And Never Let Her Go (48 page)

“Yeah. Tom had said to him that he had been blackmailed by this woman, et cetera, and—if he killed her, could he just go for a boat ride with Gerry . . . Gerry didn't believe Tommy was serious.”

T
HE
government team warned both Gerry and Louie not to tell anyone that they had made statements about Anne Marie's murder. If Tom knew that his world was about to come down around him, there was no telling what he might do. He was a man with so many masks that even those closest to him seemed not to know him. He had threatened to commit suicide in the past. He certainly had the wherewithal to leave the country if he chose to run.

The FBI put a twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance on Tom on November 10, 1997. Eric Alpert carried a radio tuned to the surveillance team's frequency with him all the time. Early on Wednesday morning, November 12, his radio crackled. “Capano's at his brother Joey's house,” the agent told him. “They're loading suitcases into his Jeep.”

Connolly was in the grand jury room, where Gerry and Louie
were repeating the information they had already given, and Alpert paged him urgently. When Connolly was in the hallway, he told him that it looked as though Tom was going to make a run for it. He was in a car, heading toward Philadelphia.

They agreed the time had come for an arrest. Connolly said it was important to stop Tom's vehicle before he crossed the Delaware state line into Pennsylvania. If he was arrested there, he would be taken before a magistrate and the whole process delayed. Alpert told the agents following Tom's Jeep Cherokee along I-95 to move in. He was apparently oblivious to the government cars that were tracking him. Tom was signaled over, and FBI agents surrounded his car and told him he was under arrest for the murder of Anne Marie.

“I heard the sirens over the radio,” Alpert recalled. “I knew they had him.”

And Tom was still in Delaware. The arresting agents reported that he had not resisted as they cuffed his hands in front of him. He appeared to be resigned, as if he was expecting to be arrested.

Ironically, Tom hadn't been going anywhere. Casually dressed in a navy blue jogging suit, he was only driving Joey and his wife, Joanne, to the airport, where they could catch a plane to Fort Lauderdale. He had planned to turn around and head home. He had promised Debby that he would cook a steak dinner for her that night. “He said we'd have a really romantic evening,” she remembered, “because I was leaving for Italy the next morning.” Instead, she heard the news that Tom had been arrested.

Tom was driven to the U.S. Attorney's office on the eleventh floor of the Chase Manhattan building, in custody before word flashed like a forest fire over the media's network. Almost immediately, reporters took up vantage points as close as they could get to the U.S. Attorney's office.

Tom had aged in triple time over the seventeen months since Anne Marie had vanished. The skin beneath his eyes was mottled and purple. But head held high, he seemed to ignore the cuffs on his wrists as if they had nothing to do with him. As he was led into the conference room, Tom's heart may have skipped a few beats; a 162-quart Igloo cooler sat there. It wasn't the real cooler, but Connolly had had Bob Donovan shoot into it in the spot Gerry specified in his affidavit. An anchor and a lock and chain rested near the cooler. No one mentioned the items as Tom walked by.

Colm Connolly hadn't really spoken to Tom since that day in September when they had first met in the hall outside the grand jury room. Now he remembered what Tom had hissed at him that day.

“The day Tom was arrested,” Connolly recalled, “he was brought in here to a conference room and an agent sat with him. I went in to tell him that his attorneys would be coming shortly. I started to shut the door, and then I opened it back up and I said, ‘By the way, Mr. Capano, I sleep very well at night.' ”

Tom let out a deep breath and put his head in his arms. For the moment, the arrogance that was such a central part of him had vanished. It had felt good to say that, but a half hour later, thinking better of his remark, Connolly came back and softened his words. Tom was sitting with his attorneys as Connolly said, “I don't want you to think this is a personal thing. Because it isn't.”

It was and it wasn't. Connolly, along with Bob Donovan and Eric Alpert, had kept their promises to Anne Marie's family to find her killer. And they believed they had done that. Starting out, they had had no way of knowing who he—or she—was. Tom Capano had never cooperated with the investigation. And they were a long way, still, from proving his guilt in a court of law. Facts rather than personal feelings were all that mattered.

With his lawyers beside him, Tom had regained his composure. He looked at the man who had pursued him almost a year and a half and spoke to him as if they were old friends, as if he had done nothing wrong.

“But Colm,” he said softly, “it was my
daughters.”

What did he mean? Was he referring to the story about extortionists threatening his four girls—or was he simply explaining that he had struck out at Connolly because he'd subpoenaed Christy to testify before a grand jury?

Bob Donovan was in that conference room and so was Eric Alpert. Tom was told that the government had statements taken from his brothers Louie and Gerry that described the way he had disposed of a body.

“You
believe
them?” Tom said to no one in particular, incredulity in his voice.

In answer, Connolly played the tapes of his brothers' statements for Tom. He listened, stone faced.

“We know,” Connolly said, “that Mr. Capano purchased a 162-quart marine cooler on April 20, 1996. And we know he is neither a hunter nor a fisherman.”

“Yeah,” Tom said knowingly, “but my brothers are.”

S
TROBES
flashed as Tom was led, still in handcuffs, to a van to be taken to Gander Hill, the prison over which he had once had authority,
the prison he had helped build when he worked for Governor Castle. But now he would be only another inmate in a white uniform. He would spend his first night in the infirmary—standard for new prisoners.

Tom would have to be in lockdown for his personal safety. Former cops, prosecutors, and public officials are never popular in prison. Alone in his cell, he would have fewer privileges than the inmates in the general population. But his jailers wondered if perhaps there were some among the seventeen hundred prisoners who remembered the billboards and the flyers with the picture of a pretty Irish girl—the young woman who the papers had said had wanted only to be free of the man who was now one of them.

Charlie Oberly and Joe Hurley told reporters that, of course, Tom would plead not guilty. They managed to suggest that it was utterly ridiculous that he had been arrested. But for the moment, the man who loved luxury and fine dining was nobody special. The cuisine on his first long day of captivity was hardly Villa d' Roma or Toscana fare: cereal and chipped beef for breakfast, Texas hash for lunch, and liver and onions for dinner.

At O'Friel's Irish Pub, there was a subdued gathering, marked more by tears than laughter. Someone asked Kevin Freel if he was going to take down the massive yellow ribbons tied there for Anne Marie, and he said slowly, “I haven't even thought about that, yet.”

Already there were rumors that Annie had been dumped in the sea and would never have a proper burial beside her mother and her father, close to Kate McGettigan. For a Catholic, that was a terrible thing. For anyone, that was a terrible thing.

Kevin kept remembering the sight of her, snowflakes caught in her hair, beautiful Annie with her feet planted on the worn wooden floor, grinning mischievously at him as she roared “KEV-EEEE!”

It was too hard to know that she would never come again.

And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

E
DGAR
A
LLAN
P
OE

W
ITH HIS ARREST
, Tom not only lost much of his own personal luster—he severely smudged the image that his father had fought so hard to maintain:
Louis Capano & Sons,
honest, hardworking, united. Now there were many in Wilmington who were glad that Lou had not lived to see what his family had come to. Some of the Capanos might rise again, but would they ever be rid of the shame, the innuendo, and the rumors? And it had all just begun. Tom's murder trial lay ahead.

Louie hadn't lost his cool when he was questioned by the government investigators, but Gerry was a basket case, in tears much of the time because he had betrayed Tom. Louie's attorneys prepared a press release that appeared in most area papers on November 12, 1997, hard on the heels of Tom's arrest:

Louis Capano, Jr. voluntarily contacted federal authorities and provided information and cooperation which has led, in part, to the arrest of his brother, Thomas Capano. . . . Louis Capano had no direct knowledge of his brother's actions, but rather has provided information regarding events following the disappearance of Anne Marie Fahey. . . . Louis Capano did certain things during the course of the investigation which he now regrets. . . . Louis admits he misled the authorities but did so motivated by belief in his
brother's innocence. . . . The picture of Thomas Capano portrayed by these charges and evidence is completely foreign to the brother Louis thought he knew.

Tom's whole family would be caught by the ubiquitous cameras and by reporters who dragged their personal lives into the public domain. If Tom's arrest did nothing else, it seemed to strengthen his brothers' marriages. Joanne, Lauri, and Michelle stood solidly behind Joey, Louie, and Gerry. Marian and Lee had always presented a strong front to the world. But the family itself broke into pieces. Marguerite could not forgive Louie and Gerry for what they had done to Tommy. She did not understand how they could have betrayed their brother. In his mother's eyes, Tommy had been through so much, and now his own flesh and blood had turned on him. Father Balducelli was concerned about Marguerite; she had a bad heart and other health problems, and seeing her favorite son in chains just might kill her.

Although Marguerite had always looked askance at Debby MacIntyre, they were in accord now; neither woman would accept that Tom was guilty of murder. It was unthinkable. On vacation in Rome, Debby was saved from the worst of the media hoopla. There, for the moment, she could almost forget the way things were steadily growing worse at home. But she would have to come back to Wilmington and see the man she loved, the man who had pledged to marry her, diminished and locked away from her. She didn't think she could bear it.

J
UST
as there are said to be no atheists in foxholes, there are few professionals in law enforcement who will deny that they sometimes receive help from invisible allies, perhaps angels sent to earth to avenge the cruelest crimes. Only a day after Tom Capano was arrested, the Wilmington investigators would receive a piece of physical evidence that no law of probability could have predicted.

“I think we worked awfully hard, yes,” Colm Connolly said, “but there were a lot of
lucky
things—or maybe divine things—that happened. At some point, you have to wonder . . .”

On November 13, the media was filled with the details of Tom's arrest and Gerry's statement. Bob Donovan and Eric Alpert were sitting in Alpert's office when a secretary told him there was someone calling about a cooler.

“I watched Alpert pick up the phone,” Donovan recalled, “and
all of a sudden his face changed, and he was frantically scribbling down notes.”

“There was this guy on the phone,” Alpert elaborated. “I wasn't too enthused when he said his friend had found a cooler in the ocean more than a year earlier. But then I asked him if there was anything distinctive about it. And he said that it didn't have a lid when the guy found it. I motioned Donovan over at that point. And then the guy said, ‘Well, it has a bullet hole in it.' That was all it took—Bob and I were out of the office and on our way.”

If it was
the
cooler, it would be a miracle. After a year and a half, the cooler they needed for trial should have been in Cuba; given the tides, the wind, and a dozen different variables, there was simply no way that a cooler discarded 60 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean could ever have drifted to within a few miles of the Delaware shore. Alpert and Donovan didn't really believe that it could be the same cooler. Even so, they nudged the speed limit as they headed south toward Smyrna, where the caller, Ron Smith, lived. Smith told the investigators that he had been reading newspaper coverage of Tom Capano's arrest when something struck a chord in his memory. He said that a fellow fisherman named Ken Chubb, whom he knew from his summer place down on the Delaware Coast, had found something in the ocean.

“I was working on my boat the day Chubb pulled in,” Smith continued. “He said, ‘Hey, take a look at this!' and I said, ‘Take a look at
what?'
and he shows me this cooler he found.”

Alpert and Donovan held their breaths when Smith said the cooler had no lid. And he and Chubb had agreed about the source of the holes that marred the back. “I said, ‘Yeah, they were bullet holes,' ” Smith told them. “I hunt deer. I do target practice. I know what bullet holes look like. As a matter of fact, I stuck my finger in one. It was made by a twelve-gauge shotgun.”

“When did this happen?” Alpert asked.

Smith had perfect recall. But more important, he could validate times and dates. He had already called Chubb to ask when he'd found the cooler and learned it was during the Fourth of July weekend of 1996. By checking his own gas receipts, he was able to confirm the date when he'd first seen the cooler. That weekend was seven to ten days from the time Tom Capano had reportedly dumped Anne Marie's body and the cooler far out at sea. The information about the bullet holes and the missing lid had never been in the newspapers. Smith drew Alpert and Donovan a map to Ken
Chubb's beach house. “The cooler's there in his shed, behind his trailer. He knows you're coming.”