And Never Let Her Go (47 page)

“He said that if this girl or this guy hurt his kids, and he killed them, could he use the boat? And I didn't—I just blew it off 'cause I didn't think he was serious. I just thought he was blowing off steam.”

“And that's why you never went to law enforcement authorities?”

“That's right.”

Asked to recall the circumstances at 6
A.M.
on June 28, Gerry said he had walked out of his house on Emma Court that morning to find his brother's black Jeep parked in his driveway. Surprised, he had walked up to the passenger-side window and peered in. Tom was sitting there, reading the morning paper.

“What did your brother say to you?”

“He said, ‘Can you get hold of the boat?' ”

“And what did you say?”

“I said, ‘Did you do it?' ”

“And by that, what did you mean?”

“He'd either killed the girl or the guy who was threatening to hurt his kids.”

“And what did your brother Thomas say in response?”

“He nodded.”

“Did he ask if you could help him?”

“Yes he did . . . I told him I didn't want to get involved, that I had a beautiful wife and kids and a great life and I didn't want to ruin my life.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Don't leave me cold—don't leave me flat. I need you, bro.' Stuff like that.”

Tom had suggested that he could use Gerry's boat by himself, but Gerry said he'd refused. Tom didn't know anything about boats. “No way” did he have the experience to do that. So Gerry had agreed to help Tom get rid of the body of the “extortionist” he had killed. They agreed to meet at Tom's house on North Grant Avenue.

“When you went into the garage at Grant Avenue, what did you see?”

“I saw a cooler and a rolled-up rug.”

The rug had been long, Gerry recalled, about three-quarters the size of the garage, and the cooler was big. “It looked to be about four feet long by two feet wide,” Gerry said.

“Was there anything unusual about the cooler?”

“There was a chain wrapped around the cooler.” Gerry added that the chain looked new and had a lock on it.

Gerry said that he and Tom had taken the cooler to his house in Stone Harbor, and from there onto his fishing boat,
Summer Wind.
He remembered that it was very heavy and he heard ice rattling inside it. A Styrofoam cooler wouldn't have attracted much attention at the shore; many fishermen used such coolers to keep fish on ice.

And then Gerry said he had steered the boat out into the Atlantic Ocean.

“About how far out?” Connolly asked.

“I would say about seventy miles. Somewhere between sixty and seventy-five miles. I would have to look at the chart.”

“How deep was the water there?”

“Hundred and ninety-eight feet.”

“What did your brother do?”

“Lifted the cooler up and put it in the water.”

“Did the cooler sink?”

“No.”

“What did you do with it—because it wouldn't sink?”

“Took my shark gun out and shot it once with a deer slug, and it still wouldn't sink.”

“What did your brother do then?”

“I maneuvered the boat back to where the cooler was floating.”

“Did you help your brother move it next to the boat?”

Gerry firmly said no. He had turned the boat's motor off and told Tom he was on his own. Then he had walked to the front of the
boat, given Tom two anchors, and turned his back on what was happening so that he didn't have to watch.

“I was telling him this was really wrong,” Gerry offered.

“But were you able to determine what he was doing by the sounds?” Connolly asked.

“Yes . . . seems to me like he was opening up the cooler, fighting with the rope [chain] and the tide—and throwing up—and tying the anchors to something.”

“Did you eventually turn around?”

“When I asked him if he was finished.”

“And then you turned around and what did you see?”

“I saw a foot sinking into the deep.”

“And it was a human foot?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see anything besides the foot?”

“Only a little bit, a little bit of calf.”

“Did you see any blood?”

“A little blood coming out of the cooler.”

“Did you know what was in the cooler?”

“I assumed what was in it.”

“What did you assume?”

“I assumed it was one of these persons who had threatened to hurt his kids.”

Everyone in the room, including Gerry Capano, knew now who had been in that cooler, but no one said it aloud.

Gerry said that he and Tom had taken the cooler apart while they were out in the ocean. They had thrown the top and bottom into the sea separately as they cruised back to Stone Harbor, and then drove back to Wilmington.

There, Tom had asked Gerry to help him move a sofa, a dark maroon sofa that was in the great room.

“Was there blood on the sofa?”

“There was a stain—he [Tom] said he had cleaned it. I said, ‘You better cut a piece out of it before you throw the sofa away.' ”

Then they broke an arm off the sofa so it would look damaged enough to be discarded. They could see there was blood on the foam beneath, but they found very little had penetrated.

“Where was the blood on the couch?”

“On the top right-hand side, [about where somebody's] shoulder would be.”

And then they had put the damaged sofa in Kay's Suburban and
taken it to the Dumpster at Capano & Sons. All that remained at Tom's house of whatever had happened was the rolled-up carpet in the garage. Gerry had seen only the outside of that; he couldn't tell them what color it was or if there were bloodstains on it.

Gerry said Tom had given him a story to tell if he was ever questioned. Once he left Tom, he wrote it down on a Post-it and stuck it in his wallet so he would remember, but in the end, he hadn't used it. He was telling the truth.

T
HE
moment that Gerry Capano confessed that Tom had dumped a cooler in the Atlantic Ocean, Eric Alpert and Bob Donovan remembered an item on Tom's credit card bill. They had seen it when they were poring over the bills looking for charges that might be relevant. But it didn't seem particularly important that Tom had bought a Styrofoam cooler at the Sports Authority on Saturday afternoon, April 20, at 3:15, using his MasterCard. It was an Igloo 162-quart marine cooler and it cost $194.84 with tax. At the time, they knew Tom had no boat.

“I think it didn't mean too much then,” Alpert recalled, “because we were looking for items around June twenty-seventh—and this was pretty remote in time.” But now the fact that Tom had bought a huge cooler no longer seemed remote or irrelevant.

They had broken the back of the case, but there was little jubilation for Connolly, Donovan, Poplos, and Alpert. The woman they had come to know better, perhaps, than anyone they had known in life had been carried out to sea and dumped in Mako Alley, where the sharks prowled. It was a horrible thought. They still didn't know
how
Anne Marie had died. But now it looked as if Tom Capano had not simply lost it in a burst of jealous rage. He had been carrying out a well-organized plan. He had apparently set up a scenario about extortionists way back in February, a good four months before Anne Marie vanished.
All those months . . .

Had Tom known what day he would kill her? Or had he kept his dark strategy in abeyance to use as a contingency plan? Would it have come into play at any point when he became convinced that he could no longer bend Anne Marie to his will and make her come back to him? For some reason, June 27 appeared to have been Tom Capano's day of decision. Bolstered with newfound confidence that she had the right to choose whom she would love, Anne Marie had, all unaware, finally convinced Tom she didn't want to be with him.

The cooler was gone in the Atlantic Ocean, the couch was buried beneath hundreds of layers of garbage. Only the cruel game
plan remained, something Tom had surely never expected would be revealed. Only two people had ever balked at the role he had cast them in; one was Linda Marandola and the other was Anne Marie Fahey.

T
HE
house that Lou Capano had built so proudly was crumbling. Two days after Gerry's confession—on Monday, November 10—Louie Capano appeared at the IRS building with his attorney Catherine Recker. He too signed a plea agreement. Admitting that he had lied to the grand jury out of his allegiance to Tom and his belief in his brother's innocence, Louie agreed to tell everything he knew about the death of Anne Marie Fahey and plead guilty to tampering with a witness in exchange for a sentence of one year's probation.

Louie said he had no knowledge of what had happened until Tom called him on Sunday morning, June 30, 1996, and asked him to come over. When he arrived at North Grant Avenue, Tom told him that the police had shown up in the middle of the night and that he was very upset.

“He told me that he had had a relationship with Anne Marie Fahey,” Louie said. “And that she was anorectic and bulimic and a troubled person—that he had stopped seeing her and he didn't want his wife, Kay, to find out about their relationship. He also told me that after he had dinner with her that evening [June 27], they went back to his house. While he was upstairs using the bathroom—when he came down—she had slit her wrists and had gotten blood, a superficial amount of blood, on the sofa.”

Tom had explained that he and Gerry had gotten rid of the sofa in the company's Dumpster on Foulk Road, and asked Louie to have it dumped. “After the conversation with my brother,” Louie said, “I went up to the job. We had men working, and I was curious and looked in the Dumpster behind the building. I saw what looked to be like a sofa, turned upside down, and I saw the legs.”

He meant the
sofa's
legs; he said he hadn't seen any sign of a body. He'd made a mental note to have the Dumpster emptied, but it slipped his mind.

It had not slipped Tom's mind. Louie said he had called on Monday morning to ask if it had been dumped yet. “I told him no,” Louie said, “but that I would have them dumped.”

“Did he tell you what had caused him some concern on Monday morning?”

“Anne Marie Fahey had not shown up for work,” Louie said.
“He was concerned that the police might start looking around and could get the Dumpsters.”

At that point, Louie said he believed Tom to be innocent of any crime against Anne Marie Fahey. Tom had done a good job of convincing him she was a very disturbed and impetuous young woman who would show up in her own good time.

Louie said that sometime later he had asked Tom why the carpet in his great room was gone. Was that bloody too? “He told me he had disposed of some carpet at the Holiday Inn over in New Jersey. It was cut up and put into plastic bags.”

The Capanos happened to own that particular Holiday Inn, and Tom told Louie he had asked the manager to have their Dumpsters emptied early, too.

“Did Tom tell you he had put other items besides a sofa in your Dumpsters at 105 Foulk Road?”

“Yes. He told me that he put [in] some of Anne Marie Fahey's personal belongings and a gun.”

They might have known. Tom had been punctilious about erasing every sign that Anne Marie had ever been to his home, much less died there. He wouldn't have risked keeping a gun around. They had no idea what kind of gun it was; he had given the ten-millimeter back to Gerry. But a check of gun sale records might turn up someone close to Tom—or even Tom himself—who had purchased a gun around the time Anne Marie disappeared. It would be a tedious process, but if someone had given his real name when he purchased a gun, they could find it.

Louie recalled a conversation he had had with Tom prior to his own grand jury testimony on August 29, 1996. Tom had been living at Louie's Greenville mansion after he moved out of the blighted North Grant Avenue house.

“I was just getting out of the shower—it was the morning of my testimony—and he came in and basically asked me to provide him an alibi for Friday morning—[to say] that he had come to visit me on Friday, June twenty-eighth.”

Tom had suggested a script for Louie to follow, even though he would be committing perjury. “I would say that he just put personal belongings in there [the Dumpster] because he didn't want his wife, Kay, to know he was having a relationship with Anne Marie Fahey.”

“Did he say anything about the sofa?” Connolly asked.

“He told me not to say it was in there.”

As Louie's testimony continued, it became apparent that all
three of Tom's brothers had some knowledge of what had happened to Anne Marie, and that they had covered up for him.

“Do you recall a conversation you had with your brother Joseph Capano in the winter of 1997?” Connolly asked.

“It was a very brief conversation in Florida—at the pool. I just asked him if he had taken care of the anchor. And he told me that he had—meaning that he had replaced one of the anchors that was on my brother Gerry's boat.”

“And how did you know anything about an anchor to ask this question of Joe?”

“My brother Gerry told me that my brother Tom used an anchor on his boat to get rid of the cooler.”

Louie remembered walking in the street in front of Gerry's house on Emma Court sometime in November 1996. Gerry had been unable to keep the ugly secret any longer, and he had confessed to Louie that Tom had come to him looking for a gun, and “anybody who could break somebody's bones.”

Louie continued haltingly. “And . . . he told me that he took my brother Tom out on a boat in Stone Harbor and disposed of Anne Marie Fahey's body.”

“And did Gerry also tell you about a conversation that he and Tom had before June twenty-eighth—that Tom had made a request of him?”