And Never Let Her Go (43 page)

But where was that blood now? Alpert found that the red cells had been shipped to a hospital. The rest of it had been used for fresh-frozen plasma, but the plasma wasn't even in the country. It was on its way to the Swiss Red Cross, somewhere on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean. At the government's request, Chris Hancock arranged to retrieve Anne Marie's plasma, and it came back, still frozen: 0387029. Now it was up to the FBI lab to see if it matched the spots found in the great room in Tom Capano's house.

Special Agent Allan Giusti was a DNA analyst in the FBI laboratory. “DNA,” he explained, “is an abbreviation for ‘deoxyribonucleic acid,' the blueprint every living organism is made of, which is found in the form of a twisted ladder that is called a double helix.”

Body fluid stains larger than a quarter are fairly easy to match to known samplers. But minuscule amounts of body fluid and tissue can be tested too. One test, termed the PCR test, is used when the sampler is minute. It actually amplifies substances like saliva on the back of a stamp or a tiny stain of semen or blood. Starting with one DNA molecule, Giusti could chemically multiply it. “If you do that approximately thirty times, you're increasing the starting amount of DNA by about a billion,” he explained.

The resultant pattern of dots could be matched with dots from a known donor.

Tom Capano had been forced to give blood, but he had refused to allow his daughters to give samples, indignant that the federal investigators should even ask. In August 1996, as he began his tests on the unknown blood specks retrieved on July 31, Giusti had Tom's and Anne Marie's blood, as well as other samples: Ruth Boylan's, Susan Louth's, and Debby MacIntyre's—all people who had been in Tom's house.

Tom, Debby, Ruth Boylan, and Susan Louth were all excluded absolutely as the source of the blood in the great room. But Giusti found that there was only one chance in eleven thousand that anyone
other
than Anne Marie Fahey had lost that blood. “So we had that blood match in late August 1996,” Connolly said. “But we didn't announce it. We waited six months to make it public.”

There had not been enough blood, certainly, to prove that Anne Marie was dead. How much might have been on the missing carpet and couch, no one would ever know. But the FBI lab had found another match—not blood but fibers. The carpet samples that Bob Donovan had retrieved from the bed-and-breakfast owner matched beige carpet fibers vacuumed from Kay Capano's Suburban. Under a scanning electron microscope that enlarged the samples exponentially, it was apparent that they had come from the same source. Someone had used Kay's SUV to transport the missing carpet.

Although they still had a long way to go, Colm Connolly was confident that he had enough evidence to move forward. He sent Tom's lawyers a letter on August 5, notifying them that their client was under investigation by a federal grand jury.

G
RAND
jury investigations are different from actual trials. What takes place there is secret, and witnesses may not have their attorneys with them, although they may leave the room after each question they are asked to consult with them. In Delaware, grand juries may sit for up to eighteen months. There are twenty-three jurors in all, and at least sixteen must be present at a session; twelve must agree in order to hand down an indictment. Grand juries start and stop, assembling whenever the prosecutor needs to elicit testimony. Unlike a regular jury, grand jurors are rarely required to be present day after day until a verdict is reached. Reporters can only watch the people who go in and out of the grand jury room, and speculate on why they were summoned.

On August 29, 1996, Colm Connolly was the prosecutor in the
first grand jury session in the Capano case, questioning a number of reluctant witnesses, who would appear only under a subpoena. The first six witnesses summoned included Louis Capano Jr.; his son, Louis Capano III; and employees of the family construction company. Louie stayed in the grand jury room for an hour and a half and left without making any comment to reporters.

Even though they were compelled to testify, the witnesses had various ways to balk. They were able to invoke the Fifth Amendment, and their attorneys could demand to know if the witness has ever been intercepted by electronic communication. (Ironically, although the government wasn't taping them, some of the principals had been taping one another.) This session marked only the beginning of what would seem like endless grand jury testimony.

C
OLM
C
ONNOLLY
had grown up in Delaware, but he didn't really know the Capano family. He remembered Gerry vaguely from his days at Archmere, and before this case, he had heard Tom's name mentioned—but only once—when he was working on a political corruption case. He didn't know the man. They were from different generations.

Connolly encountered Tom for the first time on September 10, 1996, after he subpoenaed his sixteen-year-old daughter, Christy, to appear before the grand jury. Tom had been telling friends that the blood spots found in the great room could be traced to either Christy or his daughter Katie, but he was infuriated that Connolly had called Christy as a witness. For a moment, the two men faced each other in the hall, Connolly's face bland and Tom's suffused with rage. “He got about a foot and a half away from me,” Connolly recalled, “looked me in the eye, and said, ‘I hope you can sleep at night.' ”

Connolly said nothing. He walked away—but the gauntlet had been thrown down. Tom Capano was a father prepared to fight fiercely to protect his daughter. Or was he protecting himself?

When she took the stand, Christy Capano refused to answer Connolly's questions and now faced contempt of court charges.

D
EBBY
M
AC
I
NTYRE
had been seeing Tom clandestinely for fourteen and a half years and openly for one. Tom suggested that it
would be prudent for them to say that their romantic relationship had begun
after
he separated from Kay. That would protect Kay's feelings, and besides, the feds were already poking around in his private life enough; there was no need to give in to their salacious curiosity.

As always, Debby did what Tom requested. She had no desire for everyone to know that she and Tom had been intimate since 1981. Except for lies of omission and her one blatant lie to her family when she joined Tom in Montreal, she had always told the truth. Indeed, when Bob Donovan interviewed her on July 23, she told him what she remembered—save for the fact that she classified Tom as only a very good friend whom she had known for twenty years.

“I talk with Tom every day,” she said, “and see him once or twice a week.”

“Has he ever talked about a relationship with Anne Marie Fahey?” Donovan asked.

“Never.”

In a way, that was true. He had never mentioned Anne Marie until after she disappeared. Asked to recall whether she had talked to Tom on Thursday night, June 27, Debby said she had. “I called him sometime between ten and eleven,” she said. “I know it was in the middle of
ER.
He called me back at about eleven-thirty. I called him at twelve-fifteen, but he didn't answer and I hung up. He called me back within five or ten minutes.”

That call had come in with an odd ring, the extended shrill that indicated that the calling party had hit *69 to return the last call made to his number.

“How about on Friday—the next day?”

“I saw Tom Friday morning between eight and eight-thirty at the Tower Hill track,” Debby said. “He was walking. He called me around ten-thirty to say he was playing golf that day at the Wilmington Country Club.”

Donovan jotted down his notes in short sentences, and they continued in a staccato fashion:

“Spoke with Tom later on Friday at approx 1730.

“Tuesday, July 2. He called her at work around 1500 and told her that he had been out to dinner with Anne Marie Fahey.

“Did not know that Tom was having any relationships.”

Debby didn't know where Tom had been for most of the day on Friday, the twenty-eighth. He might have called her several times during the day but she wasn't sure. She said she had spoken with him on Saturday, and he had stopped by on Sunday twice. The second
time, he had told her that the cops were at his house and they had searched it. “He was very upset,” Debby told Donovan. “He felt he was being set up, but he didn't discuss what was going on.”

It seemed strange that she hadn't pressed him for details. Debby appeared to be so confident that no one realized that Tom ran the show and that she would never dream of insisting that he tell her what was wrong.

As he had done for years, Tom had suggested a script for Debby to follow, and she stayed with it; it was what he wanted. They were together and everything was going to be fine. If she remembered things that frightened her, the memory never even got up to the surface of her mind before she buried it. One of the memories that would loom large with the investigating team when they discovered it was a favor Debby had done for Tom. She had buried that recollection deeper than all the rest.

“I honestly never thought about the gun,” she would recall. “I never connected buying the gun for Tom with Anne Marie Fahey until a long time later.”

Sometime very early in the spring of 1996, Tom had phoned to ask Debby to do something very special for him, something very “important.” He wouldn't tell her what it was, so she hadn't said either yes or no. But in April, Tom asked her again and this time specified what the task was; he wanted her to buy a gun for him.

“Why?” she asked, mystified.

“Somebody is trying to extort me,” he'd explained. “I'm not going to
use
it. I just want to threaten this person. I'll give it back to you.”

She told him she didn't want a gun in the house. But Tom said that he was concerned about her—a single mother living alone. He pointed out that crime rates were up and that it would be wise for her to have a gun handy—just in case.

“I told him I didn't want to do it,” Debby recalled. But Tom begged her, telling her he
really
needed her to buy the gun. He didn't say why he couldn't buy it himself, or anything about who was extorting him, beyond saying it was a man. “I won't use it,” Tom said. “You know I'm afraid of guns—but I need it to scare this guy off.”

At length, Debby had agreed to do it, and as he always did, Tom gave her detailed instructions. “He told me to go to the Sports Authority,” she said, “and go to the hunting section. I was supposed to walk in the front door and turn to the left.”

She did that, but when she asked for a gun, Debby made the mistake of saying she was buying it for a friend. The salesman told
her that was against the law. She could not transfer a firearm to someone else. Embarrassed, she left the store. Surprisingly, Tom wasn't angry. “He just said, ‘Fine. Don't worry about it.' ”

A month or so later, Tom took Debby to Washington, D.C., for a lawyers' conference, and they had a wonderful time. It was only the third trip he had ever taken her on, so each one was memorable. Then shortly after they came home, he asked her again to purchase a gun for him. “I'm afraid to do that, Tom,” she said. “I can't transfer a firearm to somebody else. It's against the law.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” he said. “People do it all the time. It's nothing you should worry about.”

He was so good at making her feel foolish, and he pooh-poohed her reservations until she finally said yes. The next day, May 13, Tom picked Debby up in front of Tatnall School and drove her to a little gun store—Miller's—out on Route 13. He waited in the car while she went in.

She was very nervous, but this time she knew what to say. She asked to see a small weapon suitable for self-defense. The salesman showed her a few guns, and she chose a Beretta .22 caliber revolver. She paid $180 for it and, at the salesman's suggestion, purchased a box of bullets. He cautioned her about transferring the gun, and she signed a form saying that she would not. That worried her—but Tom's displeasure worried her more.

“I was afraid Tom would get mad if I didn't do what he wanted me to,” she recalled a long time later. “I was always afraid he would get so angry that he would leave me.”

Back in Tom's Jeep Cherokee, Debby told him how concerned she was about breaking the law. Again he laughed and told her not to be “ridiculous.”

Tom put the gun and the bullets behind the backseat of his Cherokee and took Debby to a nearby restaurant for a BLT and a glass of iced tea. It was all so normal. He drove her back to Tatnall in time for the afternoon session, thanked her profusely for helping him out, and drove away.

Debby had never seen that gun again. For a long time, she worried because she had broken the law, but then she had put it out of her mind—just as she put so many things that worried her out of her mind, back in recesses she seldom visited.

O
N
September 6, 1996, Debby MacIntyre took another step that would entangle her in a morass of deception and distortion. At eleven that morning, Bob Donovan, Colm Connolly, and Eric Alpert
came to her house on Delaware Avenue to interview her in preparation for her grand jury testimony. Now she enlarged upon what she had told Donovan in their first interview, but she still did not tell them that she and Tom had been lovers for many, many years.

Debby remembered Thursday, June 27, mostly because it had affected Tom's life so severely and made him confess his unfaithfulness to her. In the morning, she and Tom had had their usual phone conversation sometime between nine-thirty and ten-thirty. She didn't hear from him again until shortly before five, when he told her he had a business meeting in Philadelphia.

Debby explained to the investigators that she was in charge of Tatnall's swim team and that both of her children had a swim meet that night. She had called Tom about ten-thirty, but he wasn't home yet, so she left a message. “Tom called me back between eleven-thirty and twelve-thirty,” she said. “He sounded like he always did, except very tired.”