...And Never Let HerGo

Marie’s diary and the search of Tom’s house hit the headlines, Debby was already on her way to the Philadelphia airport. “I left for Nantucket that morning,” she recalled. “I was gone for nine days.”
    Certainly she had her head in the sand. She was in full-fledged denial. She didn’t
want
to read the newspapers or watch television news that not only gave intimate details about her lover’s affair with another woman but also suggested he might be a kidnapper and a murderer. Debby needed to believe Tom’s reassurances that nothing had changed, that he was still there for her, and that all the things people were saying about him were ridiculous falsehoods. She had never been much of a news buff, and when she returned home from Nantucket it was not that hard for her to ignore the newspapers and keep her TV turned off.
    If she had allowed herself to follow the unfolding story, the investigationand the ensuing publicity would have been a nightmare for Debby. To come so close to a happy ending with Tom and to see it destroyed by his connection to a woman she never knew existed would be almost more than she could bear. Debby believed blindly in Tom. Her vision was so focused on what he told her to think that she saw nothing to the left or right of it.
    Tom had admitted lying to her about seeing Anne Marie—and Susan Louth, too—but he had promised he would never lie again. They were still together, and she knew he would protect her—as she would protect him. If doubts about Tom ever began to creep into her mind, Debby blocked them. Tom hadn’t stalked Anne Marie; that was totally unlike him. He was a good man who was being hounded, and she, for one, believed in him. “I believed everything he told me,” she recalled. “And it was really only coincidence, but every time something really major happened in the case, I happened to be away from Wilmington.”
    As Tom had told her so often, hadn’t he always been there for her? Hadn’t he been the one who shut her mother’s eyes? How could she
not
believe in him? How could she ever leave him?
    T HE crack in Tom Capano’s armor gradually opened wider. Little by little the federal investigation was gaining momentum. Tips were coming in, and one of the initially most promising came from an employee of the Capano & Sons construction company.
    On July 1, Shaw Taylor had been puzzled by a message from a fellow employee telling him to have the Dumpsters emptied at the family firm at 105 Foulk Road. Taylor remarked to Louie’s son, Louis Capano III, that it wasn’t the regular day for emptying the Dumpsters—they were still half empty. The younger Capano called his father on his cell phone to ask him why. Louie told him to get off the cell phone at once and not to discuss the matter over the phone.
    Their curiosity aroused, the two young men peered into the Dumpsters, but they saw nothing but trash there. Two of the Dumpsters held ordinary garbage and two others had construction materials from a building that Capano & Sons was gutting so that it could be tenant-fitted-out for a new renter—a bank. All the bins were barely half full. Still, in line with Louie’s orders, calls were made to Harvey & Harvey, a Wilmington waste disposal company, and the Dumpsters were emptied. The ordinary garbage went to the Cherry Island dump on the eastern edge of Wilmington, close by the Delaware River; the construction debris had to be taken to the Delaware recyclable-products landfill off U.S. 13, south of the city.
    When word of their premature removal trickled down to the investigation team, their first thought was that Anne Marie’s body might have been in one of those Dumpsters. If not her body, then there was the matter of the missing couch and carpet from the great room at Tom’s house.
    Cops often joke about their profession, saying, “It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.” The investigative team’s next search was
truly
a dirty job. For five days—from August 12 through 16—Bob Donovan, Eric Alpert, FBI evidence teams, and Wilmington Police officers spent their days at the dumps and landfill. Colm Connolly joined them when he could. They were all garbed in the white coveralls that they wore on evidence searches, which were soon less than pristine.
    “We held our noses,” Alpert recalled. “I guess you didn’t really need training to do that search. At Cherry Island, the garbage was spread out, and then these huge ’dozers with metal treads