And Never Let Her Go (69 page)

“Where was the gun while she was doing this?” Oteri asked.
But Tom's testimony had become a virtual monologue; he seemed to have forgotten his lead defense attorney completely.

Finally, he answered, “The gun was in her left hand, which was down. I didn't think it was in any kind of threatening position.”

“Not pointed at you or Anne Marie?”

“No . . . and I, again, I looked in Anne Marie's direction to see how far she was getting, and when I looked back to Debby, the left arm was coming up and I thought, Oh my God, she's going to shoot herself! And so I reached out with my right hand to grab her left hand to pull the gun away from herself. And as I did that, a shot went off. I couldn't believe it. And she couldn't believe it either.”

Tom said that even though Debby had “snapped,” she was able to tell him later that she didn't have the clip in the gun. But a bullet had somehow come out.

The Faheys sat rigid. Whether they believed Tom or not, it was the first time they had heard about their sister's last moments. They listened for some information that might let them know she hadn't suffered. That was the dread they had lived with.

“I didn't hear anything from Anne Marie,” Tom continued, scarcely taking a breath. “So I looked back to Anne Marie and she was motionless on the sofa. And I said, ‘No, this can't be possible,' and I checked her, and sure enough, she had a head wound on the right side of her head near her ear. And then I became a wreck. Debby became a wreck, too.”

Tom said that he had pulled Anne Marie off the sofa and tried CPR, after Anne Marie didn't respond to “little smacks to her face.”

“I even got Debby involved in the CPR efforts.” He said he had put a pillow under Anne Marie's head and looked for a flashlight to see if her eyes were dilated. “Or,” he asked himself aloud, “were they the opposite of ‘dilate'? No.
Dilate.
And they didn't.”

They had both worked over Anne Marie for a long time, Tom said, as long as there seemed to be any chance she was alive. Tom described his state of shock, and Debby's. “So you got two people in a state of shock—and one dead,” he said, drawing a breath.

“Did you call nine-one-one or anybody else?” Oteri asked.

“No,” Tom said with regret in his voice. “Most cowardly, horrible thing I've ever done in my life. It was like my whole life flashed before me.”

What was a man to do? Tom looked at the jury imploringly. Debby was sobbing and hysterical, his life was flashing before his eyes. “I always thought I was a guy with some guts, and I wasn't.
And I'm just being selfish, too, to protect myself and also to protect Debby. And so, since I knew the paramedics could not do anything—I knew Anne Marie was dead—I chose not to call the paramedics or the police but to protect myself and, to the extent I could, to protect Debby.”

Oteri asked Tom what he had done then—at eleven-thirty at night, with Anne Marie dead on the floor before him.

He had tried to comfort Debby first, he said, telling her it had been an accident and not her fault. “If I had been honest with her and told her I was seeing Anne Marie and on what basis, she would not have had reason to snap.”

Then Tom said he had put Debby in her car and sent her home. He would take care of what had to be done.

“After Debby has left. What do you do?” Oteri asked quietly.

“I break down,” Tom recalled. “I fell apart and I cried and I screamed at myself and I punched the wall, and after about five minutes of that, I did something I'm capable of doing. I compartmentalized. And then I just said, I have to do something. What am I going to do?
What am I going to do?
And the first thing I have to do is take care of Anne Marie's body.”

And then Tom said he'd remembered that he had some things downstairs that he had a choice of using. He had a brand-new garbage can—“I couldn't bring myself to think that we're talking about a corpse.” He couldn't put her in a garbage can, he said, not even a brand-new one. So that left the cooler.

“I brought the cooler upstairs,” he said. “I put Anne Marie in the cooler and I wrapped her in one of the cotton blankets from the guest room.”

“What was she wearing?” Oteri asked.

“The same outfit she had worn to dinner. And she and her shoes were in there, and eventually I put the gun in there.”

If Anne Marie was wearing her flowered dress, then where had the flowered dress come from that ended up back on the settee in her apartment? People in the gallery had read about that and looked confused.

Tom testified that he had eventually left his house on Grand Avenue that evening. And he remembered that—for some insane reason—he still had the gun with him. “I put the gun underneath the front seat of my car.”

And then he remembered that he had forgotten to mention something that he wanted the jury to know. “Despite what was said from the witness stand,” Tom testified, “Anne Marie had seen the
gift from Talbot's. Once she saw the box, she knew exactly what it was. She was very happy. And she opened it up and she didn't break the gold seal. She
never
broke the gold seal. She looked and confirmed what it was and just gave me a very big smile. Showed she was very happy. And I imposed one condition on her . . .”

His voice trailed off. “But I guess I'm beyond that . . .”

Oteri asked Tom to speak up and he explained he had been on automatic pilot by then. “I felt as though I had to go to her apartment and bring over the gift and bring over the perishables that were in my refrigerator—like strawberries and bananas. Anyway, I had something else that I thought to bring over with me.” He could not remember what it had been.

Now, Tom admitted a number of things he had done, all on “automatic pilot.”

“I did make that star-six-nine call. I wanted to find out if I was the last one she had spoken to. And I heard a man's voice answer that I didn't recognize, so I realized I was not the last one. . . .

“I did go to her room. I did turn her air conditioner on. I did not touch her bed. I did not go through her closet.”

Tom offered his guess that it had been Anne Marie herself who had left a jumble of shoes and a mess in her closet because she had been in such a hurry to take a shower and change before going to dinner with him.

A
FTER THREE DAYS OF LISTENING
to Tom, everyone in the courtroom wondered how long it would take him to finish his seemingly interminable explanations. He had yet to give his version of the long ride to Stone Harbor and the trip on Gerry's boat to Mako Alley. Perhaps he thought that if he was able to convince the jurors that Anne Marie's death was an accident, he could go home again and pick up his life. Even Debby MacIntyre would have nothing hanging over her head but a tragic accidental shooting. Tom had admitted he was a coward—but apparently he could live with that. He seemed more anxious to show the jury that he was a gentleman who always treated his women well.

On Tuesday, December 22, Tom was on the stand again, explaining how he had “compartmentalized” and done what he had to
do. Gallantly, he had sent Debby home so that she wouldn't be involved. On the same trip to the basement when he chose the cooler over the garbage can as a body receptacle, he found a bottle of Clorox bleach. He estimated that he had spent only ten to fifteen minutes putting Anne Marie's body in the cooler. He wasn't sure just when he had used the bleach—before or after he went to Anne Marie's apartment. It was only a three-to-five-minute drive. He had let himself in with her keys.

“I've only done this [compartmentalizing] one other time in my life—when my father died,” Tom told the jury. “And yet I didn't have enough sense not to pour Clorox straight onto a dark maroon love seat, and it left a very large discoloration.”

Tom insisted that Gerry could not have seen as much blood on the couch as he had described because the Clorox had turned the maroon upholstery yellow. “I also tried to clean up [the floor]; there were some fairly light bloodstains on the carpet,” he said. “And then I just sat down and tried to think of what I was going to do at this point—what I could possibly do.”

Oteri had seen the effect that Tom's matter-of-fact explanations were having on the jurors and tried to soften his image. “Now,” he asked, “are you normally an emotional person?”

“Yes,” Tom said.

“You're not being emotional today,” Oteri offered.

“No—well, first of all, I'm drugged, and secondly, I'm compartmentalizing again.” Tom said that Dr. Tavani had increased his dosage of Xanax (for anxiety) and added another drug whose name he'd forgotten.

“Does that, in your opinion, account for your semi-zombielike state?” Oteri led.

Connolly objected, but was overruled. Judge Lee let Tom testify about the effects of his prescription drugs. If Lee was erring at all during this trial, it was always on the side of fairness to the defendant. He allowed Tom to go even further and explain how his father's death had made him “put his feelings in the attic.”

Once more, as his testimony continued, Tom drew Debby into his accidental-death scenario, incriminating her even further. Regarding the toll back edit of calls from his phone, he testified that all of them had been placed, but not for the reasons Debby stated. Yes, he had called his office answering system to establish he was home at 12:05
A.M.
And he and Debby had called back and forth about what they should do to get rid of Anne Marie's body. He had to get the cooler and the carpet out of the great room, and she had known
he was far too weak to do it alone. He said Debby had volunteered to come back and help him. “She was certainly at my house no later than one,” Tom said.

“When she arrived,” Oteri asked, “what did you do, the two of you?”

Tom said they had carried the cooler down the steep narrow back steps to the laundry area and the garage beyond. “It was something I could never, ever have done myself,” he stressed. “And she helped me. And then we moved furniture around and we rolled up the rug. It was almost wall-to-wall, with rubber padding underneath. Very heavy. It took two people to lay it when it was first brought in.”

According to Tom, Debby stayed with him for a while and he reassured her over and over that Anne Marie's death had been only a horrible accident. He said he himself would bear the guilt because he had not been honest with her about Anne Marie.

Tom's avowed concern for others carried over into his testimony about Gerry's part in disposing of Anne Marie's body. He told the jury he had tried desperately not to involve his little brother, but Gerry had been adamant about not giving Tom the keys to his boat. As for Gerry's testimony that Tom had once told him he might have to kill an extortionist, Tom appeared baffled.

All he could think of by way of explanation was that Gerry was a “wiseguy wannabe. He's the one,” Tom said, “showing off in his drunken state [about] his acquaintances from the strip joint in Philadelphia—the Doll House. [They] once mentioned to him that they might ask him to make use of the boat. Actually, I think he said it in front of Joey, as well. We, of course, thought it meant in connection with a drug transaction.”

Tom was horrified at the suggestion that he would have involved Gerry in any murder plan. “I never, never—I wouldn't do that to my brother!”

Debby had called him early Friday morning, Tom said, asking him what he was going to do about Anne Marie's body. “I told her I wasn't certain,” he testified. “Again, I wanted to shield her from knowledge in the case.” But he had agreed to meet her at the Tower Hill track.

The state's case against Tom was so confining that, to show he was telling the truth, he would have to wedge into his scenario dozens of times and other details to fit. He couldn't ignore the evidence of his phone calls, his use of Kay's Suburban, the picture at the ATM, or many other inflexible elements of the case against him. He
said he happened to have a chain around his house left over from the snowy winter of 1996. He had the padlock because his locker at the Wilmington Country Club had been broken into. At one point, he said, he had slipped the Beretta into the cooler and sealed it with the chain. Once again, Tom testified that he was much too weak to lift it—so Gerry had helped him put it in the back of Kay's Suburban. Their tasks accomplished in Wilmington, Tom said, he and Gerry had headed for Stone Harbor with Tom at the wheel, driving at his customary fast clip.

Throughout his testimony, Tom had chided Joe Oteri for calling him “sir,” and now, in the midst of statements that were chilling even in that stifling hot courtroom, he smiled boyishly at Oteri when asked, “Would you say, sir, that you were disorganized and panicky?”

“If you call me ‘Tom,' I will.”

“Tom,”
Oteri said through gritted teeth, “would you say that you were disorganized and panicky?”

Seeming to luxuriate in his own words, Tom said, “I was disorganized trying to be organized. I'm not sure ‘panicky' was the right word at that point. I was trying to focus, and as I said, trying to compartmentalize and just concentrate on the immediate task at hand and not let myself think or feel.”

To protect his brother, Tom said, he had refused to tell Gerry anything, despite his “newsy” questions on the hour-and-a-half trip to the Jersey shore. Tom's testimony regarding the disposal of Anne Marie's body scarcely differed from Gerry's, although he said he didn't believe Gerry could have seen an ankle disappearing into the water. Tom spoke of how seasick he had been. The trip out on the rough sea had been tough on him. But he had persevered throughout the day. And it was a very long day, which included disposing of the couch in a Dumpster at one of Louie's construction sites. The last thing he'd had to do to cover up Anne Marie's death was cut up the bloodied carpet, stuff the pieces into garbage bags, and dispose of them in a Dumpster outside the Capanos' Holiday Inn, just across the bridge in New Jersey. (Later, of course, Tom had had to remind both Louie and the motel manager to have their Dumpsters emptied early.)