...And Never Let HerGo

Anne Marie’s family was there, too, to hear, for the first time, what Tom might say about their sister’s disappearance. There were new faces in the gallery, and some who had been there every day without fail. Emily Hensel and Kurt Zaller were the most constant court watchers—they had been first in line every morning since the first day.
    T HE court transcripts of Tom Capano talking about himself and blaming others for the crimes he was accused of would fill nine transcript books—books whose type had been reduced so that four pages could be printed on one. In person, he was a natural talker, very competent and in control. He had a wonderful voice, soft and reassuring, a voice that might have belonged to a movie star, a preacher, or a politician. He spoke directly to the jurors, giving themmore of his attention than he gave to Joe Oteri, who conducted the direct examination.
    Tom gave his life’s history, sparing no good deed he had done and emphasizing that he was not as wealthy as his brothers. In a sidebar, the state objected to an endless recitation of Tom’s benevolence and Oberly said it was only traditional character evidence. Connolly reminded the defense attorneys that if they “wanted to get in all the good stuff, we have to get in all the bad stuff.”
    At this point Judge Lee sided with the defense attorneys, but warned them, “At some stage before you canonize him, understand that there will come a time and place when the other side of Tom becomes an issue.”
    After he had finished telling about his work with the church, the poor, the elderly, and small children, Tom answered questions about his brother Gerry, pointing out that he was “an overgrown kid” who had been nice to Tom’s daughters. And it was perfectly natural that he had purchased a large cooler to say thank you to Gerry. He had put the cooler in the crawl space under his house, however, waiting for the family Fourth of July party to give it to him.
    There was nothing new in Tom’s testimony; he stuck close to the scenario already presented by the defense, although he often wandered off into long, ponderous explanations. When he did that, he asked Oteri, “Am I rambling?” and explained that his medications had not kicked in or, conversely, had kicked in too much.
    When Tom spoke of Debby, it was to describe her as a woman who had virtually forced herself on him. “I wasn’t particularly interested in fooling around with somebody who—that if I did—could easily result in the loss of my job.”
    He was far from gallant. There was an audible
whoosh
from the gallery when he said, “Secondly, Debby was by far
not
the most attractive female of the group. . . . And, third, one of the things you learn playing high school football is there’s a phrase beginning with
B F.
[Buddy fucking.] You never do that,” Tom told the jury. “Her husband, Dave, wasn’t a friend of mine, but we worked together—you just never fool around with a friend’s lady.”
    But of course, he had.
    Tom’s testimony continued day after day, morning to late afternoon. After he had pointed out how duplicitous Debby MacIntyre was and that she was not to be believed, he began on Anne Marie Fahey. Tom made it a point to refer to Anne Marie, her family, and her friends by their first names, as if to show that he was intimately acquainted with all of them. And in a sense, he was; he had insinuatedhimself into her life, demanding to meet her friends and family, to know everything about them—just as he had made it a point to know everything about Anne Marie.
    It was four days before Christmas when Tom half smiled as he told the jury how well he had known Anne Marie and how much she had trusted him. “She told me all the deep dark secrets of the Fahey family. I know them all,” he confided. “Again—assuming she was telling me the truth. And one of my vanities is that I’m pretty good at keeping confidences. I don’t intend to talk about them. I didn’t intend to talk about them then and I don’t intend to talk about them now.”
    Almost immediately, Tom set about smearing Anne Marie’s image. “She was absolutely insistent [about telling of her personal background]. She told me she had a very wild period in her life when she was, in her own words, promiscuous. . . . She felt compelled to tell me that she had been so wild that she had been tested for AIDS. I was expecting some deep dark secret.” Tom chuckled.
    He continued to expose a dead