...And Never Let HerGo

what Anne Marie was saying in her deliberately cheerful notes; they knew that her blood had stained Tom’s walls. They also knew they were still a long way from building an airtight case against him.
    When Charlie Oberly said that Tom hoped that Anne Marie would be found safe, David Weiss spoke to the press on behalf of the Faheys. “My clients’ initial reaction is that if Mr. Capano cared for Anne Marie—as the notes offered by his attorney are intended to suggest—we ask him to come in and talk to the authorities.”
    Tom did not.
    Robert Fahey found Oberly’s statements “beyond reckless” and deplored his comparing Tom Capano to Richard Jewell, the security guard who was falsely accused of planting a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics, only to be vindicated later. For the moment, headlines about the case were built on rhetoric rather than fact.
    “The Faheys were an amazing family,” Connolly recalled. “When we got frustrated during the investigation, we’d meet with them, and we couldn’t tell them anything—and then
they’d
get frustrated. You could see the
pain
on their faces, and yet they were so eloquent and so classy. That gave us more motivation than anything to keep on going.”
    T OM C APANO hired a second high-profile attorney. Joseph A. Hurley had recently made news in another sensational case. He represented eighteen-year-old Brian Peterson, the wealthy teenager who, with his girlfriend, Amy Grossberg, pleaded guilty in Wilmington to killing their newborn son and disposing of his body in a Comfort Inn motel Dumpster in Newark, Delaware. Joe Hurley was of the Melvin Belli–Gerry Spence school of lawyers, whose confidence knew no bounds. At his first press conference on the Fahey-Capano case, he announced, “I have arrived!” Despite his penchant for dramatic moments, Hurley was an excellent criminal defense attorney.
    T HE grand jury probe continued, and the investigation swept in wider and wider circles. Caught in the dust churned up were the private thoughts and deeds of people who had never known Anne Marie. On January 11, 1997, sixteen-year-old Christy Capano was found in contempt of court for her September refusal to answer questions about her father. The Third District U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals opinion was a landmark decision, which decreed that, unlike spouses, children and parents could be forced to testify against each other in criminal proceedings.
    Louie Capano’s marriage to champion golfer Lauri Merton had occasionally hit rocky shoals; like the other Capano brothers, Louie was said to have a roving eye. But were it not for Tom’s grand jury investigation, Louie and Lauri’s problems would probably have gone unnoticed by everyone but their close friends. However, Lauri had become suspicious of what her husband might be up to when she was away, and she had bugged Louie’s phone. Now the investigators wanted to know what conversations between Tom and Louie she might have inadvertently recorded. She refused to surrender the tapes, citing the marital privilege, and was held in contempt of court.
    On March 26, Lauri’s attorneys asked to have her citation overturned. On April 24, the Third District Court of Appeals declared that Lauri did not have to give the grand jury her tapes but said she would remain in contempt until she testified. What Lauri testified to, if anything, could not be revealed. There was no privacy for anyone involved with Tom; reporters noted that Louie’s blond friend, Kristi Pepper, drove away from the hearings in a car that was registered to him.
    Tom’s health deteriorated as the grand jury investigation lumbered on. He had a cervical laminectomy to stabilize the vertebrae in his neck in January 1997, but he complained of residual pain. And the stress of the investigation aggravated his colitis. He had been seeing Dr. Joseph Bryer, a psychiatrist, for a feeling of impending disaster since August and was prescribed various antianxiety medications—Wellbutrin, Paxil, and Xanax—in an effort to calm his nerves.
    P ROVING the crime of murder when there is no body is probably the toughest assignment a prosecution team can take on. It was essential that Colm Connolly build a seamless case. He could not cave in to public pressure to make an arrest. If he should go into court prematurely and a defendant was acquitted, double jeopardy would attach and he could never be tried again. Any defense attorney worth his salt would suggest to a jury that Anne