...And Never Let HerGo

body down the basement stairs and that a Styrofoam cooler wouldn’t sink. Likening Tom to the “village idiot,” Oteri asked the jury, “What kind of moron would kill her in his
own
house?”
    And then, Oteri said, Tom had compounded his clumsiness in a way that didn’t match his intelligence. He had driven eighty miles an hour to Stone Harbor with a body in the car. “If Tom Capano wanted to plan and do this crime,” Oteri said, “do you believe for one minute he couldn’t have pulled it off in a less
stupid
way? It’s a horror show—Tom was in a panic, running around like a maniac, hysterical.”
    There was no clever Tom Capano orchestrating a murder. No, Tom had been devastated by the sudden death of a woman he truly cared about, according to Oteri. It had all come about because of a jealous woman. He pointed out that Deborah MacIntyre was the shooter—the person who had fired, however accidentally, the bullet that killed Anne Marie Fahey. Oteri asked the jury to hold the gun and prove to themselves what happens when someone tries to knock the gun hand down. “See if they don’t instinctively pull the trigger.”
    But even given the fact that the fatal shooting of Anne Marie Fahey had been accidental, Oteri was scathing in his denunciation of Debby MacIntyre. “She is a devil of deceit, that woman is,” he shouted.
    At a break, Oteri asked reporter Donna Renae for aspirin and she produced some from the bottom of her purse. “For a moment,” she remembered, “I felt guilty. I didn’t want to do anything to help him convince the jury that Tom Capano was innocent.”
    All told, Oteri spoke for three hours and forty-one minutes, questioning repeatedly why anyone could possibly believe the “false witnesses” that, he said, the state had based its case on: Gerry, Louie, and Debby. He reminded the jurors that they had all made deals with the prosecutors. In conclusion, he told the jurors that whatever their verdict was, the United States always won because liberty was preserved whether an innocent man was set free or a guilty man was convicted.
    When Oteri returned to the defense table, Tom jumped up suddenly and held out his hand, spooking his guards, who were understandablya little jumpy now about his sudden movements. The two men, defendant and attorney, embraced awkwardly and unconvincingly.
    In his closing argument, Connolly had pointed out hundreds of aspects of the defense that made no sense at all in the light of reason. In his close, Oteri had been pure emotion, reinforced with a number of epithets. The jurors had listened attentively to them both. And the media had begun to lay odds.
    When Ferris Wharton began to address the jury, it was late on Wednesday afternoon and Courtroom 302 was still stifling. But no one moved. “Something happens when you crank up the volume,” Wharton began, referring to Oteri’s top-of-the-lungs delivery. “You get distortion.” He suggested to the jury that arguments delivered in a shout didn’t become any more logical. “Thomas Capano’s actions speak louder than Mr. Oteri’s words.”
    With his easy sense of humor, Wharton said he would not repeat Oteri’s reading of the entire E-mail correspondence between Anne Marie and Tom. “I won’t read them,” he said, “not because they’re not important but because you might come out of the jury box and come at me.”
    And well they might have; this was one of the first trials in America in which E-mail was a major evidentiary factor—but by now the jurors must surely have memorized much of the correspondence between the victim and the defendant. They already knew about Anne Marie’s sad attempts to keep Tom at bay by responding to his torrent of E-mail.
    For Tom Capano, Wharton pointed out, gifts meant guilt; it was his way of keeping Anne Marie in his debt, and so he had continually urged her to accept presents from him. He was a man who gave only because he wanted to get, however. “Sometimes,” Wharton said, “you hug your wife because you love her—not because you expect something.”
    The dinner hour had come and gone, but Judge Lee had decided they would continue. This would be the last day of trial. And to help moderate the ninety-degree temperature, when the rest of the courthouse offices closed, Judge Lee had the doors to the courtroom propped open.
    Anne Marie herself had written the words that best captured Tom Capano—at least in the state’s estimation. Wharton read from the