...And Never Let HerGo

extortionist, Tom appeared baffled.
    All he could think of by way of explanation was that Gerry was a “wiseguy wannabe. He’s the one,” Tom said, “showing off in his drunken state [about] his acquaintances from the strip joint in Philadelphia—the Doll House. [They] once mentioned to him that they might ask him to make use of the boat. Actually, I think he said it in front of Joey, as well. We, of course, thought it meant in connection with a drug transaction.”
    Tom was horrified at the suggestion that he would have involved Gerry in any murder plan. “I never, never—I wouldn’t do that to my brother!”
    Debby had called him early Friday morning, Tom said, asking him what he was going to do about Anne Marie’s body. “I told her I wasn’t certain,” he testified. “Again, I wanted to shield her from knowledge in the case.” But he had agreed to meet her at the Tower Hill track.
    The state’s case against Tom was so confining that, to show he was telling the truth, he would have to wedge into his scenario dozens of times and other details to fit. He couldn’t ignore the evidence of his phone calls, his use of Kay’s Suburban, the picture at the ATM, or many other inflexible elements of the case against him. Hesaid he happened to have a chain around his house left over from the snowy winter of 1996. He had the padlock because his locker at the Wilmington Country Club had been broken into. At one point, he said, he had slipped the Beretta into the cooler and sealed it with the chain. Once again, Tom testified that he was much too weak to lift it—so Gerry had helped him put it in the back of Kay’s Suburban. Their tasks accomplished in Wilmington, Tom said, he and Gerry had headed for Stone Harbor with Tom at the wheel, driving at his customary fast clip.
    Throughout his testimony, Tom had chided Joe Oteri for calling him “sir,” and now, in the midst of statements that were chilling even in that stifling hot courtroom, he smiled boyishly at Oteri when asked, “Would you say, sir, that you were disorganized and panicky?”
    “If you call me ‘Tom,’ I will.”
    “Tom,”
Oteri said through gritted teeth, “would you say that you were disorganized and panicky?”
    Seeming to luxuriate in his own words, Tom said, “I was disorganized trying to be organized. I’m not sure ‘panicky’ was the right word at that point. I was trying to focus, and as I said, trying to compartmentalize and just concentrate on the immediate task at hand and not let myself think or feel.”
    To protect his brother, Tom said, he had refused to tell Gerry anything, despite his “newsy” questions on the hour-and-a-half trip to the Jersey shore. Tom’s testimony regarding the disposal of Anne Marie’s body scarcely differed from Gerry’s, although he said he didn’t believe Gerry could have seen an ankle disappearing into the water. Tom spoke of how seasick he had been. The trip out on the rough sea had been tough on him. But he had persevered throughout the day. And it was a very long day, which included disposing of the couch in a Dumpster at one of Louie’s construction sites. The last thing he’d had to do to cover up Anne Marie’s death was cut up the bloodied carpet, stuff the pieces into garbage bags, and dispose of them in a Dumpster outside the Capanos’ Holiday Inn, just across the bridge in New Jersey. (Later, of course, Tom had had to remind both Louie and the motel manager to have their Dumpsters emptied early.)
    With all that accomplished, Tom said, he had gone to Kay’s house to spend the evening with his girls. “I saw them twice every day,” he said fondly. “The kids wanted pizza and to have me watch a video with them.” He couldn’t remember what movie they had seen because he fell asleep.
    Whenever Tom spoke of his children, he smiled expansively, and he seemed never to miss an opportunity to explain what a perfect father he was, how much his daughters adored him, and how he cherished them. This was, perhaps, not an act; Tom appeared to see himself as the ideal family man. And yet he felt no compunction—and never had, apparently—about betraying his wife. Tom testified he had left his girls that Friday night to drive the few blocks to Debby’s house. Twenty hours after Anne Marie had died of a bullet wound in her head and he had disposed of her body, he slipped into a dreamless sleep in the bed of the woman he claimed had shot her.
    In an aside, Tom testified that he had