...And Never Let HerGo

his children had been born during that time, and the son who was a baby when he started was a boy now. Sometimes, for all of them, it seemed as if their lives
were
the investigation. As Alpert had said once, Christmases came and went and they had scarcely noticed.
    There was deep emotion in Connolly’s heart as he began to talk. Despite his studied indifference to Tom’s histrionics and rages, Connolly knew his subject well. He viewed the defendant as a cruel and dangerous man. He reviewed all of the evidence that pointed to Tom’s guilt. And out of the thousands of details, he asked the jurors to concentrate on five vital categories. “The most important piece of evidence is Gerry’s testimony,” he said. “The second area of evidence concerns the cooler, the lock and chain. The third area concerns Deborah MacIntyre’s testimony about purchasing the gun. The fourth area, I suggest to you, is the defendant’s demeanor on June twenty-eighth” (the day after the murder).
    “The final area of evidence,” Connolly submitted, “is the defendant’s testimony itself. It is not credible. His demeanor on the stand is consistent with the person Anne Marie Fahey described to her psychologist and friends. It is consistent with the person who wanted to control every aspect of Debby MacIntyre, and it is consistent with the person who would not lie still as Anne Marie Fahey embraced Michael Scanlan.”
    For three hours and forty-seven minutes, Connolly presented to the jurors every stitch of the net that he and the other investigators had woven to drop, finally, over Tom Capano. And the cumulativefacts and Connolly’s ability to link those facts together brilliantly produced the devastating profile of a man for whom the truth was only relative as it suited him. Connolly reminded the jurors that Tom himself had admitted that he had told more lies than even he could count. He was a man who was quite probably a complete narcissist—and a murderer.
    Connolly played for the jury tapes of Tom’s degrading and scathing phone calls to Debby after she had told the truth about the gun. She was no longer submissive to him, and hate dripped from Tom’s words on these tapes. He had been frustrated in his attempts to use her. He would use
anyone
—even his precious daughters—to further his own interests.
    “The defendant wanted Anne Marie Fahey to play by his rules,” Connolly said as he concluded. “He is a man who does not believe he should be subjected to the same rules as everybody else. . . . He refuses to answer questions; he refuses to abide by the rules of the court. . . . He is extremely resentful when the police want to interview him. . . .
    “Well, there are rules we all have to play by. Those are rules of law. Mr. Capano has received due process of law at this trial, and now it is time for you to do justice. And justice demands that you return a verdict that is consistent with all the evidence that we have presented. And the only verdict consistent with the evidence is a verdict of guilty. . . . Thank you.”
    E VEN in the dead of winter, it was suffocatingly hot in the courtroom. Jack O’Donnell had a strep throat, and Joe Oteri had a pounding headache when he rose to make his final arguments for the defense. Oteri was a street fighter, an attorney whose style was to raise his voice along with his arguments. Still trying to run the show, Tom had disapproved of his lawyer’s footwear, annoyed when Oteri showed up that day in his lucky cowboy boots. He had warned Oteri that Wilmington was much too conservative for cowboy boots. Oteri wore them anyway.
    And it was questionable whether Tom was happy with Oteri’s line of argument; he suggested that Tom’s actions after Anne Marie died had been too stupid to be part of any plan. No, it had all been the same grotesque accident that he had told the jurors about in his opening statement.
    Oteri allowed that this trial had all the ingredients of a fictional television courtroom drama: the “kinky sex,” dumping the body, lying to the victim’s family and the police. “But my client is notcharged with those things,” he shouted. “You can’t vote guilty because you don’t like Tom Capano or what he did.”
    Tom was not, Oteri insisted, “some kind of evil genius,” plotting the perfect murder. “But
this
is the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.” He described Tom as an incompetent bumbler who should have known he wasn’t strong enough to carry a