by Ann Rule
“Where were you situated while you were watching ER? Who was where?”
The courtroom was hushed, waiting to hear what would come next. Tom’s answers were growing more lengthy and complex, and it took a careful ear to extract the kernel of an answer to the question that Oteri had asked from all the words, words, words.
“I typically would sit in the daddy chair—the recliner. And Annie would stretch out as best she could on the love seat. It was a love seat—it was not a sofa. It was not a sleeper couch as some people have said. It was not—it was big enough for her to lie down on but only with her knees pulled up. . . . Now, during the course of the TV show, at one point I went off and sat on the couch with her and she might lay her head on my shoulder or something like that. And we definitely did do that. It was pretty much how it was going at the end of the show.”
“And you watched the entire show with her?”
“Yes. Although Anne Marie—as Anne Marie always did—well, most of the time did—Anne Marie often falls asleep in front of the television and never sees the end of an eleven o’clock show because she wakes up so early in the morning. At one point Anne Marie fell asleep and I didn’t wake her up. So I saw the entire show and she did not. I did wake her up for the end.”
Tom’s words flew together, but haltingly and repetitiously. It almost seemed as if he was viewing another scene in his head, one he was hesitant to describe.
“Could you move without waking her up? Could you get up or down without waking her?” Oteri asked.
“Yes. Yes.”
“The show ends at eleven o’clock. After the show ends, what did you do?”
“Well, I heard the phone ringing sometime during the show. I didn’t bother answering. I suspected it was Debby because I had told Debby I would probably see her later that evening. And it was not at all unusual for Debby to come over, say eleven o’clock at night, and spend the night, especially during the summer, when her kids were out of school. I remember how the show ended but at the end of the show, I got up to use the powder room, so I checked my voice mail, and sure enough, there was a message from Debby.”
“Were you concerned she would come over?” Oteri asked.
“No. Because I think—I mean, what I figured was that, you know, Anne Marie and I might, you know, hang out to the end of the news. Then I might take her home. Sometimes we would both fall asleep. There were literally times when she would wake up at one-thirty, two o’clock in the morning, and we were both sound asleep, and she would come over and kick me and say, ‘Come on, Capano, you got to drive me home.’ Sometimes she did spend the night.” Tom blinked at Oteri and asked, “Where was I?”
“Talking about the phone call. You went into—”
“As I suspected, it was a call from Debby, and I did call her back from the study.” Tom seemed back on track now. “And we had a brief and pleasant conversation. She started on her normal Tatnall subject, which was always a red flag before my eyes. And she said, ‘Can I come over now?’ And I said, ‘Not right now, you know. I’ve got company. It will have to be later,’ or something like that. And I just hung up.”
Tom said it was about eleven then. He said he’d gone back to the great room to be sure that Anne Marie hadn’t fallen asleep again. “We had both sort of stretched out on the love seat, talking. . . . I knew we both had the next day off . . . and she really did tell me she might be going to the beach with Kim or going to the outlets and [we were] talking about my potential golf game. I figured I’d be taking her home—probably by the end of the news, or she might decide to stay as long as the beginning of Letterman. We were winding down the evening.”
Tom went on for some time about the golf game he had hoped to play on Friday and some in the gallery sighed. What did that have to do with anything?
“You said you stretched out on the love seat?” Oteri asked, bringing Tom back to the vital night.
“No. Well, we didn’t lie down next to each other. I don’t mean to give that impression. We were sitting right next to each other . . . our legs were stretched out straight.” He explained that Anne Marie was to his left, and “adjacent to my body.”
“Any parts of her body touch your body?”
“Pretty much her entire right side.”
“Were you engaged in any form of—”
“No, no.”
“—kissing or anything?”
“No. No. Not that way.” There was, at times, a certain prissiness about Tom; it was hard to picture him as the man who had bragged about having so many mistresses. When he was disturbed with a question, he bubbled out a string of “No, no, no, no, no, no, no’s,” as if he were truly shocked.
“All right,” Oteri said, “what happened next, sir?”
“Well, the next thing I knew,” Tom answered in a rush, “Debby MacIntyre was in the room. She must have entered the front door. She had a key to my house and I had a key to her house. I even had a garage door opener for her house. And she was pretty ballistic at the time.”
The courtroom buzzed. Although Gene Maurer had hinted at it when he cross-examined Debby, this was the first outright testimony that put her in Tom’s house on the last night Anne Marie was seen.
Tom testified that Debby had used her key to come through his front door. She would have to have entered at his front door, walked down a few steps, turned left through a narrow hallway to the kitchen. A few steps more and she was in the great room.
“We didn’t hear her come in because of the noise of the air conditioner,” Tom said. “And Debby also has a very soft tread. She’s a very small lady, and we didn’t realize she was there until she started yelling. I heard her before I saw her. She was yelling as she got closer to the love seat. And then I saw her standing more or less at the end of the love seat. And yelling.”
Tom said Debby had been on the right side of the love seat, a woman furious. “She was yelling, ‘Who’s this? What is this all about? Is this why you couldn’t see me?’ ”
And suddenly, Tom detoured to editorialize on Debby’s work pressures, his “red flags” when the Tatnall School was mentioned. He wanted the jurors to know that it was not strange that Debby had snapped.
“As far as she was concerned, basically I was spending all my romantic time with her. So all of this is sort of coming out and I’m trying to say, ‘Relax. Let’s slow down. I mean, Anne Marie and I are friends—’ ”
Oteri interrupted to ask what Debby had been wearing.
“I know she had on a T-shirt and some kind of shorts and carrying a little something—”
“Was that ‘something’ a purse—or do you know what it was?”
“Something a woman might carry around in the summertime for personal stuff.”
Tom testified that he had been caught between two angry women. “I was listening to Anne Marie saying, ‘Capano, what the hell is this?’ And I was turning to Anne Marie to try to explain, to say, you know, ‘Hold up,’ ” Tom said, speaking faster with remembered emotion. “And I got up. I stood up to face Debby. And Anne Marie is in the background muttering, ‘I don’t want to put up with garbage like this.’ And she actually had gotten her panty hose from wherever she had thrown them or put them on the table, and she said, ‘I want to go and I want to go now.’
“And she started to put—I was glancing back and forth between Anne Marie and Debby. And Annie was in the process of pulling her panty hose up and getting her shoes—”
“You were standing?” Oteri rushed to say.
“Yes.”
“And Annie was—”
Colm Connolly objected to the leading question. Oteri was trying desperately to help Tom get his story out in a way that made some kind of sense. Judge Lee sustained the objection.
“I was standing.”
“Where was Anne Marie in relation to you?”
“. . . to my right, and Debby was more or less in front of me. As I said, Anne Marie was pulling on her panty hose, and you know, she wasn’t screaming at me but she
was making it quite clear whatever was going on here was ridiculous and [she] wanted no part of it and she wanted to go home immediately.”
“What was Debby doing?”
“Debby was off the wall,” Tom said, his face expressing shock. “Debby—I had known Debby a long time. Debby was completely snapped. She was all red from the neck up. She was not coherent. I’m trying to explain to her that ‘This is not what you’re trying to make it out to be. Anne Marie and I are friends. You know, I have female friends.’ ”
Tom testified that Debby wasn’t even listening to him. “She was starting to cry and she was saying, ‘All these years I’ve waited for you,’ and things that just didn’t need to be said.”
“How long did this incident take?”
“Which incident?” Tom had been so caught up in his own words. “I mean, what part of the incident?”
“From the time she came in until the time you’re telling us about—the hollering, and . . .”
Tom could not give an estimate.
“All right,” Oteri said evenly. “Did something happen after you stood up?”
“Yes.”
“Tell the jury what happened.”
“Debby shot Anne Marie,” Tom said flatly. “And it was absolutely, positively, and certainly accidental.”
So there it was. The terrible accident. Tom stared ahead and stopped in the middle of his long explanation, seemingly unable to pick up the thread of his thoughts.
“Tell the jury what happened, Tom,” Oteri urged.
“She had bought this gun,” Tom said, now incorporating a number of elements that touched on previous testimony, “which she claims she gave to me, but she had bought this gun in May for self-protection. And she particularly made a point of having it with her if she went anyplace at night. Debby frightens very easily. And so she must have had the damned thing in her little carry thing, and the next thing I know I see the gun in her left hand—Debby is left-handed.
“And Anne Marie even saw it and said, ‘Oh, my God,’ like making fun of it. I couldn’t even take it seriously. She never threatened me; she never threatened Anne Marie. She basically said things that were suicidal. You know, ‘After all this time, if I can’t have you and if you want somebody younger and prettier,’ and all that sort of stuff. She said, ‘I have nothing to live for. I might as well shoot myself.’ This is all the talk of somebody who had lost it,” Tom said confidently. “So—”
“Where was the gun while she was doing this?” Oteri asked. But Tom’s testimony had become a virtual monologue; he seemed to have forgotten his lead defense attorney completely.
Finally, he answered, “The gun was in her left hand, which was down. I didn’t think it was in any kind of threatening position.”
“Not pointed at you or Anne Marie?”
“No . . . and I, again, I looked in Anne Marie’s direction to see how far she was getting, and when I looked back to Debby, the left arm was coming up and I thought, Oh my God, she’s going to shoot herself! And so I reached out with my right hand to grab her left hand to pull the gun away from herself. And as I did that, a shot went off. I couldn’t believe it. And she couldn’t believe it either.”
Tom said that even though Debby had “snapped,” she was able to tell him later that she didn’t have the clip in the gun. But a bullet had somehow come out.
The Faheys sat rigid. Whether they believed Tom or not, it was the first time they had heard about their sister’s last moments. They listened for some information that might let them know she hadn’t suffered. That was the dread they had lived with.
“I didn’t hear anything from Anne Marie,” Tom continued, scarcely taking a breath. “So I looked back to Anne Marie and she was motionless on the sofa. And I said, ‘No, this can’t be possible,’ and I checked her, and sure enough, she had a head wound on the right side of her head near her ear. And then I became a wreck. Debby became a wreck, too.”
Tom said that he had pulled Anne Marie off the sofa and tried CPR, after Anne Marie didn’t respond to “little smacks to her face.”
“I even got Debby involved in the CPR efforts.” He said he had put a pillow under Anne Marie’s head and looked for a flashlight to see if her eyes were dilated. “Or,” he asked himself aloud, “were they the opposite of ‘dilate’? No. Dilate. And they didn’t.”
They had both worked over Anne Marie for a long time, Tom said, as long as there seemed to be any chance she was alive. Tom described his state of shock, and Debby’s. “So you got two people in a state of shock—and one dead,” he said, drawing a breath.
“Did you call nine-one-one or anybody else?” Oteri asked.
“No,” Tom said with regret in his voice. “Most cowardly, horrible thing I’ve ever done in my life. It was like my whole life flashed before me.”
What was a man to do? Tom looked at the jury imploringly. Debby was sobbing and hysterical, his life was flashing before his eyes. “I always thought I was a guy with some guts, and I wasn’t. And I’m just being selfish, too, to protect myself and also to protect Debby. And so, since I knew the paramedics could not do anything—I knew Anne Marie was dead—I chose not to call the paramedics or the police but to protect myself and, to the extent I could, to protect Debby.”
Oteri asked Tom what he had done then—at eleven-thirty at night, with Anne Marie dead on the floor before him.
He had tried to comfort Debby first, he said, telling her it had been an accident and not her fault. “If I had been honest with her and told her I was seeing Anne Marie and on what basis, she would not have had reason to snap.”
Then Tom said he had put Debby in her car and sent her home. He would take care of what had to be done.
“After Debby has left. What do you do?” Oteri asked quietly.
“I break down,” Tom recalled. “I fell apart and I cried and I screamed at myself and I punched the wall, and after about five minutes of that, I did something I’m capable of doing. I compartmentalized. And then I just said, I have to do something. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? And the first thing I have to do is take care of Anne Marie’s body.”
And then Tom said he’d remembered that he had some things downstairs that he had a choice of using. He had a brand-new garbage can—“I couldn’t bring myself to think that we’re talking about a corpse.” He couldn’t put her in a garbage can, he said, not even a brand-new one. So that left the cooler.
“I brought the cooler upstairs,” he said. “I put Anne Marie in the cooler and I wrapped her in one of the cotton blankets from the guest room.”
“What was she wearing?” Oteri asked.
“The same outfit she had worn to dinner. And she and her shoes were in there, and eventually I put the gun in there.”
If Anne Marie was wearing her flowered dress, then where had the flowered dress come from that ended up back on the settee in her apartment? People in the gallery had read about that and looked confused.
Tom testified that he had eventually left his house on Grand Avenue that evening. And he remembered that—for some insane reason—he still had the gun with him. “I put the gun underneath the front seat of my car.”
And then he remembered that he had forgotten to mention something that he wanted the jury to know. “Despite what was said from the witness stand,” Tom testified, “Anne Marie had seen the gift from Talbot’s. Once she saw the box, she knew exactly what it was. She was very happy. And she opened it up and she didn’t break the gold seal. She never broke the gold seal. She looked and confirmed what it was and just gave me a very big smile. Showed she was very happy. And I imposed one condition on her . . .”
His voice trailed off. “But I guess I’m beyond that . . .”
Oteri asked Tom to speak up and he explained he had been on automatic pilot by then. “I felt as though I had to go to her apartment and bring over the gift and bring over the perishables that were in my refrigerator—like strawberries and bananas. Anyway, I had something else that I thought
to bring over with me.” He could not remember what it had been.
Now, Tom admitted a number of things he had done, all on “automatic pilot.”
“I did make that star-six-nine call. I wanted to find out if I was the last one she had spoken to. And I heard a man’s voice answer that I didn’t recognize, so I realized I was not the last one. . . .
“I did go to her room. I did turn her air conditioner on. I did not touch her bed. I did not go through her closet.”
Tom offered his guess that it had been Anne Marie herself who had left a jumble of shoes and a mess in her closet because she had been in such a hurry to take a shower and change before going to dinner with him.
Chapter Forty-three
AFTER THREE DAYS OF LISTENING to Tom, everyone in the courtroom wondered how long it would take him to finish his seemingly interminable explanations. He had yet to give his version of the long ride to Stone Harbor and the trip on Gerry’s boat to Mako Alley. Perhaps he thought that if he was able to convince the jurors that Anne Marie’s death was an accident, he could go home again and pick up his life. Even Debby MacIntyre would have nothing hanging over her head but a tragic accidental shooting. Tom had admitted he was a coward—but apparently he could live with that. He seemed more anxious to show the jury that he was a gentleman who always treated his women well.
On Tuesday, December 22, Tom was on the stand again, explaining how he had “compartmentalized” and done what he had to do. Gallantly, he had sent Debby home so that she wouldn’t be involved. On the same trip to the basement when he chose the cooler over the garbage can as a body receptacle, he found a bottle of Clorox bleach. He estimated that he had spent only ten to fifteen minutes putting Anne Marie’s body in the cooler. He wasn’t sure just when he had used the bleach—before or after he went to Anne Marie’s apartment. It was only a three-to-five-minute drive. He had let himself in with her keys.
“I’ve only done this [compartmentalizing] one other time in my life—when my father died,” Tom told the jury. “And yet I didn’t have enough sense not to pour Clorox straight onto a dark maroon love seat, and it left a very large discoloration.”