And Never Let Her Go (72 page)

Tom was clearly unnerved that Connolly had come up with a case he'd prosecuted twenty-two years earlier. “Perhaps I can end this nonsense,” he said, fixing the prosecutor in his steely gaze, “by telling you that I remember next to nothing about this case, and it certainly has no connection whatsoever to this case or to the events of June twenty-seventh.”

That was for the jurors to decide.

Connolly asked Tom about the $8,000 and $9,000 checks he had cashed in February—and then the $8,000 he had borrowed from Gerry to make a total of $25,000. “This was the twenty-five thousand dollars you wanted to give to Anne Marie Fahey?”

“That's absolutely correct and the truth.”

“You had a hundred fifty-six thousand dollars in your checking account on February 8, 1996, didn't you?” Connolly asked.

“I find that difficult to believe.”

“Let me show you your bank statement,” Connolly said, moving toward Tom. It was obvious that Tom particularly hated having Connolly come close to him to hand him documents; his loathing was palpable. And it was just as apparent that Connolly deliberately invaded some invisible personal space of Tom's when he approached him.

“And you said you needed twenty-five thousand to shock Anne Marie?”

“Yes, I was using it for that purpose.”

Tom said he had been distressed when Joe Oteri mentioned the money on direct examination. “I did want it to be confidential,” he said. “I figured showing Anne Marie a check for twenty-five thousand dollars—I just figured the hospital is so many bucks a day, but I thought it would, you know, shock her and let her know how serious it was.”

“So you testified twelve days ago a check would shock her?”

“I misspoke,” Tom said. “A check would not have shocked her—it's a simple piece of paper. Dumping twenty-five thousand dollars on her kitchen table would at least get her attention, if not her agreement or her gratitude.”

But Tom said that Anne Marie had been angry at his gesture, so he had taken the money back and put it in his bedroom closet. However, the prosecution and those who were following the case closely wondered why Tom had
really
wanted that much money in cash.
Had he offered it to Anne Marie—who made only $30,000 a year—in a grand gesture to coax her to come back to him? Perhaps she had never seen that money at all. Had he stockpiled it to hire someone who would punish or destroy her for rejecting him? Or, as he testified, had he only wanted her to get well and been so unselfishly concerned for her that he was willing to pay $25,000 to a clinic?

W
HEN
Tom resumed his testimony the next day, two days from 1999, the courtroom heated up along with Connolly's cross-examination. It was apparent to everyone that Tom's life had been consumed with women. He spoke freely about Anne Marie's life, letters, fears, hopes, and menstrual problems, and Connolly reminded him about Debby's belief that she and Tom would marry one day. Tom was also voluble about Debby's life, letters, fears, and, especially, her stupid mistakes.

“You believed Debby wasn't very intelligent?” Connolly asked.

“Debby was not very academic,” Tom replied. “She was intelligent in some ways. In book learning, she was not.”

More of Tom's letters to and about Debby were read into the record. Where Tom was concerned, she had been “submissive.” He used the word often, reminding her that she had no backbone and that everyone pushed her around. Connolly asked Tom about the “buttons” he pushed to manipulate Debby. His letters proved that he had known exactly what to say to her to achieve a desired response. He had known all the things she held dear as well as those that upset her: the gold necklace he gave her for Christmas 1996 (his very first gift of jewelry), her father, her children,
his
children, her home, her sister, Tatnall, the memory of Montreal.

The jurors had heard Debby testify and knew she wasn't stupid; she had been a woman in love who was trying to believe in Tom. Even locked up, he had obviously pushed buttons and pulled strings.

Tom had a hot button, too, and Connolly knew just how incendiary it would be to mention Tom's daughters. In their very first meeting, Tom had lashed out at Connolly because one of his daughters had been called before the grand jury. Now, when Connolly quoted a passage from a letter to Debby that mentioned the four girls, Tom was instantly furious. “Do not ask me questions about my children,” he spat out.

Connolly ignored the order and continued to read from Tom's letter, in which he wrote how much his daughters missed him and how unfair it was that they should be upset. “Now this idea of invoking your kids,” Connolly said, “is the same thing you did with Anne Marie Fahey, right?”

“You're way out of line here.”

Tom had exaggerated his daughter Katie's illness to elicit Anne Marie's sympathy and get her to resume their exchange of E-mail. “And with Debby MacIntyre,” Connolly continued, aware that Tom was seething, “when things got really bad and you needed her to cooperate, you would reference your kids?”

“Don't go there.”

Connolly moved on to the other people in Tom's life who had trusted him, believed in him, depended on him—and whom he had betrayed. The list was a long one: his psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Bryer, who had once been prepared to testify that Tom was telling the truth; Tom Shopa; Debby's son, Steven; Adam Balick, the attorney he chose for Debby. Connolly had only to read Tom's own words in the endless letters he wrote, so perfectly crafted to manipulate and control. He had used his words like so many staples to pin the people in his life precisely in the position that would satisfy his needs.

O
N
M
ONDAY
, J
ANUARY
4, 1999, Tom was back on the witness stand, still under cross-examination. He made no attempt at all to hide the hatred in his eyes whenever he looked at Connolly.

Tom admitted that he had learned on March 17, 1998, that Debby knew about the burglary plan and had seen the maps he had drawn of her house. “At which time,” Connolly said, “you wrote her a letter. You explained your version of the Perillo incident, correct?”

“I attempted to, yes.”

“OK, and here again you hit on the theme of your adoration for Debby. You write: ‘I wept then and I'm weeping now and trying to do it silently. Oh, God, Debby, how could you leave me like this and hurt me so? . . . Oh God, why can't I stop loving you?' That's your writing?”

“Absolutely,” Tom said.

“OK,” Connolly said. “Now, let's look at the letter you wrote to Susan Louth on the same day, March seventeenth: ‘Dear Slutty Little Girl, My oldest cousin on my mom's side has been writing me. . . . She told me she believes I'm guilty of only two things—extreme stupidity and taking my pants down too often. . . . She also told me
. . . she thinks Debby looks like a shrew and a backstabber. Pretty perceptive. Do you think I should tell her that she swallows and loves it?'

“So on the same day you're writing how much you totally love Debby MacIntyre, you're describing to Susan Louth she's a shrew and backstabber, she swallows and she loves it. Right?”

“I was a mess during the entire month of March and my emotions went the whole gamut,” Tom said. “I mean, I was depressed, I was sad, I was angry, I was vindictive. I was funny.”

It was Tom's fallback position. Whenever he was faced with his dichotomous ploys, he explained that his brain had turned to “mush.” And yet, he seemed completely in control of his faculties now. He fenced with Connolly, bristling whenever his daughters were mentioned. He was enraged that the police had involved them by coming to their house on Greenhill Avenue.

“Children were involved? Did they stop your children?” Connolly asked.

“No, they were obviously waiting right outside. . . . They can interview me, but they can do it in a proper manner—how did they know I wasn't coming out of the garage with a car full of kids?”

Tom's daughters had often been in the courtroom, listening to the testimony, hearing the most intimate details of their father's other life. Kay hated to have them go to court, but Tom encouraged them to be there, cheering him on.

Connolly submitted that Tom had lied to his own attorney Charlie Oberly and provided him with an anchor—one that he knew was a red herring. “You knew that Mr. Oberly spoke with members of the press, went on national TV in May of 1997—and showed the anchor to make people believe that Gerry's boat was not missing an anchor?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You hadn't even told your attorneys that Debby MacIntyre was involved in the death of Anne Marie Fahey?”

“I'm not answering that.”

“You hadn't told your attorneys as of January 4, 1997, that Anne Marie Fahey had been killed?”

“I'm not going to break the attorney-client privilege.”

Connolly suggested that there were even more people Tom had used to protect himself: his sister, Marian, his mother, Kim Horstman. And then he marched again into the inflammatory subject of Tom's daughters, although he could not have estimated how hot his rage might burn. “Now, notwithstanding what you've told
us about your deep love for your daughters, you used your daughters in this investigation, did you not?”

“Do you really want to get into this?”
Tom's eyes warned the prosecutor not to go further.

“Did you use your daughters to impede the investigation?” Connolly persisted.

“You tormented my daughters,” Tom said. “You tormented my mother.”

“All right. Let's talk about your daughters.”

“No,” Tom said. “No, we're not.”

“You were given an opportunity to make it so that your daughters would not have to be interviewed by the government,” Connolly said. “All you had to do was agree to submit to an interview yourself. You didn't do that, did you?”

“That's not a choice.”

“You had a choice.”

“No, no, and you, as this unethical—”

The attorneys headed toward Judge Lee even as Tom started to rave at Connolly. Joe Oteri asked for a mistrial. Connolly reminded Judge Lee that the state had offered not to talk to Tom's two younger daughters. If he had signed an affidavit that he would not call them as alibi witnesses, Tom himself wouldn't even have had to talk to the investigators. But he wouldn't do that. For all of his posturing about being the perfect father, the state believed Tom's daughters were his ace in the hole and he was not above asking them to lie for him. For a long time, Tom, of course, had blocked even the taking of blood samples from his daughters to eliminate them as sources of the blood specks in the great room.

Judge Lee denied the motion for mistrial and allowed Connolly to continue questioning Tom about his daughters.

“Now,” Connolly began again, “you had the opportunity to prevent your daughters from undergoing any trauma associated with an interview, correct?”

Tom rose up in his chair in such towering rage that everyone in the courtroom felt his fury. Robert Fahey and David Weiss watched the transformation from their bench with horror. Neither had ever seen a human being so angry. Capano had “steam from his ears, snakes from his eyes,” Robert recalled. “His eyes were bulging. He had bulging veins in his face where people don't even have veins. At that moment, he was pure evil.”

“Absolutely INCORRECT!” Tom roared at Connolly. “You heartless, gutless, soulless disgrace for a human being!”

Connolly paused, his arms folded across his chest, watching a man completely out of control. Even he hadn't expected an explosion like this.

The jury stared at Tom Capano with shocked fascination. Whenever they were confused by something in the courtroom, they had looked to Judge Lee for guidance, and they looked at him now, obviously wondering what they should do. Lee took a long deep breath. He was angry, too—but at the defendant.

Connolly started to resume his line of questioning. “You not only had the opportunity by agreeing—”

“Why don't you explain what you did to my mother?” Tom shouted, smacking the microphone in front of him.

“OK, Your Honor,” Connolly said, “we did nothing to his mother—”

“You did nothing to my mother?” Tom screamed. “That's a lie right there in front of the Court!”

Judge Lee turned to the guards. “Please take Mr. Capano out of the courtroom.”

As Tom was wrestled out of the courtroom, he pulled away from his guards and turned to the jury. “He's a liar!”

Robert Fahey wished he'd had a camera to record the moment as the man he felt was the real Tom Capano emerged from behind his charismatic shell, but then he felt a chill. “That was probably what my sister saw just before she died,” he said. “The last face Annie saw.”

T
HE
trial was not over, nor was the cross-examination, but for all intents and purposes they had come to a stopping point. A somewhat chastened defendant took the witness stand the next morning, January 5, but no one who had seen his awesome temper would ever forget it. Judge Lee made sure that it would not happen again in his courtroom, adding his instructions to the advice Tom's own legal team had given him.

“There will be no apologies to the Court and the jury for yesterday's outburst,” Lee warned. “You are simply to answer the questions directed to you by Mr. Connolly. He will be permitted to ask questions on cross-examination subject
only
to your attorneys' right to object. You will answer all questions put by Mr. Connolly. Failure to do so will result in appropriate admonitions. . . . If you refuse to accept the responsibilities of responding to cross-examination, there are Draconian sanctions which can be imposed and they will be considered.”

Lee evinced such a stern presence that even a man as mercurial as Tom saw he meant business. But he still answered Connolly's questions sullenly. Finally, near the end of his cross-examination, Connolly asked Tom, “Until the first day of trial, they [the Faheys] had not heard one iota of explanation from you or anybody representing you to account for the whereabouts of their sister, correct?”