...And Never Let HerGo

Wilmington paper, but instead asked Bud to tell him what was being written.
    Deputy state attorney general Ferris Wharton had commentedon the missing persons case, but not officially. He was speaking as the chief prosecutor in New Castle County—although there certainly was no case as yet that would necessitate prosecution. Wharton, who had an impressive record of convictions in high-profile homicide cases, was native born and familiar to most Wilmington residents. Tall and lanky with straight brown hair that was forever flopping over his forehead, he seemed almost shy outside a courtroom, but he was a powerful force in front of a jury. Fortyish, Wharton was still an athlete; he worked out at the Y, played basketball, and every summer spent his vacations riding in a bicycle convoy across Iowa—which he found was not nearly as flat as everyone thought.
    Wharton had the look of a Gary Cooper or a Jimmy Stewart. He was the kind of an attorney whose easy, quiet presence made people feel somehow calmer, a nice guy with a keen mind—unless they happened to be the subjects of his cross-examination. Then his questions could lure them into snares they never saw coming. Wharton sometimes watched basketball tournaments from a bar stool at O’Friel’s. Like Bud Freel, he knew both the Faheys and the Capanos, if not as well, and like everyone else, he wondered what could have happened to Anne Marie.
    “Each day, you become more and more pessimistic about the outcome,” he told a
News-Journal
reporter, phrasing his statements cautiously. He was still talking about a missing persons case, but everyone was growing edgy. The whole town seemed to know that Anne Marie had been seeing both Tom Capano and Mike Scanlan, and Wharton was not about to comment on that. “Everybody who had contact with her, in a very broad sense,” he said, “is a suspect. . . . The complete spectrum of options is out there. She’s missing.”
    M ONDAY was the eighth of July. It was the day Tom had promised Bud Freel that he would come back to Wilmington to talk to the police. Anne Marie had been missing for eleven days. Tom called Bud to say that he was meeting with his attorneys in the morning and would probably talk to the police that afternoon.
    But he didn’t. Instead, he called Bud in the evening and repeated his tirade about the police and their sick, prurient interest in his sex life. He could not bring himself to sit still for that. The police were trying to set him up, and he wasn’t going to go in and let them do it.
    Bud was exasperated. “You know, Tom,” he began, “I just don’t get it. Anne Marie’s been missing now for more than a week. They just want to sit down and ask you some questions in hopesthere might be something that you know, and you might not even realize you can be helpful to them. If you’re not willing to do that, I have nothing else to say to you.”
    It was their last conversation.
    W HEN Tom finally came back to Wilmington, he turned to his good friend, Brian Murphy, for companionship. Tom and Brian had been friends for twenty years, ever since they played on the Wilmington Rugby Club team with Dan Frawley. Later, Murphy became the city’s public information officer and reported to Tom when he was Mayor Frawley’s top aide. Tom had lent Murphy $15,000 to pay his daughter’s tuition at Ursuline Academy. He was a generous creditor who rarely called in his loans to male friends.
    Tom and Brian Murphy ate dinner together in Little Italy and Tom confided that he was very frightened. He showed Murphy some threatening letters he had received, letters that accused him of hurting Anne Marie. They were unsigned. Tom told Murphy that he had no idea what had happened to her. It was obvious that Tom didn’t want to be alone in his house on Grant Avenue, so Murphy went home with him. They sat in the two La-Z-Boy recliners in the great room and watched late-night television with the lights off so no one driving by could see them. They sipped Sambuca until it grew light outside. Murphy suggested that Tom make a public statement telling everyone what he had told him. An innocent man shouldn’t have to worry about anonymous threats.
    J ULY 8 was a very important day in the investigation of the disappearance of Anne Marie Fahey; although the public was not yet aware of it, the federal government moved quietly into the picture. Although the media said President Clinton had given that directive, that wasn’t true.