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

by Ann Rule

“About eleven, anywhere from eleven to eleven-thirty. He walked upstairs to my room.”

  “Did he have a key to your house?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  Tom had also known the combination to the alarm system, something the state was now fully aware of. His eyes never left Debby’s face as she testified.

  “What happened when he came up to your bedroom?”

  “He just said, ‘I’m sorry I’m late—fell asleep in front of the TV with the kids. Can I stay?’ ”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said yes.”

  Debby recalled that Tom had fallen asleep immediately after he crawled into her bed. He was still there Saturday morning and she noted that, for some reason, he had been driving Kay’s blue Suburban. It was parked in her driveway.

  Tom had left to do some errands Saturday afternoon, she said, and she didn’t see him until about one on Sunday afternoon. “He just came over unannounced and walked into my house and was very upset, with his head in his hands,” Debby said. “I could see he was visibly shaken. He said, ‘I feel like I’ve been set up; somebody has set me up.’ ”

  “Did you ask him what he was talking about?”

  “He said, ‘I can’t tell you—not yet.’ ”

  Tom was sitting in the wing chair in her living room while she knelt in front of him in concern. He would tell her only that the police had come to his house at three in the morning. In five minutes, he was gone.

  But Tom had come back shortly and called her out to his car. “He gave me a bag with three adult movies in it,” she testified. “He said, ‘Hang on to these; it would be embarrassing if somebody found these.’ ”

  “How long was he there that time?” Wharton asked.

  “Sixty seconds.”

  And, Debby testified, Tom had come over for a third time on Sunday afternoon—but only for five minutes. “He said that the police had come back to his house again and that he had to pack up his children and take them back to their house and then go back to the Grand Avenue house, and they searched it again.”

  “Do you know whether he made any phone calls from your house at that time?”

  “Yes,” Debby said. “He asked to use the phone.”

  Wharton entered Debby’s phone bill for June 1996 into evidence. It showed that someone had made three phone calls to New Jersey that afternoon and evening—one to the Holiday Inn in Penns Grove, the motel the Capanos owned, and the others to the motel manager’s home.

  “Did you make those phone calls?”

  “No.”

  Debby had been pleasantly surprised when Tom asked her to spend that Sunday night with him at his house. He had her drive into the garage and walk up the stairs to the great room. Although she had been worried about him, he told her nothing about why the police had come to his house twice. Indeed, it wasn’t until Tom had called her on Tuesday, she said, that she knew he was the last person to have been seen with a woman whose name she had never heard: Anne Marie Fahey.

  Debby told the jury that she had been shaken to realize that Tom had apparently been seeing Anne Marie for “about three years.”

  “During that time,” Wharton asked, “in 1993 and 1994 and 1995, were you still seeing Tom Capano?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “What was he telling you about how he felt about you during that time period?”

  “He was telling me that he loved me very much.”

  “Had you had some arrangement whereby you would be sort of exclusively seeing one another?”

  “We were not exclusive, no,” Debby said softly. She had been so upset “because he hadn’t told me about her, and I had always told him when I was going out on a date with somebody, or who I was seeing, and he hid this from me.”

  Before Judge Lee called the lunch break, Debby testified about the mysterious changes in Tom’s great room—the new rug, the missing couch—and his explanation that he had spilled red wine on both the original carpet and the maroon love seat.

  Bob Donovan had been sitting in a spot at the prosecutors’ table where he believed Debby could look at him as she testified. Indeed, for most of the morning he thought they had held eye contact. He knew how vulnerable she was and how Tom had controlled her for so many years. At some point, Donovan realized with a sinking sensation that Debby wasn’t looking at him; she was staring into Tom’s eyes. During a break, he walked over to Debby and said, “You’re not looking at him, are you?”

  “I am, Bob,” Debby said.

  “Don’t do it, Debby,” Donovan pleaded. “He’s trying to get into your heart.”

  “It’s OK,” she said. “My heart is closed to him.”

  Debby would later recall that moment. “And it was true,” she said. “My heart was closed to Tom. But I intended to keep on looking at him as I testified. I wanted him to realize what all his lies had done and to know that I was no longer fooled by him.”

  Whether she was as strong as she felt at that moment remained to be seen. Debby’s marathon testimony had just begun, and so far she had to deal only with Ferris Wharton, whom she liked and who was not going to spring any surprises. Even so, for the rest of that first day, Debby answered questions about her seventeen-year affair with Tom—five hours on the witness stand as every shred of her private life became fodder for the media. Through it all, she stared at Tom and he glared back at her, sometimes shaking his head from side to side as if to say, Debby, how could you do this?

  He had once been so sure that she didn’t have the common sense to know how to behave at the proof positive hearing that he sent her tedious letters of instruction. Now she was here on her own, and at Wharton’s urging, she read those endless letters aloud for the jury. He’d told her what to say about the gun, about the cooler, about their relationship.

  At 4:55 on that long afternoon, Judge Lee called a halt to the proceedings. But not to Debby’s testimony; she knew that she might be on the stand all week. Yet, in a way, she had an absurd sense of freedom. She had slipped out of Tom’s control, and the earth hadn’t opened up and swallowed her after all.

  As Tom was led away from the courtroom in chains, he turned toward the reporters who waited for a word from him. His face a forlorn study, he said, “She broke my heart.”

  FOR much of Thursday, November 19, Debby again read from the letters Tom had sent her from Gander Hill. She also read her own letters to him, letters written only eight months earlier. Clearly, she had still been conflicted—even after she agreed to tape his phone calls to her home. But then, she had never denied that she still loved Tom at that time.

  “Today, I received a letter from you,” she read from one of her letters to him,

  that was written from the heart and it made me cry for both of us who can’t hold on to each other. You think I have betrayed you. I have not. I have told the truth and we must both live with the truth.

  I know completely without a doubt that you love me. I never doubted your love. Some letters were horrible and I could not read them. But some of it was true. I had been walked over most of my life and by you for sure. I guess I let the men of my life walk over me more than anyone else.

  You can build me up and point out my strengths better than anyone . . . but you can trash me like no other as well. I’d like to think that I know you better than anyone, but maybe I don’t. Yes, we were one—soulmates. . . . There is no way that can be taken away, regardless.

  “Often I wonder,” Debby read in the hushed courtroom, “why all this tragedy had to happen. What happened and why are you involved? Will you ever be able to tell me? I think not, and that will always keep us apart.”

  Ferris Wharton asked Debby if it was true that the day after she wrote the letter she had just read, she came in to speak to him and Colm Connolly and told them about buying the gun.

  “Yes, I did.”

  And still, she had written to Tom, trying to explain to him why she was not changing lawyers, despite his insistence that she fire Tom Bergstrom. “For me,�
�� Debby read aloud,

  changing lawyers is not proving to you that I love you. . . . I could not mentally or physically make another change without compromising my health. I am tapped out and can take little more. Besides, I like him and believe in him. . . . If you love me, you will support me for the choices I have made. . . .

  I want to believe more than anything that we will go to our eventual destinies in the future knowing that both of us have been loved and have loved completely.

  Debby put her last letter to Tom in her lap as Wharton offered the next exhibit for identification. It was the floor plan of her home that Tom had drawn with all of the things she treasured marked for the attention of a burglar. She had seen it before, of course, but she had tried to bury the memory of Tom’s meticulous scheme intended to intimidate and terrify her.

  Wharton then peppered Debby with short questions about her home and the mirror in her bedroom. “What was the significance [of that mirror] as related to Tom Capano?”

  Her voice was hushed. “We could watch ourselves having sex in the mirror.”

  The jurors would have a chance to review the diagrams of Debby’s house at their leisure, but now, alert, they craned their necks to see what Tom had drawn.

  “During the period of time roughly from March eighteenth to March twenty-eighth of 1998, did you have any travel plans?”

  “Yes—to go to Sanibel Island in Florida.”

  “You had a lengthy relationship with the defendant, did you not?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Did you fall in love with him? Did you tell him that?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Did he ever tell you that he was in love with you?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Did he ever tell you that you were soul mates?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he ever tell you that he would give his life for you?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Did he ever tell you about dumping Anne Marie Fahey’s body in the Atlantic Ocean?”

  “No, he did not.”

  “Did he ever tell you that she died as a result of an accident?”

  “No, he did not.”

  “No other questions.”

  FERRIS WHARTON turned away, but Debby still sat in the witness chair, waiting. Now it was Gene Maurer’s turn to question her, and she knew he had ample ammunition. She had lied to the federal investigators and to the grand jury. It was all documented. She had stonewalled them to protect Tom, because he had asked her to. In the beginning, she had detested Colm Connolly for trying to hurt Tom.

  Now it was obvious what Maurer intended to do. His questions demanded answers that seemed to show Debby as a faithless friend to Kay Capano, a tempting seductress who almost forced Tom to have sex with her back in 1981, and the initiator of the idea to bring Keith Brady to her house.

  Quoting letters Debby had written to Tom shortly after his arrest—letters written when she shared his view that Connolly and the other investigators were trying to trap him—Maurer read: “‘And I can’t think of why they think I would hurt your case. Maybe he [Connolly] thinks I’ve had a change of mind since your arrest, but I don’t know how an obsessed mind works.’ ”

  Debby’s blind devotion to Tom had come back to haunt her. Again and again, Maurer quoted her own words. She had truly believed what Tom told her about the federal investigators and she had distrusted them. She had lied to them then to protect Tom. Might not she be lying now to protect herself?

  At last, that day was over. The trial would not resume until Monday. But there would be headlines and endless television and radio coverage about her testimony. If being the other woman was a sin, Debby was paying the price. And Connolly and Wharton had warned her that it might get even worse.

  Chapter Forty-one

  ON MONDAY, Maurer hammered Debby with questions about purchasing the Beretta, pointing out that she had had six separate meetings with investigators—including the grand jury—and still continued to lie about buying the gun for Tom. She didn’t deny it. It was true. He had told her that he would die for her. It was really the other way around; at the time Maurer referred to, not only would Debby have given her life for Tom, she had surrendered her free will and the control of her mind. She had believed everything he told her about his innocence and the conspiracy against him. Could anyone understand that?

  Once more, Maurer asked Debby about the encounters with Keith Brady and with her high school boyfriend. It had been Tom who was the voyeur but his attorney painted Debby as the harlot. “Now, these particular incidents that we just talked about relating to sexual activity that were brought up on direct examination are things that you say Tom basically made you do?”

  “He asked me to do them, yes.”

  “Not because that was an interest that you had, sexually, or things that you were interested in doing?”

  “We had talked about it—”

  “Does that mean it was something you were interested in doing too?” Maurer asked with a trace of sarcasm in his voice, “or only because he asked you to do it?”

  “I agreed to do it because he wanted me to do it,” Debby said quietly. “And I agreed because I was afraid not to.”

  Finally, Maurer moved away from questions about sex and began to question Debby’s testimony about the time period from June 26 through June 30. It was a strong defense technique: repeating what she had said earlier but with a hint of doubt in his voice as if he saw deception there.

  “Gene Maurer is one of the best criminal defense attorneys in Delaware,” Debby said a long time later, “and I was prepared for an onslaught of questions—but in the end, Tom didn’t allow him to do his job. There were long pauses between questions while Maurer read the notes that Tom kept handing him. It was obvious that Tom was in charge. And that helped me, because the pauses gave me time to gather my wits.”

  “Basically,” Maurer asked, changing directions again, “you say you learned on July second that the man that you’d waited for for all those years and who you wanted to marry was involved with a younger, attractive woman?”

  “I don’t know if those were my words, but—”

  “But you learned that?”

  “I learned that.”

  “How upset were you?”

  “I was upset.”

  “Angry?”

  “I was upset.”

  “Extremely upset, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  But then Maurer’s words shocked Debby, just as Connolly and Wharton had warned her. “Didn’t you, in fact, find out about Anne Marie Fahey—not on July second—but on June twenty-seventh and June twenty-eighth?”

  “No, Mr. Maurer, I never heard of Anne Marie Fahey until July second.”

  “Didn’t you go to 2302 Grant Avenue on June twenty-seventh or June twenty-eighth with a firearm to visit Tom?”

  “Mr. Maurer,” Debby said, her voice loud in her own ears, “I never left my property from the time I returned home from the Arden Swim Club until the next morning when I went to the Tatnall School.”

  “Very strenuous about that, aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  “Didn’t you have your firearm at Tom Capano’s house on June twenty-eighth of 1996, where you first learned about him and Anne Marie Fahey?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “You deny that you discharged the firearm?”

  Debby looked at Maurer as if he had gone mad. She saw Tom’s face was a smug mask. “I deny that I discharged that—”

  “Are you absolutely certain about that?”

  “I’m absolutely certain.”

  “And you deny that your firearm discharged that night in that house, striking her?”

  “I don’t know what happened with that firearm. I gave that firearm to Tom Capano on May thirteenth.”

  The courtroom hush broke into scattered gasps and murmurs. The defense was apparently accusing Debby of Anne Marie’s murder. Debby looked down at To
m, her chin set. He would not meet her eyes. She realized then that he was quite willing to throw her away to save his own skin. “I remember looking at him,” Debby said, “and he finally looked up at me and he knew what I was thinking: It’s come to this, Tom, and here we are.”

  Her day on the stand was far from over, but it wasn’t Debby who broke; it was Tom. In midafternoon, Jack O’Donnell reported to Judge Lee that Tom was lying on a bench in the holding cell. “He claims he’s having a very bad colitis attack—that this is the worst it’s been.” Tom felt he was too weak to continue and wanted the judge to recess court for the day.

  They were so close to the end of Debby’s testimony. She had been on the stand for three days and it seemed cruel to ask her to come back another day for the ten to fifteen minutes that Connolly estimated it would take to finish his redirect.

  In the end, Judge Lee decided to continue with Debby’s testimony. Tom would have to ride in the bus back to Gander Hill anyway, and in court or on the bus, the time would be the same. “I’m sure that’s going to be unpleasant for him but so’s the ride back going to be unpleasant for him,” Lee said. “And without dealing with the issue too much, I’m not inclined to let him tell me when I can hold court—and I think there is a certain element of that involved in this.”

  No one in the courtroom could miss the way Tom sought to control his own attorneys, the guards—and now even the judge. His notes to Oteri and Maurer had become more frequent and intricate. And he still turned to chat with his family whenever he felt like it. Even as an attorney who knew what the protocol should be, he continued to try to make his own rules.

  For another forty-five minutes, Maurer continued to ask Debby questions that implied that she was somehow involved in Anne Marie’s death. She was exhausted; the gallery was exhausted. But she knew she hadn’t been anywhere near Tom’s house on the night Anne Marie died, and there was no way on earth anyone could prove that she had been.

  It was almost six when it was finally over and Debby was allowed to step down from the witness stand. Tom, still gripped by intestinal spasms, shuffled out of the courtroom and onto the bus bound for Gander Hill.