...And Never Let HerGo

completely secret day? Receipts, phone bills, minutiae had caught him as accurately as if a candid camera had literally been following him around.
    “They head off to Stone Harbor. Nine-twenty-seven A.M. , they’re en route,” Wharton continued. “The bill for Tom’s portable phone reflects a call from outside of Delaware. And somewhere around 10:25 A.M. , they arrive at Gerry’s house in Stone Harbor.”
    The jurors, who had just seen Gerry’s huge house in Wilmington, blinked slightly as Wharton pointed to the photo of another half-million-dollar house, at the shore.
    “One of the first things the defendant does when they get to Stone Harbor is get on Gerry’s phone,” Wharton said. “He calls Debby MacIntyre on her line at Tatnall School at 10:31. It’s only a minute conversation. He also calls Kay Capano’s house at virtually the same time.”
    Tom and Gerry bought gas at a marina in Stone Harbor from a young woman who recognized Gerry. They paid $138.86 cash. Because it was cash there was no receipt with a time on it, but the next charge on that Friday morning was at 11:33. “So about this time is when Tom and Gerry head out to sea on Gerry’s boat.” Wharton tapped on the picture of a boat, the
Summer Wind,
which had carriedAnne Marie’s body in the cooler. “Gerry Capano follows the sun. And he heads out sixty miles or so and he notices that the depth gauge is about 190 feet. And they throw Anne Marie Fahey in her coffin off the boat. But it doesn’t sink. Even wrapped in chains, it doesn’t sink.
    “So to get that cooler to sink, Gerry takes out a shotgun that he keeps on the boat, which he uses for sharks, puts a slug in it—not buckshot, but a slug—and shoots the cooler. It let water come in so that it will sink.
    “Still doesn’t sink.”
    Anne Marie’s brothers and sister knew what had happened to her, but the retelling was agonizing for them. And the jurors’ faces mirrored—what? Shock? Horror?
    “Gerry brings the boat around,” Wharton continued, “to the side of the cooler, and they bring it in to the side. And Gerry’s had enough at this point. This is wrong. This is
wrong,
and he goes to the front of the boat and looks away as his brother wrestles with the cooler, wrestles with the chains. He gives him an anchor—two anchors—and the defendant wraps the chains and the anchors around the body of Anne Marie Fahey, which is now taken out of the cooler, and Gerry turns around to see a foot, a part of a calf, sinking into the ocean.”
    Wharton then told the jury of how the cooler had been disassembled, the lid thrown into the ocean one way and the main portion, marred now with two holes from the slug, another.
    The two men were back in Stone Harbor by 3:30 P.M. , when Tom made another call, Wharton told the jury.
    Then they returned to the Grant Avenue house, where the two brothers dismantled the couch in the great room, with its “basketball-sized” bloodstain at shoulder height on the right side. Pointing again to his timeline chart, Wharton said, “This location is 105 Foulke Road. There’s a project being conducted there. Louis Capano’s business was renovating some of the buildings there. And they had these large Dumpsters—they’re almost the size of railroad cars. They throw the couch into one of those Dumpsters and Gerry leaves.
    “But Tom Capano’s not done yet,” Wharton said. “He still has Kay’s car. A little after six-eleven, he fills it up with gas at Deerhurst Exxon—$54.85 worth. Returns to Kay’s, spends some time with his kids, goes home—goes to Debby MacIntyre’s house and basically crashes at eleven o’clock. But he’s not done yet. He’s not done cleaning up. He’s not done covering up what he had done on June twenty-seventh,because on June twenty-ninth—the next day after the trip to Stone Harbor to dispose of Anne Marie Fahey—he buys a new carpet at Air Base Carpet. And the day after that, he buys stain remover at Happy Harry’s.”
    Wharton now had a more difficult task. He had to try to tell the jury who Anne Marie Fahey had been. To sum up a life in half an hour, to explain why a beautiful young woman had fallen in love with a married man seventeen years older, wouldn’t be easy. He could only give the jurors the facts and impressions he had gleaned, to describe her transcendent beauty and her vast capacity for love. If he had been able to bring her back just for a moment to stand before the jury, he would have. But