...And Never Let HerGo

and her home often, urging her to go out with him. He offered her a job at his law firm, and still she declined. But then one night Linda was attending a bachelorette party at Galluccio’s Restaurant in Wilmington and she ran into Tom, who was there by himself.
    Before the evening was over, Linda and Tom had sex in his car in the parking lot of Galluccio’s. She was horrified by what she had done. “I felt so unfaithful,” she said a long time later. She never intended to be alone with him again, but Tom began calling her continually, begging her to have an affair with him. He was very persuasive, but Linda planned to be married—and she didn’t want an affair with another man.
    More than two years later, under remarkably similar circumstances, Linda
did
have intercourse with Tom again, and she had every reason to feel more regret than she had the first time she gave in to him. He showed up at her own bachelorette party, which took place shortly before her wedding. It was 1980, and they were once again at Galluccio’s. Somehow Tom had found out where she was. There was a great deal of drinking that night at Galluccio’s and Linda left with Tom. He took her to his own home on Seventeenth Street, and they had sex again. Where his wife was, she didn’t know—but he assured her there was nothing to worry about.
    Linda thought Tom was a really nice guy, particularly when he arranged for her and her bridegroom to move into a large apartment in the Cavalier complex. But she was resolute that she would not have sex with Tom again—not once she was married.
    Linda married her fiancé, but her wedding day was blighted when she saw Tom sitting in the church, his face unreadable. At the wedding reception after, Tom cut in on the bridal couple and whirled Linda away from her new husband. He whispered in her ear that his heart was broken, and he wished that she hadn’t gone through with her marriage because she was the love of his life. He didn’t mention that Kay was pregnant with their first child.
    When Linda returned from her honeymoon, Tom wrote and called her, telling her that he loved her and still wanted her. He asked her to get divorced and said he wanted to divorce his wife so they could be together.
    Linda had promised herself that she would never tell her husband about Tom Capano. She was horrified that Tom wasn’t at all deterred by her status as a married woman. He didn’t see any reason why they couldn’t continue to meet. Despite her telling him that she wasn’t interested, he called and wrote to her many times over thenext few years. He still wanted her to come to work for him and he continually proclaimed his love for her.
    His letters were bizarre—almost delusional—as he wrote of his belief that they were meant to be together. Yes, there had been two brief physical encounters and Linda was everlastingly sorry for that, but they had never had any kind of permanent commitment. He was still married and Linda knew now that his wife was about to have a baby. She couldn’t understand why he continued to stalk her. But he would not stop calling or writing.
    When Kay Capano gave birth to their daughter Christy in August of 1980, Linda received a letter from Tom that frightened her. “He said that he wished it had been me who gave birth to his child, not Kay.”
    Linda refused to see Tom, and she told him that hot summer of 1980 that she didn’t want him to call her anymore. That was when he turned vicious. He told Linda that if he couldn’t have her, he couldn’t stand to be around her. She would be sorry for rejecting him; he didn’t want her living or working in the same state with him. He said that he “controlled Delaware” and that she had no choice. She would have to quit her job and move. He set deadlines for when he expected her to do as he ordered.
    When she did not, Tom tracked her. She started to get hang-up calls, fifteen or more a day. He phoned her to say he knew where she parked. At night, she had to walk past the law offices of Morris, James, Hitchens & Williams to get to her car and she knew he was watching her. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of Tom staring at her through the window. He was such a moody man, his eyes almost black and the planes of his face all shadowed as he watched her sullenly.
    Frustrated and furious, Tom contacted a man he had represented in a landlord-tenant dispute. The man owed him, but Tom offered a barter instead; he had heard that Joe Riley was a