by Ann Rule
Jill knew her friend well enough to know that she wouldn’t find out any more than Annie wanted to tell. “She was always saying about herself,” Jill quoted, “‘The more you push me in one direction, the more I go in the other direction.’ And I did not want to push her. I figured if people want to tell me something, or confide in me, they will do it in their own time.”
And apparently, Anne Marie had nothing she wanted to talk about with Jill, at least nothing about Tom Capano. She certainly had no exclusive arrangement with him; she had other dates, with men closer to her own age. She could be dramatic sometimes, and impossibly romantic, but it was clear to anyone who knew Annie well that she yearned to be in love, to be married, to have children of her own.
Men so often disappointed Anne Marie—or maybe it was that she shot herself in the foot because of the way she seemed to fear rejection. As beautiful as she was, she didn’t see herself that way. If a man promised to call and didn’t, she was convinced he would never call again—certain that she had said or done something to scare him off. And all the time she was absolutely lovely, with a figure both lush and angular with her full breasts and long arms and legs. Her eyes were wide and blue under heavy brows, and she had such thick, curly hair that it tumbled heavily down around her face unless she swept it up on her head and let tendrils escape. Her complexion was pure Irish, freckled skin that was suffused with pink washes when she felt emotion or embarrassment.
And Anne Marie was often caught unaware by both, although her defense system was locked in place so firmly that someone had to know her really well to see it. She seemed so happy and so confident, but she was as vulnerable as a wildflower growing on a freeway.
ONE night in the fall of 1993, Jackie Binnersley came home about eight after working out at the gym. She was startled to see Anne Marie sitting on the couch in their living room with a man. Jackie recognized him but would never have expected to find him in her own living room. He was well known around Wilmington. What surprised Jackie the most was the intimate way Annie was sitting with him on the couch. They were drinking wine, and a bottle of Rosemont merlot—Anne Marie’s favorite—sat on the coffee table.
“They were facing each other,” Jackie said. “As soon as I walked in, I detected something. I just felt uneasy. Body language tells a lot—you could just tell by the way they were sitting that there was some contact there.”
Anne Marie was leaning toward her visitor, apparently entranced, her cheeks flushed. Jackie knew who Tom Capano was, and she knew he was married and had children. It seemed totally out of character for Anne Marie to be sitting there with him, drinking red wine. “She wasn’t promiscuous at all,” Jackie would recall. “She was very reserved, conservative, never had guys over to the house . . . but that night she had her cleavage showing.”
Anne Marie usually wore tailored shirts or blouses with high, rounded necks. But now the top three buttons of her blouse were definitely undone. It was an awkward moment and Jackie apologized for intruding. Anne Marie quickly recovered her composure and introduced Jackie to Tom.
After he left, Jackie confronted Anne Marie. “What’s going on?” she asked bluntly. “Why is this guy here? He’s a married man. Why is he over here drinking a bottle of wine?”
“Oh, Jackie,” Anne Marie said. “We’re just friends.”
Jackie never totally bought that explanation, although Anne Marie tried to convince her that there was nothing the least romantic about her being with Tom Capano. They had a work relationship and she couldn’t not talk to him.
Tom continued to drop over to their house, although neither Jackie nor Bronwyn wanted to encourage that. He made them uneasy. He was so smooth and relaxed. Too smooth. Something made them want to protect Annie. “I didn’t like him at first,” Jackie said. “I didn’t like him at all. I usually give people a chance, but I just got a bad impression. Why was he hanging out at the house? Why was he drinking wine with Annie?”
Both Jackie and Bronwyn found Tom’s attempts to ingratiate himself to them unctuous. “He just went over a little bit too much,” Jackie said. “I thought it was false the way he kind of gave me compliments on the house. He would bend over backwards to be nice . . . and say, ‘This house looks great—you did this—you did that. Annie tells me you stained the floors?’ or whatever.”
His lavish compliments sounded false. It was too much; Jackie’s house was only average, and she had heard that Tom was very wealthy and lived in a great big house. Why would he bother to gush about her house?
Jackie’s suspicions went beyond her distrust of Tom’s compliments. She had known Annie since they were both twelve, and she wanted something better for her than a married man who came calling with presents but who never seemed to take her out.
For a while, Tom was a regular visitor at their house, and he called Annie often, too. And when Jackie and Bronwyn went away for a weekend, they knew that Tom visited Annie in their absence. Once Jackie came home to see them leaving Anne Marie’s bedroom, but Tom just looked her in the eyes with a slight smile. She didn’t care what Anne Marie did in her private life, but she didn’t want her to get hurt.
Abruptly, Tom’s visits stopped, and Jackie and Bronwyn were relieved when they didn’t see him for several weeks. But he was back again around Christmas 1993. Anne Marie still talked about him a lot and spoke of seeing him at work. It was obvious she was intrigued by him. Still, that didn’t seem to be enough for Tom; her roommates sensed that he wanted all of her friends to like him too. It was as if he wanted them to shout for joy when he showed up, and neither Jackie nor Bronwyn was inclined to do that.
The main trouble with Tom Capano was that while he seemed to be what Annie wanted, in reality he wasn’t available. He had a whole family out there on Seventeenth and Greenhill, and that was where he was going to be on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. Anne Marie deserved better than that. Jackie knew that she had always been drawn to men with a little edge to them, and Tom had that. But her friends hoped devoutly that he was only a fleeting fancy.
ANNE MARIE was working extremely hard on her job. She charted every hour of Governor Carper’s official days and nights and gave him file folders well in advance of every event, telling him where he would be, what the dress was, and which security staff would accompany him. No matter what might be going on in her personal life, she never missed a beat on the job. Tom Carper liked Anne Marie, and appreciated her personality as well as her cheerful efficiency. She didn’t appear to have any special man in her life, and Carper kept his eye out for someone he felt was deserving of such a good woman.
ALTHOUGH she kept it to herself, there was a lot going on in Anne Marie’s life away from the office—some good things and some frightening to her. More than ever, she needed to have a sense of control over her world. But there were some elements that she couldn’t regulate. Her brother Mark had been in and out of rehab in a vain attempt to free himself of his addiction to alcohol. “He is worse now than he ever was,” she wrote in her diary. “I no longer have a brother Mark, because that person inflicts too much pain in my life. It’s much easier (emotionally) to leave him out. I spent too much of my life living with an alcoholic—that part of my life is over! Not forgotten—over.”
She didn’t mean the part about shutting Mark out; she loved him too much. But she was so afraid for him and for the rest of her family. She could not bear to see the dread cycle play out again.
But far worse than her worries about her brother was Anne Marie’s own conscience when it nattered at her about the secrets she was keeping from her family. She was involved with a totally unacceptable and unavailable man. She wasn’t sure whether she would be—by definition—an adulteress or a fornicator, but both were forbidden by the Catholic Church, and her religion was as important to her as her family was.
On her twenty-eighth birthday—January 27, 1994—Anne Marie gave her heart away to the man she trusted to take care of it. “I have fallen in love with a very special p
erson,” she told her diary (but no one else),
whose name I choose to leave anonymous. We know who each other are. It happened the night of my 28th Birthday. We have built an everlasting friendship. I feel free around him, and like he says, he “makes my heart smile”! He deserves some happiness in his life, and it makes me feel good to know that I can provide him with such happiness. Who knows if anything serious will ever happen between the two of us. (I only know what I dream.) Ciao, AMF.
TOM CAPANO insinuated himself into Anne Marie’s life like a bindweed, whose heart-shaped leaves look so innocuous at first but which wraps its runners around whatever it selects until it nearly strangles its host. Tom wanted to know every detail of what went on in Anne Marie’s life. Few women experience the kind of rapt attention he paid her, encouraging her to share her problems and her triumphs with him. And he wanted to meet all of her girlfriends.
Sometime in the spring of 1994, Tom suggested that Anne Marie pick two of her best friends, saying that he would take them all out to lunch at Tiffin, a very fancy restaurant where they would never have gone on their own. Anne Marie invited Jill Morrison and Ginny Columbus. When Jill asked suspiciously why Tom was taking them out to lunch, Anne Marie replied, “Tommy likes to do nice things for people that they might not normally be able to do on their own.”
The four of them did have a nice time. Tom was a charming host and he told them to order whatever they wanted. He was very warm and pleasant to all of them, but it was clear that his eyes darted continually toward Anne Marie to see her reaction to the splendid lunch and the ambiance of Tiffin. She just smiled, happy to see him with two of her dearest friends.
But for all of her apparent happiness, Anne Marie was struggling with her life on many levels that spring of 1994. She was very grateful to her sister and brothers. As adults, they were determined to maintain solid family traditions and to create for their children the kind of childhood they had never known. Except for Mark, who was struggling with his own demons, they all had good jobs and nice houses. Good lives. Brian was a teacher and coach at the Friends School, Kathleen was the clinical coordinator of education at the Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital, Robert was in commercial mortgage banking, and Kevin was a financial planner for Allstate Insurance. Anne Marie was part of everything they did, and they were all working hard to erase memories of the unhappy years. Robert, Kathleen, and Brian were happily married, and starting families. Mark’s marriage to Debbie Gioffre had ended in divorce, but Anne Marie had a very special relationship with their son, Brian, born in 1991. For the three years before she disappeared, she made it an unbreakable habit to have dinner with her nephew Brian every Monday night. She wanted him to feel that he was a very important part of a large family.
Even for her diary, Anne Marie always seemed to put on a bright face, and she used exclamation points often. “Kathleen, Patrick, ‘Seymour’ [Brian], and I went to Robert’s last Thursday for his birthday,” she wrote in March 1994. “What fun! It’s great having such a close beautiful family. Robert looks beautiful with Liam Michael. He will be such a great dad. He was a great substitute for me.”
However, another entry on the same date revealed that Anne Marie was tremendously conflicted over her infatuation with Tom Capano. She told her diary that she and “Tomas” had had lunch on Friday, but that “we have problems because he has a wife and children, also. I don’t want to be in love, but I can’t help it. My God, please don’t judge me!”
She continued to see Bob Conner, who had sensed Anne Marie’s inner struggles and started her on a low dose of Prozac in an attempt to counteract her tremendous sense of social isolation, her hypersensitivity, and her obsession about her weight. But rather than easing her internal stress, Prozac only gave her headaches.
She might well have headaches; she wasn’t eating enough to keep a bird alive. “No news on weight loss,” she wrote in her diary.
I am stuck at 135 pounds, and it’s pissing me off! I can’t starve myself any more than I already am. I suppose I should be thankful that I have not gained any weight either. I still avoid situations where there is food involved. G.R. was making mussels marinara and linguine with shrimp and chicken tonight, but I was afraid if I went over, I would eat, and when I got on the scales in the morning, I would have gained a pound or two. So I declined the invitation. When I lose my last five pounds, I will treat myself.
There were other worries. That March, Kathleen’s three-month-old baby, Kevin—Anne Marie’s godson—was very ill, Mark continued to slide down into the hell of alcoholism, Anne Marie was in love with a man with whom she knew she could have no future, and she had said good-bye to Paul Columbus, her first serious boyfriend, when he went off to the service. She wondered a little sadly in her diary why their romance hadn’t worked out. All around her, people were pairing off, but she was still basically alone.
March was a hard month. Anne Marie’s mother had died on March 16 nineteen years earlier, and March 24 was the eighth anniversary of her father’s death. On the twenty-fourth, she wrote,
Today is the day my father died! How sad. My father was a bad father, but he was the only father I ever had, so therefore I loved him. I do not think that he consciously meant to be a bad father—he just had no clue! He really made my life very sad and lonely. I will never forget the pain he caused me. He forced me to lie to protect my identity.
It was on that bleak anniversary that Tom Capano made an offer to Anne Marie. He, too, asked her to lie, but this time it was more to protect his identity. The words scrawled across the page of her diary sound almost childlike: “My boyfriend (Tomas) asked me today if I wanted to be a girlfriend and live alone and he would pay rent for my room. I need to think. I love him, but . . . he has four children (girls) and a wife. I will be a silent girlfriend. Oh my God.”
Tom Capano may have sensed that he had not won over Anne Marie’s housemates and felt their coolness when he dropped in. Or perhaps he liked the idea of having a mistress who would be alone somewhere in a room that he paid for, a young woman waiting for him to visit. But Anne Marie refused his offer. She wanted to stay with Jackie and Bronwyn.
And then there were the summers at the shore. For years, she and a number of compatible girlfriends had pooled their funds to rent a house on the New Jersey shore during the hot Delaware summer months. On weekends, they joined up either in Sea Isle City or in Avalon, both just north of Stone Harbor. If she had agreed to live in a room that Tommy paid for, Anne Marie knew that everything would change. She was afraid of being cut off from the friends who were such an integral part of her life.
Kim Horstman, the pretty blonde from Philadelphia who had met Anne Marie during one of the summers at the shore, remained one of her best friends. Kim was always a partner in the shared summer houses, although others came and went. And Kim was one of the few people who was privy to every aspect of Anne Marie’s life. They were already planning to rent a house for the summer of 1994 in Sea Isle City with Eileen Duffy; Anne Marie felt she couldn’t back out on that. She explained all of her concerns to Tom as she gently refused his offer of support.
Tom seemed to understand. He was so nice about everything. If something made her happy, he wanted her to have it. He told her again and again that he got a great deal of pleasure in seeing someone else happy. The money that was for him only a drop in the bucket was supposed to be used to make others happy. For instance, hadn’t she and Jill and Ginny enjoyed the lunch at Tiffin? That was the kind of thing he meant. He cared about her and was concerned only about her.
Anne Marie and most of her friends lived from paycheck to paycheck, with the end of the month often looking pretty lean. She made around $31,000 a year as Tom Carper’s scheduling secretary, less than $2,000 a month after taxes, and she tried to stay away from credit cards. Still, there always seemed to be something unexpected she needed to pay for. And she loved clothes. Anne Marie had gone through school wearing hand-me-downs, cheap imitations, and making do with what she could afford on a wai
tress’s salary. Now she attended so many functions where women wore wonderful clothes, and she longed for them herself.
The first spring she was secretly seeing Tom, Anne Marie went shopping with Jill Morrison to find a dress to wear to a family wedding. They went to Talbot’s and Anne Marie tried on a pale peach linen dress that suited her perfectly. But when she and Jill looked at the price tag, they gasped. It was way beyond Anne Marie’s means. Nothing else she looked at could compete with the peach linen, so they left Talbot’s without buying anything.
“About a week after the wedding,” Jill recalled, “I asked Anne Marie, ‘What did you end up wearing?’ and she said, ‘The peach linen dress.’ She explained that Mr. Capano purchased it for her.”
ANNE MARIE had begun an emotional roller-coaster ride. On April 22, Tom invited her to his house “to eat.” She did not tell her diary if they were alone or if he had somehow managed to make her appear a casual business acquaintance. She only wrote, “My friend and I went to his house to eat. What a house! He enchants me. During the weekend, my thoughts are devoted to Tomas. I am afraid because I am in love with a man who has a family. I need to realize that our relationship will never be anything other than a secret.”
On April 26, Tom came to Anne Marie’s house to have dinner, and afterward, he told her gently that she deserved to have a man without children, a man who had a lot of time to spend with her, because she was “very special and deserved much more.” She was bereft when he said that they could not go on seeing each other. And she watched from her window as he got into his car and drove away, probably, she thought, for the last time. She blamed herself, as she always blamed herself when someone left her behind. “I know it is my problem and my fault, because from the very beginning, I knew what I was getting myself into. After he left, I was so empty, sad, lonely. I [had] told him things that were hidden inside me. I feel so comfortable with him—I can say anything. I went to bed and cried myself to sleep.”