...And Never Let HerGo

jurors studied the woman on the witness stand. She was in her forties now, and she was no longer beautiful.
    Linda Marandola testified about the phone calls, the threats, and Tom’s insistence that he owned the state of Delaware and the city of Wilmington. If he could not have her, then she could not live in his city or his state. The gallery murmured when Marandola recalled that Tom had come after her many times—the last time only four months before Anne Marie Fahey died.
    Ferris Wharton commented that if Tom had been chastised by the bar when his harassment of the witness first became known, all of the rest of the awful, vindictive tumbling down might not have happened. But to “the everlasting shame” of the lawyers who chose to look the other way, he had continued to feel that
he
didn’t have to answer to the laws of ordinary men.
    Anne Marie Fahey’s birthday was approaching as the penalty phase neared its close. Had she lived, she would have been thirty-three on January 27. The defense wanted very much not to have that coincide with the jury’s deliberations on Tom’s sentence.
    His family pleaded for him; Gerry and Louie, the brothers who he felt had ultimately betrayed him, wept on the witness stand as they begged for Tom’s life. Kay Ryan (no longer Capano), the wife Tom had betrayed, spoke first to the Faheys. “I can’t imagine losing one of my siblings, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry for your loss. And I’m so sorry that Tom was somehow involved in this.”
    Kay looked as if she hadn’t slept for days. No longer a part of the close-knit family she had always hoped for, she now had to bring her four daughters to court to plead for their father’s life. And only for their sake, she too was going to try to save him. “Well,” she began what was clearly a distasteful task for her, “I’m not here to stand by my man. I’m here for my daughters. I’ve been as repulsed by his vile actions and behaviors as most of you here in the courtroom have been. I will say—for everything that he’s done—he has been a loving father and there has been a very close relationship he’s maintained with his daughters. . . . I’ve said to the girls when they started learning about all these things that went on in his life that no matter what he’s ever done . . . their father loved them very much.
    “I think,” Kay said, “for Tom to receive the death penalty would just have horrific effects on my daughters. In time, they may determine that the relationship with their father might lessen—but they should be the ones to interrupt the relationship, not by lethal injection, not by Gerry, not by the judge, not by the government. . . . If you can’t do it for Tom, do it for the girls. They need him in their life.”
    And then Tom’s daughters, tremulous teenagers, slender and lovely in their tiny skirts or tight pants, accentuating their long coltish legs, their long dark hair shining, their beautiful eyes softened by unshed tears, took turns on the stand. Alex, thirteen, Katie, a week away from her seventeenth birthday, Christy, eighteen, and Jenny, fifteen, described a man the court watchers scarcely recognized. He had taught them to drive, gone to their sports events, joked with their friends, and been a counselor to many of them. The girls were wonderful young women; that was apparent. But it was just as apparent that their father had failed them in so many ways.
    And now, Tom summoned all of those whom his attorneys had refused to call earlier. His mother, Marguerite, in her wheelchair, pleaded for his life as Joe Oteri gently questioned her. She didn’t understand the rules of law that said his guilt had already been established and that she was allowed only to ask that he live. Judge Lee had to remind her she could not tell the jury that her son was not guilty of murder.
    Father Roberto Balducelli, his face a study of compassion and kindness, could barely hear the questions Oteri put to him, but the old priest dutifully recalled all of Tom’s good works for the church.
    Tom himself had the right to allocution, the right to speak on his own behalf. He could no longer argue his innocence; if he took the stand, he must stay within strict guidelines and beg for mercy. Itwas, of course, not in him to beg, but he took out the notes he had prepared.
    “I hope you can appreciate,” he began somewhat petulantly, “that it is pretty difficult for me to speak to people who have already rejected me. . . .