...And Never Let HerGo

mile.”
    “Weren’t you afraid if you fired a shotgun you might draw attention to yourself?”
    “No—people are always firing guns out there trying to kill sharks, catch a big shark,” Gerry said. “You have to kill it before you can bring it in the boat.”
    It was clearly a different world sixty-five miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, a world where Anne Marie Fahey never belonged. In the early afternoon of Friday, June 28, 1996, at the hour when Tom Capano was weighting her body down and lowering it into the choppy sea, she had planned to be sitting in the cool green of Valley Garden Park reading a book.
    As gruesome as it was, Gerry’s testimony was not really a surprise. Joe Oteri had already conceded that Tom had dumped Anne Marie’s body in the ocean, but no one knew what had happened late on the night she died. There had been no further mention of the “accident” that killed her.
    G ERRY C APANO had just begun his ordeal on the witness stand.
    “Who drove home [to Wilmington]?” Connolly asked him.
    “Tommy did.”
    “And on the way, did he ask you anything?”
    “He told me what to say if I was ever questioned.”
    “What did he tell you to say?” Connolly pressed.
    “That he had met me in the morning at my house to talk about a property my mother was giving him and myself, and that I left and went to the beach. And then that he left and went over to my brother Louie’s house to talk to Louis about the property, and then he met me down to the beach later and we had lunch down at the beach. And then I think it was—we went and walked a new piece of property that I was buying down there—or had already bought—and he either said he was going over to my sister’s in Stone Harbor or my mother’s in Stone Harbor. But, you know, I left first.”
    In fact, the two men returned to Wilmington, and in response to Connolly’s questions, Gerry described to the jury how he had helped Tom get rid of the bloodstained couch. “It had a stain on it,” Gerryrecalled. “On the right, if you were sitting on it, on the right side about shoulder height. It was about the size of a basketball.”
    “What did you do with the couch?”
    “We carried it out the double doors of that room and down the steps, which would be in the front of the house, and around to the garage. And at that point, I cut the stained piece out of it and tried to break the couch up so it looked like it was just an old broken couch, and we threw it in the Dumpster.”
    Gerry testified that he couldn’t see the color of the stain on the maroon upholstery, but when he cut into the couch with his pocketknife, he saw “something red” on the foam underneath.
    W HEN it became apparent that Tom was under suspicion in Anne Marie’s disappearance, Gerry had met with Dan Lyons, an attorney that Tom had recommended. It was two months after Anne Marie vanished. Gerry testified that Tom had instructed him to tell Lyons the “same thing we talked about in the car coming home.”
    “Did you make a record of what he told you?” Connolly asked.
    “I did.”
    “What did you write it on?”
    “A yellow postee [Post-it].”
    “What did you do with the yellow Post-it?”
    “Stuck it in my checkbook and it stayed there.”
    “Now, Mr. Capano,” Connolly asked, “would you read what you wrote down in your note as a result of the conversation with your brother, please?”
    “We were at my house at 5:45. Wanted to talk about Capano investments. I went to work. Then met you at your house about seven-thirty, eight. We talked. I left for the beach. Did my thing, saw you around elevenish. We talked again because you saw Louie. Then I left. You stayed. I met you at your house around five to help move a love seat. It looked old. That’s all. Helped you throw it in the Dumpster. Then I left. That’s what I’m telling Dan Lyons on Friday.”
    Gerry said he’d lied to his own attorney at first and only later told him the truth.
    “When did you tell him the last part of the story—about your brother asking you, if he hurt somebody, could he use the boat?”
    “Before I went and took the lie detector test—”
    Gerry realized instantly that he had said the one thing he had been warned not to say. Neither side wanted him to mention the polygraph test. His face crumpled and he buried it in his hands, muttering, “I’m sorry—I’m sorry.”
    Oteri turned white and Tom clenched his jaw.
    Case law in Delaware Superior Court provides that