...And Never Let HerGo

jurors that had it not been for a “pin drop size blood stain,” Tom had come close to getting away with murder. Tom had believed that he had a good plan, Connolly said, and he had believed he controlled local law enforcement. “Remember, Henry Herndon was the managing partner of the defendant’s law firmwhen that tape that you heard—that tape that had to do with Linda Marandola—was played for Herndon and
nothing happened.
Now, you heard that tape. How could anybody listen to that tape and not think something horrible was going on?”
    Connolly pointed out that the tapes that showed Tom ordering physical injury and harassment of Linda Marandola, a woman he could not have, had been played for Mayor Dan Frawley long before Tom became his right-hand man. “He [Tom] had a track record of getting away with things,” Connolly said. “He thought he could control Wilmington police. He had his contacts. . . .”
    Without retrying the case, Connolly reminded the jurors of the crime and the cover-up, of Tom’s absolute self-interest as he used other people to buy the gun, to help him get rid of the body. And the cover-up. How cruel to let the victim’s family suffer. “He could have saved a lot of people from a lot of pain and a lot of suffering,” Connolly said. “He didn’t. Think about the callousness of stuffing Anne Marie Fahey’s body in the cooler. What kind of a person do you have to be to be capable of that? What kind of person do you have to be to be reading the sports pages the next morning while you’re sitting in your brother’s driveway and a person you claim you ‘deeply love’ had been stuffed into a cooler by you less than a half day before? What kind of a person do you have to be to dump the body sixty miles out in the ocean? . . . You need to think about that.”
    Tom, Connolly pointed out, had done nothing in prison thus far to suggest he would ever obey the rules, much less help other prisoners learn to read. And his daughters? When, really, had Tom thought about his daughters? “When he says to her [Linda Marandola] ‘I wish you could have been the mother of my first born’?” Connolly continued. “When he went to Gerry . . . about loaning him the boat and the gun? When he bought the cooler? . . . Was he thinking about his daughters on June 27th, 1996? No, he was thinking of himself.”
    Perhaps the most devastating example of what Tom, the man who claimed to be a protective father, had done was caught in the letter Connolly now read to the jury. It was written to Tom from Harry Fusco in September 1998. “‘Tom, thank you for letting me talk to the kids. I love them very much as I know they love me very much. They are like me—like my own—and Katie has said I am like “Dad.” . . . The girls sent me a picture of all of them, and to protect them, you, and myself, I tell everyone they are my kids . . .’
    “He did know Harry Fusco was in communication with his daughters,” Connolly told the jury. “And if he really loved hisdaughters, he would not have put them in communication with Harry Fusco. Having your daughters send pictures to a convicted child molester is not loving your daughters.”
    Finally, Connolly submitted to the jury that there was no argument at all for keeping Tom Capano alive. He had had every privilege, but he had wasted his heritage and used the people who loved him the most. “Evil is the absence of good,” Connolly said, quoting a Catholic teaching that evil is not an existence in and of itself. “Like a vacuum. That’s what the defendant is; he’s a black hole. He’s a vacuum of evilness, and he sucked in all those different people into the black hole. He’s ruined their lives—from Gerry to Louie, to his daughters, his ex-wife, his mother, the Faheys, Keith Brady, [Debby MacIntyre], Susan Louth . . . Anne Marie Fahey . . .”
    Jack O’Donnell, Tom’s longtime friend, rose to address the jurors about the mitigating factors that argued Tom should live. He said that Tom could not have planned to murder Anne Marie. “We already know from the evidence presented,” he said, “that Tom had purchased tickets and planned to take Anne Marie Fahey to a Jackson Browne concert on August 5th.”
    O’Donnell said that Tom could not have known that Gerry would be available on Friday, June 28. The cooler? Merely a Fourth of July gift to thank Gerry for being so nice to Tom’s daughters. And Tom’s demeanor, according to witnesses, had been very