by Ann Rule
Gerry said Tom had given him a story to tell if he was ever questioned. Once he left Tom, he wrote it down on a Post-it and stuck it in his wallet so he would remember, but in the end, he hadn’t used it. He was telling the truth.
THE moment that Gerry Capano confessed that Tom had dumped a cooler in the Atlantic Ocean, Eric Alpert and Bob Donovan remembered an item on Tom’s credit card bill. They had seen it when they were poring over the bills looking for charges that might be relevant. But it didn’t seem particularly important that Tom had bought a Styrofoam cooler at the Sports Authority on Saturday afternoon, April 20, at 3:15, using his MasterCard. It was an Igloo 162-quart marine cooler and it cost $194.84 with tax. At the time, they knew Tom had no boat.
“I think it didn’t mean too much then,” Alpert recalled, “because we were looking for items around June twenty-seventh—and this was pretty remote in time.” But now the fact that Tom had bought a huge cooler no longer seemed remote or irrelevant.
They had broken the back of the case, but there was little jubilation for Connolly, Donovan, Poplos, and Alpert. The woman they had come to know better, perhaps, than anyone they had known in life had been carried out to sea and dumped in Mako Alley, where the sharks prowled. It was a horrible thought. They still didn’t know how Anne Marie had died. But now it looked as if Tom Capano had not simply lost it in a burst of jealous rage. He had been carrying out a well-organized plan. He had apparently set up a scenario about extortionists way back in February, a good four months before Anne Marie vanished. All those months . . .
Had Tom known what day he would kill her? Or had he kept his dark strategy in abeyance to use as a contingency plan? Would it have come into play at any point when he became convinced that he could no longer bend Anne Marie to his will and make her come back to him? For some reason, June 27 appeared to have been Tom Capano’s day of decision. Bolstered with newfound confidence that she had the right to choose whom she would love, Anne Marie had, all unaware, finally convinced Tom she didn’t want to be with him.
The cooler was gone in the Atlantic Ocean, the couch was buried beneath hundreds of layers of garbage. Only the cruel game plan remained, something Tom had surely never expected would be revealed. Only two people had ever balked at the role he had cast them in; one was Linda Marandola and the other was Anne Marie Fahey.
THE house that Lou Capano had built so proudly was crumbling. Two days after Gerry’s confession—on Monday, November 10—Louie Capano appeared at the IRS building with his attorney Catherine Recker. He too signed a plea agreement. Admitting that he had lied to the grand jury out of his allegiance to Tom and his belief in his brother’s innocence, Louie agreed to tell everything he knew about the death of Anne Marie Fahey and plead guilty to tampering with a witness in exchange for a sentence of one year’s probation.
Louie said he had no knowledge of what had happened until Tom called him on Sunday morning, June 30, 1996, and asked him to come over. When he arrived at North Grant Avenue, Tom told him that the police had shown up in the middle of the night and that he was very upset.
“He told me that he had had a relationship with Anne Marie Fahey,” Louie said. “And that she was anorectic and bulimic and a troubled person—that he had stopped seeing her and he didn’t want his wife, Kay, to find out about their relationship. He also told me that after he had dinner with her that evening [June 27], they went back to his house. While he was upstairs using the bathroom—when he came down—she had slit her wrists and had gotten blood, a superficial amount of blood, on the sofa.”
Tom had explained that he and Gerry had gotten rid of the sofa in the company’s Dumpster on Foulk Road, and asked Louie to have it dumped. “After the conversation with my brother,” Louie said, “I went up to the job. We had men working, and I was curious and looked in the Dumpster behind the building. I saw what looked to be like a sofa, turned upside down, and I saw the legs.”
He meant the sofa’s legs; he said he hadn’t seen any sign of a body. He’d made a mental note to have the Dumpster emptied, but it slipped his mind.
It had not slipped Tom’s mind. Louie said he had called on Monday morning to ask if it had been dumped yet. “I told him no,” Louie said, “but that I would have them dumped.”
“Did he tell you what had caused him some concern on Monday morning?”
“Anne Marie Fahey had not shown up for work,” Louie said. “He was concerned that the police might start looking around and could get the Dumpsters.”
At that point, Louie said he believed Tom to be innocent of any crime against Anne Marie Fahey. Tom had done a good job of convincing him she was a very disturbed and impetuous young woman who would show up in her own good time.
Louie said that sometime later he had asked Tom why the carpet in his great room was gone. Was that bloody too? “He told me he had disposed of some carpet at the Holiday Inn over in New Jersey. It was cut up and put into plastic bags.”
The Capanos happened to own that particular Holiday Inn, and Tom told Louie he had asked the manager to have their Dumpsters emptied early, too.
“Did Tom tell you he had put other items besides a sofa in your Dumpsters at 105 Foulk Road?”
“Yes. He told me that he put [in] some of Anne Marie Fahey’s personal belongings and a gun.”
They might have known. Tom had been punctilious about erasing every sign that Anne Marie had ever been to his home, much less died there. He wouldn’t have risked keeping a gun around. They had no idea what kind of gun it was; he had given the ten-millimeter back to Gerry. But a check of gun sale records might turn up someone close to Tom—or even Tom himself—who had purchased a gun around the time Anne Marie disappeared. It would be a tedious process, but if someone had given his real name when he purchased a gun, they could find it.
Louie recalled a conversation he had had with Tom prior to his own grand jury testimony on August 29, 1996. Tom had been living at Louie’s Greenville mansion after he moved out of the blighted North Grant Avenue house.
“I was just getting out of the shower—it was the morning of my testimony—and he came in and basically asked me to provide him an alibi for Friday morning—[to say] that he had come to visit me on Friday, June twenty-eighth.”
Tom had suggested a script for Louie to follow, even though he would be committing perjury. “I would say that he just put personal belongings in there [the Dumpster] because he didn’t want his wife, Kay, to know he was having a relationship with Anne Marie Fahey.”
“Did he say anything about the sofa?” Connolly asked.
“He told me not to say it was in there.”
As Louie’s testimony continued, it became apparent that all three of Tom’s brothers had some knowledge of what had happened to Anne Marie, and that they had covered up for him.
“Do you recall a conversation you had with your brother Joseph Capano in the winter of 1997?” Connolly asked.
“It was a very brief conversation in Florida—at the pool. I just asked him if he had taken care of the anchor. And he told me that he had—meaning that he had replaced one of the anchors that was on my brother Gerry’s boat.”
“And how did you know anything about an anchor to ask this question of Joe?”
“My brother Gerry told me that my brother Tom used an anchor on his boat to get rid of the cooler.”
Louie remembered walking in the street in front of Gerry’s house on Emma Court sometime in November 1996. Gerry had been unable to keep the ugly secret any longer, and he had confessed to Louie that Tom had come to him looking for a gun, and “anybody who could break somebody’s bones.”
Louie continued haltingly. “And . . . he told me that he took my brother Tom out on a boat in Stone Harbor and disposed of Anne Marie Fahey’s body.”
“And did Gerry also tell you about a conversation that he and Tom had before June twenty-eighth—that Tom had made a request of him?”
“Yeah. Tom had said to him that he had been blackmailed by this woman, et cete
ra, and—if he killed her, could he just go for a boat ride with Gerry . . . Gerry didn’t believe Tommy was serious.”
THE government team warned both Gerry and Louie not to tell anyone that they had made statements about Anne Marie’s murder. If Tom knew that his world was about to come down around him, there was no telling what he might do. He was a man with so many masks that even those closest to him seemed not to know him. He had threatened to commit suicide in the past. He certainly had the wherewithal to leave the country if he chose to run.
The FBI put a twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance on Tom on November 10, 1997. Eric Alpert carried a radio tuned to the surveillance team’s frequency with him all the time. Early on Wednesday morning, November 12, his radio crackled. “Capano’s at his brother Joey’s house,” the agent told him. “They’re loading suitcases into his Jeep.”
Connolly was in the grand jury room, where Gerry and Louie were repeating the information they had already given, and Alpert paged him urgently. When Connolly was in the hallway, he told him that it looked as though Tom was going to make a run for it. He was in a car, heading toward Philadelphia.
They agreed the time had come for an arrest. Connolly said it was important to stop Tom’s vehicle before he crossed the Delaware state line into Pennsylvania. If he was arrested there, he would be taken before a magistrate and the whole process delayed. Alpert told the agents following Tom’s Jeep Cherokee along I-95 to move in. He was apparently oblivious to the government cars that were tracking him. Tom was signaled over, and FBI agents surrounded his car and told him he was under arrest for the murder of Anne Marie.
“I heard the sirens over the radio,” Alpert recalled. “I knew they had him.”
And Tom was still in Delaware. The arresting agents reported that he had not resisted as they cuffed his hands in front of him. He appeared to be resigned, as if he was expecting to be arrested.
Ironically, Tom hadn’t been going anywhere. Casually dressed in a navy blue jogging suit, he was only driving Joey and his wife, Joanne, to the airport, where they could catch a plane to Fort Lauderdale. He had planned to turn around and head home. He had promised Debby that he would cook a steak dinner for her that night. “He said we’d have a really romantic evening,” she remembered, “because I was leaving for Italy the next morning.” Instead, she heard the news that Tom had been arrested.
Tom was driven to the U.S. Attorney’s office on the eleventh floor of the Chase Manhattan building, in custody before word flashed like a forest fire over the media’s network. Almost immediately, reporters took up vantage points as close as they could get to the U.S. Attorney’s office.
Tom had aged in triple time over the seventeen months since Anne Marie had vanished. The skin beneath his eyes was mottled and purple. But head held high, he seemed to ignore the cuffs on his wrists as if they had nothing to do with him. As he was led into the conference room, Tom’s heart may have skipped a few beats; a 162-quart Igloo cooler sat there. It wasn’t the real cooler, but Connolly had had Bob Donovan shoot into it in the spot Gerry specified in his affidavit. An anchor and a lock and chain rested near the cooler. No one mentioned the items as Tom walked by.
Colm Connolly hadn’t really spoken to Tom since that day in September when they had first met in the hall outside the grand jury room. Now he remembered what Tom had hissed at him that day.
“The day Tom was arrested,” Connolly recalled, “he was brought in here to a conference room and an agent sat with him. I went in to tell him that his attorneys would be coming shortly. I started to shut the door, and then I opened it back up and I said, ‘By the way, Mr. Capano, I sleep very well at night.’ ”
Tom let out a deep breath and put his head in his arms. For the moment, the arrogance that was such a central part of him had vanished. It had felt good to say that, but a half hour later, thinking better of his remark, Connolly came back and softened his words. Tom was sitting with his attorneys as Connolly said, “I don’t want you to think this is a personal thing. Because it isn’t.”
It was and it wasn’t. Connolly, along with Bob Donovan and Eric Alpert, had kept their promises to Anne Marie’s family to find her killer. And they believed they had done that. Starting out, they had had no way of knowing who he—or she—was. Tom Capano had never cooperated with the investigation. And they were a long way, still, from proving his guilt in a court of law. Facts rather than personal feelings were all that mattered.
With his lawyers beside him, Tom had regained his composure. He looked at the man who had pursued him almost a year and a half and spoke to him as if they were old friends, as if he had done nothing wrong.
“But Colm,” he said softly, “it was my daughters.”
What did he mean? Was he referring to the story about extortionists threatening his four girls—or was he simply explaining that he had struck out at Connolly because he’d subpoenaed Christy to testify before a grand jury?
Bob Donovan was in that conference room and so was Eric Alpert. Tom was told that the government had statements taken from his brothers Louie and Gerry that described the way he had disposed of a body.
“You believe them?” Tom said to no one in particular, incredulity in his voice.
In answer, Connolly played the tapes of his brothers’ statements for Tom. He listened, stone faced.
“We know,” Connolly said, “that Mr. Capano purchased a 162-quart marine cooler on April 20, 1996. And we know he is neither a hunter nor a fisherman.”
“Yeah,” Tom said knowingly, “but my brothers are.”
STROBES flashed as Tom was led, still in handcuffs, to a van to be taken to Gander Hill, the prison over which he had once had authority, the prison he had helped build when he worked for Governor Castle. But now he would be only another inmate in a white uniform. He would spend his first night in the infirmary—standard for new prisoners.
Tom would have to be in lockdown for his personal safety. Former cops, prosecutors, and public officials are never popular in prison. Alone in his cell, he would have fewer privileges than the inmates in the general population. But his jailers wondered if perhaps there were some among the seventeen hundred prisoners who remembered the billboards and the flyers with the picture of a pretty Irish girl—the young woman who the papers had said had wanted only to be free of the man who was now one of them.
Charlie Oberly and Joe Hurley told reporters that, of course, Tom would plead not guilty. They managed to suggest that it was utterly ridiculous that he had been arrested. But for the moment, the man who loved luxury and fine dining was nobody special. The cuisine on his first long day of captivity was hardly Villa d’ Roma or Toscana fare: cereal and chipped beef for breakfast, Texas hash for lunch, and liver and onions for dinner.
At O’Friel’s Irish Pub, there was a subdued gathering, marked more by tears than laughter. Someone asked Kevin Freel if he was going to take down the massive yellow ribbons tied there for Anne Marie, and he said slowly, “I haven’t even thought about that, yet.”
Already there were rumors that Annie had been dumped in the sea and would never have a proper burial beside her mother and her father, close to Kate McGettigan. For a Catholic, that was a terrible thing. For anyone, that was a terrible thing.
Kevin kept remembering the sight of her, snowflakes caught in her hair, beautiful Annie with her feet planted on the worn wooden floor, grinning mischievously at him as she roared “KEV-EEEE!”
It was too hard to know that she would never come again.
PART FOUR
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
Chapter Thirty-one
WITH HIS ARREST, Tom not only lost much of his own personal luster—he severely smudged the image that his father had fought so hard to maintain: Louis Capano & Sons, honest, hardworking, united. Now there were many in Wilmington who were glad that Lou had not lived to see what his family had come to. Some of the Capanos might ris
e again, but would they ever be rid of the shame, the innuendo, and the rumors? And it had all just begun. Tom’s murder trial lay ahead.
Louie hadn’t lost his cool when he was questioned by the government investigators, but Gerry was a basket case, in tears much of the time because he had betrayed Tom. Louie’s attorneys prepared a press release that appeared in most area papers on November 12, 1997, hard on the heels of Tom’s arrest:
Louis Capano, Jr. voluntarily contacted federal authorities and provided information and cooperation which has led, in part, to the arrest of his brother, Thomas Capano. . . . Louis Capano had no direct knowledge of his brother’s actions, but rather has provided information regarding events following the disappearance of Anne Marie Fahey. . . . Louis Capano did certain things during the course of the investigation which he now regrets. . . . Louis admits he misled the authorities but did so motivated by belief in his brother’s innocence. . . . The picture of Thomas Capano portrayed by these charges and evidence is completely foreign to the brother Louis thought he knew.
Tom’s whole family would be caught by the ubiquitous cameras and by reporters who dragged their personal lives into the public domain. If Tom’s arrest did nothing else, it seemed to strengthen his brothers’ marriages. Joanne, Lauri, and Michelle stood solidly behind Joey, Louie, and Gerry. Marian and Lee had always presented a strong front to the world. But the family itself broke into pieces. Marguerite could not forgive Louie and Gerry for what they had done to Tommy. She did not understand how they could have betrayed their brother. In his mother’s eyes, Tommy had been through so much, and now his own flesh and blood had turned on him. Father Balducelli was concerned about Marguerite; she had a bad heart and other health problems, and seeing her favorite son in chains just might kill her.
Although Marguerite had always looked askance at Debby MacIntyre, they were in accord now; neither woman would accept that Tom was guilty of murder. It was unthinkable. On vacation in Rome, Debby was saved from the worst of the media hoopla. There, for the moment, she could almost forget the way things were steadily growing worse at home. But she would have to come back to Wilmington and see the man she loved, the man who had pledged to marry her, diminished and locked away from her. She didn’t think she could bear it.