The Rise and Fall of Thomas Capano

Putting together the various reports, it seemed that the affair had gone on for two years, although it appeared that Anne Marie had decided to end it.  The government got a search warrant and went through Capano's home and vehicles.  They found a bloodstain remover and hard copies of emails back and forth between the two lovers.  There were also small bloodstains in Capano's great room.  These were sent to the FBI crime lab in Quantico.  One more questionable item was the fact that a love seat and rug were missing from the same place they found the blood.  Yet all of this combined was insufficient for an arrest.

They were going to continue to check into Capano.

It seemed likely that if he'd done something with the young woman, others might know.  He had three younger brothers, Louis, Joey, and Gerard, each of whom Tom had rescued from legal scandals.  In fact, between the brothers and some of the cousins, they were to Delaware what the Kennedys were to Massachusetts.  Louis had been caught giving illegal campaign contributions, Joey was charged with the kidnap and rape of a woman, and Gerry was involved in drugs.

Perhaps one of them could be pressured to talk.

Two facts emerged that seemed interesting: Gerry Capano had sold a fishing boat without an anchor and Louis Capano had ordered the emptying of a dumpster at a construction site before it was scheduled to be emptied.  Had Annie been killed and dumped in a landfill?  Or at sea?  Then a receipt was discovered for a cheap rug that Capano had bought.  Why had he replaced an expensive rug with this one?

In August, the Prosecutor's Office began to apply pressure on Louis Capano.  He resisted, believing in his brother's stated innocence, but finally admitted that Tom had told him that a despondent Annie had slit her wrists on his loveseat and bled on that and on the rug.  He'd asked Louis to help him to get rid of these items.  This was directly after the woman turned up missing.  Tom had also asked Louis to supply him with an alibi for a certain suspicious time period.

It took more than a year to hear from Gerry, but the nightmares he'd been experiencing had worked on him.  He'd been involved in something that Tom had explained in a way that had initially convinced him, but with the unfolding events, he'd come to understand that the incident had been something else altogether, something that left a bad taste in his mouth.  Louis and he had put two-and-two together, and they begged Tom to go to the police.

Then the Prosecutor's Office sent 25 federal agents to Gerry's home to search for drugs and illegal firearms.  They found cocaine and a gun in the bedroom of Gerry's son which spelled parental neglect.  Gerry went to Tom for assistance, but Tom rebuked him to "be a man."  Then a second search warrant allowed the Prosecutor's Office to invade the home of Gerry's best friend, a convicted felon.  They found a gun, linked to Gerry, and Gerry was now ready to talk.

On November 8, 1997, pressured by a certain prison sentence, he went in to confess what he knew.  Gerry admitted that Tom had once asked him for a gun and then wondered if he knew anyone who could break someone's legs.  Tom claimed that an extortionist was threatening him and he needed to protect himself and his children.  Gerry had given him a gun, but had balked at Tom's request to use his boat in the event that he had to kill the guy.  Eventually Tom returned the gun, unfired, to Gerry.

Then he talked about what happened on June 28, 1996, and no one could quite believe it.