...And Never Let HerGo

from his direct testimony; he didn’t recall some of the statements he had made. But he insisted that Anne Marie hadn’t been afraid of the wild woman waving a gun.
    Connolly began to ask questions about where the gun was when Debby allegedly began to lift it. Its position, its angle? Where was it pointed?
    Tom struggled to keep up with Connolly’s questions. “The gun started to move,” he said, “and as I said, my belief was that if the movement had been allowed to continue, it would have gone to her head in this fashion—” He gestured.
    “So you reached out with your right arm to stop this?”
    “Yes.”
    “What did you grab?”
    “I grabbed her wrist so that I could keep it from going any further.”
    “How high was the gun?”
    “Probably hip high, what somebody might call shooting position.”
    For every answer Tom gave, Connolly had three or four more questions. Tom said he had pushed the gun down toward the floor.
    “So how far away are you from Anne Marie Fahey at this point?”
    “Almost touching. I’m at the end of the love seat and Annie is still sitting there. I guess she had finished putting her panty hose on—which is something she
absolutely
would have done anytime. And at that point, I believe she was putting her shoes on.”
    “What color shoes were these?” Connolly asked and unwittingly opened up a rambling monologue from Tom about the green shoes he had bought Anne Marie in Philadelphia. But his babble was only diversionary. To those familiar with trajectory, it was unlikely that a gun pointed down at the floor could have been fired diagonally up, fatally wounding Anne Marie in the head and leaving a bloody circle on the top of the love seat.
    Perhaps realizing this, Tom hastened to say that Anne Marie had not bent over to put on her shoes. He said she had her feet on the floor and was sliding them into her shoes, using only one finger. But after several more questions, he was not able to recall just how Anne Marie had managed this contortionistic feat.
    Connolly tried again. “Could you describe what you saw in terms of her putting her shoes on?”
    “I saw her sitting on the love seat,” Tom began. “The shoes were in front of her. You’ve asked me if I remember her bending over. This is not something I thought of before. She certainly was not bent over in a very extreme position.”
    “OK,” Connolly said finally. “Can you tell us where her head was positioned as she put her shoes on?”
    “Straight up.”
    “Straight up above the top of the couch?”
    “No. Maybe just the very top of her head was above the head of the love seat.”
    Anne Marie was five foot ten inches tall, and yet Tom said her head had been below the back of the love seat.
    Tom described once more his recall of the moment Anne Marie died. After the shot sounded, he said, “the first thing I did was look at Debby in a state of complete shock and bewilderment. Debby looked at me the same way. And I know we exchanged a few words and then all of a sudden: shock. I mean, I turned to see because Anne Marie wasn’t saying anything. She wasn’t yelling or screaming—so I turned around and . . . I saw she had been hit.”
    “OK,” Connolly said quietly. “Where had she been hit?”
    “As I said before, the right side of her head, behind the ear.”
    “How close was it to her ear?”
    “I can’t tell.”
    “How many inches?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You can’t give us an estimate of how many inches away from her ear?”
    Tom paused for a long time. “I didn’t measure it, Mr. Connolly.”
    “How many inches down from the top of her head . . . ?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Could you estimate?”
    “I’m not allowed to do that.”
    “Was it three inches from the top of her head?”
    “It may have been.”
    Connolly realized full well that this testimony about wounds and blood was painful for Anne Marie’s family, but he also knew they wanted to get at the truth about their sister’s death. More important, he was aware that as a former prosecutor, Tom knew all about bullet wounds.
    Tom hedged continually now, refusing to give Connolly any specifics. He would not say how much blood there had been, citingthe low light in the room. There had been some blood in Anne Marie’s hair, on the carpet, on the love seat. Not a lot. He couldn’t begin to estimate how much. He said Anne Marie’s eyes had been open and her mouth closed as he began to give her CPR. He had shone a flashlight