...And Never Let HerGo

Lee made sure that it would not happen again in his courtroom, adding his instructions to the advice Tom’s own legal team had given him.
    “There will be no apologies to the Court and the jury for yesterday’s outburst,” Lee warned. “You are simply to answer the questions directed to you by Mr. Connolly. He will be permitted to ask questions on cross-examination subject
only
to your attorneys’ right to object. You will answer all questions put by Mr. Connolly. Failure to do so will result in appropriate admonitions. . . . If you refuse to accept the responsibilities of responding to cross-examination, there are Draconian sanctions which can be imposed and they will be considered.”
    Lee evinced such a stern presence that even a man as mercurial as Tom saw he meant business. But he still answered Connolly’s questions sullenly. Finally, near the end of his cross-examination, Connolly asked Tom, “Until the first day of trial, they [the Faheys] had not heard one iota of explanation from you or anybody representing you to account for the whereabouts of their sister, correct?”
    “Not from me, they hadn’t,” Tom agreed.
    “And unless Gerry told the authorities what happened to Anne Marie Fahey, the Fahey family
still
would not know?”
    “Oh no, oh no, oh no,” Tom disagreed. “If Robert had called me back, if Robert had responded to me when I asked for Bud Freel, when I asked for Kim Horstman, if Kim had come to my mother’s home in Stone Harbor when I asked her, it would have made a world of difference.”
    Tom complained because the Faheys were suing his family for “some thirty million dollars or whatever the hell the number they’re throwing around is.”
    “Well,” Connolly said,
“you’ve
actually talked about a book or a movie deal for this case, haven’t you?”
    Tom shrugged. “In jest,” he said. “I have no intention of writing a book.”
    Connolly held out a letter Tom had written to Debby on January 29, 1998, a year earlier. “On page nine of this letter, twelve lines down, the sentence begins with ‘Tonight—’ ”
    “Yes.”
    “You write, ‘I will focus on the book and movie stuff after the hearing next week,’ right?”
    “That’s what it says.”
    “No further questions, Your Honor.”
    Later, on re-cross, Connolly asked Tom about why he had been so insistent that Anne Marie’s best friend, Kim Horstman, join him at the shore and about why he had lied to her.
    “By getting her to meet with me in person,” Tom explained, “or trying to get Robert to meet with me in person, we could begin to undo everything . . . and by the way, what is the lie?”
    “Well,” Connolly explained, “you told her to come to Stone Harbor so you could put your heads together so you could figure out where Anne Marie might be.”
    “Yeah, that part,” Tom said, still failing to see a lie.
    “You knew where Anne Marie was.”
    “That part, yes,” Tom admitted. “But I figured that was theonly way I could get her to attend in order to, again, move against the greater evil.”
    “The greater evil being?”
    “What had happened to Anne Marie.”
    T HE jury had now seen two sides of Tom Capano. Either he was the weak and vulnerable—but charming—gentleman the defense wanted them to see, or he was the self-absorbed, conscienceless sociopath the state had described, a complete and utter narcissist.
    Morale was low in the defense camp. Gene Maurer was away from the courtroom doing paralegal work much of the time. Tom and his attorneys had little connection to one another; their disagreements were reflected in the way they rarely conferred anymore. He still wanted them to pull out all the stops and use his “chain-saw” approach, and they continued to try to dissuade him, even though it was like shouting into the wind.
    There was a flurry of interest when the defense called a surprise witness. Kim Johnson was an attorney’s wife who lived with her family across the street from Debby. In the past week, she had contacted the defense attorneys to say she had information about the case. On the stand, she testified that she had seen Debby MacIntyre drive into her driveway late in the evening sometime in June 1996. “I heard her kind of issue a terrible kind of an anguished sob as she kind of fell out of the car, and then she quickly ran to the side door of her house.”
    Johnson said she had mentioned what she had seen and heard to her husband. She could not be sure of the