...And Never Let HerGo
cooler?”
“There was a chain wrapped around the cooler.” Gerry added that the chain looked new and had a lock on it.
Gerry said that he and Tom had taken the cooler to his house in Stone Harbor, and from there onto his fishing boat,
Summer Wind.
He remembered that it was very heavy and he heard ice rattling inside it. A Styrofoam cooler wouldn’t have attracted much attention at the shore; many fishermen used such coolers to keep fish on ice.
And then Gerry said he had steered the boat out into the Atlantic Ocean.
“About how far out?” Connolly asked.
“I would say about seventy miles. Somewhere between sixty and seventy-five miles. I would have to look at the chart.”
“How deep was the water there?”
“Hundred and ninety-eight feet.”
“What did your brother do?”
“Lifted the cooler up and put it in the water.”
“Did the cooler sink?”
“No.”
“What did you do with it—because it wouldn’t sink?”
“Took my shark gun out and shot it once with a deer slug, and it still wouldn’t sink.”
“What did your brother do then?”
“I maneuvered the boat back to where the cooler was floating.”
“Did you help your brother move it next to the boat?”
Gerry firmly said no. He had turned the boat’s motor off and told Tom he was on his own. Then he had walked to the front of theboat, given Tom two anchors, and turned his back on what was happening so that he didn’t have to watch.
“I was telling him this was really wrong,” Gerry offered.
“But were you able to determine what he was doing by the sounds?” Connolly asked.
“Yes . . . seems to me like he was opening up the cooler, fighting with the rope [chain] and the tide—and throwing up—and tying the anchors to something.”
“Did you eventually turn around?”
“When I asked him if he was finished.”
“And then you turned around and what did you see?”
“I saw a foot sinking into the deep.”
“And it was a human foot?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see anything besides the foot?”
“Only a little bit, a little bit of calf.”
“Did you see any blood?”
“A little blood coming out of the cooler.”
“Did you know what was in the cooler?”
“I assumed what was in it.”
“What did you assume?”
“I assumed it was one of these persons who had threatened to hurt his kids.”
Everyone in the room, including Gerry Capano, knew now who had been in that cooler, but no one said it aloud.
Gerry said that he and Tom had taken the cooler apart while they were out in the ocean. They had thrown the top and bottom into the sea separately as they cruised back to Stone Harbor, and then drove back to Wilmington.
There, Tom had asked Gerry to help him move a sofa, a dark maroon sofa that was in the great room.
“Was there blood on the sofa?”
“There was a stain—he [Tom] said he had cleaned it. I said, ‘You better cut a piece out of it before you throw the sofa away.’ ”
Then they broke an arm off the sofa so it would look damaged enough to be discarded. They could see there was blood on the foam beneath, but they found very little had penetrated.
“Where was the blood on the couch?”
“On the top right-hand side, [about where somebody’s] shoulder would be.”
And then they had put the damaged sofa in Kay’s Suburban andtaken it to the Dumpster at Capano & Sons. All that remained at Tom’s house of whatever had happened was the rolled-up carpet in the garage. Gerry had seen only the outside of that; he couldn’t tell them what color it was or if there were bloodstains on it.
Gerry said Tom had given him a story to tell if he was ever questioned. Once he left Tom, he wrote it down on a Post-it and stuck it in his wallet so he would remember, but in the end, he hadn’t used it. He was telling the truth.
T HE moment that Gerry Capano confessed that Tom had dumped a cooler in the Atlantic Ocean, Eric Alpert and Bob Donovan remembered an item on Tom’s credit card bill. They had seen it when they were poring over the bills looking for charges that might be relevant. But it didn’t seem particularly important that Tom had bought a Styrofoam cooler at the Sports Authority on Saturday afternoon, April 20, at 3:15, using his MasterCard. It was an Igloo 162-quart marine cooler and it cost $194.84 with tax. At the time, they knew Tom had no boat.
“I think it didn’t mean too much then,” Alpert recalled, “because we were looking for items around June twenty-seventh—and
Weitere Kostenlose Bücher