I’ve had this feeling during my life that I was fortunate to have lived when certain other people did, like James Taylor, whose father taught in the med school at UNC; or when the Atlanta Braves, whom I could watch every night if I wanted to even back in the 70’s, won 14 straight titles with great pitchers, two of whom turn out to have been fascists; or that I could watch Gaylord Perry smirk his spitters for decades; or that Richard Nixon rose and fell and left a rank smell behind; or that the Thomas Capano murder trial happened when we were living in the small big city of Wilmington, Delaware.
Tom Capano was a prominent lawyer in the small legal community of Wilmington. People have called it the northernmost southern city, and, indeed, it featured a pedestrian mall that might lead you to believe that you’re in Raleigh. But unlike the South, it was heavily ethnic; there was an enormous little Italy, a Greek community, and there were the Irish. Teenagers were polite and self-effacing; the shopkeepers direct, sometimes loud, and gracious: very mid-Atlantic.
Capano was married with four kids, three daughters, but the couple had separated. Capano was dating a divorcee named Debbie MacIntyre, and, in his spare time, he was courting a much younger woman, Anne Marie Fahey, whose family was Irish, of course. She was Governor Tom Carper’s appointments secretary. Capano, who had money, took Fahey, who did not, to expensive dinners in Philadelphia, away from Wilmington’s gossipy mouths.
Eventually, Anne Marie, in her mid-20’s, wanted someone her own age who didn’t have a family (and who wasn’t controlling and obsessive), and she began dating a young banker, Michael Scanlon.
Capano took such exception to this development that he shot her dead. Then, with the help of his little brother Gerry, he rolled her up in a carpet, which he later cast off into a dumpster serviced by a company controlled by his next-older brother, Louis, then stuffed her into a cooler (purchased with a credit card at a sporting goods store), and prevailed on Gerry to sail her out to sea where he dumped the cooler. It wouldn’t sink, so Capano shot at least one hole in it.
That cooler washed ashore in New Jersey. The prosecutors had mentioned publicly that a cooler existed and might surface. The fishermen read that and found it and told the prosecutors that there was a hole in it. Bingo.
There was blood in Capano’s apartment, so he went to a Happy Harry’s (think east coast Bartell’s) and asked for and bought blood remover also with his credit card.
Let’s pause so I can drop on you the fact that Capano used to be a prosecuting attorney. Let’s now all slap our foreheads at how stupid he was. Or, as Nancy frequently concludes: Rich white guys think they can get away with anything.
Capano was arrested. The city of Wilmington was abuzz, and everyone seemed to know someone involved in the scandal. A paralegal in our department at AIG knew a paralegal whom Capano later described on the stand as a “blonde ditz.” I wonder how that poor woman dragged herself into work the next morning, law firms being the circle of empathy that they are. Ouch.
After the usual interval, Capano went on trial, but it was not the usual trial. He assembled a dream team of defense lawyers, including someone from Boston, and then told them how to run his trial. He was, predictably, his own worst lawyer.
He insisted on having his lawyers pick a jury including half a dozen young women, believing he could win them over. It later came out that his Boston lawyer told the JUDGE something to the effect that the “stupid bastard” thinks he can charm them.
The trial began with a surprise. Having argued all along that Capano had nothing whatsoever to do with the disappearance, suddenly his dream team’s story was that Ms. Fahey was tragically shot by the other girlfriend, Debby MacIntyre, who had showed up at Capano’s apartment in a jealous rage. Or maybe it was an accident. Then Anne-Marie was rolled in a carpet, taken on a sea cruise, dumped overboard, all horribly gruesome etc.
An intervening issue was that the Feds pressured the youngest brother, Gerry, to turn on his brother Tom or be nailed on drug charges. Brother Louis had lied about emptying his dumpster, so he cooperated with the Feds as well. (This became a Federal case when there was a potential for a kidnapping charge, if I recall correctly.)
The case was, for a brief time, at least, all anyone in the legal community could talk about. My old boss Robert imitated Tom Capano’s grandmother, pursing his fingers together, waving his hands back and forth, pretending to cry and wailing, “But Tommy was the good boy!”
Oh, there were wonderful moments in this trial! For some reason, a state’s deputy attorney general was called to the stand to bear witness to something or other, and he ended up testifying to having sex with Debby MacIntyre while Tom watched. The Philadelphia Inquirer the next morning reported on the story under the headline, “Thanks for Sharing!” The Pacific Northwest has its charms, but a journalistic sense of humor like that isn’t one of them.
A psychiatrist testifying on behalf of Capano took the stand with a wooden hat, which he placed ostentatiously on the railing in front of him. Sensing a tiny touch of vanity, the prosecutor questioned him about his hat, of which he was inordinately proud. If I were on that jury, I’d have thought, “Nutbar.”
But Capano was his own worst advocate. He flirted with the female members of the jury and otherwise treated everyone else, including his own lawyers, with contempt.
I was recently pulled back into this story when Nancy found one of several fairly recent stories in a Wilmington newspaper. It’s the kind of paper that, when a jet goes down, the headline is, “352 killed; two Delawareans on board.” But they also held a contest to choose a motto for Wilmington, the winner of which was, “Wilmington: So close to everywhere else you’d rather be.” Harsh but fair.
To cut to the end, Capano was convicted, and the judge sentenced him to death. Also harsh but fair. At some point, the U.S. Supreme Court found that certain state death penalties including Delaware’s were unconstitutional for some reason or other. Let’s face it, I was barely a lawyer at all and certainly have no interest in or knowledge of criminal law. Capano’s sentence was commuted to life in prison. At that point, he literally ate himself to death, reported to have become obese.
The recent stories featured a juror on that case. She said that Capano convicted himself. He had been asked if Anne-Marie had fit easily into the cooler. He said yes. In the jury room, they had the very same cooler which the fishermen had retrieved and had been presented at court with gasps and gunshot gaps. This juror was about Anne-Marie’s size, so they asked her to see if she could fit in the cooler. She couldn’t. It became apparent that Capano had had to break bones or otherwise deform her to get her to fit in and close the top.
Remember that Capano admitted to everything about disposing of Fahey’s body after he said Debby shot her, and he had said that Anne Marie had fit in there without trouble. That was when the jury realized that he had been lying about everything. His proverbial goose was smoking heavily at that point.
When I lie in bed at night, sometimes I think about what Tom’s little brother Gerry said he saw before he turned away to vomit: Anne Marie’s foot was sticking out of the cooler.
At least three books were written about this trial. I spoke with a local guy, George Attanasia, a Philadelphia journalist, who wrote Summer Wind about the case, and he was mainly bitter that the true crime writer Anne Rice showed up at court at the end to steal everyone else’s thunder.
Please let us not forget the bottom line of this case: poor young Anne Marie lost her promising life because she got tired of this old guy stalking her, trying to control her life, and she wanted a life of her own.
Why do old white guys think they own everything? Why would Capano think Anne Marie, about 20 years younger, would be interested in him for any reason at all? To this day, if I see an attractive young woman with dark curly hair and bright eyes, I avert my eyes in honor of Anne Marie. Except for Capano’s ego, she should have had a happy life with her nice young man.
Nancy and I are not fans of the death penalty, but we do think that there are some cases deserving of it. Guess which one this is. And Tommy was the good boy.
He knows when you've been sleeping. He knows when you're awake.