...And Never Let HerGo

22, 1997, the New Castle County grand jury made it absolutely official when Tom Capano was indicted on state charges for the first-degree murder of Anne Marie Fahey. He continued to be held without bail, and a bail hearing wasn’t even likely to be set until after the holidays.
    Two days before Christmas, Judge William Swain Lee of the Superior Court was appointed to the Capano case. Lee was much admired for his experience, brilliance, and common sense. Attorneys on both sides of the case were heartened. If anyone could maintain a sense of order and dignity in what would be the trial of the century in Delaware, it would be William Swain Lee.
    A LONE in his cell almost constantly, Tom evaluated his chances to get out on bail. He could count on his mother (although he worried that she would be a “crybaby and make a scene”), on his daughters, and to some extent on Kay—except that she was going ahead with the divorce. And he knew that Debby’s love for him was steadfast and completely dependable; as always, she would do whatever he directed.Debby’s testimony would never hurt him; she would say exactly what he told her to say. His sister, Marian, and her husband, Lee, were there for him, and his brother Joey. Louie and Gerry, of course, had betrayed him. But Tom had the best attorneys in the business. And he had a handful of male friends who would stand by him; he had been generous in helping some of them pay for houses or their kids’ education. There were other women, too, that he thought would come through in a pinch—Susan Louth, for one.
    Tom didn’t expect to be in Gander Hill for very long; they couldn’t hold him without bail endlessly. Delaware statute said that the prosecutors would have to hold a proof positive hearing to prove to a judge that they had a good case to take into court. Tom figured if they were basing it on Gerry’s babblings and what Louie knew, they might as well forget it.
    As for the state proving that he had stalked Anne Marie, there were dozens of E-mails, notes, and records that showed she had been his friend to the end. His attorneys would make short shrift of anyone who said otherwise.
    Tom was intelligent and he was great with people,
any
people who happened to move through his life—except, perhaps, for prison guards. He had always made his own rules, and now he railed against the rules at Gander Hill. He was not an easy prisoner to deal with.
    Among the prisoners who came to the 1-F pod was a man with far more experience as an inmate than Tom. Nicholas Perillo, forty-five, had a potent on-and-off addiction to both drugs and alcohol and a rap sheet that went back almost two decades. He was silver haired and very handsome, spoke in a gruff voice that sounded remarkably like Sylvester Stallone’s, and had a mother whose heart he had broken often and a brother who was a successful television actor, appearing on such shows as
ER.
Perillo was always looking for an angle. He was an admitted burglar, forger, and thief, but even so, he was exceedingly likable and he always
meant
to do better. Perillo was smart and he was con wise—but he wasn’t violent.
    By rights, Perillo probably should have long ago received the “big bitch”—thirty-four years and ninety days in prison as a habitual offender. But he had slipped out of that when a young woman attorney went to bat for him. While he was in prison in 1989, he married the attorney who had made the plea bargain for him and, because she had so much faith in him, vowed to mend his ways. It could have been a made-for-a-miniseries marriage, but when he was released in 1992, Nick slid back into the seductive world of drugsand alcohol. His marriage foundered, and he shattered any romantic illusions his wife might still have had when he burglarized her house.
    Perillo had been arrested often enough that Gander Hill was familiar to him. On his last sojourn, the prison was full to bursting and he had to sleep on a pallet on the floor of Booking and Receiving for three months. When he was charged with third-degree burglary after being found drunk and asleep in a vacant house next door to his mother’s in the fall of 1997, he knew he was going back to Gander Hill. But he had no intention of sleeping on the floor again.
    “When the officer told me to go get a mattress out of the corner and pointed me to a particular cell, there were six people laying on the floor,” he said later. “So I walked up to the desk and told them I had a