...And Never Let HerGo

to work for Governor Carper, tried to break up with Tom, and met Mike Scanlan. In the Capano family, Tom, Louie, and Joey all had October birthdays. Debby had divorced her husband in October. In later autumns, Tom had left Kay, proposed to Debby, and been arrested for murder. Thanksgiving had long since ceased to be a time of celebration for all of the principals in this case. But after a long sultry summer, perhaps it was fitting that Tom’s murder trial should begin in the bright coolness of October.
    The Daniel J. Herrmann Courthouse hunkered over an entire block of downtown Wilmington, only grudgingly giving up enough space on each front corner for two tall holly trees. Huge, gray stoned, with massive colonnades across the front, the courthouse looked as if it would last a century, although Wilmingtonians were already suggesting it was obsolete. The Wilmington library was kitty-corner across the street, the Hotel du Pont was straight across on the other side of Rodney Square. In October, the trees in thesquare still had leaves, but they changed color a little more with each chilly night.
    This trial above all trials attracted the curious like a magnet. The sidewalk and the wide steps in front of the courthouse drew passersby who all seemed to have an opinion, many speaking conspiratorially to anyone who would listen. “Thomas is a good man—he could not have done what they say.” “Ahh, the old man must be spinning in his grave today. His sons killed him, you know—to get at his money.” “It’s those women—they made him do it.” “That poor mother. To see it all come to
this.”
    When asked if they actually
knew
the principals, most of the rumor carriers shook their heads. But they felt qualified to judge—from what they’d read in the papers, or seen on television, or even heard in the neighborhood.
    Those who made it into the courtroom were extremely determined, or lucky—or privileged: family members of the victim and defendant, of course; the press; and those willing to rise before the sun and drive through the hazy dawn to wait in a serpentine line. Everyone had to pass through metal detectors before they could even move into the courthouse. The winding marble stairs to the third-floor courtroom, number 302, were smoothed and worn in the center of each step, testimony to the hundreds of thousands who had climbed there. Between the second and third floors, traffic would halt as people up ahead were checked for contraband.
    The rotunda at the top of the stairs was high and splendid. Bronze banisters kept the crowd back from the well that channeled upward through the two flights of curving stairs; the floor was marble. Three courtrooms with ornate portals reaching to the ceiling of the rotunda opened off the waiting area. It was a grand, if not economical, use of space.
    Kathi Carlozzi, a pretty woman in middle age and a secretary from the Superior Court, had been chosen to make the decisions about who would get in and who would not. The organizing of the press and the gallery in the Capano trial would be meticulous. Court employees had already been through a baptism of fire with the high-profile cases of Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson. Kathi would also keep track of the forbidden items: cell phones, cameras, recorders, and laptop computers. Regulars pasted their names on the phones and other gear; eventually, when court recesses ended too quickly, even half-empty cans of pop were labeled and left on the battered table in the rotunda area.
    The last step before access to the courtroom itself was grantedwas to hand over purses and briefcases before passing through another metal detector. Kathi was unfailingly pleasant, but immovable when she had to be.
    Courtroom 302 had an octagonal theme that was translated in its windows, wood trim, five hanging lamps, and wainscoting. The high ceiling was golden, molded in bas relief. Majestic as it was, the room’s acoustics were lousy, especially when the nine wooden benches on each side were packed with avid spectators whose whispers and murmurs bounced off the lofty walls. The courtroom was so long and narrow that those in the backseats seemed a football field away from the witnesses.
    Each day Kathi Carlozzi would usher the Faheys and Capanos in first, and, two warring families, they were separated by both an invisible boundary and a true one, the center aisle. The Capanos took up several of the forward rows on the left, and the Faheys sat on the