...And Never Let HerGo

in her eyes to see if she was dead.
    “I could tell the flashlight did not cause her eyes to be dilated,” he said.
    “It’s your testimony that during the entire twenty minutes [you worked on her], the rigidity of her body did not change, correct?”
    “Didn’t seem so to me,” Tom said. “I was mostly concentrating on trying to get air into her lungs and making sure her airway was not blocked.”
    The jurors had already heard Tom’s version of the sequence of events that followed that night, but Connolly went through all of it again, questioning Tom’s answers. Tom seemed more at ease now that he didn’t have to discuss the position of the gun, Debby’s hand, and Anne Marie on the love seat. Now that he didn’t have to speak of wounds and blood.
    Tom denied that he had taken the groceries and the box from Talbot’s to Anne Marie’s apartment to make it look as if he had left her at home at ten. It had just been a “ridiculous” thing to do, to go driving wildly through the streets of Wilmington with the gun beneath the seat of his car. Tom admitted to making the *69 phone call from her apartment. He said he had felt relieved to know that he could not be singled out as the last man to call her.
    C ONNOLLY had a pattern of taking Tom to the edge of an abyss and then deliberately changing direction, only to return later to the same spot with renewed intensity. Tom testified that forensic evidence would have had no importance in explaining Anne Marie’s death. “My statement would be more important—what I was prepared to tell the Wilmington Police” in July 1996.
    Wharton and Connolly had pored over the transcript of the complicated murder case Tom himself had prosecuted in the mid-seventies and now Connolly wound Tom’s own words around him. “You knew because of your involvement in the Squeaky Saunders case,” he said, “that forensic evidence is critical to determining the cause of death. Is that right?”
    “Actually no, you’re not right,” Tom corrected once again. “That case turned entirely on the testimony of people who said they were with him at the time of the murder.”
    “Well, do you recall [your] actually telling the jury in that casehow important forensic evidence was because the victim was shot three times?”
    “I don’t remember.” Tom watched Connolly as if he really were the snake he had so often called him.
    “Shot three times by three different people—do you remember that?”
    “Now I do, yes.”
    “And it was critical to your argument,” Connolly said, “to establish that Squeaky Saunders fired the first shot, the lethal shot?” Did Tom recall that?
    “No, I don’t,” Tom said. “But I take your word for it. You’ve obviously studied it.”
    “. . . and do you recall testimony that established the trajectory of bullets critical to deciding who fired the first shot?”
    “I don’t remember that.” Tom looked uncomfortable. “It’s 1976. I don’t remember.”
    “The victim in that case was shot from behind by Squeaky Saunders?” Connolly pressed.
    “I’m not going to talk about it.”
    “. . . shot in the head—one lethal shot about five inches from the top of the head? Correct?”
    “I’m not talking about it.”
    “Did you get the idea to dump the cooler in the ocean from your participation in the Squeaky Saunders case?”
    Tom clamped his mouth shut for a long time, then finally said, “I most certainly did not.”
    “Do you remember the significance of the sluice gates in the Squeaky Saunders case?”
    “Not a clue.” Tom tried to sound bored, but it wasn’t convincing.
    “Do you remember that
you
said to the jury: ‘If you’re going to dump a body into a creek—especially if you’re in the area of Delaware City—that creek leads out to the Delaware River and then into the ocean. Therefore, that body is going to disappear’?”
    “No, I don’t remember saying that.”
    “And then you said,” Connolly continued, “‘Well, the state suggests that the people involved in dumping that body did not know that the area was controlled by sluice gates, did not expect that body to surface as soon as it did, and would be found as quickly as it was, and I think that’s important.’ ”
    Tom said he had no memory at all of that statement.
    “Do you remember telling the jury in the closing argument that the gun was broken apart and was disposed of? You said, ‘There’ssome disagreement as to who exactly had what parts of