by Ann Rule
In 1931, a hundred years after Bancroft started his mill, William Ralph MacIntyre became the first non-Bancroft to serve as president of the company, and he ran the company during its boom years, when it had trademarked a miracle formula known as Ban-Lon. Highly thought of in the company and in Wilmington, MacIntyre would work for Bancroft for forty-seven years, and his son, Bill, would join him in the upper echelons of Bancroft management.
Bill and his bride, Sheila, had a wonderful future ahead when they married in St. Ann’s in Wilmington, just after World War II; they had each come from prominent families. Sheila Miller’s father was an attorney who worked for the DuPont company, and an uncle, Don Miller, was one of the Four Horsemen, the legendary backfield that played football under Knute Rockne at Notre Dame in 1924. Sheila’s brothers, Tom and Creighton, also played for Notre Dame. Both Bill MacIntyre and Sheila Miller were well placed in Delaware society, and they married for love.
But despite their high hopes going into it, this was to be a blighted marriage. Sheila was so fragile emotionally that she was incapable of being either a wife or a mother. Despite the wealth and privilege the MacIntyres enjoyed, her illness cast a pall over many generations of the family.
Deborah MacIntyre, Sheila and Bill’s second daughter, always longed for a secure family life—and never found it. She would fill the walls of her homes with photographs of Millers and MacIntyres. One particularly poignant picture shows Sheila at the age of eight in the early thirties, posing with what appears to be her perfect family. Harry and Mary Cecilia Duffy Miller and their children sat self-consciously on lawn chairs on a sweep of manicured grass. Within a year, the young woman with the marcelled bob would be dead, and Sheila left without a mother, a loss magnified by the fact that she was never allowed to grieve for her mother: child psychology of the era dictated that children must simply go on and not dwell on sadness. Indeed, Sheila did bottle up her tears and her questions, and it well nigh destroyed any hope that she would ever be able to cope with the world.
Catholic, Sheila and Bill MacIntyre had three children in just a little over two years; she was twenty-four and hadn’t been able to care for even one baby confidently. In the winter of 1953, Mary Louise was three and a half, Debby was two and a half, and their little brother, Ralph, was barely one when Sheila had a complete nervous breakdown.
“That was the end of my having a mother,” Debby MacIntyre recalled forty-five years later, the loss still caught somewhere in her voice. “I was abandoned. We were all abandoned. There was money—that’s what saved us—but money doesn’t make up for not having a mother. We lived with my father’s parents for a year. My mother was in the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Hospital for six months.”
When Sheila was released from the hospital, Bill bought a little white house on Woodlawn Avenue, four doors down from his parents’ much larger home just off the Bancroft Parkway. The children stayed with their grandparents, while Bill and Sheila lived together for six months. They could visit their mother, but Debby and her brother and sister made Sheila too nervous for them all to live together. The elder MacIntyres were there to give them some semblance of a serene home. Eventually, the children did move back in with their parents, but it was never to be a normal home. Sheila never spoke of her own mother to her children. “I didn’t even know my grandmother’s name,” Debby said, “not until one of my cousins told me it was Mary Cecilia.”
Debby was Bill and Sheila’s second child, but she was right in the middle of the birth order for many years. “My sister was the first grandchild on my father’s side, and she could do no wrong,” Debby recalled. “And my brother was the first son, the namesake, William Ralph MacIntyre III, and I was the one in the middle—the classic middle child. I needed to be noticed. I would do anything to be noticed. The way I grew up, I would do anything to please. I became the placater; I did everything to please my grandparents and my parents to get their love and attention.
“Sometimes I just had to keep doing it and doing it. I became very persistent because they just didn’t notice me most of the time. I had to compromise—but to be strong about that—even as a little person.”
Bill MacIntyre was the parent who looked after his children; Sheila couldn’t—but Debby was too young to understand why. All she knew was that she had no mother in the sense that her friends did. Her mother was a vague, temperamental woman who withdrew to her room when her children got too close or too insistent.
“I wanted her to love me,” Debby said later, “and I couldn’t understand that she couldn’t. It was a sad way to grow up.” But her father was there, and pleasing him meant everything to Debby. “I learned to do what I was told. Always. That way, I would make whoever it was happy. I couldn’t take anyone being mad at me, because that meant that I had failed.”
Barely three, Debby formed behavior patterns that were natural to her. She never questioned her own reactions—not even as a grown woman. She made a little place for herself in the world and clung to it. She adored her father, and kept hoping that her mother might come to love her. She, of course, couldn’t begin to understand what alcoholism or drug addiction meant.
Sheila MacIntyre not only was mentally ill, but also used both alcohol and drugs to assuage the depression that gripped her. The success of lithium in treating bipolar disorders was not yet proven, but even when it was, Sheila would continue in her addictions.
There was to be yet another child, another son, Michael, born in 1958, when Debby was six. But nothing really changed. Sheila couldn’t care for three children—and now she couldn’t care for four.
The MacIntyre children all attended the best private schools in Wilmington, and Tatnall was right up there in prestige. Debby would attend Tatnall for fifteen years. She was especially adept at athletics and would be nationally ranked in swimming—both in the butterfly and in the backstroke. As a young girl she was a pretty blond little tomboy. In high school she would still be athletic but hardly a tomboy. Her success in swimming competitions gave her her first glimmerings of self-esteem.
Unlike the Fahey family, the MacIntyres never lacked for food or clothing or a nice house, but they also lived in a home where things happened that they tried to keep secret. With Sheila abusing both drugs and alcohol, she was often very irrational, sometimes almost comatose. “I’m amazed she didn’t die,” Debby said later, “with what she was taking. She was unpredictable. Sometimes she would lash out. Sometimes she was incoherent. We didn’t know what she was going to do. It was embarrassing to us, and it was a very stressful way to live. We never wanted anyone in the house because of what our mother might do.”
The MacIntyre grandparents were appalled by Sheila’s behavior. “My grandparents hated her because of what she did to our family,” Debby said. “So I was torn. I didn’t know what to think or who to side with—and I was still trying to be sure everyone was happy, because although I didn’t realize it then, I felt that was still my job.”
In December of 1966, when Debby was sixteen, Sheila MacIntyre moved out of the family home. Actually, she left because she needed to be hospitalized at the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Hospital once again. Bill committed his wife, and when she was released this time, he found her an apartment in Media, Pennsylvania. He had accepted the truth that she could never come home again, not with the children there. Her psychiatrist recommended that she have a quiet place of her own.
As a good Catholic, Bill had married for life. As a man, he still loved Sheila with a devotion that few could understand. He was terribly conflicted—but he stayed with the children.
“My mother just couldn’t manage us as teenagers,” Debby said. “It was ruining her, ruining the family—so she moved away. My brother Ralph, who’s eleven months younger than I am, had been in boarding school since the seventh grade. My sister was invisible—that’s the way she dealt with the situation. I have no idea where she went, but she was never there. I was left to care for my younger brother. I was sixteen and Michael ten.”
Scrambling as they all were for a small place in the sun, there was little cohesiveness among Bill and Sheila MacIntyre’s children. Debby was fully responsible for her youngest brother. “I was given the responsibility for raising him and running the house when I was sixteen.”
A long time later, Bill MacIntyre admitted to his younger daughter that what he did was wrong—that he had compromised his children in his efforts to save his wife. “He loved my mother,” Debby said, “but he never dealt with the fact that she had all these problems. And all the time he still loved her, and he put us [in line] behind her at a very critical time of our lives. And so we were really left to fend for ourselves. We all reacted differently. I continued to placate.”
But sixteen-year-old Debby was finally angry at her mother. She had bailed out on the family, and Debby refused to talk to her for a year. “Then I came around to realizing she couldn’t help it; she was sick.”
DEBBY MACINTYRE met Dave Williams when she was a junior at Tatnall. She had broken up with her boyfriend the week before the prom, and a friend set her up with Dave. He was quite short but handsome, with wavy dark hair. He was an escape from all that was going on at home.
“No one guided me about choosing a husband—or anything else,” Debby remembered. “My home life was terrible. Dave came into my life, and he was my savior. And all the time it was a match that never should have happened. But my dad always said I was impressionable. Later, he said, ‘I knew it wouldn’t work—but you were so impressionable that nothing I said would have made a darn bit of difference. You were so stubborn, so determined that you were going to make it work.’ ”
Debby and Dave dated all through high school, and continued to go together when she went off to Mt. Vernon College for Girls in Washington, D.C. She dated other boys casually, but she always planned to marry Dave.
Mt. Vernon was a two-year college, and Debby MacIntyre graduated salutatorian in her class, with honors. She earned a Phi Beta Kappa key, but she burned out and decided she didn’t want to go back to college. She took a year of business courses, where the pressure to excel academically wasn’t nearly so strong. After that she still didn’t feel like going back to college, so she got a job as a receptionist in a brokerage firm.
Debby loved Dave and she was emotionally dependent upon him. She would always feel safer with men than with women. Even though her father had often chosen his wife over his children, she had come to understand that her mother was more helpless than she was, and that her father loved her; it was just that he loved her mother more. Dave would love her more, and she visualized marrying him and being the most important person in someone else’s life for the first time.
“I do think that I loved Dave,” Debby said later. “I told him that I loved him. I’m not sure how capable I was of understanding what that meant. I thought that I was going to have a wonderful, happy life with Prince Charming.”
Dave graduated from college in 1972 and had been accepted at law school. He and Debby were married at St. Anthony’s Church in Wilmington at noon on June 17, 1972. Father Roberto Balducelli performed the Catholic ceremony. Coincidentally, Debby and Dave were married at the very moment that Kay and Tom Capano were having their wedding ceremony in Connecticut.
Debby was twenty-one when she married Dave. They lived their first summer with his parents. It was a “terrible, terrible summer,” according to Debby. “His father was an alcoholic, but of course, I didn’t know anything else.” She felt as if she had been plunged back into the situation she had tried so hard to escape.
In the fall, the young Williamses moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where Dave went to law school at Dickinson College. Now Debby wanted so much to go back to college, but that opportunity was gone; she had to work to put her husband through school. She worked for a year in Harrisburg as a secretary to a man who had a government grant. When that funding was phased out, she got a job in a bank as a teller. She couldn’t look for a career job because they had to move back to Wilmington each summer so Dave could do his law clerk internship.
Debby’s marriage was not what she had hoped it would be. It’s quite possible that no marriage could have been. Starved so long for attention and love, she still longed for a Prince Charming who would put her first in his life, sweep her off her feet, pay attention to her. But Dave had never had that kind of personality, and he wasn’t naturally demonstrative. They never fought, never had an argument. Their relationship was very quiet and controlled. It always had been, but Debby thought that would change.
She was stunned when she finally realized that Dave wasn’t the man she thought she was marrying. And of course, he wasn’t. He immersed himself in his law studies, and she found herself alone in a strange town. “He had no friends—we had no friends, other than a few people I’d met at work,” Debby said. “We had a very lonely existence. I was very lonely.” But still anxious to please and to make everyone around her happy, she did all the wifely things as well as working. She kept the house clean and even took up needlepoint to make the time pass.
After Dave finished his first year at Dickinson, they bought a little house in Deerhurst, just east of the Concord Pike, in the area where Lou Capano had built dozens of homes. They bought it for an investment; they would rent it out while they were in Carlisle, and then hoped to move into it when Dave got his law degree. Debby’s money paid for the house—she used some of a trust fund that had been established for her. Although money would never really be a problem for her now, she always preferred working to being alone at home.
In 1975, they did move into the Deerhurst house, and Dave studied for the bar exam. He passed and was accepted to the Delaware bar that October. He was, in Debby’s words, “a workaholic, very, very focused. He was very thorough and he worked very hard.”
Debby had to face reality. She had believed she was lonely when her husband was in law school because they were so far from home. But now they were home, and nothing had changed. “I remember sitting in our den, alone, one night, and I was miserable. I still remember that moment. But I was so out of touch with my feelings that I didn’t know why. I was twenty-six then. I was trying to get pregnant and I couldn’t. I thought if I had a baby, that would make me happy—and I couldn’t even do that.”
Debby went back to college and she felt better. She was doing something for herself and had a modicum of control over her own life. She got involved in Junior League and all manner of volunteer activities. “I tried to fill my time,” she said. “And that worked for a little while, and then, finally, my daughter was born. I was so happy, and Dave became the most affectionate father in the world—to her. He showered her with so much love. I saw a side to him that I never knew existed.”
Although she was thrilled that Dave was a wonderful father, Debby felt a certain bleakness, too. She had never been the recipient of any of the kind of affection and outpouring of love her husband was apparently capable of. Inside, although she didn’t understand it then, she was still the little girl who had done everything she could to please, to make people happy, so they would love her and notice her. And she was still alone. She was a good mother and she loved caring for her daughter, Victoria.* Dave was a great father, a hard worker, but she was “just there.”
Debby and Dave were moving in divergent paths that took them further and further away from each other. She sought out pursuits that made her happy. She studied art, became remarkably adept with a camera, and doted on her baby. When they did anything social together, it was usually with other couples from Dave’s law firm: Morris, James, Hitchens & Williams. The “Williams” was Dave’s father, but Dave’s job was anything but nepotistic; he would become a very skilled labor attorney.
Debby enjoyed the get-togethers with their peers from the law firm. The wives were all attractive, well educated, and fun. Although she no longer believed that she was particularly attractive, in her late twenties Debby was very pretty. She was slim and blond, with her hair styled in the blunt short cut that skater
Dorothy Hamill made famous.
But she was definitely not a femme fatale. She almost always had a baby on her hip and a diaper bag on the other arm. But most of all, her attitude was not that of a woman who was sending out signals. She believed she had failed at marriage, failed to please her husband enough so that he would love her.
DEBBY was twenty-seven when she met Tom Capano in 1977 at one of the law firm’s functions. When Debby was pregnant with Victoria in the fall of 1978, she and Dave went to a lunch that Kay and Tom had at their Seventeenth Street house. “We all became friendly—we all had similar interests and young children,” Debby said. “There was a group of us that became more and more involved socially.”
By that time, the Williamses had moved into a little Cape Cod house near the house Debby had grown up in, near the Bancroft Parkway and Rockford Park. Her mother, despite all her excesses and mental problems, was still alive and living in her own apartment in Pennsylvania, and her father still took care of her—but Sheila wasn’t available to Debby any more than she had ever been. Debby and her sister were not close, her brothers were far away, and she had no one but her father to talk to about the things that worried her.
Debby wouldn’t recall having felt any special attraction to Tom Capano when she first met him. He seemed to be a nice person, and a very friendly person. He did not, however, impress her any more than the other men who worked with her husband. But later on, when he began to take a special interest in her, that mattered a lot. “I wasn’t happy in my marriage,” she said. “I didn’t know how unhappy I was for a long time. My relationship with Tom wasn’t the reason for my divorce, but he fulfilled something in my life that I wasn’t getting in my marriage. He actually paid attention to me. He appeared to genuinely care for me—to like me, to be interested in me as a friend. And I was very flattered because my husband didn’t seem to be any of those things.”