Donovan, but Donovan was at least a Wilmington Police detective. And Mark Daniels was a longtime State Police detective. Tom knew Ferris Wharton to speak to, and they sometimes made small talk when they met in checkout lines. The men who were investigating Anne Marie’s disappearance were all known entities to Tom, part of the fabric of Wilmington, where he felt comfortable.
In fact, Tom rarely left Wilmington, except to go to Philadelphia. A circle drawn on a map would show the remarkably small confines in which he operated. Occasionally he made a trip for law seminars, or went down to Boca Raton for vacations—but Wilmington was a place he had always been able to count on, a city with no unsettling surprises. With tact, diplomacy, and mediation, Tom had worked out all manner of problems to his satisfaction. He could not understand the need for the federal government to enter into what was, at heart, a local concern.
As it was, anyone living outside Delaware would be easily confused by the interweaving of state and local government. The state Attorney General’s office is in Wilmington, and since there are only three counties in all of Delaware, the senior deputy attorneys general act as county prosecutors would in most states, but they reported to Delaware attorney general Jane Brady. Ferris Wharton, for instance, had prosecuted cases all over Delaware.
For a while, word that the feds were coming into the case was only a rumor. On July 8, it became a reality, but it was still a secret. And they would have come in on any baffling case where local authorities asked for help. The fact that Anne Marie was the governor’s secretary made headlines, yes, but for the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office, all that mattered was that a young woman was missing and her family was in agony. It would have been the same if she had been a secretary at DuPont or a waitress at Galluccio’s.
AT forty-three, Eric Alpert had been an FBI special agent for fourteen years. He had earned his law degree from the Cumberland School in Birmingham, Alabama, and had served in New York City, Buffalo, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., before being assigned to the Wilmington office. In February 1996, Alpert had been honored at the Philadelphia City Hall for his work as the coordinator of the Violent Crime Fugitive Task Force; his team had been successful in bringing in cop killers. That operation had meant long hours away from his wife, Lisa, and their children (who were five and two), and he wasn’t particularly anxious to jump into another high-pressure investigation. Still, as he read about Anne Marie’s disappearance in the papers, Alpert thought it sounded like an interstate kidnapping. Wherever she was currently, she had obviously been in Pennsylvania early in the evening of June 27 and had been taken back to Delaware.
On Tuesday, July 2, Alpert had called Bob
Donovan at Wilmington Police headquarters and asked, “Is there anything we can do to help?”
There was. Donovan said the police were hoping to get pen registers on phone lines of people closely connected to Anne Marie Fahey. The devices note the time, date, and numbers called from designated phones. To obtain pen registers, the U.S. Attorney’s office would have to participate.
Another man who worked for the federal government had offered assistance to the local investigators. He was to become the prime mover in solving the seemingly impenetrable puzzle of Anne Marie’s disappearance, but he came on board with little fanfare. Assistant U.S. Attorney Colm Connolly was only thirty-two when he was tapped by his boss, U.S. Attorney Greg Sleet, to investigate what would become the biggest case of his career. He had already prosecuted more than a hundred defendants for a whole spectrum of offenses ranging from embezzlement and arson to extortion and tax evasion. One of the myriad convictions he had won involved a fraud conspiracy and money-laundering case with fourteen hundred victims; another involved a case of armed bank robbery, conspiracy, and weapons violations. Connolly had commendations from FBI director Louis Freeh and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and he was the first Delaware recipient of the Director’s Award for Superior Performance, an award given to fewer than 3 percent of all assistant U.S. attorneys. Still, when he was assigned to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Anne Marie Fahey, he had yet to work a kidnapping or homicide case. Indeed, when he came into the case, no one knew what—if any—charges might be brought against a suspect.