...And Never Let HerGo

codefendant currently incarcerated at Gander Hill and I was afraid for my life and wanted protective custody. I knew they would give me a cell and a bed and I wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor.”
    Unlike Tom, Perillo was delighted to get his own cell in the 1-F pod. He drew Cell 2, identical to Tom’s and right next to it.
    Perillo read the papers; he knew who Tom Capano was, but he didn’t realize that Tom was in the 1-F pod until he heard the other prisoners yelling at him when he was taking his hour of rec. Curious, he went to the doorway of his cell and saw Tom in the hall.
    Even though the prisoners in segregation were discouraged from talking to one another, there were ways. During meals, the flaps at the bottom of their cell doors were opened and they could hunker down on the floor and talk back and forth. Men who were out for rec could slide notes under cell doors and receive notes the same way. If the guards had stepped away from the bubble, they could even cross the painted red lines.
    There is no place that challenges its residents to beat the system more than a jail or a prison; rules there cry out to be broken. And all humans need to communicate. Perillo and Tom were both Italian and of an age. They became acquainted despite the restrictive environment, trading life stories and books. Nick could match Tom for charm anyday, and for intelligence. After the two men got to know each other, he told Tom he would get his brother’s autograph for Tom’s girls.
    Perillo had pretty much run out of people on the outside who trusted him, so he didn’t use all of his telephone time. And he was down to his last twenty cents in his commissary account. In his real life, Tom had used the phone continually, checking on his daughters and his lovers several times a day. Now the fact that he was permittedonly a certain number of calls rankled him. He desperately needed to find a way to circumvent the phone system.
    All phone calls from Gander Hill had to be collect, of course, and the inmates got access to the outgoing phone lines by punching in their prisoner identification number (SBI) first, and then dialing numbers from an approved list. Tom’s list was soon full, but other prisoners, like Nick Perillo—and Harry Fusco, a man waiting trial on sex offenses—had phone time they never used. Perillo explained the ways that he and other prisoners could make calls for Tom. Tom had family, friends,
and
money; many of his pod mates had neither.
    Tom rapidly got himself into a position where he had more control over his life, and also the lives of people on the outside whom he felt needed direction. If he wanted more phone calls, he now had a way to make them. He could have Kay send checks to the commissary accounts of some of his new friends.
    I RONICALLY , Debby MacIntyre felt that she and Tom had had their best times together in the months just before his arrest. “We saw each other practically every day,” she recalled. “He would come over to the house—just stop in—almost every night. Maybe one evening or two he wouldn’t come because he was doing something with his office friends.”
    Debby had been serene in the knowledge that they would be married before another year passed. She was scarcely aware that the investigation into Anne Marie Fahey’s murder was continuing and was still focused on Tom. “I knew he didn’t do it,” she said. “Later, they [the investigators] asked me, ‘Didn’t you even think that he was a suspect and she’s disappeared?’ and I said, ‘No.’ Because I believed that she had gone off—as Tom told me—that she’d gone off the deep end and joined some cult in Colorado or someplace. He told me that he had ended his relationship with Anne Marie in September of 1995 when we decided we would get married one day. It wasn’t any part of our life. We never talked about it.”
    There was no proof, Tom had told her a long time back, that Anne Marie was even dead. If she was, no one knew where or how, he pointed out, and none of it had anything to do with him.
    But when Debby came home from Rome in late November, Tom was in jail. Even so, he convinced her that he would be out within a matter of weeks and that they would go on as they always had. Even from Gander Hill, Tom could control her life.
    Debby continued to suffer from an emotional reaction that many women share. Talk shows call it the “disease to please,”and those who suffer from it never feel good enough about