...And Never Let HerGo

said, managing to interrupt Tom’s aimless flow of words, “you’ve just been
betrayed
by a woman you’ve been protecting for two years—”
    “A woman I’m in love with,” Tom declared.
    “Would you not, at that point,” Oteri persisted, “go on a rooftop and scream, ‘I’m taking the fall for something she did’?”
    “. . . I was basically out of my mind for a couple of weeks and not thinking rationally,” Tom explained. “There were issues with changing attorneys and my mental status and condition. That’s when they really had to jack the drugs up. . . . I was just going to be looking to put together a final legal team and follow the advice of the four chiefs.”
    “Which was to trust the jury?” Oteri added quickly.
    Tom explained that he had gone out of his mind in Gander Hill after he learned that Debby had betrayed him. He had become suicidal. “I was operating on about half my cylinders. I was confused. I was not thinking clearly. Solitary confinement has a significant effect on people. I learned,” he said bleakly, “that the woman I loved and had been protecting had turned on me and stabbed me in the back, betraying me.”
    Tom’s expression was pitiful as he said he had never betrayed Debby; he had torn
her
letters to bits and flushed them down the toilet to protect her. He was “crushed” when he learned of her betrayal, full of various medications, vulnerable, and he had allowed himself to listen to Nick Perillo when he “suggested that I do something to get revenge.
    “He brought it up,” Tom told the jury. “He played on the anger phase of it and told me that his profession was burglary and that I should allow him to either burglarize it himself or arrange a burglary of her house. And my brain was like mush then. . . .”
    “And what happened after he made this suggestion?”
    “It preyed on my mind,” Tom said. “He kept bringing it up. At first, I was totally nonresponsive, and at one point I did succumb to it. I let my anger and frustration and hurt get the best of me and I agreed with him to do it.”
    Tom said that Perillo had asked for directions and an outline of the house. He admitted drawing the plans but he said they had taken him no more than twenty minutes to scribble down. Because he wasso hurt by Debby’s betrayal, he had added the two very personal requests about the mirror and sex toys in her bedroom.
    Tom insisted he had changed his mind a few days later and asked Perillo to give the diagrams back. But he never saw them again—not until they appeared in this courtroom. He said that Perillo had agreed with him when he decided against the burglary. “He said, ‘This is something you should not do,’ ” Tom recalled. “But he never gave them back to me because he told me he had seen someone he thought was an investigator enter my cell and he panicked and tore them up and flushed them down the toilet.”
    J UDGE L EE closed court at 4 P.M. on December 23. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “We will be back here next Tuesday.”
    A ND when court reconvened, the jurors, who had been sitting with inscrutable faces, would have to make at least two major decisions. Was Tom Capano innocent, or guilty, of killing Anne Marie Fahey? And if they should find him guilty, should they recommend to Judge Lee that he receive the death penalty?
    Outside the thick stone walls of the old courthouse, there were Christmas lights in the trees of Rodney Square and streaks of snow. But there was no sign of Christmas in Courtroom 302.

Chapter Forty-four
    T OM HAD A STUBBLY BEARD on December 29—and not by choice; he explained to Joe Oteri that Gander Hill had run out of razors.
    That day, Oteri finished up the last of his direct examination with a question that demanded an explicit answer. “Tom, did you kill Anne Marie Fahey?”
    “No!” Tom said dramatically. “A thousand times,
no.”
    “Thank you,” Oteri said. “Nothing further.”
    “I loved Anne Marie Fahey,” Tom called after him.
    “Nothing further.”
    A LTHOUGH Ferris Wharton would have leapt at the opportunity to cross-examine Tom Capano, there had been no question about whoshould do it. Wharton willingly stepped aside because it had to be Colm Connolly. Tom had despised the assistant U.S. attorney going into the trial, and Connolly had done nothing to endear himself to the defendant. Each day when he greeted Judge Lee, the jury, and the defense attorneys, Connolly never once acknowledged Tom. It