One Deputy Attorney From Murder

One deputy attorney from murder We’re heading to Wilmington Delaware in the 1990’s to Governor Carper’s office. His scheduling secretary, Anne Marie Fahey is a young up and comer in the political scene. She’s got maybe one of the most important positions in the governor’s office and she rubs shoulders with many powerful and influential people. She’s excellent at her job partly due to her vivacious and charismatic personality. On the outside, she projects positivity, but on the inside, she’s troubled. Though only 30 years old at this point, she’s been through a lot of tragedy. Her mother had died young leaving a large family of Irish Catholic kids and a husband behind. Anne Marie’s father turned to alcohol to cope and for the most part wasn’t a father figure to her and her older siblings. Anne Marie was the youngest of the group of 4 brothers and 2 girls, and she made her siblings promise to care for her after their mother died. Fortunately, they all adored her and worked together to keep her safe and on a good path. Anne Marie is very organized and on top of things both at work and in her home life. She’s always on time and never breaks a scheduled appointment. This is why the job of scheduling secretary suits her to a tee. Anne Marie’s family, the Fahey’s, had planned a family dinner for a Sunday evening in 1996, but Anne Marie didn’t show up. She also didn’t show up for a planned drink date with her boyfriend. Obviously, this is not like her even in the slightest, so her sister and her boyfriend go to her apartment to look for her. When they get in her place, they notice her bed is unmade and clothing was scattered around the floor. When I say Anne Marie is known for being organized, I mean that you should imagine her on par with Martha Stewart and she never would have left her apartment messy. Her sister and boyfriend also discover 12 unanswered messages on her answering machine dating back to the Thursday before this Sunday in question. Groceries were spoiling on the kitchen counter and an expensive pantsuit in a gift box on her bed lay open and untouched. Her purse with her ID and wallet were all in the apartment, but her car keys were missing. They also found surprising letters on her living room table. The letters were from a well-respected local attorney named Thomas Compano. They were on his office letterhead and they made it look the Anne Marie and Thomas had a lurid love affair which came as a surprise to them. She had never spoken a word to any of her family or friends about Thomas who was 17 years her senior. Her sister and boyfriend immediately go around asking neighbors if they’ve seen Anne Marie or anything unusual and get nothing. Calling her umptillion friends also results in nothing. Co-workers tell them she was at work Thursday and everything seemed fine. She had scheduled Friday off so they had expected her to miss that day of work. Anne Marie lived by a tight schedule, and she never disappeared for any length of time without letting someone know, especially if she had plans with them. Cathleen, her sister, knows something must be wrong and she decides to call the big guns. She calls the governor Anne Marie works for who immediately dispatches a security detail to get police on the case right away. Everyone is concerned that she may have been abducted due to a number of rapes and robberies that had recently taken place not far from her place. News of Anne Marie’s disappearance quickly swirls around Washington where even President Clinton (who knew Governor Carper well) heard about it. He told Carper that all federal resources would be at their disposal to help find her. Fearing she may have been abducted, a ground search is started. 300 of friends, family and co-workers – even the governor - searched a park Anne Marie had lived across from. It was many acres of land along the Brandywine creek. However, nothing was found there. Detectives knew the name of the man who wrote Anne Marie those salacious letters well. Thomas is known as a powerful and connected man who had at one time been head legal counsel for the governor’s office. He was also tight with the Wilmington police chiefs. Tom is known as the golden child in his family. He’s known as a real family man with a wife and 4 kids living in a mansion that was a former catholic diocese. He was the oldest of 4 sons to his parents and though he was living a charmed life, his brothers weren’t as squeaky clean. They had all run into criminal problems in the past and Tom was often their savior with his legal help. Tom’s brother Louis was an excellent businessman and had made millions in their family’s real estate holdings. That success aside, there was talk that he had made some sketchy payoffs to political officials. I read a piece that said Louis had been served with a lawsuit by his brother-in-law, an attorney. Not taking it well, he went to his brother-in-law’s home, threw a chair through a sliding glass door and attacked the man, choking him. He was arrested and charged no contest to second degree reckless endangering. He had been involved later in some illegal campaign contributions, so he definitely fell into the “rich and crooked” basket at one time. Their brother, Joseph was no gem either after he was charged with kidnapping and raping a 27 year old woman he had dated for 9 years and had become obsessed with. Later, Joe took over the construction side of the business their father had started and was making good bank with that, although there were allegations of shoddy work from customers. Their youngest brother, Gerry was the definitive black sheep of the family. Although I personally don’t consider what I read about him to be as shady as his brothers. He was fond of drugs, fast cars, guns, hunting big game animals and partying hard. He ran a landscaping business and was also very wealthy due to family inheritance. It seems they all kind of collaborated in tandem on business deals with one another. Among Anne Marie’s things, detectives find her diary which details her relationship with Thomas Capano. She was aware that he had been married for 24 years and had 4 children and she had terrible guilt about the affair. She had strong Catholic beliefs and she felt horrible about herself because of it. She was worried about her reputation with her family and work and tried to keep the affair secret, knowing they would disapprove. The diary gave a kind of timeline of their relationship which had started out with simple lunches and then turned sexual. It documents how their relationship changed over time and she was becoming fearful and distrusting of him. She had begun to try to pull away, but he became possessive of her, even breaking into her apartment and tearing apart all the gifts he had given her. He was constantly calling and emailing her, becoming totally immersed in his obsession for her. He even separated from his wife and rented a luxurious brick home for himself to show Anne Marie how serious he was about her. This just made Anne Marie more uncomfortable, not wanting to be a homewrecker. The last entry of her diary was the most striking where she refers to Tom as a "controlling, manipulative, insecure, jealous maniac." So, police go talk to Thomas Capano at 3:39 in the middle of the night who’s house is only minutes from Anne Marie’s. When asked about Anne Marie, he says that he’d had a relationship with her, but that hit had been over for quite some time. He said they were still friends and had even had dinner together on Thursday evening in Philadelphia. After dinner, he brought her back to his place to give her some groceries that she had wanted (maybe he wasn’t going to use them or something?) along with a gift he had for her and then took her home. He said he hadn’t seen her since and was shocked to hear they thought she was missing. He suggests in so many words that Anne Marie was moody and suicidal and since she had that Friday off, maybe she’d taken off for the weekend and would show up for work the next day. Police ask if they can have a look around Tom’s house right then, but Tom said it wasn’t a good time since his kids were there for the weekend and it was the middle of the night and they were asleep in bed. Just before her disappearance, Anne Marie had begun seeing her boyfriend, Michael Scanlon (if that name sounds familiar, it’s with good reason and I’ll touch on that later in the story.) When she was dating Michael, she was very excited about him. She told friends that he was caring and stable. She even thought he may be the guy she would eventually marry. The Monday after her disappearance, Anne Marie still doesn’t show up for work, so they check her financial accounts. There wasn’t any activity after that Thursday, June 28th, so it would be hard to assume she’d taken off for the weekend without using one of her accounts. They then head to the restaurant Tom had told them he’d taken Anne Marie to that Thursday night. Workers recognize the photo of Anne Marie police show them and says she remembers serving her and Tom. She said she hadn’t wanted to approach the table because the couple was so tense and silent. She could tell Anne Marie was especially unhappy and barely spoke or ate her meal. Anne Marie’s psychiatrist comes forward to tell police about his last session he’d had with her. She had come to him to seek help for dealing with Tom’s intimidation and obsessive behaviors. She was his last appointment of the day on that Thursday and she told him she was on her way to have dinner with Tom in Philadelphia. She thought she might be able to finally break things completely off that night and tell him firmly that he was to stop contacting her. Her psychiatrist told her that he felt uneasy about the situation and advised her against going. The FBI got involved with the case since Anne Marie had traveled across state lines the evening of her disappearance and because of all of the governor’s connections, I’m guessing. It helps to know people in high places with a lot of wealth. The FBI pulls phone and credit card records belonging to both Anne marie and Tom. Tom had claimed in his first statement that he had bought gas on his way back from Anne Marie’s. but it was an obvious lie as that gas station was already closed at the time he claimed he’d bought his gas. There was also no charge on his credit card. They also notice Tom had made a $308 purchase at a place called the Wallpaper Warehouse 2 days after Anne Marie’s disappearance. They thought that was a little strange since Tom was renting the house he was living in. One doesn’t usually do upgrades and repairs in a place they’re renting, it’s typically the landlord. When they call the Wallpaper Warehouse number, the person who picks up answers with, “Airbase Carpets, how can I help you?” They find out this business sells mostly carpeting. They have a hunch that Tom probably rolled Anne Marie up in carpet to dispose of her body, but a hunch isn’t enough for a search warrant on his rental house. Investigators find out Tom had a housekeeper, so they call her in for questioning. She had cleaned the house 4 days prior to Anne Marie’s disappearance but Tom cancelled her services the following week claiming that the house wasn’t dirty since his kids hadn’t stayed over that weekend. This sparks something in their minds since Tom had told them that night they interviewed him at his rental house that his kids were staying with him for the weekend. The housekeeper returned 3 weeks later to Tom’s house and noticed something that seemed different. The loveseat and carpet from the living room had been replaced with a new carpet and 2 new chairs. This information was enough for a search warrant since he’d told them he’d brought Anne Marie to his home that Thursday night and now a carpet and loveseat were missing. They concentrate their search in the living room, for obvious reasons and don’t find any big stains. But, they do find 3 tiny spots of blood. We’re talking flecks. They take swabs of the spots and send them in for testing. Examiners found that it was human blood, but now they needed Anne Marie’s DNA to compare it to. Since Anne Marie was so meticulously clean, they couldn’t find anything that they believed would provide them a viable sample in her apartment. I’m thinking since it was the 90’s, that maybe they didn’t have the DNA technology we have now, so that may have been the reason. As an alternative, they would need blood samples from one of her parents, but unfortunately, both of her parents were deceased at this point. However, her brothers and sister told investigators that they noticed in her date book that she had given blood the month before she disappeared. Agents go to the blood bank to collect the sample but are told it has already been turned into plasma and shipped out to Europe. Once blood is turned into plasma, the DNA rich blood cells are stripped away so the chances of it working is slim, but they ask for the blood bank to have it returned. Their case against Tom is weak, so investigators don’t have enough to arrest him on yet. Then they get a call from a project manager who works for Tom’s brother Louis on one of the construction sites. He agrees to meet them in a secure location, fearing that if the Capanos found out he was talking to authorities, he’d be killed. He told them that the day after Anne Marie went missing, Louis had called him telling him to pull the dumpsters from the job site and have them emptied. None of the dumpsters were full and the cost of dumping the giant commercial construction dumpsters is very expensive. It just isn’t done unless the job is complete, or the dumpsters are brimming full. They get a search warrant for the dumpster records from the Capano’s company. They trace it to a hauling company and the dumpsite it was taken to. They go digging for 4 long, hot days in August, but don’t find anything they’re looking for. When they question Louis about it, he denies ever giving the order to have the dumpsters dumped early. At this point, Anne Marie has been missing for 8 weeks. It feels to the police that Tom has gotten away with murder. But then, they get a call from the blood bank. Anne Marie’s plasma had been returned. The laboratory had little hope they’d retrieve dna from it, but in a stroke of luck, the technician found a few residual red blood cells and was able to extract the DNA. It was a match to the samples taken from Tom’s house. This is another step closer to having enough to charge Tom, but without a body or a murder weapon, they know their case is still weak. When scouring Tom’s phone records, investigators notice one number popped up often. They lead to a woman named Debbie McIntyre. They’re shocked when they discover Debbie is another mistress of Tom’s that he’s been side-chicking for 12 years. BREAK They see Tom had placed a call to Debbie the morning after Anne Marie’s disappearance from Stone Harbor, New Jersey. Then, they find out that Stone Harbor is where Tom’s brother Gerry keeps his boat called The Summer Wind docked. Strangely, Gerry has sold the boat right after Anne Marie went missing. However, police were able to track down the new owner and he allowed them to examine the boat. Once again, though, no evidence is on the boat that they could find. One thing that stood out to them was that the new owner said that Gerry had sold him the boat without anchors. So, the team decide to focus more on Gerry. They decide to put together an undercover operation to gather incriminating evidence about Gerry assuming that he probably had something to do with helping Tom dump the body. They knew that if they were able to find enough evidence to charge him with conspiring, they could pressure him to turn on Tom. For 11 months they follow Gerry everywhere and note that he visits a lot of bars and nightclubs and uses lots of illegal drugs. They also find out that he collects firearms. A known drug user having a firearm is a federal crime. They take Gerry in on October 9 of 1997 and raid his house. They find a small arsenal of guns in the bedroom closet of his 3 year old son. In the laundry room, they find cocaine and marijuana in his clothing pockets and with this, they have enough to charge him with felony firearms violations. They also had the option of charging him with child endangerment because of the firearms in the toddler’s room. They told him they’d offer him immunity if he’d testify against his brother. Gerry had a pretty good life, he had money, a wife and kids. Giving all that up to save his brother was a hard ask. He decided to talk to the FBI. Gerry told them that at months before Anne Marie’s disappearance, Tom came to him with a problem. Mind you, it was always the other way around, so this was a new thing of Tom asking Gerry for help. Tom told Gerry that he was being extorted and he needed Gerry to get him cash and a gun. He also told him that he may need Gerry’s help one day using the boat to get rid of the extortionist’s body if it came to that. Gerry gave Tom $8000 in cash as well as a gun. A month later, returned the gun to Gerry saying that the money had been enough to get the extortionist off his back and that he didn’t need the gun anymore. Gerry didn’t hear anything else about it until the early morning of June 29 of 1996, the day after Anne Marie’s disappearance when Tom showed up at his house. Tom told his brother to go get the boat. Gerry said as soon as Tom told him to get the boat, he knew someone was dead at Tom’s hands. Gerry told tom he didn’t want any part in it and refused to help him. Tom, though, wasn’t one to take no for an answer and he guilt-tripped Gerry into helping him. The brothers went to Tom’s garage where they loaded a heavy cooler into Tom’s truck. Gerry didn’t even attempt to look in the cooler and believed it contained a body. They also loaded up a carpet but Gerry told Tom it probably wouldn’t sink. They lugged the heavy cooler in broad daylight onto the boat and headed out for the open ocean. When they got 60 miles away from shore, they threw the cooler into the ocean, but the cooler just floated and bobbed around like a rubber duckie. Tom yells at Gerry to shoot the cooler to sink it. Gerry shoots slugs into the cooler, but it continues to bob carefreely. Gerry is also horrified that when the shots hit the cooler, blood starts seeping out. They pull it back into the boat when Tom realized he’d have to sink the body without the cooler. To avoid seeing any of the mess Tom had caused, Gerry went to the other side of the boat and out of view. Tom grabbed the boat’s anchor and wrapped it around the body and while trying to dump it into the ocean, he began vomiting and retching. Gerry turned around to look at his brother and caught sight of a leg and foot sinking into the dark seas. On their way back to shore, Tom dismantled what he could from the cooler which was basically just taking the lid off and threw the pieces into the ocean. Then the pair went back to Tom’s house where Tom said they had something else to get rid of. Gerry walked in and saw a huge blood stain at about shoulder height on Tom’s couch. Police think that would have happened if Anne Marie had been shot in the head. The brothers then head to their brother Louis’s construction project site and dispose of the couch and carpet into the dumpsters there. Probably because of Tom’s police connections, word quickly gets out that Gerry is cooperating with police. Two days later, Louis shows up at the station with his lawyer. He wants to recant his earlier statement and admits that he had the dumpsters dumped on the order of his brother, Tom. Now, word is out that Louis too is cooperating with authorities and police track Tom 24/7, worried that he may try to kill his brothers to keep them from testifying against him. Less than a week later on November 12 of 1997, Tom and his remaining brother, Joseph are spotted loading suitcases into a vehicle. When they begin to head towards the airport, agents ask for an emergency approval to stop them, fearing Tom is fleeing the country. They are able to arrest Tom on grounds that he was coercing his brothers to give false testimony. I’m guessing because Louis’s first statement. Authorities search the area of the Atlantic where Gerry said they dumped the body, but nothing was found. Trying to prosecute a case without a body is very difficult. In Delaware, there had only been one previous no-body case taken to trial and it had resulted in an acquittal. The only actual physical evidence they had were a few drops of blood. But, then, they get a phone call from someone who had heard about the case and had retrieved a cooler floating in the ocean on the forth of July weekend. That would have been just a few days after Anne Marie had gone missing. Additionally, the caller had said the cooler had slug holes through it and it was missing a lid and had blood stains in it. That information hadn’t been released to the public Investigators scramble to get the cooler. Ken Chubb, the caller, had been fishing when the bobbing cooler caught his attention. It was an area of a lot of shark fishing. He explained that when people hunt the sharks, they sometimes shoot them in the head to kill them quickly. He assumed that someone had caught a shark, threw it into the cooler and shot it in the cooler. Chubb had patched the holes and replaced the lid, cleaned out the blood, and used the perfectly good cooler as his own until he saw the news report. Those particular Igloo coolers have a bar code on them. Investigators scanned the barcode and found it to match the barcode of the cooler Tom had bought with his credit card 2 months before Anne Marie had disappeared. They now had another piece of physical evidence, and it proved premeditation. They still wanted more evidence to seal the case as much as they could. They checked gun stores for purchases made by Tom or any of his close knit circle. They hit gold when they found that Debbie McIntyre, Tom’s other mistress, had bought a 22 beretta 6 weeks prior to Anne Marie’s disappearance. When Debbie was brought in for questioning, she tried to make it like her relationship with Tom was more casual than investigators knew it to be. And, when asked if she owned a gun, she became visibly nervous and she told them that she did not. Then she switches, makes a long-winded explanation about how she bought a gun then throwing it away in a garbage. When asked if anyone knew she had bought that gun, she said only Tom knew. Police point out that if she had given the gun to Tom, she had committed a felony. So, under advice from her counsel, she switches her story again and admits that Tom had told her to buy the gun. They then convince Debbie that it’s in her best interest to testify against Tom at trial and she agrees. Now they feel like they have enough to make a successful case at trial against Tom and a few pretty air-tight witnesses to testify. His 12 week trial begins on October 26 of 1998. During trial, it comes out that, according to the FBI, in the months after Tom’s father had died, Tom had asked a man to break a legal secretary’s legs or run her over because she denied his advances. This man he tried to hire was an FBI informant who had quoted Tom as having said that Wilmington was his town and that no woman was allowed to turn him down. The woman wasn’t ever hurt, but the informant had made harassing phone calls to her after Tom ordered him to. The intent was to get the woman to leave town, and it had worked. When Gerry was testifying against his brother, it was obviously a painful and emotional thing for him. He knew his testimony could send his brother to his death. He kept glancing at their mother who looked furious. I imagine a blonde Ursula character dressed in a silk button down blouse. Tom’s attorneys were pretty annoyed with him. One said it was his worst client ever and Tom made the epic mistake (against counsel’s advisement) to take the stand in his own defense. When he takes the stand, he surprises everyone when he admits that he disposed of Anne Marie’s body with Gerry and that he had asked Louis to have the dumpsters dumped early. He weaves his own story of how he got in this pickle of a mess. He says that after their dinner date, he and Anne Marie had gone back to his house and that they had resolved their differences, deciding to stay together. They were having a good time on his couch when Debbie McIntyre bursts through the front door. When she caught him with Anne Marie, she pulled out a gun and put it against her own head, threatening suicide. Tom jumped up and began struggling with Debbie, trying to get the gun away from her. During their struggle, the gun went off and hit Anne Marie. (Is she just sitting there, watching the show? Wouldn’t you think she would have jumped up or something?) He says he doesn’t call for help because he wants to protect Debbie now that she was a murderer. That’s when he grabbed the coffin and put Anne Marie in it. (He left out that he would have had to break many of Anne Marie’s bones to get her to fit in it.) During cross, the attorney pointed out that Tom had himself prosecuted a similar case in 1976 when he served as the Assistant Attorney General for Delaware.