And Never Let Her Go (59 page)

“Were there any noticeable stains or tears in the dress when you saw it?”

“No.”

How the floral dress, in perfect condition, got to Anne Marie's apartment was a big question. She had only one floral dress and she had been wearing it when she had dinner with Tom in Philadelphia on that last Thursday night. Had she changed into something else after she arrived home—if she
had
arrived home? Or had Tom brought it back to her apartment deliberately, just as he may have brought the box from Talbot's and the food found on the counter?

Kathleen believed that Tom had done just that, but there was no way to prove it. She told the jurors about that frightening Saturday night when they realized Anne Marie was missing, and about finding the letters from Tom Capano. Then she began to read the letters aloud, her sister's secret letters. Her clear voice was the only sound in the courtroom as she read Tom Capano's directives to her sister, coaxing Anne Marie to accept money and gifts from him.

“Now,” Connolly asked, “as of June 29, 1996, did you have any knowledge that there had been a relationship between your sister and Tom Capano?”

“No, I did not.”

“Did you know they knew each other?”

“I did know they knew each other. Wilmington's so small and Annie working for the governor and Capano doing bond work, she would mention he might be in now and then because she had known I knew him from before.”

“Had you ever asked Anne Marie whether there was anything between her and Tom Capano?”

“No, I did not.”

“Did you find any birth control pills in the apartment that night?”

“I found a box of birth control pills. To me, it looked like a sample pack. There may have been like five months' worth. They were unopened.”

“Was Anne Marie's toothbrush in the apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Did you at some point inventory everything that was in the apartment?”

“Yes. I was ordered by the court to inventory everything.”

“Was anything missing that you recognized?”

“Anne Marie's keys were missing and her Walkman and her blue topaz ring.”

The keys were the important item; someone had needed those keys to get into her apartment the night Connie Blake heard footsteps overhead.

When the trial resumed after a lunch break, Kathleen read her sister's diary aloud. If she heard a familiar, lost voice echoing in her words, still, in order to convict the man she believed was Annie's killer, Kathleen had no choice but to reveal Anne Marie's deepest secrets in a crowded courtroom. The diary had been published, but never before spoken aloud to strangers.

Connolly asked Kathleen if Anne Marie had had plans for the future. Yes, she had savings bonds tucked away. She had had hopes for marriage and babies.

“Anne Marie had plans to vacation with you in the summer of '96?”

“I think it was the third week in July,” Kathleen said. “She was coming to the shore with my husband [and me] and two other couples for a week in Avalon. She gave my husband a check for four hundred dollars.”

“Do you have any reason to suspect that Anne Marie would have run off?”

“No, I do not.”

“Did she ever run off before?”

“No, she hasn't.”

“Do you have any reason to suspect she would have committed suicide?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Had you ever seen her manifest signs of violence toward anybody?”

“Anne was very gentle and sweet. She was not violent at all.”

“Are you aware that she had told others that she had . . . exhibited violent behavior toward your father?” Connolly pressed.

“If I remember correctly,” Kathleen answered, “my father used to take Anne Marie's change and she got tired of it, and chased him around the house with a field hockey stick.”

“How old was she?”

“Probably junior high.”

T
HERE
was a break before Gene Maurer began cross-examining Kathleen. In the hallway, reporter Donna Renae from WHYY-TV murmured to Kathleen, “You're very brave.”

“I always said this was Anne Marie's last fight,” she replied quietly, “and I am going to finish it for her.”

Most of the press and gallery were out in the hallway, phoning in stories, so that few saw that the Fahey family's priest gave Kathleen a quick blessing as she knelt in the aisle of the courtroom before she took the stand again.

Maurer questioned Kathleen intensely about when she had seen the twenty-seven-inch television set; whether the box from Talbot's had been opened; and whether she had seen some Cézanne prints Tom had given Anne Marie. “And there was, I guess,” the defense attorney said, “continuing discussions . . . concerns on your part, maybe some friction between the two of you, that you felt Anne Marie did not manage her money well?”

“Yes.”

“Anne Marie told you she had won the TV?”

“Yes. She told me Mrs. Columbus bought a chance for her and she won.”

“Your characterization of Anne Marie's response when you would talk about this money issue was that she was ‘snippy.' Is that right?”

“It was a source of contention.”

The thrust of Maurer's questioning was clear; he wanted to suggest that Anne Marie and Kathleen were not really close, that Anne Marie had lied to her big sister and been snippy. Anyone who ever had a sister knew that was often the way even loving sisters interacted.

Maurer brought up a red herring when he asked, “Did Anne Marie have a red-and-white striped shirt?”

“I don't know. I don't remember seeing it in her laundry basket.”

“Now, when you did your inventory of her apartment,” he persisted, “did you find a red-and-white striped shirt?”

“No.”

“Nowhere?”

“No.”

“How many pairs of sneaks did she have?”

“I may be off by a pair or two, but she had a number of pairs of sneakers.”

“I take it she also had more than one jogging outfit?”

“I know of a purple one. She may have had a blue one, too.”

“Do you know if she had a black one?”

“I'd have to look at my list.”

If Maurer could establish that some of Anne Marie's clothes were missing from her apartment, the defense might be able to bolster its scenario. He questioned Kathleen exhaustively on every detail of what she had found in Anne Marie's apartment, and she admitted that the shoes that Annie usually wore with the blue floral dress were there. How this line of questioning meshed with the accident theory remained to be seen.

And now Maurer put Kathleen through an ordeal. She had felt guilty enough about reading her sister's diary for the prosecution. Maurer asked her to read the rest, the sections written in the beginning of her relationship with Tom—when Anne Marie had been besotted with him.

On Friday, February 24, 1995, Anne Marie had written,

I have shared my soul with T. I gave him my whole world, body and love. What I have not shared with T. is my fear of abandonment. I will withhold thoughts, info, etc., about myself if I think it may steer someone away from me. If I ever have the opportunity to speak to T. again, I will share everything, even my soul, and let him know exactly the way I feel. If I am rejected, at least I know that I told him about me, and let him into my world.

I love you T.

There were other entries, written by a young woman who seemed virtually defenseless in dealing with a man she thought she knew—a man whom she perceived to be gentle, kind, and as vulnerable and sad and lonely as she was. In those entries, Anne Marie seemed nothing at all like the savvy, opportunistic woman Joe Oteri had described. She sounded as gullible as any eighteen-year-old. In
asking Kathleen to read the diary, it was possible that Maurer had given the prosecution a two-edged sword.

On re-cross, Connolly asked, “All of the diary entries you just read with Mr. Maurer were from the year 1994 and before March 1995?”

“That's correct.”

At last, Kathleen could step down. All the while she had testified, Tom had glared at her with unmistakable hatred, “as if daring me to say what I needed to say.” Now, as she walked between the lectern and the defense table, he hissed, “You fucking bitch.”

Remembering it months later, Kathleen said, “I used to like Tom Capano, just like everyone else did. He actually said that to me when I stepped down from the witness stand. And the jurors heard him.”

T
HAT
was the way this long-awaited legal contest would continue. And between tearful memories and complicated testimony on police procedure and forensic evidence, there would be occasional smiles. But there would also be—despite all of the pretrial media coverage—startling revelations.

Tom Capano had long suffered from colitis, his particular response to stress. On the second day of trial, Oteri signaled Judge Lee urgently. Tom was having an attack of colitis, and he was rushed from the courtroom, something that would happen more than once. Medicine was prescribed for him but it had to be taken with food. Judge Lee then had to explain to the jurors why the defendant often ate bagels and sipped water as the trial progressed.

Dr. Neil Kaye, the psychiatrist who monitored her prescriptions and saw Anne Marie on the last afternoon of her life, testified that she had made the decision to rid herself of the man who was “freaking her out” by calling her every half hour and sending her endless E-mail. But Kaye admitted she had never told him the man's name.

Curiously, Dr. Kaye wore a wooden hat to court. It was very expensive, and meticulously carved from a single block of wood, so that it appeared to be an actual half fedora, half cowboy hat. He set it carefully on his knee as he testified. When Oteri asked him about his hat, he acknowledged that it was somewhat unwieldy and hot, but said he collected wooden hats and a trial was as good a place as any to display them. Dr. Michelle Sullivan knew the name of the man Anne Marie feared. It was Tom Capano. And she told the jury about her patient's determined struggle to break off with him.

I
N
sidebar conferences, the defense attorneys fought to keep out of the jury's hearing statements Anne Marie had made to her friends about Tom. They submitted to Judge Lee that much of what Jill Morrison, Siobhan Sullivan, Jennifer Haughton, Jackie Steinhoff, Ginny Columbus, and Kim Horstman might say would be hearsay or even triple hearsay. They claimed it would show “prior bad acts” of their client. The prosecution maintained that her friends' testimony would validate Capano's stalking behavior.

Judge Lee finally decided to let their testimony in because it would show Anne Marie's state of mind. There was no other way to do that. “I think her state of mind becomes important,” Lee said, “for a number of reasons because somehow we now know that she died in his house—the defense has indicated that in its opening argument. . . . And we are told that this was a very tragic, ill-defined accident. . . . In order for the state to approach the concept of there being some intentional homicide—because they are not interested in proving an accident occurred in the house—they have to show a change in their [Anne Marie and Tom's] relationship that made it more toxic. And that this pattern of calling her under circumstances that were inconsistent with the E-mails, inconsistent with the portrait of domestic tranquillity . . . is important in balancing the emotional condition of their relationship at this time.”

Judge Lee ruled, however, that Jill Morrison could not tell about the time Tom made Anne Marie tear up all the pictures of her old boyfriends while standing over her as she tearfully complied. Nor could Jill testify about how he flew into a rage if Anne Marie spoke to anyone in the office when she was on the phone with him. “He'd tell her she was to talk to him and no one else,” Jill had told Wharton. But the defense objected to testimony about these incidents because Jill was unable to pinpoint the time they had occurred.

Allowed now to speak for Anne Marie, her friends followed one another to the witness stand. They spoke to the jury of the hovering, smothering presence Tom had become in their friend's life. They recalled his incessant phone calls, his unexpected visits, his continual E-mail, and his rage when Anne Marie began to date Mike Scanlan. Jill Morrison testified about her friend's anguish when Tom drove his Jeep Cherokee slowly by Mike's house, and his inevitable calls to Anne Marie later to tell her the exact times he'd seen her car there.

The prosecuting attorneys moved through their witnesses, some talkative and some speaking haltingly because of stage fright or emotion. The presentation flowed effortlessly. Now that all the components
of the case were assembled, no one listening could ever have known how hard they had worked to put them together.

The gallery and the media waited eagerly for particular witnesses. Everyone wondered if Tom's brothers would actually take the stand and repeat the information that had led to Tom's arrest. Could Gerry and Louie look Tom in the eye and say the words that might bring him the death penalty?

Joe Oteri had claimed to be looking forward to cross-examining Gerry. “Gerry and I will have some good times,” he said, smiling and almost licking his lips.

G
ERRY
was the soft spot in the strong Capano front. He had idolized Tom from the time he could talk and he was reportedly agonizing about testifying against him. He was thirty-five years old, but Gerry had never really grown up. Whatever their faults, the three older Capano brothers were hard workers. Gerry still played most of the time, fueled by cocaine and alcohol. He hung out at drag strips with his customized Corvettes and, of course, hunted and fished for dangerous prey. Probably none of them really needed to work, but all but Gerry had the work ethic bred into them. Gerry knew he didn't even have to show up at his landscaping business; the money kept flowing in from the firm that his long-dead father had built.