...And Never Let HerGo

date, however, but tried on the witness stand to reconstruct it by remembering when her children had left for summer camp, almost three years earlier. She thought it had been close to July 4, and after the eleven o’clock news, on a weekday. Johnson admitted that she had never told the authorities about hearing Debby sob.
    Ferris Wharton cross-examined her. He asked Johnson about pear trees that had been trimmed in the interim, and taller trees whose leafy branches had hung over Debby’s driveway in June 1996, which would have obscured much of her view. She testified that she had been able to see and hear someone 205 feet away—a distance more than the length of three courtrooms. More important, Wharton asked the witness about what kind of light fixture there had been over Debby’s garage door. Johnson told him the fixture had two bright bulbs in it, allowing her to see quite well. And shespoke of seeing a “flash of blond hair” as the sobbing woman passed beneath them.
    Wharton knew that on the night Anne Marie died the light fixture on Debby’s garage had not been the double-bulb motion-detector setup it was at present; until January 1997, it had been an old-fashioned porcelain socket with a single low-watt bulb. Moreover, Johnson admitted that, only the night before her testimony, she had refused to let the four investigators look out her window to determine what they could see from that viewpoint.
    “I said I would really prefer that you not do that because my sons are in the next room,” she said.
    “Your husband suggested that maybe only one person go up?”
    “Um-hmm.”
    “And you still declined?”
    “I believe I did because I was concerned for my sons, who knew nothing of this.”
    Johnson’s testimony was rendered virtually useless. No one would ever know what she might have been able to see or hear from her window, far from Debby’s driveway. Both Debby and her daughter, Victoria, had blond hair, and Kim Johnson said she hadn’t seen a face. She had no good reason for not coming forward sooner. Her husband listened in the back of the courtroom while she testified that he didn’t remember her telling him about any incident that involved Debby MacIntyre sobbing in the night.
    T OM ’ S sister, Marian, and brother-in-law, Lee Ramunno, testified next, principally to undermine Gerry’s credibility. Ramunno was garrulous and Marian obviously torn as she denigrated one brother in her efforts to save another.
    Tom had been insistent that his attorneys call his mother to the witness stand to further vilify her youngest son, but they would not. Beyond compassionate regard for a woman whose heart condition made her health tenuous, Joe Oteri told Judge Lee, “We’re not going to call her, for reasons of strategy permitted to all of us, not permitted to Mr. Capano. I want the record to indicate we’re not calling her. It’s something the four of us are in total agreement on, and Mr. Capano can do what he wants later.”
    The last defense witness was Angel Payne, a physical education teacher at Ursuline Academy. She testified that Katie Capano had, indeed, “fainted or fallen down” during a basketball game in the spring of 1996, when she was in the eighth grade.
    “Do you recall whether Mr. Capano responded to the school when it happened,” Gene Maurer asked, “and what his reaction was?”
    “Not specifically,” Payne said, offering a vague answer. “I know that I’ve talked to him about his daughters, and anything that would happen, I would call him.”
    “And his reaction would be?”
    “He would be very upset and probably start to panic as most parents would.”
    Ferris Wharton had no questions to ask of the young teacher.
    Wharton and Connolly then called a number of rebuttal witnesses to answer questions raised during the defense’s case, among them Tom Bergstrom, Debby’s attorney. Since Tom had described Bergstrom repeatedly as “the Malvern misanthrope,” “the slickster,” and “loathsome pond scum,” the prosecutors thought the jurors might like to see the real man. Bergstrom came across as what he was: a kind man who was concerned about and involved in the case solely to protect his client. (Although he didn’t advertise it, Bergstrom had not billed Debby for all the hours he spent on her case.)
    Kim Horstman came back on rebuttal to testify that Tom had, indeed, told her in late May 1996 that his daughter Katie had undergone surgery to remove a brain tumor a few