...And Never Let HerGo

the death of Anne Marie Fahey?”
    “I’m not answering that.”
    “You hadn’t told your attorneys as of January 4, 1997, that Anne Marie Fahey had been killed?”
    “I’m not going to break the attorney-client privilege.”
    Connolly suggested that there were even more people Tom had used to protect himself: his sister, Marian, his mother, Kim Horstman. And then he marched again into the inflammatory subject of Tom’s daughters, although he could not have estimated how hot his rage might burn. “Now, notwithstanding what you’ve toldus about your deep love for your daughters, you used your daughters in this investigation, did you not?”
    “Do you really want to get into this?”
Tom’s eyes warned the prosecutor not to go further.
    “Did you use your daughters to impede the investigation?” Connolly persisted.
    “You tormented my daughters,” Tom said. “You tormented my mother.”
    “All right. Let’s talk about your daughters.”
    “No,” Tom said. “No, we’re not.”
    “You were given an opportunity to make it so that your daughters would not have to be interviewed by the government,” Connolly said. “All you had to do was agree to submit to an interview yourself. You didn’t do that, did you?”
    “That’s not a choice.”
    “You had a choice.”
    “No, no, and you, as this unethical—”
    The attorneys headed toward Judge Lee even as Tom started to rave at Connolly. Joe Oteri asked for a mistrial. Connolly reminded Judge Lee that the state had offered not to talk to Tom’s two younger daughters. If he had signed an affidavit that he would not call them as alibi witnesses, Tom himself wouldn’t even have had to talk to the investigators. But he wouldn’t do that. For all of his posturing about being the perfect father, the state believed Tom’s daughters were his ace in the hole and he was not above asking them to lie for him. For a long time, Tom, of course, had blocked even the taking of blood samples from his daughters to eliminate them as sources of the blood specks in the great room.
    Judge Lee denied the motion for mistrial and allowed Connolly to continue questioning Tom about his daughters.
    “Now,” Connolly began again, “you had the opportunity to prevent your daughters from undergoing any trauma associated with an interview, correct?”
    Tom rose up in his chair in such towering rage that everyone in the courtroom felt his fury. Robert Fahey and David Weiss watched the transformation from their bench with horror. Neither had ever seen a human being so angry. Capano had “steam from his ears, snakes from his eyes,” Robert recalled. “His eyes were bulging. He had bulging veins in his face where people don’t even have veins. At that moment, he was pure evil.”
    “Absolutely INCORRECT!” Tom roared at Connolly. “You heartless, gutless, soulless disgrace for a human being!”
    Connolly paused, his arms folded across his chest, watching a man completely out of control. Even he hadn’t expected an explosion like this.
    The jury stared at Tom Capano with shocked fascination. Whenever they were confused by something in the courtroom, they had looked to Judge Lee for guidance, and they looked at him now, obviously wondering what they should do. Lee took a long deep breath. He was angry, too—but at the defendant.
    Connolly started to resume his line of questioning. “You not only had the opportunity by agreeing—”
    “Why don’t you explain what you did to my mother?” Tom shouted, smacking the microphone in front of him.
    “OK, Your Honor,” Connolly said, “we did nothing to his mother—”
    “You did nothing to my mother?” Tom screamed. “That’s a lie right there in front of the Court!”
    Judge Lee turned to the guards. “Please take Mr. Capano out of the courtroom.”
    As Tom was wrestled out of the courtroom, he pulled away from his guards and turned to the jury. “He’s a liar!”
    Robert Fahey wished he’d had a camera to record the moment as the man he felt was the real Tom Capano emerged from behind his charismatic shell, but then he felt a chill. “That was probably what my sister saw just before she died,” he said. “The last face Annie saw.”
    T HE trial was not over, nor was the cross-examination, but for all intents and purposes they had come to a stopping point. A somewhat chastened defendant took the witness stand the next morning, January 5, but no one who had seen his awesome temper would ever forget it. Judge