...And Never Let HerGo

this person. I’ll give it back to you.”
    She told him she didn’t want a gun in the house. But Tom said that he was concerned about her—a single mother living alone. He pointed out that crime rates were up and that it would be wise for her to have a gun handy—just in case.
    “I told him I didn’t want to do it,” Debby recalled. But Tom begged her, telling her he
really
needed her to buy the gun. He didn’t say why he couldn’t buy it himself, or anything about who was extorting him, beyond saying it was a man. “I won’t use it,” Tom said. “You know I’m afraid of guns—but I need it to scare this guy off.”
    At length, Debby had agreed to do it, and as he always did, Tom gave her detailed instructions. “He told me to go to the Sports Authority,” she said, “and go to the hunting section. I was supposed to walk in the front door and turn to the left.”
    She did that, but when she asked for a gun, Debby made the mistake of saying she was buying it for a friend. The salesman toldher that was against the law. She could not transfer a firearm to someone else. Embarrassed, she left the store. Surprisingly, Tom wasn’t angry. “He just said, ‘Fine. Don’t worry about it.’ ”
    A month or so later, Tom took Debby to Washington, D.C., for a lawyers’ conference, and they had a wonderful time. It was only the third trip he had ever taken her on, so each one was memorable. Then shortly after they came home, he asked her again to purchase a gun for him. “I’m afraid to do that, Tom,” she said. “I can’t transfer a firearm to somebody else. It’s against the law.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “People do it all the time. It’s nothing you should worry about.”
    He was so good at making her feel foolish, and he pooh-poohed her reservations until she finally said yes. The next day, May 13, Tom picked Debby up in front of Tatnall School and drove her to a little gun store—Miller’s—out on Route 13. He waited in the car while she went in.
    She was very nervous, but this time she knew what to say. She asked to see a small weapon suitable for self-defense. The salesman showed her a few guns, and she chose a Beretta .22 caliber revolver. She paid $180 for it and, at the salesman’s suggestion, purchased a box of bullets. He cautioned her about transferring the gun, and she signed a form saying that she would not. That worried her—but Tom’s displeasure worried her more.
    “I was afraid Tom would get mad if I didn’t do what he wanted me to,” she recalled a long time later. “I was always afraid he would get so angry that he would leave me.”
    Back in Tom’s Jeep Cherokee, Debby told him how concerned she was about breaking the law. Again he laughed and told her not to be “ridiculous.”
    Tom put the gun and the bullets behind the backseat of his Cherokee and took Debby to a nearby restaurant for a BLT and a glass of iced tea. It was all so normal. He drove her back to Tatnall in time for the afternoon session, thanked her profusely for helping him out, and drove away.
    Debby had never seen that gun again. For a long time, she worried because she had broken the law, but then she had put it out of her mind—just as she put so many things that worried her out of her mind, back in recesses she seldom visited.
    O N September 6, 1996, Debby MacIntyre took another step that would entangle her in a morass of deception and distortion. At eleven that morning, Bob Donovan, Colm Connolly, and Eric Alpertcame to her house on Delaware Avenue to interview her in preparation for her grand jury testimony. Now she enlarged upon what she had told Donovan in their first interview, but she still did not tell them that she and Tom had been lovers for many, many years.
    Debby remembered Thursday, June 27, mostly because it had affected Tom’s life so severely and made him confess his unfaithfulness to her. In the morning, she and Tom had had their usual phone conversation sometime between nine-thirty and ten-thirty. She didn’t hear from him again until shortly before five, when he told her he had a business meeting in Philadelphia.
    Debby explained to the investigators that she was in charge of Tatnall’s swim team and that both of her children had a swim meet that night. She had called Tom about ten-thirty, but he wasn’t home yet, so she left a message. “Tom called me back between eleven-thirty and twelve-thirty,” she said. “He sounded like he always did, except