by Ann Rule
It didn’t sound as if the evening had been a happy one, however. Even a waitress who didn’t know them had wondered why Anne Marie and Tom had seemed glum and had only picked at their meals. She was quite sure, though, that they weren’t having an argument; they just seemed to be at an impasse, bored, or even silently angry. But that evening was becoming more and more important to investigate, since Jacqueline Dansak appeared to be the last person—other than Capano—to have seen Anne Marie before she vanished.
On Tuesday morning, July 2, with Anne Marie still missing, the Wilmington paper noted that she had last been seen in an unidentified Philadelphia restaurant on Thursday night and added quotes from her brothers. “This is very odd . . . very confusing for everybody,” Robert told reporters. “It’s so unlike her to be out of touch for more than an afternoon, let alone a whole weekend. She’s your normal, 30-year-old single girl with a lot of local friends and family.”
Kathleen, Robert, Kevin, Mark, and Brian were spending most of their time at Anne Marie’s apartment. Mark moved in so that someone would be there constantly. He was the brother she had agonized over, loving him so much that she wept for him. Now, she was gone—and Mark would have done anything to get Annie back. They all would.
The police asked Kathleen to inventory everything in Anne Marie’s apartment to see what might be missing. She did, and the only things she could be sure of were Anne Marie’s keys, her Walkman, and the blue topaz ring that Paul Columbus had given her. Anne Marie had worn that ring with the cotton dress they’d found flung over her settee; it matched the little blue flowers in the pattern. But now it was missing, along with Anne Marie. And by the end of the day, rumors were already circulating that she had last been seen dining with a “prominent Wilmington attorney” in Philadelphia just before she vanished.
DEBBY MACINTYRE was only peripherally aware that a woman was missing in Wilmington. In retrospect, she remembered that she had seen the picture of a pretty woman on the front page of the paper and read the headline. It didn’t seem to touch her world, and she rarely read crime news. She had heard the rumor but thought nothing of it. Wilmington was filled with attorneys, many of whom could be described as prominent.
Sometime on that Tuesday, Debby got a phone call at work from Tom. “I have something very shocking to tell you,” he began. “You’d better sit down.”
Automatically, Debby sank to her chair, ready for what must surely be bad news.
“Do you recall reading about a woman who is missing who had gone to dinner with a prominent attorney?”
“I think I saw something in the paper . . .”
“You heard that she was last seen having dinner with a prominent attorney?”
Debby waited, her heart suddenly thudding.
“That was me.”
“Oh, no,” she breathed.
“I’m a suspect in her disappearance,” Tom said. “I’ve hired Charlie Oberly to represent me. I wanted to call you now because I’m going down to Stone Harbor a day early for the Fourth.”
“Who is this woman?” Debby asked, puzzled.
“Her name’s Anne Marie Fahey. I’ll call you later tonight and we’ll talk about it.”
Debby was stunned. What had Tom been doing with a woman who had disappeared? For that matter, what had he been doing having dinner with another woman without even mentioning it to her? It was as if the earth had opened up beneath her feet and everything in Debby’s world had begun to slide in. She would have bet money that Tom had no secrets from her—not about women. She had bet her life on him for fourteen years.
Tom was still talking. He said that Charlie wanted to speak to her on the phone and asked her when he could call her.
“Five-thirty, I guess,” she said. “At my house.”
Charlie Oberly was a respected attorney in Wilmington and had once been the Delaware State Attorney General. He was a good friend of Tom’s. Debby didn’t mind talking to him. Actually, she wanted to find out more about what was going on. She stayed at work for another hour, blindly doing what she needed to do to clear her desk. But she couldn’t focus or concentrate as she tried to figure out what on earth Tom was involved in.
When Charlie Oberly called Debby, he asked her if she had spoken with Tom on the previous Thursday night and during the day on Friday. That was simple enough to answer. Tom had said he had a meeting with his law firm in Philadelphia on Thursday night and she had spoken to him on the phone a couple of times after ten—the first time, she thought, was during ER, and again later. She had seen Tom early Friday morning and talked to him on the phone a few times during the day, and he had spent Friday night with her.
Oberly listened to her timetable but he didn’t give her much information. She needed to talk to Tom.
At nine-thirty Tuesday evening, Tom called her from his mother’s house in Stone Harbor. By this time, Debby had had too many hours to think and she was very upset. As soon as she heard Tom’s voice, she said, “Who is this Anne Marie Fahey?”
“I’ve been seeing her.”
“When?”
“Up until September of last year, but it’s over.”
“Are you in love with her?”
“I did fall in love with her,” Tom said, “but it’s over, Debby.”
She could scarcely believe that Tom had been that involved with another woman and never once mentioned it to her. On the rare occasions when she dated anyone else, she had always told him. And now it seemed that Tom had hidden what was apparently a love affair from her, even as he kept telling her how very much he loved her.
“How can you tell me you love me?” she asked.
“I do.”
“I know she’s a lot younger,” Debby said. “I can’t compete with someone who’s thirty years old.”
“She had so many problems,” he said. “I was so good to her—I was helpful and I was interested—but then I couldn’t get rid of her. She was so mentally ill, Debby, and she attached herself to me, and I knew I had to unload her.”
“How long, Tom?” Debby asked. “How long did you see her?”
“About three years.”
“Three years?”
Tom kept insisting that she had nothing to feel bad about now, since he was no longer in love with Anne Marie Fahey. He didn’t seem to understand why she was so emotional, but Debby was so distraught that, for once, she couldn’t hide her real feelings. She felt betrayed, and she felt a fool for never once suspecting him.
Tom said he was sorry that he’d ever had to tell her about Anne Marie, but since it was probably going to hit the news any minute, he wanted her to know the truth first. Of course, he had no idea what had happened to Anne Marie, who was such a ditsy girl that he never could tell what she might do next. She could be any of a dozen places.
“Are there others?” Debby asked when he had finished telling her about Anne Marie, a woman she had never even heard of until the day before.
“One other,” he replied quietly. And then he said that he had been seeing Susan Louth since November.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Debby cried. “How could you let me believe that I was the only woman in your life?”
“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”
“My feelings?” Debby felt as though she had no breath left in her body. “Don’t you know that lying to me is worse than that?”
Debby wasn’t even thinking she could be making Tom so angry that he might leave her. She spoke her mind without thought of the consequences. She was absolutely devastated, but she didn’t think of leaving him. Her mind scurried around, trying to mend the damage, albeit unconsciously. Her future had been with Tom for so long that she couldn’t imagine life without him. It wasn’t that she believed even for a second that he could have done anything to the girl; Tom wouldn’t hurt anyone. Debby’s pain came from his cheating on her and telling her lies.
Finally she told him that she could take anything as long as they were truthful with each other. “No more lies, please,�
�� she said. “OK? Let’s put it all out on the table, here. You said you wouldn’t tell me because you didn’t want to hurt my feelings. You’ve hurt me more than you know by not being up front with me. Please, from now on. Please promise. Please don’t lie to me anymore. If there is somebody else, please tell me. I’d rather know than have it this way.”
Tom promised. “So I thought everything was fine and wonderful,” Debby recalled. “From that point on, I never knew there was anyone else. I believed him.”
Tom had been anxious to get away from Wilmington for the Fourth of July holiday because he didn’t particularly want to talk to any more detectives until he and Charlie Oberly established some ground rules. Although he had evinced interest in helping them find out what had happened to Anne Marie, he was not about to have them declare open season on his personal affairs. There were aspects of his life and his family’s life that were none of their business.
His whole family would be at the shore for the long holiday weekend, and he suggested to Debby that she might want to get away for a while too. The press was going to have a field day with this thing. He had to tell Kay, too. He wanted her to round up the girls and head for the shore as soon as possible. Otherwise they would probably have reporters and police making their lives miserable.
TOM’S name did hit the papers on July 3, although the coverage was more subdued than it might have been:
Anne Marie Fahey . . . was last seen by Wilmington attorney and political insider Thomas J. Capano when the two had dinner Thursday night in Philadelphia, according to friends and sources close to the investigation. . . . Police said they do not consider Fahey’s dinner companion, whom they did not identify, to be a suspect and said he had been cooperative with investigators.
It was the first breath of scandal ever to touch Tom, and everyone who knew him was surprised. But he was separated from his wife, and there was no indication in the article of what his relationship with Anne Marie might have been. It wasn’t a crime to take a pretty woman out to dinner.
Back at Anne Marie’s apartment, which her family had set up as a headquarters in the search for her, Brian didn’t comment to the press on Capano’s possible involvement in the case. “Her disappearance is so seamless,” he said quietly. “It’s not that the trail’s run out. There is no trail.”
On Wednesday, July 3, the Faheys began passing out hundreds of flyers bearing Anne Marie’s picture to businesses that promptly taped them up in prominent spots or in their front windows. They were offering a $10,000 reward for information that would lead to finding Anne Marie. She had been missing six days now, and her face was rapidly becoming familiar around Wilmington. Soon the flyers would cross the Pennsylvania and New Jersey state lines. Newspaper articles and television and radio coverage of her disappearance were growing exponentially, and lots of tips and suggestions were coming in to the investigators—but as in most high-profile cases, virtually all of them were useless. Because people wanted to help, they tended to imagine that the young women they saw alone in bus stations, grocery stores, and airports were Anne Marie. But none of them was.
At noon on that first Wednesday, a mass was held for Anne Marie at St. Joseph’s. Three dozen of her friends and family prayed for her safe return, and then her brothers and sister took up their quiet vigil on the broad white porch of the house where she had lived. They still hoped that she might come back to them, although their spirits sank lower with every passing day. But they were positive of one thing: if she was able, Anne Marie would either call them or find a way home. And when she did not, they had to accept that she could not. That left a number of possibilities—all of them bleak: she was being held somewhere against her will; she had amnesia; she was ill or injured; or she was dead. That last possibility was too terrible to contemplate, and yet their minds sometimes went there, in thoughts that skittered like mice over a gravestone.
The next day was the Fourth of July. It was to have been a day of celebration for the Fahey family, who had planned a barbecue. Instead, they would spend the day in a massive search for their sister. Anne Marie’s family and friends asked for help from the public to search Wilmington’s Brandywine Park and canvass her neighborhood for any possible clues to her disappearance. Volunteers were asked to come to the Baynard Stadium at 8 A.M.
Three hundred people—friends and strangers—showed up. With police assistance, they were split into search groups, working in assigned areas so that the same places wouldn’t be searched twice and others missed. They spread out, only an arm’s length apart in the park itself, looking under trees and bushes and along the banks of Brandywine Creek. On the city streets and alleys of Wilmington, they looked into garbage cans, empty garages, anyplace where a person, a body, a weapon, clothing, or some other physical evidence might be hidden.
Police helicopters equipped with infrared devices had scoped out the huge park earlier in the week. With infrared film, freshly turned dirt and decomposing bodies of humans and animals glow red, something that cannot be detected by the human eye. Nothing had shown up. But now, one of the search teams found a small area of fresh dirt that was hidden from the air. Grimly, the police began to dig with shovels. There was nothing buried there. Some women’s clothing turned up; it wasn’t Anne Marie’s size or recognizable as anything she had ever worn.
The Faheys continued to make themselves available to reporters and used the vast resources of the media to help find Anne Marie. They knew when they made that decision that they would lose any vestige of their privacy and be subjected to endless interviews and speculation. But it was a very pragmatic choice. “We knew we could speak out well,” Robert recalled, “and we were fairly photogenic. It was the best way we knew to find our sister.”
The long day ended and still there was not even a trace of Anne Marie. If she was dead, the police investigators didn’t know where she had died. The putative crime scene would be the last place she was said to have been—her apartment—but they had found no sign of a struggle there. The last person she was known to be with—Tom Capano—had been questioned and his house briefly examined. Nothing there seemed out of the ordinary. In order to get a search warrant, the investigators would have to establish a probable cause to indicate that a crime had been committed and that there might be evidence in a house, a yard, or a vehicle. They did not yet have that probable cause.
Chapter Twenty-three
WHILE THE OFFICIAL INVESTIGATION of Anne Marie’s disappearance was hampered by a complete lack of evidence of foul play, one of her friends was able to contribute a few more provocative details. Kim Horstman told Bob Donovan that she had spoken to Anne Marie on Wednesday night, the night before she vanished, and it had been a very upbeat conversation. Kim had been one of the first of Annie’s friends to learn that she was missing. Susan Fahey, who had gone to high school with Kim, called her at her brother’s house shortly after Anne Marie had failed to show up for dinner on Saturday night.
“She asked me if I knew where Annie was,” Kim said, “and I didn’t know where she was.” But her first thought was that Annie might be with Tom. She wasn’t going to give that deep secret away to Susan, so Kim decided to call Tom herself. She got two numbers from information. When she dialed the first number, a young girl answered, so Kim hung up, believing it was Tom’s family’s house. But when she called the second number, Kay answered. She hung up again. But Kay, suspicious, pressed *69 and called her back.
Kim didn’t say anything. If Annie was OK, she didn’t want to make things worse. To be on the safe side, Kim had her brother call Tom’s house this time and ask for him.
When Tom came on the line, Kim asked, “Where is Annie?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Where is Annie? She is missing. Do you know where she is?”
Tom seemed confused and upset at the news that Anne Marie was missing. “Where are you?” he asked Kim.
“I’m at my brother Michael’s house,” she said.
“I thought you w
ere supposed to be at the shore this weekend,” Tom said with surprise in his voice. “I thought Annie was with you at the shore.”
Kim explained that their lease at the shore had ended on that very day, but Tom kept asking her where she was, until she finally made him understand that she was at her brother’s.
“She was going to the shore with you this weekend, Kimmie,” Tom insisted.
“That was never the case.”
Tom sounded genuinely stunned and told Kim that she had “blown his mind” because he was sure Annie was with her. He seemed very agitated and asked her over and over where she was calling from. He finally took her number and said he would call her back.
Kim dialed Anne Marie’s apartment next but she got only the answering machine. By this time it was eleven on Saturday night. At midnight, Tom did call Kim at her brother’s house. In a twenty-minute conversation, he said he had had time to think and decided that Anne Marie must have just gone away for the weekend—that she’d had a rough week. He told Kim about what he called “Annie’s big fight” with Kathleen and said he’d had dinner with Anne Marie on Thursday night.
“He said he was confident that she would be back to work on Monday,” Kim recalled, “and that this whole mess would be cleared up.”
Then Kim told Tom that she’d heard Kathleen was going to file a missing persons report with the Wilmington Police.
“I wonder if they’ll be looking for me,” he said in what seemed to be a non sequitur.
Calls went back and forth during the wee hours of Sunday. Kathleen called Kim and put her on the spot. She asked Kim if she knew who Tom Capano was and what connection he had to Annie.