...And Never Let HerGo

Mike worried him, and Tom not only cruised by Anne Marie’s house to check on her but also started driving by Mike’s house, and he was furious when he saw Anne Marie’s green Jetta in the driveway late at night. He called to let her know every time he saw her car at Mike’s. He was particularly angry that she parked in the driveway and not in the street. He demanded to know if she was having sex with Mike. When she told him she wasn’t, that placated him—but only a little.
    Back in 1994, Tom had tried to get Anne Marie to go to Spain on his money, and he had managed to make her accept the five $100 bills he gave her, even though she never went to Spain. He knew this was one of her dearest wishes and he could make it come true.
    Tom E-mailed Anne Marie and suggested that he give her a plane ticket to Spain for Christmas. Moreover, he would make reservations for her at hotels, arrange everything. She didn’t want that. She told Kim about his offer and said that she couldn’t get him to accept her no.
    November and December had been so turbulent for Anne Marie in her relationship with Tom—or rather, in her attempts to end her relationship with him. Sometimes he would offer her the world—like the plane tickets and the hotels—and then he would turn on her, attacking her insecurities where he knew he could hurther the most. “She had a problem with her background and the way her childhood was,” Kim said. “He would attack her and refer to her as ‘white trash,’ or [say] she was lucky that he’s even going out with her—because of who he is, and where she came from, and what he could buy her.”
    On December 21, 1995, Tom went ahead and bought Anne Marie a first-class ticket—one way—to Madrid. It cost $1,235.95. He was amazed when she refused to take it. Very reluctantly, he took it back and turned it in to his credit card company for credit.
    Tom tried another tack. He told Anne Marie that he had gone to the parish priest at St. Anthony’s, where they both attended church, and confessed that he was having an affair with her. “She was humiliated,” Kim said. “She felt she could never go back to her church again because the priest knew she had an affair with him. She felt that she had to escape. The obsessiveness of it was weighing very heavily on her shoulders. And sometimes she said, ‘I feel like I have to move out of the state to get away from him.’ ”
    But all the while, she knew she couldn’t go. She had her family, her job, her friends—and she had Mike Scanlan. She told her friends that for the first time since she had broken up with Paul Columbus, in 1988, she had met someone with whom she felt there was a potential for marriage. And she was scared to death that Tom was going to find some way to ruin that for her.
    He was certainly trying. Tom had been working on several fronts to break up Anne Marie’s romance with Mike. He now had Jackie Steinhoff convinced that he was terribly depressed, so it was easy to get her to approach Anne Marie for him. “Whenever I did see him, I asked how he was doing, or how he was feeling,” Jackie said. “He wanted to take Annie and me out to dinner in Philadelphia—it would just be a good thing to go out and get together.”
    Although they talked on the phone as much as ever, Jackie hadn’t seen Anne Marie purely for socializing for a while. They were both so busy, and Jackie thought it would be fun for the three of them to have dinner.
    “I called Annie several times,” Jackie said. “She didn’t want to go. December was a busy time for her, and she kept saying, ‘I have this to do—I have that to do.’ ”
    Tom came into Java Jack’s often to see if Jackie had set up their dinner date, but she had to tell him Anne Marie couldn’t make it. He urged her to keep calling, and she did. “I said, ‘Let’s pick a date—pick a date in January.’ And she couldn’t commit to it. She kind of hemmed and hawed. She never said why. She told me she did notwant to go, and said, ‘Oh, we’ll get together sometime,’ but she made it sound more of an effort than anything.”
    Still, Jackie didn’t realize what the problem was. And she thought it would be beneficial for Anne Marie to get out and have dinner with two good friends. Finally, Anne Marie agreed to set a date in mid-January, but Jackie sensed that it was only because she had persuaded her to say yes.
    Tom seemed pleased when Jackie told him that she had worked out a date