...And Never Let HerGo

Marie’s diary and printed sections of it all over the front page. For a woman who guarded her privacy so carefully, it was, perhaps, a final cruelty. If Anne Marie was out there alive somewhere, she would be destroyed to see all her secret thoughts revealed for readers to digest along with their morning coffee and rolls. Very soon, other area papers picked up the story. Everything she had written about Tom—and about Mike—was no longer secret, all of her hopes and dreams and disappointments, her essence, corroded by printer’s ink.
    It was galling for the three men building a case; Colm Connolly hadn’t released anything about the investigation. But people were talking to insistent reporters, and so, much that the investigators had tried to keep hidden for the good of the probe was coming from other sources.
    Ironically, Tom came off better than one might have expected. A cry went up from his defenders. Joe Hurley, perhaps
the
top Delaware criminal defense attorney and an old friend, said, “It’s unimaginable! I sent [Tom] a note myself—in sympathy more than anything else. This will haunt him to his grave and hurt his career—which has been exemplary.”
    Charlie Oberly told the
News-Journal
that his client had only been trying to help Anne Marie with her problems by bringing her food and tempting her with dinners at her favorite restaurants. Far from being estranged from Tom, Oberly said, she only recently had sent him messages full of affection. “Tom was trying to boost her spirits,” he said.
    Tom himself refused to be interviewed for the long article in the
News Journal,
but he did give reporter Valerie Helmbreck a quote, his first: “I’ve personally been devastated by this.”
    F ERRIS W HARTON was about to step out of the investigation—at least for the time being. Far from being resentful that the federal government was treading on state turf, he welcomed the assistance of the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI. “They have greater resources,” Wharton told the
News-Journal
reporter Cris Barrish. “They have the manpower, technical expertise, people with forensic expertise. The purpose is to find out what happened to her [Anne Marie] and to the extent that the FBI can resolve that situation, we’re very thankful that they can step in to help.”
    But Wilmington and all of Delaware is insular and self-contained. The idea of the government coming in and pressuring one of their own rankled some people, and indeed, the
News-Journal
’s headline on August 3 read:
FBI Uses Typical Tactics With Capano.
    Charlie Oberly, who had served as Delaware’s attorney general for three terms, was outraged for the Capanos, characterizing the FBI search of Kay’s car as “Gestapo tactics,” and calling Tom “a scapegoat.” Indeed, Tom had a groundswell of support from highly placed people who could not imagine him as either Anne Marie’s stalker or her killer.
    Anne Marie’s sister, Kathleen, felt differently. “I’ve known Thomas Capano for probably 15 years,” she told a
Philadelphia Inquirer
reporter. “Up until six weeks ago, I thought he was a nice man. Now, I probably know more about Thomas Capano than his wife even does. And what I know of him now—he’s not a nice man. Now, looking around the apartment, I realize there are a lot of things that he gave her—things that Annie didn’t have the money for. Expensive cappuccino makers. . . . There’s this big TV in her living room. I asked her where she got it. She said she won it. I was like, ‘Oh—that’s good luck!’ Now, things make sense.”
    None of her siblings were angry with Anne Marie because she hadn’t told them everything about her life; they would not have judged her. They would have helped her get free of Tom. Now, it might be far too late. But still, they paid the rent on her little apartment, and one or another of them waited there for her to return. If they let her apartment go, it was like saying she was never coming home at all.

Chapter Twenty-six
    D EBBY M AC I NTYRE ’ S reaction to what was happening to Tom was predictable for a woman who had been programmed to be submissive for almost two decades. She figuratively put her hands over her ears and eyes to shut out what she could not deal with. And Tom had told her not to read the newspapers, assuring her, “They’re full of lies. And they’ll just upset you.” As always, she had obeyed.
    Early on the morning of August 1, when the stories about Anne