by Ann Rule
Wednesday, February 4, 1998, came and went, and Debby was not at the bail hearing to testify for Tom. He was thunderstruck. He had been so certain that he would get out of jail that he had packed his clothes before leaving his cell. “I’ll send someone to pick that up,” he told the jailers.
Indeed, he had heard rumors from his family that Debby wasn’t going to testify for him, and he had laughed at them. When his attorneys broke the news to him, he looked at them in disbelief and told them they were wrong. Belatedly, he got the note Debby wrote to him, telling him she couldn’t do it.
Judge Lee’s decision at the end of the proof positive hearing on February 6 went against Tom. He would continue to be held without bail, awaiting trial, which was tentatively set to start in October 1998. In Ferris Wharton’s considerable experience, most proof positive hearings took only a few hours. Tom Capano’s had taken five days.
“It was a mini trial,” Connolly commented. So much information had been presented: the records from Tom’s phones, the picture of him at the ATM machine on the morning of June 28, receipts for the fishing cooler and for gasoline bought by two boaters in Stone Harbor on June 28, the receipt for the Beretta, all the interviews with Anne Marie’s friends and coworkers. It seemed that there could be no secrets about Anne Marie Fahey or Tom Capano left.
But there were secrets still. And Debby, like many others, dreaded October 6 and what promised to be endless weeks of trial. Tom returned to his cell and unpacked his belongings, fuming that Debby’s failure to testify for him had cost him his freedom.
BUT he didn’t give up. Within days, Tom began to bombard Debby with letters that would fill an entire book, letters designed to evoke guilt, love, despair.
Dear Deb,
So. I did open the envelope and I read it because I did not believe what I had been told. I am beyond shocked. The one thing I always thought, believed, loved, was that I could always rely on you and your unconditional love. To have that yanked away from me this week is almost too much to bear. And it was done coldly and with finality. I guess I always knew that this day would come but knowledge has not dulled the pain. I am, quite literally, numb with that sinking feeling in my stomach. I’ve been abandoned in my time of need by most of the people I cared about and who I thought cared about me. I would have bet my life on your unlimited devotion and loyalty. Perhaps that’s exactly what I have done—at least my freedom—and find that I have lost.
And that was only the first paragraph in a letter that went on for many more pages. Tom wrote again the next day to chastise Debby about her gun statements to Colm Connolly. He said that she had missed her chance to vindicate herself in the media when she refused to testify at his bail hearing. “It was crucial Judge Lee heard and saw you instead of allowing Connolly to paint you as a liar and an adulteress. You chose not to allow that to happen. We will both have to live with the consequences. Good luck. I wish you happiness. Perhaps I’ll see you in October, but I doubt it.”
Tom had controlled Debby for seventeen years. Now he used every manipulative trick he knew to bring her back to his side and his defense. With his written words, he pulled her closer, berated her, pushed her away, and then attempted to reel her back in. It was a hellish thing because she had loved him for a very long time, and she still did.
Beyond making her feel guilty for betraying him, Tom set out to frighten her.
They can still charge you with conspiracy or whatever if they really believe you are involved—which, of course, you are not. If they believe they have a weapon used to commit murder and can prove that, and they can also prove you bought the weapon to help me commit murder, then they will charge you with a crime. . . . Because Connolly is ruthless, he will threaten you with charges at some point to get you to change your story and testify against me at trial. He’s bluffing. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument they can prove the gun they showed you at the interview was the one you bought and has my fingerprints on it. Juicy, yes. But how can he prove it was used to commit murder? They don’t have a body to examine for gunshot wounds.
Tom was aghast that Connolly would suggest that he controlled Debby. “The irony of Connolly thinking you are under my spell is rich because you generally do the exact opposite of what I suggest. Do you think I don’t consider these things before I offer advice?”
He was furious with Debby, and almost every letter ended with a last farewell of some sort. But he kept writing—because he needed her testimony. Or perhaps because he was afraid of what she might say as a witness against him.
Chapter Thirty-four
ON FEBRUARY 10, 1998, Debby retained a new attorney, Tom Bergstrom, who had a one-man law office in Malvern, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. A very tall, solid man with a good Midwestern face, who had practiced law for thirty years, he’d graduated from the University of Iowa and gone right into the marine corps for a four-year tour of duty in Southeast Asia. After he left the marines, he worked for the Department of Justice in its organized crime and racketeering section. Like Connolly, Bergstrom had worked as an assistant U.S. attorney; from 1975 he had run his own solo practice as a criminal trial attorney. His only assistant was his wife, Dee, a striking woman with white-blond hair, who not only served as a paralegal but was a shrewd judge of human nature.
In January 1996 Bergstrom had defended John E. du Pont against the murder charges resulting from the shooting of Olympic wrestler David Schultz. Philadelphia Magazine named Bergstrom one of the top criminal defense attorneys in Pennsylvania.
Bergstrom was probably the last attorney Tom would have wanted for Debby. When he learned somewhat belatedly that she had retained him, he was appalled—and he characterized her new lawyer as “loathsome,” calling him “the Malvern malefactor” and “pond scum.” The fact that another of his least favorite people—Debby’s ex-husband, Dave—had recommended Bergstrom made Tom even angrier.
But there was more than rage behind Tom’s attacks on Bergstrom. Bergstrom was smart and skilled and he would protect his client against anyone, and that included Tom. Tom needed Debby in his camp no matter what, and Bergstrom was a major threat.
Tom was convinced that if he forgave Debby for failing to support him at the bail hearing, she would come back to him as loyal as always. But he had to do some backtracking because he had sent her a final, final farewell letter on February 9, telling her he would no longer read her letters and ending with, “I wish you peace and happiness from the bottom of my heart and apologize for everything, especially for the invasion of your privacy. Keep swimming, take care of yourself, move on, find contentment.”
But he was not quite as bereft as he sounded. Now that Debby had defected, Tom contacted another of his mistresses who might be a good witness for him. He was corresponding with Susan Louth, the blond legal secretary Marguerite Capano called “that slutty little girl.” Susan was living in the Virgin Islands, but their relationship in Wilmington dated back to 1995 and 1996. There were holes in Tom’s case he felt Susan could fill.
But not like Debby. On reflection, Tom realized Debby was still a loose cannon and started courting her again with phone calls and letters on February 24. He knew she would be in a terribly vulnerable emotional state; because of her involvement with him, she had just been fired from her job at Tatnall School. Tatnall had been Debby’s life for a dozen years, and she had worked early and late without complaining, doing double duty. That had always annoyed Tom.
There was no question at all about Debby’s competency in her job, but a prestigious private school apparently dared not risk the scandal that she had been plunged into. Tearfully, Debby gathered her staff together and said good-bye before she cleared out her office. Then she left on an already scheduled trip to New England.
On a Sunday in late February, there was an article in the paper about Debby’s dismissal, and Tom tried to call her that evening. He knew she would be embarrassed and heartsick. He got only her answering machine. When he lost his phone privileges a day later for
breaking yet another rule at Gander Hill, he asked one of his attorneys to call Debby and express his concern, and to urge her to fight Tatnall’s decision.
Tom followed that with a letter he gave to one of his attorneys’ legal aides to deliver personally. He wanted Debby to know that his good friend Nick Perillo would be calling her to convey how worried he was about her.
The first two pages of his letter were full of concern for Debby. He didn’t begin to berate her until the third. She had returned one of his long letters with only a short note and he was concerned that she might be accepting the advice of her new attorney and rejecting his.
“I loved you with every fiber of my being,” Tom wrote. “We planned the rest of our lives together.” He reminded her of all the people who did not love her and who had failed her, and then went on,
I wasn’t perfect. I don’t want credit. You don’t owe me. But I loved you, from rubbing your aching hip—to helping you clean out your garage attic—to taking you to Villa d’ Roma, sharing Montreal with you, listening to your problems as a sounding board. I thought you were my best friend. I thought I was your best friend . . . I would never have abandoned you when you needed me, despite my own fears. I say before God and swear upon the lives of my children that I would have stood by you regardless of the cost. I would have trusted you. I would have fought for you. I would not have listened to an obvious incompetent, written a “Dear John” note (not even a letter,) and then run out of town so I wasn’t even available to comfort you in your most desperate hours.
Tom had told Kim Horstman, of course, that he and Anne Marie were best friends. One could only suspect that he had also been “best friends” with Susan Louth, Linda Marandola, and the other women he saw regularly. But, wisely, he mentioned none of those women in his fourteen-page reconciliation letter to Debby.
“Do not forget,” he wrote, “that no one has ever loved you as I have, despite my many failures. Do not think that those who come after me will ever approach the depth of love bordering on adoration that I have given you.” And after four more pages of similar sentiments, “I beg you to do me the kindness of writing at least one more time and explaining why you did what you did and are doing, as well as [not] responding to these letters from my heart . . . I do love you and I always will and I can’t give it up . . . Adoringly, Tom.”
Tom wrote Debby three letters on February 26, as passionate as the hero of a romance novel, as pitiful as a dying man’s last request. He was concerned that neither he nor Nick Perillo could get her on the phone. But a deeper worry gripped him when he did get her on the phone. Debby told him that Bergstrom had asked to see his letters. Tom was horrified. He had just ordered her to get another attorney when the prison phone line went dead.
“He must have thought I’d hung up,” Debby recalled. “But I didn’t. His phone time was over and they would cut off conversations in the middle.”
“Why would he want my letters?” Tom wrote minutes later, even though he knew it might take days for Debby to get this letter. “More importantly, why would you consider giving them to him, regardless of what he says? Now there’s him to contend with?”
There was, indeed. And Tom had good reason to be worried. On February 26, he filled eight pages with his small, precise handwriting as he told Debby what she must do. “There is only one way now,” he wrote, “for you to prove your love clearly, completely, and unequivocally and also to demonstrate that your act [of] abandoning me when I most needed you was not something you will ever do again. This is my ultimatum and this is your choice: me or your lawyer. You cannot straddle the fence. You must choose between us.
“Lawyers are a dime a dozen,” he wrote. “True love is rare. . . . To prove that this is no momentary flash of a broken heart, I make the same offer to prove my love for you. I will fire Charlie, Joe, and Gene . . . who are all my friends . . . [even though] I am imprisoned and will soon go on trial for my life.”
Reading his bizarre ultimatum, Debby finally saw what she had to do. “Sometimes,” she recalled, “I didn’t even read all of those endless letters he sent. And I would just agree with what he told me to do on the phone—because he wouldn’t stop talking until I did. But I got the message in this letter, and I knew I wasn’t going to fire Tom Bergstrom. I never believed he would fire his attorneys.”
Debby liked the Bergstroms and felt protected for the first time in many long years. They were no-nonsense people who were demonstrating that they cared about what happened to her. Dee, particularly, was intuitive about Debby’s feelings. Women know how other women feel, although it is almost impossible to explain this to a man.
“Still,” Debby said softly, “and I don’t know if anyone can understand this—I still loved Tom and I still wanted to believe in him. Even at that low point, I couldn’t hear the things in his voice that I heard later.”
On February 27, Debby and Tom Bergstrom met Wharton, Connolly, Alpert, and Donovan in Wharton’s office in the Carvel building. With Bergstrom’s approval, Debby agreed to cooperate with the prosecution team. She would answer their questions truthfully. Although she hated the thought, Debby also agreed to have a recording device attached to her phone, and henceforward Tom’s letters suggesting that she lie about evidentiary matters would be read not only by her attorney, but also by Connolly, Wharton, Alpert, and Donovan.
In addition, all of Tom’s mail would be copied—in and out—and would be saved, without being read, until such time as that might become necessary.
Dee Bergstrom understood Debby’s anguish and explained to her husband and the all-male prosecuting team that very few women would be able to turn off overnight a love that had lasted two decades. Often to their own detriment, she said, women cling to memories of how they perceived their relationship. For the moment, Debby was fragile, but she was doing her best to break free of Tom.
“We don’t wake up one morning,” Dee told them, “and just say, ‘I don’t love him anymore.’ ”
USING ANOTHER PRISONER’S SBI number, Nick Perillo had to try five times before he managed to get through to Debby. He was completely unaware that calls from Gander Hill to her home were now being recorded. “I’m right next to Tom,” he told her. “He wanted me to call you to see what your schedule was—and [to tell you] that he misses you. Well, of course, he misses you.”
“Ah, God. Doesn’t he know it’s past that for me?”
“OK.”
“You can tell him that for me . . . I’m past missing him.”
Perillo’s words were mixed up and he sounded unsure. He told Debby that Tom had given him a letter with a number of questions to ask her, but the guards had caught him as he crossed the red line and taken it. He was doing this from memory. “He wants to know if the rumor is true?” he said. “I don’t know what that means.”
“I don’t know,” Debby said carefully.
Perillo asked her if what was in the paper that day—about Tom asking her to get the gun—was true, and she said it was. He hemmed and hawed and hung up without really saying anything, and then called back to ask if she’d gotten “the delivery.” She said she had. He was talking about Tom’s letter insisting that she fire her attorney.
The very fact that Tom was worried enough to have another inmate—a stranger with a rough voice—call to nudge her only confirmed what she had decided.
Debby had agreed to tape Tom’s calls, although she hated doing it. “I couldn’t do it for long,” she recalled. “It was too difficult for me to take the calls and not be truthful, and when I told them I couldn’t stand it any longer, they took the device off. I really wanted the phone blocked. It was torturous to hear it ring and not pick it up.”
Wharton arranged for her phone to be blocked to all calls from Gander Hill. It was easier for her. But from about February 27 to March 3, Debby did record Tom’s calls. Although he was somewhat out of the loop—or rather, late in the loop—he knew now that Debby had caved in about the gun and admitted that she had bought it at his r
equest.
His voice, questioning, jabbing, accusing, incredulous, and ugly, filled up most of the tapes. He wanted to know everything she had told Connolly and the other prosecutors. He kept asking why she had told them she bought the gun.
“I told them the truth,” she said. “I told them I bought it and gave it to you. You wanted it and I gave it to you.”
“Why did you say such a thing?”
“Because you did.”
She kept repeating that she had only told the truth.
“Don’t say that. Just tell me what you said.”
There was such loathing in his voice that when Debby listened to the tapes a long time later, she had to ask Bob Donovan again and again to turn them off. “They made me ill,” she said. “I heard things in his voice then that I’d never noticed before.”
“Do you know what you’ve done to us?” Tom hissed.
She leaned her head against the wall, knowing now that it was not she who had destroyed their relationship. Impossible as it seemed, impossible to explain, she still loved the man she remembered. It was as if there were two men: the Tom she had loved for seventeen years and the Tom in Gander Hill.
From that point on, Debby didn’t read his letters. “Bob Donovan came and picked them up,” she remembered. “He was very kind, very understanding. He took them away, unopened. It was easier for me not to have to read them.”
Although Debby didn’t send Tom any more letters, she wrote them. It was only an exercise in trying to understand her own feelings. She typed her letters to Tom on her computer, letters with no place to go. Sometimes she hoped it would all turn out to be a terrible mistake. But she knew better.