...And Never Let HerGo

Debby was saved from the worst of the media hoopla. There, for the moment, she could almost forget the way things were steadily growing worse at home. But she would have to come back to Wilmington and see the man she loved, the man who had pledged to marry her, diminished and locked away from her. She didn’t think she could bear it.
    J UST as there are said to be no atheists in foxholes, there are few professionals in law enforcement who will deny that they sometimes receive help from invisible allies, perhaps angels sent to earth to avenge the cruelest crimes. Only a day after Tom Capano was arrested, the Wilmington investigators would receive a piece of physical evidence that no law of probability could have predicted.
    “I think we worked awfully hard, yes,” Colm Connolly said, “but there were a lot of
lucky
things—or maybe divine things—that happened. At some point, you have to wonder . . .”
    On November 13, the media was filled with the details of Tom’s arrest and Gerry’s statement. Bob Donovan and Eric Alpert were sitting in Alpert’s office when a secretary told him there was someone calling about a cooler.
    “I watched Alpert pick up the phone,” Donovan recalled, “andall of a sudden his face changed, and he was frantically scribbling down notes.”
    “There was this guy on the phone,” Alpert elaborated. “I wasn’t too enthused when he said his friend had found a cooler in the ocean more than a year earlier. But then I asked him if there was anything distinctive about it. And he said that it didn’t have a lid when the guy found it. I motioned Donovan over at that point. And then the guy said, ‘Well, it has a bullet hole in it.’ That was all it took—Bob and I were out of the office and on our way.”
    If it was
the
cooler, it would be a miracle. After a year and a half, the cooler they needed for trial should have been in Cuba; given the tides, the wind, and a dozen different variables, there was simply no way that a cooler discarded 60 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean could ever have drifted to within a few miles of the Delaware shore. Alpert and Donovan didn’t really believe that it could be the same cooler. Even so, they nudged the speed limit as they headed south toward Smyrna, where the caller, Ron Smith, lived. Smith told the investigators that he had been reading newspaper coverage of Tom Capano’s arrest when something struck a chord in his memory. He said that a fellow fisherman named Ken Chubb, whom he knew from his summer place down on the Delaware Coast, had found something in the ocean.
    “I was working on my boat the day Chubb pulled in,” Smith continued. “He said, ‘Hey, take a look at this!’ and I said, ‘Take a look at
what?’
and he shows me this cooler he found.”
    Alpert and Donovan held their breaths when Smith said the cooler had no lid. And he and Chubb had agreed about the source of the holes that marred the back. “I said, ‘Yeah, they were bullet holes,’ ” Smith told them. “I hunt deer. I do target practice. I know what bullet holes look like. As a matter of fact, I stuck my finger in one. It was made by a twelve-gauge shotgun.”
    “When did this happen?” Alpert asked.
    Smith had perfect recall. But more important, he could validate times and dates. He had already called Chubb to ask when he’d found the cooler and learned it was during the Fourth of July weekend of 1996. By checking his own gas receipts, he was able to confirm the date when he’d first seen the cooler. That weekend was seven to ten days from the time Tom Capano had reportedly dumped Anne Marie’s body and the cooler far out at sea. The information about the bullet holes and the missing lid had never been in the newspapers. Smith drew Alpert and Donovan a map to KenChubb’s beach house. “The cooler’s there in his shed, behind his trailer. He knows you’re coming.”
    Ken Chubb had been fishing off Rehoboth Bay for ten years, and he told Alpert and Donovan he thought he’d made a lucky find a year and a half earlier when his son said, “I see something floating over there, Dad!”
    When he eased his boat over the white object, they found it was a cooler—missing a handle and its lid. “It had two bullet holes in it,” Chubb recalled. “And it sort of amazed us all. We were questioning, wondering why anybody would shoot it. Looked like a brand-new cooler.”
    “Did you notice anything on the inside of the cooler?” Alpert asked.
    “It had a