And Never Let Her Go (23 page)

Had Tom known that, or had he just accidentally homed in on women who would sacrifice themselves to make him happy?

D
EBBY
had never remarried. How could she when she was in love with Tom? Virtually the only dates she had with other men were those that he urged her to go on, and she hadn't enjoyed herself. It wouldn't be too long before both of her children were out of the house. She had devoted her life to Tom, her children, and Tatnall School. And now it was going to be all right, after all. “When he left Kay,” Debby said, “he told me that he needed eighteen months to be a bachelor, so he wouldn't embarrass Kay by marrying again right away. But then we would get married. That was one of the happiest times of my life.”

As well it should have been. While they still didn't date much in Wilmington—in deference to Kay—Tom was much more available to Debby. She could call him at any time, and he called her more often. They saw each other several times a week. After being alone for a dozen years, waiting in the shadows of Tom's life, Debby felt secure now in the knowledge that they were going to be together forever. She had waited for him this long; another year and a half would be a cakewalk.

S
EPTEMBER
1995 was a watershed point for a number of people in Wilmington. Governor Tom Carper, who had no idea that Anne
Marie was involved with one of the lights of the Democratic Party, was about to play Cupid. Carper, who was a contemporary of Tom Capano, had met a young man in the spring who seemed the perfect match for Anne Marie. The governor went up to Mike Scanlan and asked him if he was single. When he said yes, Carper asked him if he was “interested in meeting a nice young lady.”

They both forgot about the discussion for a few months, until Carper had occasion to send a business letter to Scanlan. On the bottom of the letter, he jotted down Anne Marie's name and phone number. Tom Carper cared a great deal for Anne Marie, and he approved of Mike Scanlan as a person. He had checked Mike out before he broached the subject with Anne Marie. Mike, thirty, was a senior executive vice president of the MBNA America Bank, the massive Delaware-based credit card company. He was in charge of community relations and responsible for MBNA's grants to charitable organizations. In fact, his life since graduation from Georgetown University had been devoted to philanthropy of one sort or another. He had worked with troubled kids in Maryland and Florida, combining training and discipline in programs that used the sea as a teacher: aquatics, marine biology, oceanography. He was like a fish himself, a champion swimmer in the backstroke on the Georgetown swim team.

Mike was Irish and Catholic, one of seven children, and grew up in Bristol, Rhode Island. His father worked for General Mills and his mother was a librarian. But Carper knew that all those attributes weren't what really mattered on a blind date. Mike was six feet, two inches tall, and handsome, with a wide smile. He was a nice guy who owned his own home in Sharpley off the Concord Pike, he made more than $100,000 a year, and he was still single.

After Governor Carper told Mike about Anne Marie, and even though he wasn't any more enthusiastic about blind dates than she was, he considered calling her. “I kept it [her phone number] and thought about it for a while, and finally got up the guts and called her.” It was arranged that they would meet on Friday, September 15. The likely spot was O'Friel's Irish Pub.

Mike asked around a little bit about Anne Marie, but he really knew only about her family and where she'd grown up. He got to O'Friel's first, and he was teased unmercifully by the regulars. Former mayor Bill McLaughlin chuckled as he sipped beer at the bar, enjoying the suspense. Mike was asking, “Is she a dog? Tell me, you guys,” and Kevin Freel was making faces. Someone fed Mike the dread line “She has a
really
nice personality,” and he looked a little pale.

And then Anne Marie walked in, dragging Jill Morrison along for moral support, just as Mike had brought along his friend Dan Simons. And of course, she was beautiful. And funny, and obviously a good person. They were perfect for each other; anyone could see it.

Anyone but them. They sat together and talked, but it was like being under a magnifying glass with everybody in O'Friel's watching. Their conversation felt stilted and awkward, and Anne Marie had that old sinking feeling that the man she was with wasn't interested in her. She called her brother Brian later and told him that she had really liked Mike Scanlan and found him attractive, but felt she'd been brushed off.

She hadn't. Eight days later, they had a real date and got along fine without an audience studying them. And by October, Anne Marie's calendar was full of dates with Mike. Her entry for the fifteenth read, “1st Night w/Mike,” and that night marked the end of a long, hurtful relationship and the beginning of one that she had longed for most of her life. Anne Marie didn't mean that they had spent that night together, but this was clearly the beginning of a love match.

The governor could retire undefeated as a matchmaker—he had guessed right. Anne Marie and Mike could not have been better suited. She took him to visit her family and he fit in as if he'd always known them.

Everyone was happy for them. Almost everyone.

Tom Capano had to be the one who chose when to walk away from a relationship. He could not permit anyone to leave him. Debby had never tried; she was too frightened of losing him. Anne Marie had made futile efforts to break up with him, but he knew her trigger points so well that she never succeeded. All he had to do was tap into her guilt, her loyalty, her distress that she might have hurt him, and she was back. She had chafed at the bonds that he began to tighten early in 1995, but usually she exploded only when she caught him tracking her movements.

And then Tom would pull his double-reverse-psychology dialogue, telling her that she deserved so much more than a backstreet romance with a married man, with
him.
“You deserve your
own
Patrick Hosey,” he would say, referring to Kathleen's husband, who was, indeed, a wonderful husband to her sister. “You shouldn't waste your time with me.”

And it had always worked. It wasn't until Anne Marie met Mike Scanlan that she realized what she did, indeed, deserve. And Mike seemed to be her “own Patrick Hosey.” She didn't have to slip
out of town to have dinner with a married man. She and Mike could go out in Wilmington and see their friends. She could dream of living in her own house and have children of her own instead of just house-sitting and baby-sitting. She didn't have to tiptoe around Mike's moods; he was even tempered and good natured. He was thirty; Tom was almost forty-seven.

But meeting Mike meant that Anne Marie still had to keep secrets. She knew that Tom mustn't sense how much she liked being with Mike. He had never meant it when he told her to leave him and find someone she deserved. Indeed, she didn't even mention Mike to him for a long time. But even more than that, she dreaded the thought that Mike would ever know just how involved she had been with Tom. Mike was a devout Irish Catholic, and she hated to contemplate what he might think of her if he knew about Tom. Once she met Mike, Anne Marie avoided compromising situations with Tom. She had always been ashamed of being intimate with him, and that was over for good. And now she would have given anything if she could just blink her eyes and make that part of her life go away.

T
HERE
were other women who had tried to make their connection to Tom Capano just go away, only to learn that getting free of him was like trying to escape from quicksand. He had been married when they met him, too, but that hadn't kept him from pursuing them. One of the most frightened of Tom's women was Linda Marandola. She was twenty-five, beautiful in an earthy way, with a cascade of thick dark hair, when Tom first met her in the late seventies. Like Debby and Anne Marie, Linda had found Tom very nice and quite kind, but she had no interest in him as a man. At that time, she was engaged to be married.

Linda was a legal secretary, working for one of Tom's friends, attorney Ted Sprouse.* Sprouse and Tom both lived on West Seventeenth Street and they often socialized, and it had seemed natural enough to occasionally invite Linda to go along with them to lunch when Tom dropped into Sprouse's office.

Tom was five years older than Linda, but he always made an effort to draw her into their conversations and she liked him. When he showed up at Sprouse's office one day and her boss couldn't take time for lunch, Tom smiled and said, “I'll just have to take Linda, then.”

That was the beginning of their lunches together, and it was soon apparent that Tom was very attracted to her. If she was honest with herself, Linda would have admitted she felt a spark too—but
she
was
engaged, and he was married. He called her office and her home often, urging her to go out with him. He offered her a job at his law firm, and still she declined. But then one night Linda was attending a bachelorette party at Galluccio's Restaurant in Wilmington and she ran into Tom, who was there by himself.

Before the evening was over, Linda and Tom had sex in his car in the parking lot of Galluccio's. She was horrified by what she had done. “I felt so unfaithful,” she said a long time later. She never intended to be alone with him again, but Tom began calling her continually, begging her to have an affair with him. He was very persuasive, but Linda planned to be married—and she didn't want an affair with another man.

More than two years later, under remarkably similar circumstances, Linda
did
have intercourse with Tom again, and she had every reason to feel more regret than she had the first time she gave in to him. He showed up at her own bachelorette party, which took place shortly before her wedding. It was 1980, and they were once again at Galluccio's. Somehow Tom had found out where she was. There was a great deal of drinking that night at Galluccio's and Linda left with Tom. He took her to his own home on Seventeenth Street, and they had sex again. Where his wife was, she didn't know—but he assured her there was nothing to worry about.

Linda thought Tom was a really nice guy, particularly when he arranged for her and her bridegroom to move into a large apartment in the Cavalier complex. But she was resolute that she would not have sex with Tom again—not once she was married.

Linda married her fiancé, but her wedding day was blighted when she saw Tom sitting in the church, his face unreadable. At the wedding reception after, Tom cut in on the bridal couple and whirled Linda away from her new husband. He whispered in her ear that his heart was broken, and he wished that she hadn't gone through with her marriage because she was the love of his life. He didn't mention that Kay was pregnant with their first child.

When Linda returned from her honeymoon, Tom wrote and called her, telling her that he loved her and still wanted her. He asked her to get divorced and said he wanted to divorce his wife so they could be together.

Linda had promised herself that she would never tell her husband about Tom Capano. She was horrified that Tom wasn't at all deterred by her status as a married woman. He didn't see any reason why they couldn't continue to meet. Despite her telling him that she wasn't interested, he called and wrote to her many times over the
next few years. He still wanted her to come to work for him and he continually proclaimed his love for her.

His letters were bizarre—almost delusional—as he wrote of his belief that they were meant to be together. Yes, there had been two brief physical encounters and Linda was everlastingly sorry for that, but they had never had any kind of permanent commitment. He was still married and Linda knew now that his wife was about to have a baby. She couldn't understand why he continued to stalk her. But he would not stop calling or writing.

When Kay Capano gave birth to their daughter Christy in August of 1980, Linda received a letter from Tom that frightened her. “He said that he wished it had been me who gave birth to his child, not Kay.”

Linda refused to see Tom, and she told him that hot summer of 1980 that she didn't want him to call her anymore. That was when he turned vicious. He told Linda that if he couldn't have her, he couldn't stand to be around her. She would be sorry for rejecting him; he didn't want her living or working in the same state with him. He said that he “controlled Delaware” and that she had no choice. She would have to quit her job and move. He set deadlines for when he expected her to do as he ordered.

When she did not, Tom tracked her. She started to get hang-up calls, fifteen or more a day. He phoned her to say he knew where she parked. At night, she had to walk past the law offices of Morris, James, Hitchens & Williams to get to her car and she knew he was watching her. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of Tom staring at her through the window. He was such a moody man, his eyes almost black and the planes of his face all shadowed as he watched her sullenly.

Frustrated and furious, Tom contacted a man he had represented in a landlord-tenant dispute. The man owed him, but Tom offered a barter instead; he had heard that Joe Riley was a wiseguy and he needed something done for him.

Meeting in Tom's office, Riley, who had been convicted of threatening bodily harm to someone almost twenty years earlier, saw a man who looked as if he hadn't slept for a week. Tom said he had “a problem” with a woman. He told Riley that he was “crazy” about a woman who wouldn't have anything to do with him. He confided that he loved her and couldn't live without her. She had told him off and he couldn't eat or sleep thinking about it. He wanted Riley to find someone to knock her over the head or have her run over by a car. “I want her hurt very bad,” Tom said. He
wanted her punished, physically punished. “Her name is Linda Marandola.”

Riley was in his sixties and had seen the other side of the law in his day, but he had never met wiseguy qualifications. His rap sheet was short and he had long since become a police informant. He was getting a little long in the tooth, and he wasn't enthusiastic about breaking some poor woman's legs.