...And Never Let HerGo

who sat tearfully in the courtroom, and mouthed, as he often did, “I’ll be OK,” or, less likely, “It’ll be OK.”
    It was late on Thursday afternoon, January 28, 1999. The jurors recommended by a vote of ten to two that Tom Capano be put to death by lethal injection. Only once in Delaware history had a judge gone against a jury’s recommendation of the death penalty.
    Outside, horns blared, people clapped and cheered.
    Now it was up to Judge William Swain Lee.

Chapter Forty-six
    J UDGE L EE HAD MANY THINGS to consider as he decided what Tom Capano’s sentence should be. The jurors’ recommendation would certainly have tremendous weight, but there was one haunting voice, a voice that spoke for the whole family. It was Robert’s, as he sat on the witness stand during the penalty phase, on January 21, and remembered his sister and the pain of losing her.
    For sixty days, the Faheys had kept a vigil at Anne Marie’s apartment and then entered a lost place, where they still were. “And the best description I can give anybody is that it is a black hole without boundaries,” Robert said, “and it is as black as it gets. There is no light.”
    Robert talked of their search for someplace where they could feel Anne Marie’s presence so they could say good-bye to her. They had been to the Grant Avenue house. “If you had a sibling or a spouse or a child or someone that you deeply cared about, and theywere killed in a car accident, and that car was towed away to a junkyard, I would argue that everybody in this courtroom would go to that junkyard and look at that car, especially if the body had never been recovered. And that was our way of trying to see where Anne Marie’s last resting place was. . . . We knew in our hearts she had died in that room. And we had to go and see it and touch it and say a prayer for Anne Marie . . . by going to the place where she was brutally murdered.”
    Robert spoke of never having been able to have a funeral for his sister. “You think about how important a funeral is, because there are rituals, and some of the rituals I never appreciated the benefit of because they had always been there. And when they’re not there, you don’t have the opportunity to grieve.
    “You don’t have a viewing. Rather than a piece of plastic with a bullet hole in it, you generally have a wooden coffin. And you go to the funeral home, and you can say your prayers and hug everybody collectively that’s there to support you. So instead of a funeral, we have a cooler for a coffin and we have images that are just very, very painful.”
    As pitiful a substitute as it was, they
had
all gathered around the cooler and prayed for their sister. Now, as Robert spoke, people began to cry; even reporters who
never
let their emotions show in public had tears running down their faces. Anne Marie had been with them all along, but as part of a legal puzzle, and it had been easier to look away from the real woman. But as her brother talked about her, the sounds of sniffling and nose-blowing grew stronger.
    “Rather than Anne Marie being buried in a family plot next to her grandmother and her mother,” Robert said, “instead of being surrounded by her family when she died, Anne Marie was surrounded by her killer and her killer’s brother.
    “And she was thrown over the side of a boat, wrapped in chains and anchors and rope, rather than in her finest dress. And rather than being in a coffin—whether it was a hundred thousand dollars or ten thousand—she was in an Igloo cooler.
    “And rather than being buried next to her mother, she was thrown into a piece of water that’s known as Mako Alley. So instead of my mother, she had sharks.”
    Robert remembered how his family and grandmother had gone to the shore for a week every summer. He said he and his siblings would continue to do that for their children, but it would never again be the same. “I can’t go anywhere near the Atlantic Ocean, becauseI know my sister is out there, probably in a million pieces, and it’s not a real pleasant thought.”
    They would never know, any of her brothers and her sister, if Anne Marie had been beaten or tormented before she died. And even though their religious beliefs told them she was safe with God, their minds would go back forever to that night when she died and wonder about that.
    Kathleen would say, “I hope he shot her from behind and she never had to be afraid. I cannot bear to think that she was