...And Never Let HerGo

Tom’s daughter Katie to Gander Hill for visiting hours.
    Tom knew that Shopa lived only a few houses down Delaware Avenue from Debby, and he asked him to intercede with her. “He wanted me to find out if she still loved him, and why she wasn’t writing to him,” Shopa would recall. “And if she wasn’t going to continue writing to him, would she return the letters that he sent her?”
    Following Tom’s instructions, Shopa called Debby and asked her if she still loved Tom. “She said, ‘I love him very much,’ and used the word ‘soulmate’ in describing their relationship,” Shopa recounted.
    Shopa reported that information in another visit to Tom, and explained that Debby could not write to him because of an addendum to an agreement with the state. Nor could she return his letters, because they had been turned over to the state as evidence.
    Tom said that he was concerned about Debby—she needed a shoulder to cry on, and he wasn’t able to be there for her. And then he asked his old friend for a bizarre favor. “He felt,” Shopa said with embarrassment, “that she was
needy,
and he wanted me to take care of her, to kind of be there to help her, to be strong for her . . . and—and—also to have—a physical relationship with her, to sleep with her.”
    Shopa was shocked. Never in a million years had he expected his old friend to suggest something like that. He was too appalled, in fact, to say much at the time. But the idea was upsetting and inappropriate. Why would Tom ask him to do such a thing?
    Tom apparently didn’t hear the shock in Shopa’s voice. Two days later, on March 31, he reached out from his cell with his pen once more. This time his target was, perhaps, the most vulnerable of all. He wrote an eight-page letter to fifteen-year-old Steve Williams, Debby’s son.
    Ever since September 1995, Steve had come to think a lot of Tom. Tom had been a great pal. His arrest and the publicity surrounding it had been hard for Steve. Tom’s letter to him was written in a warm, man-to-man style and it was totally confusing, designed to open barely healed emotional wounds. Tom assured Steve he would be out of prison by Thanksgiving, “for sure,” and that heplanned to take Debby to Provence and Tuscany for a month or two. He spoke of his daughters, Christy, Katie, Jenny, and Alex, mentioned the boys they were dating and the trips they were taking—to Jamaica, Boca Raton, and Disney World.
    And then Tom moved smoothly into what his life in Gander Hill was like. “Besides the pain of being separated from my kids,” he wrote, “I suffer from being held in solitary confinement—supposedly for my own protection, although I know that’s bullshit and it’s part of a plan to break me.”
    From there, Tom went on to an intimate discussion of his long affair with Steve’s mother. “I should have listened to your mother many years ago when she urged me to follow my heart and not hide our relationship or limit it to certain times. . . . At the very least, I would not now be in this predicament.”
    Writing, still, to a fifteen-year-old boy, Tom held back little. “Your Mom has made nothing but bad decisions since January 28th which have hurt me more than anything I’ve ever experienced. I’ll let her tell you if you want to know and she wants to tell you. Despite the tragic choices she has made—which I mostly blame on others—I cannot stop loving her.”
    Tom told Steve he blamed his father and his mother’s “unethical lawyer” for frightening and confusing Debby. He assured Steve that he loved him like a son, and had since he was a baby for a “special reason.”
    (Tom was
not
Steve’s father, it that’s what he was implying, and there was absolute scientific proof of that fact, but perhaps he thought such a suggestion would strengthen his hold over Debby.)
    He asked the boy to be stronger than his mother had been and to keep his letter private. And then Tom got around to what probably was the main reason for the letter.
    First, give your mom a long, hard hug, tell her it’s from me and that I love her, miss her, and need her very much. Second, tell her I am 1000% certain
your
phones are not tapped unless she gave them permission, and that I’d still like to call on
your
line. I need the number. Third, tell her to be extremely nice to Tom Shopa because he has what she needs and can be trusted to be very private and is definitely interested in helping her take care of it but is too