...And Never Let HerGo

help?
    Debby testified that when she called Tom at 6:45 the next morning, he told her he no longer needed her help. And of course, he didn’t; by that time he had Gerry lined up with his boat.
    For Debby, that Friday had been an ordinary day; she had no idea her world was beginning to crash. She saw Tom at the track and he told her he planned to play golf later in the day. Then he called her at work sometime after ten. She didn’t know he was calling from Stone Harbor; he sounded relaxed as he said, “I’m still trying to get a golf game together,” and promised to be with her by nine that evening.
    Wharton produced a copy of Debby’s day-planner for June 28, 1996. “What did you have planned that day?” he asked.
    “Well,” she said, “I got the paychecks out in the morning.” She had gone in at six, an hour early, because she thought that Tom needed her. “At eleven I had a meeting with the parent of a pre-camper, a little boy three or four years old.”
    “What’s at 3:45?”
    “I took my son to the dermatologist.”
    “Do you recall what else you did that day?”
    “I probably took prescriptions from the dermatologist to the drugstore—Happy Harry’s.”
    Debby testified she had stayed home that Friday evening, waiting for Tom—but he wasn’t on time and she went to bed.
    “Did he arrive?”
    “About eleven, anywhere from eleven to eleven-thirty. He walked upstairs to my room.”
    “Did he have a key to your house?”
    “Yes, he did.”
    Tom had also known the combination to the alarm system, something the state was now fully aware of. His eyes never left Debby’s face as she testified.
    “What happened when he came up to your bedroom?”
    “He just said, ‘I’m sorry I’m late—fell asleep in front of the TV with the kids. Can I stay?’ ”
    “What did you say?”
    “I said yes.”
    Debby recalled that Tom had fallen asleep immediately after he crawled into her bed. He was still there Saturday morning and she noted that, for some reason, he had been driving Kay’s blue Suburban. It was parked in her driveway.
    Tom had left to do some errands Saturday afternoon, she said, and she didn’t see him until about one on Sunday afternoon. “He just came over unannounced and walked into my house and was very upset, with his head in his hands,” Debby said. “I could see he was visibly shaken. He said, ‘I feel like I’ve been set up; somebody has set me up.’ ”
    “Did you ask him what he was talking about?”
    “He said, ‘I can’t tell you—not yet.’ ”
    Tom was sitting in the wing chair in her living room while she knelt in front of him in concern. He would tell her only that the police had come to his house at three in the morning. In five minutes, he was gone.
    But Tom had come back shortly and called her out to his car. “He gave me a bag with three adult movies in it,” she testified. “He said, ‘Hang on to these; it would be embarrassing if somebody found these.’ ”
    “How long was he there that time?” Wharton asked.
    “Sixty seconds.”
    And, Debby testified, Tom had come over for a third time on Sunday afternoon—but only for five minutes. “He said that the police had come back to his house again and that he had to pack up his children and take them back to their house and then go back to the Grand Avenue house, and they searched it again.”
    “Do you know whether he made any phone calls from your house at that time?”
    “Yes,” Debby said. “He asked to use the phone.”
    Wharton entered Debby’s phone bill for June 1996 into evidence. It showed that someone had made three phone calls to New Jersey that afternoon and evening—one to the Holiday Inn in Penns Grove, the motel the Capanos owned, and the others to the motel manager’s home.
    “Did you make those phone calls?”
    “No.”
    Debby had been pleasantly surprised when Tom asked her to spend that Sunday night with him at his house. He had her drive into the garage and walk up the stairs to the great room. Although she had been worried about him, he told her nothing about why the police had come to his house twice. Indeed, it wasn’t until Tom had called her on Tuesday, she said, that she knew he was the last person to have been seen with a woman whose name she had never heard: Anne Marie Fahey.
    Debby told the jury that she had been shaken to realize that Tom had apparently been seeing Anne Marie for “about three years.”
    “During that time,” Wharton asked, “in 1993