And Never Let Her Go

by Ann Rule

  With Dr. Sullivan’s help, Anne Marie began to feel stronger. Ideally, in her view, she would be with Mike forever—and Tom would no longer trail her and threaten her. And, perhaps most important to her, he wouldn’t feel sad that she no longer loved him.

  Easter was approaching, a time of rebirth and renewal. Anne Marie and Mike went to services on Holy Thursday. They would not be together for Easter because Mike was going home to Rhode Island. He sent her a card that hardly seemed in the spirit of the season, but it was. It was a picture of a seal, which he explained was an “Easter seal” from the North Pacific.

  “I hope your holiday is a good one,” he wrote.

  I’ll be thinking about you. I’m sure everything will be fine. Keep strong. You’re doing good. I hope, too, that you get some time for yourself this weekend—a cup of java and the paper, a walk in the park, or sitting alone at home in the dark, one of my favorites. I will look forward to seeing you Sunday evening at the airport. Happy Easter, do be sure to have one of those chocolate or marshmallow bunnies for me. Love, Mike

  Mike knew that Anne Marie was coping with something and that she was seeing a psychologist, although she had not confided any specifics. She had told him she was working out her feelings about self-confidence and self-esteem and that she had some family problems. Mike knew that her brother Mark was battling alcoholism and that Anne Marie was terribly worried about him—and angry with him at the same time—but he never asked too many questions, sensing that she would tell him all in good time.

  Mike knew that Anne Marie had dreams for the future. Her dearest wish was to become a teacher, but she was very loyal to Tom Carper. She wouldn’t even consider leaving her job until she had seen him through his upcoming campaign for reelection. “After that time,” Mike said, “she had it in her mind that she would move on.”

  Mike knew nothing at all about Tom Capano, and Anne Marie still hoped devoutly that he never would.

  Around Easter in 1996, Anne Marie believed that she was finally free of Tom’s influence and was strong enough to fight whatever battles might come her way. She had confided to her friends that she hoped to marry Mike. She talked about what kind of wedding she would like with her friend Jennifer in one of their endless phone calls between Delaware and Massachusetts. Had Mike mentioned marriage? Jennifer asked. Anne Marie said he hadn’t but that they were getting closer all the time.

  April was a beautiful month in Wilmington; the dogwood and cherry trees that lined almost every neighborhood street in the city were in bloom. After such a long and bitter winter, everyone was delighted to see that spring had come again after all.

  On Easter Sunday, April 7, 1996, Anne Marie wrote in the diary she had been keeping for two years (if only in a very sporadic fashion):

  Happy Easter! Well . . . another year has passed since my last entry and man o’ man has a lot happened. I’ve been through a lot of emotional battles. I finally have brought closure to Tom Capano. What a controlling, manipulative, insecure, jealous maniac. Now that I look back on that aspect of my life, I realize just how vulnerable I had become. It hurts me when I think about that year. For one whole year, I allowed someone to take control of every decision in my life. Bob Conner’s death hurt me / affected me more than anything. . . . My being after Bob’s death became the little girl growing up in a chaotic world. I lost all sense of trust. I thought it would be easier that way.

  I have been fortunate enough to find another therapist, Michelle Sullivan. No one will ever take the place of Bob—but . . . she’s pretty damn close. 5 weeks ago, I was diagnosed w/ Bulimia. My weight is currently 125 pounds. Pretty skinny, but I want more.

  Anne Marie was still sick, but her mind was straight and her perceptions were dead on. Once she accepted herself and the fact that a woman five foot ten inches tall was underweight at 125 pounds, she could regain her physical health too. She was going to make it.

  DEBBY MACINTYRE heard from Tom at least twice a day during the spring of 1996, and they were together in an intimate way several times a week. He had long had a key to her house on Delaware Avenue and the combination to her burglar alarm. Although it always startled her, he would appear in the door to her bedroom late at night, undress in the dark, and crawl into bed with her.

  Debby didn’t have a key to Tom’s house, nor did she ever visit him without calling first. It never occurred to her to ask for a key. She knew that Tom often had his daughters staying there, and beyond that, he had always made the rules in their relationship. “I was very much in love with him,” she recalled. “I trusted him and I believed what he told me.”

  Tom often spent evenings in Philadelphia, explaining to Debby that he had meetings with the main office of Saul, Ewing. Her job also took up a lot of her time. She was in charge of the summer program at Tatnall, along with the before- and after-school programs. Both of her children were on the swim team at Tatnall and her life was very busy. She sometimes fell asleep as she watched the David Letterman show—waiting for Tom—but she never questioned him and she never worried about his fidelity. After all the years she had loved him, they were now a very close couple planning for marriage in the not too distant future. It was all she had ever hoped for.

  Debby had never even heard the name Anne Marie Fahey.

  Nor had she heard the name Linda Marandola. In April, after six weeks of not hearing from Tom, Linda began to get phone calls again. As she would remember, she finally agreed to have dinner with him on her birthday in April 1996. Tom said he wanted to talk to her about a job as his secretary at Saul, Ewing. She needed a job badly, she was a good legal secretary, and she thought there was no harm in just talking about it.

  It was close to Easter when Tom picked her up and drove her to the Ristorante La Veranda in Philadelphia. They had a superb meal, and Tom was attentive and charming; and by the time he paid the $175 tab for their meal, Linda had agreed to apply for the secretarial job at his firm. It would be a lifesaver financially, and for the third time, she began to trust Tom.

  When the officer manager at Saul, Ewing began to schedule applicants for the position that would become available at the end of May, Tom gave her Linda’s résumé. An interview was set up and Tom and one of the partners talked with Linda. When it was over, Tom advised the office manager that she should hire Linda, who he felt was the best applicant for the job.

  Linda was hired, due to report for work on May 29. And Tom was back in her life. He had deduced early on that she was having a difficult time paying her bills, and offered to lend her $3,000 until she had a salary again. Hesitant but in a pinch, she accepted. On May 15, Tom wrote her a personal check for $3,000.

  ANNE MARIE and Mike were together for all of the bright spring of 1996. They went to weddings, parties, and high school plays, and they spent long evenings with her family. On the first weekend in May, they went to a Kentucky Derby party given by one of Mike’s friends. The next day, MBNA was hosting guests at the Point-to-Point steeplechase races on the grounds of Winterthur. The steeplechase had begun as a very posh event to raise money for Winterthur, but after two decades, the Point-to-Point was no longer strictly for the blue bloods of society. The event attracted the common folk, too, along with horse fanciers from all over the world. “This is the only melting-pot event we have,” a Wilmington woman said. “It’s a great event where everybody can come and just have a good time.”

  Anne Marie bought a flower-sprinkled cotton dress in a size four to wear to the Point-to-Point. The skirt was long and swirled around her ankles, and she was confident that her “fat legs” were covered. She and Mike watched the races, looked at the vintage cars displayed by collectors, and walked past the entries in the tailgate contest. The Point-to-Point, half reminiscent of Ascot in England, half state fair, was only one of many good times that Anne Marie was having with Mike, days that made her want to pinch herself to see if this was all real, times that did, indeed, have a storybook feel to them.

  She didn’t agonize that Mike wouldn’t call
her again. There was a steadiness about him that gave her serenity and trust. They were a couple and their friends expected to see them together. Sometimes Mike sent her flowers for no reason at all, and he included Anne Marie in most of his plans.

  AND then, through devices that no one would understand for a long time—perhaps never—Tom Capano reappeared in Anne Marie’s life. She had never told anyone what had happened to make her shut him out in February, nor did she immediately explain to her friends why she had let him back in. Indeed, many of them did not know he was back.

  The torrent of E-mail between Tom’s office and the governor’s office began again on April 24, heavily weighted on Tom’s end of the line. He initiated these new contacts by telling Anne Marie of a catastrophe in his life. Anne Marie knew that Tom’s daughters meant everything to him, and when he called her to say that Katie, his second daughter, was going to have brain surgery, her heart broke for him. She couldn’t hang up on him when he was dealing with such terrible news. Tom was very strong, but he could not live if he lost one of his girls to a brain tumor. He told Anne Marie that he needed her—just as a friend—to get through his agony over Katie’s illness. He asked her if she would go to the hospital with him to see Katie. And instantly, she was wary.

  Perhaps Tom knew what her reaction would be. Anne Marie told him she could not go to the hospital with him. It wasn’t her place to be there; it was Kay’s place. And she felt angry and manipulated that he would ask her. She reported to Dr. Sullivan that she had been able to say no to Tom about the hospital visit.

  “I registered some surprise that she even knew them [his daughters],” Dr. Sullivan recalled. “And she said she had communicated with them. It didn’t surprise me because she is extremely friendly with children . . . so her contact with that young person would have made it tougher for her to say no.”

  She had run into Tom’s girls now and again and Tom had always introduced her as an old friend, but she didn’t know any of them well enough to visit in the hospital. If Anne Marie had gone to see Katie, however, Tom’s lie would have been found out. Katie wasn’t having brain surgery. She had only fainted during a basketball game. Of course, Anne Marie didn’t know that, but she was suspicious. She wondered if Tom was using a story about his daughter to get to her. She now weighed everything he said to her for some underlying purpose.

  Tom had, in fact, experienced something like what he had described to Anne Marie—only not with Katie. Ten years earlier—in 1986—his daughter Alex, who was only fifteen months old at the time, had had a dermoid cyst (a fatty tumor) removed from her head at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. General anesthesia was required, and Tom and Kay had to wait a few days to find that the tumor was benign. Kay was not as worried as Tom; as a nurse, she was fairly certain it was only a cyst. It clearly had greater impact on Tom. Odd that he would bring up an actual event and transform it to suit his purpose such a long time later.

  However, it worked. He and Anne Marie were talking again. And that was what Anne Marie had always hoped for, that she and Tom could be friends. It had been months since they had had a physical relationship. She never intended to have sex with him again; it was hard to believe she ever had.

  They were soon exchanging dumb E-mail again with trivia questions. That was safe enough. Some sounded totally innocuous. In their trivia contest, he asked her who made Coach leather and she correctly answered, “Sara Lee.” But in reality, he was reminding Anne Marie that he had offered to buy her a Lexus, a very expensive car, outfitted in Coach leather. He cared little for cars, but she was a connoisseur of them. She would have reveled in a Lexus.

  It wasn’t long before Tom began to call more and more often and to ask questions again, about Anne Marie’s health, her financial situation, her friends, her life. He knew she was still seeing Mike, and she told him, very cautiously, about some of the places they went.

  When she mentioned that a rock had put a crack in her windshield, he was very concerned and warned her that it was dangerous. He insisted she get bids on replacing it. As he had with Jackie, he asked to see her finances, using that as an excuse to drop by her apartment. Jackie had avoided that, but Anne Marie let Tom see her bills. He shook his head and said, “You’re getting no place—all you’re doing is paying the interest.” He chided gently about her clumsiness with money.

  When Anne Marie found out that a new windshield would cost $460.55, Tom offered to pay for it. That $460 was a quarter of her monthly take-home pay, but Tom assured her it was nothing to him. He would always say, “Just add that to the running tab,” as if he actually enjoyed lending her money. He sent her an envelope by messenger, and when she opened it, a handful of brand-new, crisp bills fluttered to the floor. As the accompanying note suggested, it looked like Monopoly money. She didn’t want to keep it, but she finally did after Tom sent her an E-mail the next day: “Regarding the Monopoly money, we’ll talk about that in person as you suggest, but remember it’s not a gift; it’s only a loan with some pretty serious repayment provisions (I didn’t go to law school for nothing).”

  And indeed, there were serious repayment provisions. Tom rarely spent his own money without a payback in mind. Anne Marie insisted upon paying him back in kind, writing him checks whenever she could.

  Money was one of Anne Marie’s chief anxieties, and Tom knew it. He assured her over and over that they were only friends now but that he would always be there for her. If she had an argument with Kathleen—a sisterly certainty—he was there to take her side, just as he had always advised Debby that her sister did not have her best interests at heart.

  Tom prevailed upon Anne Marie to take $500 to pay for part of her therapy, although Robert was making $1,000 and $1,500 payments; she had had some insurance and she was paying as much as she could. She could consider it just another loan.

  Then Tom began to contact Kim and Siobhan and some of Anne Marie’s other friends to ask about her. She had always hated that; her pride made her furious to think that he was discussing her problems behind her back. It didn’t matter to Tom; he was back in Anne Marie’s life, and once he got his foot in the door, he was confident that she would see that Mike Scanlan wasn’t for her—and that he was.

  DESPITE his efforts to win Anne Marie back, Tom had never left Debby MacIntyre’s life. And she had come to depend on him more than ever. In May, he invited her to go on another trip with him. He had a legal seminar to attend in Washington, D.C., and she went along. They didn’t have to slip around now the way they had on the Montreal trip, and she didn’t have to pretend she didn’t know him if someone they knew saw them together.

  Debby sensed that something was bothering Tom; he was more uptight and moody than ever, but he really didn’t want to talk about it. She knew better than to press him.

  AS hard as Tom was trying to break down Anne Marie’s defenses, Dr. Michelle Sullivan was helping her to stand up for herself and be assertive. In their sessions, Dr. Sullivan saw a young woman with a vibrant personality whose humor was so on target that it wasn’t easy for even a trained therapist to see the sad little girl peeking out from inside. Laughing at something Anne Marie said, Dr. Sullivan had to bring them both back to why she was there. Anne Marie needed desperately to be assertive.

  “If you spent most of your life trying to be compliant so as not to get into trouble,” Dr. Sullivan explained, “and when somebody is saying to you, ‘Let’s work on your assertion,’ obviously you are going to start to get panicky that if you are assertive, this other person is going to kick you out of their life, or they are going to hate you, or try to manipulate you into trying to go backwards.”

  In therapy, determined to change the way she had always dealt with her world, Anne Marie was alternately assertive and frightened. She wanted so much to get well, but even as she made progress, she scared herself.

  “She had always been compliant,” Dr. Sullivan said later. “People who got to know her and really loved her were used to saying, ‘Oh you know Anne Marie w
ill go to the show. We will decide and she will just come along.’ And as she got firmer and firmer about what she would do and not do, we both knew that some people wouldn’t like it—and that resulted in increased anxiety.”

  Moreover, Anne Marie was keeping so many things secret from people she cared about that she must have felt as if she was about to explode. Mike didn’t know about Tom, and most of her friends still didn’t know that she was back in touch with Tom. They were all relieved believing that she was not.

  Anne Marie also thought she was concealing her anorexia, although that was a secret she could not hide. By wearing loose and layered clothing, she could almost disguise her gaunt rib cage, but her image of herself was so distorted that she saw a heavy woman with fat thighs when she looked in a mirror; other people gasped when they saw how thin she had become.

  Robert knew, and Tom; and Jill Morrison was worried sick about her. Anne Marie hadn’t seen Kim for a while, and Jennifer was up in New England. Her brother Brian was startled to see how thin she had become when he saw Anne Marie during a get-together at Kathleen’s house. “She didn’t look good, and I asked her about it,” Brian recalled. She admitted to him that she was having some difficulty in that area. “But she was a little cryptic about it because my nephews were around, and there were some other people in the house, so she didn’t want to talk about it a lot that day.”

  Anne Marie assured Brian that she was talking to someone about her problem with food. “She told me that she was getting help for it,” he said.

  She told her other friends that she thought she was gaining a few pounds. But still, she took the laxatives every night to rid herself of the few calories she had managed to eat during the day. Amazingly, whereas most women on such a starvation diet completely shut down, her menstrual periods continued as always.