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

by Ann Rule

  Dr. Carol Tavani, a neuropsychiatrist employed by the Delaware Prison Health Department to see prisoner patients fifteen hours a week, evaluated Tom on November 14. Tavani’s discipline looked far more to pharmacological treatment than Freud to treat patients. She took Tom’s medical history and found nothing of much importance beyond his colitis and a spell of hypertension some years earlier. Even in his present circumstance, the psychiatrist found her patient “most pleasant. He was cooperative with me . . . cognitively, intellectually intact. Very upset . . . that his brother—or brothers—would have turned on him.”

  Tom confided that he wished he had had a fatal heart attack, but denied that he had suicidal thoughts. Dr. Tavani extracted a promise from him that he would not try to kill himself. It seemed to her that he was very anxious, terribly depressed, and worried about his daughters.

  And indeed he must have been; those were completely appropriate emotional responses for someone who has just been charged with murder and locked away from the life he knew. Tom’s world had plunged from the opulent surroundings of his mother’s estate on Weldin Road to the bare essentials of life in a crowded prison.

  After a few days in the infirmary, Tom was moved to solitary confinement in Cell 1 in the 1-F pod at Gander Hill Prison; 1-F was the area that held prisoners who for one reason or another had to be designated “administrative segs.” Inmates who feared for their safety, those who had been threatened, and those who were being disciplined were placed in segregation there.

  Like the other nine single cells in the pod, Tom’s was approximately six by ten feet and faced the guards’ bubblelike modular unit. There was no privacy. There was a bunk with a thin foam pad, a small table bolted to the floor, a pale fluorescent light, a toilet and sink, a narrow window looking out on the prison yard, and vents on the opposite side of the common wall shared with Cell 2.

  Tom would be locked in twenty-three hours a day. His one hour of “rec” would be used for exercising, showering, cleaning his cell, and making phone calls. But the calls would be limited and often cut off in midsentence. And Tom would have his rec hour by himself, although some of the prisoners on the 1-F pod were permitted to mingle. He was a man alone; other prisoners weren’t allowed past the red line painted in front of his cell.

  For a man who had always had whatever he wanted, imprisonment was a shock. For a man who had a television and a VCR in most of the rooms of his house, the lack of TV or even a radio left him with endless empty days. Even the number of books he could have was curtailed; Tom was permitted only six a month.

  Always fastidious, he wrote to Debby that he was living in filth. He shuddered to think of where his sheets and blankets had been before he got them. Even the number of pairs of socks and shorts he could have was specified, so he said he had to wash his underwear in his toilet when he ran out.

  Tom could have visitors, but not nearly as many as he wanted, and the visits were over too soon. His attorneys tried to come by every Wednesday—if not more often. He was sullenly outraged that he had come to such an existence.

  But he had. On November 22, 1997, the New Castle County grand jury made it absolutely official when Tom Capano was indicted on state charges for the first-degree murder of Anne Marie Fahey. He continued to be held without bail, and a bail hearing wasn’t even likely to be set until after the holidays.

  Two days before Christmas, Judge William Swain Lee of the Superior Court was appointed to the Capano case. Lee was much admired for his experience, brilliance, and common sense. Attorneys on both sides of the case were heartened. If anyone could maintain a sense of order and dignity in what would be the trial of the century in Delaware, it would be William Swain Lee.

  ALONE in his cell almost constantly, Tom evaluated his chances to get out on bail. He could count on his mother (although he worried that she would be a “crybaby and make a scene”), on his daughters, and to some extent on Kay—except that she was going ahead with the divorce. And he knew that Debby’s love for him was steadfast and completely dependable; as always, she would do whatever he directed. Debby’s testimony would never hurt him; she would say exactly what he told her to say. His sister, Marian, and her husband, Lee, were there for him, and his brother Joey. Louie and Gerry, of course, had betrayed him. But Tom had the best attorneys in the business. And he had a handful of male friends who would stand by him; he had been generous in helping some of them pay for houses or their kids’ education. There were other women, too, that he thought would come through in a pinch—Susan Louth, for one.

  Tom didn’t expect to be in Gander Hill for very long; they couldn’t hold him without bail endlessly. Delaware statute said that the prosecutors would have to hold a proof positive hearing to prove to a judge that they had a good case to take into court. Tom figured if they were basing it on Gerry’s babblings and what Louie knew, they might as well forget it.

  As for the state proving that he had stalked Anne Marie, there were dozens of E-mails, notes, and records that showed she had been his friend to the end. His attorneys would make short shrift of anyone who said otherwise.

  Tom was intelligent and he was great with people, any people who happened to move through his life—except, perhaps, for prison guards. He had always made his own rules, and now he railed against the rules at Gander Hill. He was not an easy prisoner to deal with.

  Among the prisoners who came to the 1-F pod was a man with far more experience as an inmate than Tom. Nicholas Perillo, forty-five, had a potent on-and-off addiction to both drugs and alcohol and a rap sheet that went back almost two decades. He was silver haired and very handsome, spoke in a gruff voice that sounded remarkably like Sylvester Stallone’s, and had a mother whose heart he had broken often and a brother who was a successful television actor, appearing on such shows as ER. Perillo was always looking for an angle. He was an admitted burglar, forger, and thief, but even so, he was exceedingly likable and he always meant to do better. Perillo was smart and he was con wise—but he wasn’t violent.

  By rights, Perillo probably should have long ago received the “big bitch”—thirty-four years and ninety days in prison as a habitual offender. But he had slipped out of that when a young woman attorney went to bat for him. While he was in prison in 1989, he married the attorney who had made the plea bargain for him and, because she had so much faith in him, vowed to mend his ways. It could have been a made-for-a-miniseries marriage, but when he was released in 1992, Nick slid back into the seductive world of drugs and alcohol. His marriage foundered, and he shattered any romantic illusions his wife might still have had when he burglarized her house.

  Perillo had been arrested often enough that Gander Hill was familiar to him. On his last sojourn, the prison was full to bursting and he had to sleep on a pallet on the floor of Booking and Receiving for three months. When he was charged with third-degree burglary after being found drunk and asleep in a vacant house next door to his mother’s in the fall of 1997, he knew he was going back to Gander Hill. But he had no intention of sleeping on the floor again.

  “When the officer told me to go get a mattress out of the corner and pointed me to a particular cell, there were six people laying on the floor,” he said later. “So I walked up to the desk and told them I had a codefendant currently incarcerated at Gander Hill and I was afraid for my life and wanted protective custody. I knew they would give me a cell and a bed and I wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor.”

  Unlike Tom, Perillo was delighted to get his own cell in the 1-F pod. He drew Cell 2, identical to Tom’s and right next to it.

  Perillo read the papers; he knew who Tom Capano was, but he didn’t realize that Tom was in the 1-F pod until he heard the other prisoners yelling at him when he was taking his hour of rec. Curious, he went to the doorway of his cell and saw Tom in the hall.

  Even though the prisoners in segregation were discouraged from talking to one another, there were ways. During meals, the flaps at the bottom of their cell doors were opened and they could hunker down
on the floor and talk back and forth. Men who were out for rec could slide notes under cell doors and receive notes the same way. If the guards had stepped away from the bubble, they could even cross the painted red lines.

  There is no place that challenges its residents to beat the system more than a jail or a prison; rules there cry out to be broken. And all humans need to communicate. Perillo and Tom were both Italian and of an age. They became acquainted despite the restrictive environment, trading life stories and books. Nick could match Tom for charm anyday, and for intelligence. After the two men got to know each other, he told Tom he would get his brother’s autograph for Tom’s girls.

  Perillo had pretty much run out of people on the outside who trusted him, so he didn’t use all of his telephone time. And he was down to his last twenty cents in his commissary account. In his real life, Tom had used the phone continually, checking on his daughters and his lovers several times a day. Now the fact that he was permitted only a certain number of calls rankled him. He desperately needed to find a way to circumvent the phone system.

  All phone calls from Gander Hill had to be collect, of course, and the inmates got access to the outgoing phone lines by punching in their prisoner identification number (SBI) first, and then dialing numbers from an approved list. Tom’s list was soon full, but other prisoners, like Nick Perillo—and Harry Fusco, a man waiting trial on sex offenses—had phone time they never used. Perillo explained the ways that he and other prisoners could make calls for Tom. Tom had family, friends, and money; many of his pod mates had neither.

  Tom rapidly got himself into a position where he had more control over his life, and also the lives of people on the outside whom he felt needed direction. If he wanted more phone calls, he now had a way to make them. He could have Kay send checks to the commissary accounts of some of his new friends.

  IRONICALLY, Debby MacIntyre felt that she and Tom had had their best times together in the months just before his arrest. “We saw each other practically every day,” she recalled. “He would come over to the house—just stop in—almost every night. Maybe one evening or two he wouldn’t come because he was doing something with his office friends.”

  Debby had been serene in the knowledge that they would be married before another year passed. She was scarcely aware that the investigation into Anne Marie Fahey’s murder was continuing and was still focused on Tom. “I knew he didn’t do it,” she said. “Later, they [the investigators] asked me, ‘Didn’t you even think that he was a suspect and she’s disappeared?’ and I said, ‘No.’ Because I believed that she had gone off—as Tom told me—that she’d gone off the deep end and joined some cult in Colorado or someplace. He told me that he had ended his relationship with Anne Marie in September of 1995 when we decided we would get married one day. It wasn’t any part of our life. We never talked about it.”

  There was no proof, Tom had told her a long time back, that Anne Marie was even dead. If she was, no one knew where or how, he pointed out, and none of it had anything to do with him.

  But when Debby came home from Rome in late November, Tom was in jail. Even so, he convinced her that he would be out within a matter of weeks and that they would go on as they always had. Even from Gander Hill, Tom could control her life.

  Debby continued to suffer from an emotional reaction that many women share. Talk shows call it the “disease to please,” and those who suffer from it never feel good enough about themselves to protect and defend their own needs, or to set boundaries. Any confrontation makes them physically ill, and many who seek therapy actually apologize to the therapist for talking about themselves; above all, it is essential not to make anyone else uncomfortable or angry.

  With Tom in prison, Debby did her best to please him, to keep up his spirits. She couldn’t visit him because visits were reserved for his daughters and his family, but Tom called her almost every evening and she curtailed her activities so she would be there when he called. They wrote each other daily letters.

  In those phone calls, “We really talked more about emotions,” Debby recalled. “How he was feeling, how he was faring, what I was doing. We rarely talked about the case. He said a couple of times that he didn’t want to talk about the case because he didn’t know how safe the phones were—the phone he was calling from.”

  At one point, however, Debby brought up something that had begun to eat at her. Now that Tom was charged with Anne Marie’s murder, it was almost impossible for her not to think about it. She asked Tom what had become of the gun she bought for him.

  His response was immediate and stern. “Please don’t mention that on the phone. I don’t want to discuss anything like that on the phone or about the case.” He seemed so agitated that she instantly regretted mentioning the gun.

  With Tom’s warnings ringing in her ears, Debby didn’t care much for the men who had brought him down—Colm Connolly, Eric Alpert, and Ferris Wharton, particularly. Bob Donovan seemed somehow nicer to her. He didn’t say much, and he didn’t seem to be bearing down on her as hard as the others. But still, she knew they wanted her to help them convict Tom and she wasn’t going to do it.

  Debby was getting another kind of pressure from Tom himself. Although she was perfectly content to wait for him until he got out of jail after his bail hearing, Tom kept urging her to see other men and have sex with them. He still found that thought as arousing as ever—perhaps more so because he no longer could make love to her himself.

  In fact, Tom had always been almost obsessively curious about the bodily functions and responses of the women he was intimate with. Unlike most men, he seemed fascinated with their menstrual cycles and demanded to know all of their secrets. Nothing was too personal for him to ask or write. Either he was convinced that his mail was private or he didn’t care. His long letters to Debby were full of pornographic descriptions and sexual innuendo, declarations of his love, complaints about his unbearable living conditions, and his hope that it would all be over soon. But most of all, they told her what to do.

  Christmas 1997 was yet another holiday for the Fahey family without Anne Marie. Yet there was the hope that when Tom Capano went to trial, they would finally have some kind of closure. Tom fully expected to get out on bail and to prepare for trial in the comfort of civilized surroundings. Debby just wanted to have him back with her.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  THERE WAS NO WAY for the men building the case against Tom to know for certain how Anne Marie had died. The utensils and tools taken from Tom’s house had tested negative for human blood, refuting their original suspicions that, in a blind rage, he had beaten her to death. Gerry Capano said the ten-millimeter handgun he’d given to Tom in February 1996 had been returned unused. And a tedious search through receipts of gun sales in the state of Delaware for the first six months of 1996 had turned up no record of a firearm being sold to Tom Capano.

  However, there was a record of a gun sale to someone close to Tom. The investigators learned that Debby MacIntyre had bought a .22 caliber Beretta handgun on May 13—forty-five days before Anne Marie vanished. That purchase certainly interested them.

  Whatever had happened to Anne Marie, now Connolly, Wharton, Alpert, and Donovan were convinced that her fate had been plotted out carefully for a long time before she disappeared. Tom had borrowed money from Gerry way back in February 1996—$8,000, allegedly to pay off an extortionist. If there really had been an extortionist, why didn’t Tom simply go to his bank and take money out of his own account? He had had a balance of over $153,000 at the time. Indeed, he’d paid Gerry back the very next day. No, it was obvious that Tom had borrowed the money from Gerry to make sure that his little brother would have the extortionist story firmly in his mind. And then, whenever Tom might need to get rid of a body, Gerry wouldn’t ask questions.

  And he hadn’t. Gerry wasn’t happy about dumping a body at sea—but he had gone along with Tom’s pleas. He’d kept his back turned while Tom removed the body from the cooler and weighted it down befo
re dropping it overboard.

  Now it seemed that Tom had drawn Debby into his crime, persuading her to be the goat who bought a weapon for him, but not just before he intended to kill Anne Marie—forty-five days in advance. It was one more indication that Anne Marie’s murder was premeditated.

  The investigators looked again at Tom’s E-mail from May through June 1996 and found it full of his dogged insistence that Anne Marie have dinner with him—that she keep him informed of her plans. “Hey,” Tom E-mailed her on May 3. “It’s 2:30 and I ain’t heard from ya so I was wondering what was up. Please give me a call or e-mail me when you get a chance. Is there a good time to call you? Hope you’re having a good day, but my guess is you’re not. Think mussels . . . in a white sauce.” There were many like that, apparent attempts to lure Anne Marie into a meeting that might be their last.

  They looked at the statement from Siobhan Sullivan, Anne Marie’s state trooper friend. Anne Marie had told her that Tom was “a fucking stalker” in May 1996. Anne Marie was afraid of Tom, but the prosecution team realized that she had had no idea of how dangerous he might be; she never knew that he had asked another woman to buy a gun for him—that he had made plans to get rid of a body. And none of them believed for a moment that Debby MacIntyre had bought that gun for herself.

  But where was it now?

  ON January 8, 1998, Tom Capano pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder. His bail hearing—the proof positive hearing—was set to begin in the first week of February. He and his lawyers concurred that Debby MacIntyre would be one of the best witnesses they could present. Tom knew she was scared to death to testify for him; he also knew she would do it. She would do anything for him.

  On January 28, Tom wrote a letter to the woman he purportedly loved and planned to marry. In earlier letters, he had persuaded her to accept a date with another man, urging her to have sex with him, which she could not do. Now he wrote a letter that would haunt her, although it was clearly a picture of who he was, rather than a portrait of her.