The next night, after dinner with his parents, Mike took Anne Marie to Tosca at the Grand Opera House. On December 1, the new couple went to Governor Carper’s reception, where the marines collected Toys for Tots. And a night later, Mike had a Caddyshack party, which was hilarious, with everyone dressed as someone from the Bill Murray movie with its manic golf course antics.
Christmas was approaching but it seemed the oddest season. On December 4, Anne Marie flew to Puerto Rico for a weeklong legislative convention. Along with Tom Carper’s press secretary, Sheri Woodruff, she would represent the state of Delaware. But while Anne Marie was in Puerto Rico, she became ill and fainted. Doctors weren’t able to diagnose what was wrong with her. It may have been the heat or some bad food. Or it may have been that she was living with such dread that Tom would approach Mike and tell him terrible things about her, she was barely eating.
When she returned from Puerto Rico on the eleventh, Anne Marie plunged into a whirl of activities. There was a Women for Carver dinner, lunch with a friend a day later, and the weekend was filled with parties. Anne Marie always called parties “fiestas” when she noted them on her calendar. On many dates, she jotted down two fiestas on the same night.
As always, her calendar noted birthdays, showers, weddings, and of course, baby-sitting for her siblings’ youngsters. She and Mike had a dinner together at the Columbus Inn, a wonderful restaurant in a structure in Wilmington that seemed little changed over centuries. Mike had no idea what she was going through. She didn’t want to tell him about Tom and she made excuses about why she had fainted in Puerto Rico, fearful that Mike would find her anorexia disgusting. Finally, because he was so worried about her fainting, she fudged and told him that the doctors couldn’t figure out why she was losing weight—that they thought it might be stress or fatigue.
On Sunday, December 18, Anne Marie and Mike went on a Christmas tour to see the lights and decorations in Wilmington. Afterward she helped him decorate his home for Christmas and they trimmed the tree with his brother, Vin. Because Mike was going to Rhode Island for Christmas, they had an early celebration. A photograph from that night shows them together on a love seat next to a miniature Christmas village arranged on drifts of cotton snow.
They looked like a couple, with Anne Marie holding their presents in her lap and Mike laughing, his eyes shut against the flash of someone’s camera. It was easy to picture them together in Mike’s house for many Christmases to come.
Mike left for Rhode Island on the twenty-second and told Anne Marie he’d be back on the thirtieth, in plenty of time to take her to the celebration at Winterthur, Henry Francis du Pont’s majestic museum of American arts. Not only did she have a date for New Year’s Eve, but it was with the man she truly wanted to be with.
Tom had been working on her, of course, warning her away from Mike. He told her that Mike was a nerd and he was amazed that she would even be interested in him. He hinted that he might have to tell Mike that she wasn’t available—that she belonged to him. And if he did so, it would be for her own good, since she apparently didn’t have enough sense to know what was best for her.
That sent a chill through Anne Marie. Even imagining a confrontation between Mike and Tom made her sick to her stomach. Tom would make their relationship sound dirty and he would paint her as such a sinner and loose woman—face it, he would make her out to be a slut and a whore (his favorite words for her when he was angry)—that Mike would run for the nearest exit.
It should have been a wonderful time, but Anne Marie was always looking over her shoulder and waiting for the phone to ring. Tom, who had always been so in control, was losing it—or seemed to be. He threatened suicide if Anne Marie didn’t come back to him. One night he came up the back stairs to her apartment and burst in when she opened the door. Breathing heavily, he stomped around and collected everything he had ever given her: the television, clothes, records—even a jar of mayonnaise. “I don’t want another man watching the TV I gave you,” he said, “or seeing you in clothes that I gave you—so I’m taking it all back.”
In the end, he relented and returned his gifts, but it was an awful fight. It was only one of many scenes. One night Tom drove her home and refused to let Anne Marie get out of his car until she agreed to talk to him. When she tried to reach for the door, he grabbed her around the neck. He didn’t hurt her, and she wasn’t afraid of him physically—but it showed that he was out of control. Her life had become a back-and-forth secret tug-of-war.
Another night, Tom drove Anne Marie into the garage at his house on North Grant Avenue and shut the doors behind them. He would not let her go until she agreed to discuss their relationship. Why? she wondered desperately. There was nothing to discuss. She had always been claustrophobic, and she felt suffocated in closed-in places. Locked in Tom’s garage, she began to panic—but he was obdurate. When he finally opened the doors, she was sick to her stomach.
There would be more scenes like that, and then Tom would send Anne Marie long, almost childlike E-mail, as if everything between them was still all right. The reversal itself was chilling.
Tom used Anne Marie’s friends, calling in old favors. Jackie Steinhoff saw him almost every day until mid-October. But when he came into her coffee shop in December, she noticed that he looked terrible. “He began to lose a lot of weight. His cheeks were drawn—he just didn’t look good. He looked like a sad person.”
Jackie had always seesawed in her opinion of Tom, but she felt really sorry for him as Christmas approached. Anyone would have, she thought.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You’re not eating.”
He only shook his head sadly and told her he wasn’t sleeping well, either. “He never went into it,” she recalled. “He tried to put a smile on, and said, ‘Things aren’t going good—I’m depressed. We’ll talk about it.’ ” Tom told Jackie he would come down sometime and tell her about his problems, but he never did—not until just before Christmas. “It was the second week of December that he said he wanted to kill himself, that he was suicidal.”
Jackie was very worried about Tom and tried to talk to him, but he just turned and walked away. She immediately called Anne Marie, told her that Tom was talking about suicide, and asked her what they could do to help him. But Anne Marie, who was usually the first one to jump in to help someone in trouble, seemed strangely detached.
“He’s OK, he’s OK, Jackie,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with him. He’ll be fine.”
Jackie wasn’t so sure. But Annie knew Tom better than anyone, and if she said he was OK, he was OK.
Tom was OK in every way except for his rage at Anne Marie for trying to slip out of his grasp. He knew that she was dating Mike Scanlan and he was furious. It didn’t matter that he had promised to marry Debby MacIntyre, or that he had begun dating one of the legal secretaries in his firm in November. Susan Louth was thirty-two, a “great-looking blonde,” according to one of Tom’s attorney friends, and they were having a rollicking, passionate affair. They had a lot of private jokes, and he often took her to the Villa d’ Roma in Philadelphia for dinner. It was the same restaurant that Debby considered “their special place,” but the management was very discreet.
Susan knew that Tom dated other women, and he seemed to relish the fact that she dated other men; oddly, he didn’t obsess about her. She didn’t want a man she could count on—Tom was what she termed “a challenge, and that’s what I like in a relationship.”
Tom took Susan to his mother’s house and introduced her to Marguerite. Thereafter, when his mother referred to Susan, she called her “that slutty little girl,” which Tom and Susan found hilarious. When he sent Susan notes, Tom addressed them to “Dear Slutty Little Girl.”
Tom was also trying to renew another love affair; he had been looking for Linda Marandola for a long time. He’d heard she was back in town. He appeared to view women as either whores or madonnas. He held less tightly to the former and never quite let go of the latter.
And Tom still walked into his former home whenever he liked. He didn’t seem to want Kay, but he would not let her have her own life either. One night, Kay was giving a dinner party when Tom strolled in, uninvited and unannounced. As she sat at the table with her guests, he took his shoes off and plopped his stockinged feet in her lap. He wanted her to massage them. He had embarrassed her in front of her guests, and everyone there, even those who knew that Tom could be imperious with women, was disgusted.
IN late 1995, Tom was still threatening suicide to Jackie Steinhoff, promising marriage to Debby, jumping into bed with Susan, doing business as usual at Saul, Ewing, and considering new conquests. And he was still trying to buy Anne Marie.
Tom’s money had always gotten him what he wanted. He told Anne Marie that he had more money than Louie, which was a lie, but his net worth did top $5 million. That was more than enough for him to buy whatever he needed. He persuaded Anne Marie to go for a drive and took her to a ten-room house. He offered to buy it for her if she would come back to him. No one who hadn’t been without a home could even imagine what pretty houses meant to Anne Marie. She often wrote in her diary about her friends’ wonderful houses. A home of her own was the ultimate in security and serenity for her.
Tom also tried to buy her a Lexus, knowing that she had trouble with her Jetta. She looked at him, appalled. He found out that Anne Marie and Kim were hoping to go to Spain together after Christmas. And that was a trip he could approve of. It would get Anne Marie out of Wilmington and away from Mike Scanlan. 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 hurt her 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 not want 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 with Anne Marie; the three of them would go to La Famiglia in Philadelphia in mid-January. Despite his tendency to meddle in her business affairs, Jackie was grateful to Tom for all the help he had given her in setting up Java Jack’s and, because he seemed so sad, she really wanted to help him.
Anne Marie was sad too—sad that she hadn’t known Mike was going to enter her life. Her friend Jennifer Bartels Haughton was in Wilmington for Christmas, and Anne Marie took Jennifer out to dinner at Toscana. Afterward they sat in Anne Marie’s car for a long time, talking. Jennifer gave Annie her Christmas gift, and Annie started to cry. She cried for a long time. “She was crying because she said she didn’t deserve Mike,” Jennifer remembered. “There were so many things about her that she hadn’t told him and she was really scared she would lose him if she was honest with him.”
PART TWO
Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon
thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is
cruel as the grave.
SONG OF SOLOMON 8:6
Chapter Sixteen
DEBBY MACINTYRE WAS EXCITED about New Year’s Eve 1995. It was the first time that she and Tom would be together on this holiday. She had promised him a lobster dinner with all the trimmings, and he seemed pleased about that. It was wonderful to be able to have Tom visit when Victoria and Steve were home, and he was so nice to them. Steve particularly admired Tom, and Tom seemed to go out of his way to be, if not a father figure, a grown man willing to take time for a boy. This time, however, neither of her children would be home on New Year’s Eve. And Debby worked all day cooking and making sure that everything was perfect for her dinner with Tom. She set a graceful table with the china and silver that she rarely had occasion to use.
But Tom was late, and when he arrived at Debby’s house on Delaware Avenue, he was in a foul mood. “He was moody, sulky, and depressed,” she would recall. “I asked him what I’d done wrong—and he would only say, ‘It’s not you.’ ”
That didn’t help her feel any better. This night was to have been a celebration of their new beginning, the start of a year when they could be together all the time. Instead it was a disaster. Tom grudgingly ate the delicious meal Debby had prepared, picking at it indifferently. He didn’t brighten up the who
le evening and generally acted as if they had nothing to celebrate.
Debby didn’t know what was wrong; she wondered if Tom regretted his impending divorce or perhaps felt sad to be away from his daughters on New Year’s Eve. But she knew better than to question him too closely.
ANNE MARIE and Mike were also together that night for their first New Year’s Eve since they’d met. Anne Marie was able to forget for a while the lowering presence of Tom Capano; and she prayed that the year ahead, all the years ahead, would be with Mike. It seemed possible that night. It didn’t matter that Mike was fighting off a nasty cold and they couldn’t stay out as late as they might have; they enjoyed just being together. They watched Winterthur’s fireworks explode into a million cascading colors and then headed for home.
But Anne Marie moved into 1996 apprehensively. Her friends and family knew that she was happy with Mike. Her very close friends knew she dreaded that Tom would destroy her new love. They also knew that she was hiding something else from Mike: her eating disorder. She realized that she had to tell him about that soon—but she hoped she would never have to admit to Mike that she had slept with Tom.
The physical side of Anne Marie’s relationship with Mike was not nearly as intimate as it had been with Tom, and that was OK with her. Mike’s restraint was a sign that he cared about her and took his Catholicism seriously. But they kissed and hugged and held hands all the time.
Anne Marie knew Mike was concerned that she was so thin, but unlike Tom, he didn’t pressure her to eat. She hoped she could gradually explain more about her eating problems to Mike—about how she sometimes felt as if her life was slipping away from under her and she wasn’t able to control anything but her appetite. But that could wait. It wasn’t as though she was lying to him; he could see she had lost weight.