| go back to anne's page go back to main index - DIARY OF A LOST WOMAN IT'S BEEN EIGHT MONTHS SINCE ANNE MARIE FAHEY, THE VIVACIOUS AIDE TO DELAWARE GOVERNOR TOM CARPER, MYSTERIOUSLY VANISHED--BUT NOT WITHOUT A TRACE. LISA DEPAULO REPORTS FROM WILMINGTON ON A TALE OF POWER AND OBSESSION, JEALOUSY AND RAGE, POLITICS AND, THE FEDS SAY, MURDER. I finally have brought closure to Tom Capano. What a controlling, manipulative, insecure, jealous maniac. Now that I look back on that aspect of my life -- I realize how vulnerable I had become." -- From Anne Marie Fahey's last diary entry, dated April 7, 1996, some three month before she disappeared. As usual, he did all the ordering. Later, that's what they'd remember most about the couple who came to dine that night in June, a night that would most likely be Anne Marie Fahey's last night alive. "Is there something wrong with the food?" the waitress kept asking, as course after course that Tom Capano had selected was delivered to the table and barely touched. The couple from Wilmington, Delaware, had come before to Philadelphia's Ristorante Panorama -- the kind of well-heeled soft-lit spot where a wealthy older man with a pretty younger woman wouldn't exactly raise eyebrows. Still, they'd be vividly remembered that night. Usually they were so affectionate. Usually there'd be ripples of laughter. Annie Fahey had a laugh that could conquer the room. But tonight they were solemn, serious. They drank a lot -- cocktails, a nice bottle of chardonnay, more cocktails -- but ate very little. He did most of the talking. Later the waitress would remember that whenever she approached the table, Fahrey would manage a "forced smile." When the check came, Capano dropped his credit card on top, then pushed the bill in front of Fahey, as she sat there sadly in her Laura Ashley dress. At a little after nine, they left Panorama for the 30-mile drive to Wilmington. In the hours to come, the FBI now suspects, Tom Capano -- a rich, high-profile, politically connected lawyer -- took Annie Fahey home and murdered her. It has been eight months since Anne Marie Fahey was declared missing. Those who loved her have given up hope of ever finding her body, much less finding her alive. Because in these months, what began as a strange and unsettling case of a missing woman has evolved into something even more sinister: a kidnapping and murder investigation that has led authorities on an eerie trail from a strained dinner in a quiet restaurant to a gruesome search for what the FBI calls "the parts of Anne Marie" -- in dumpsters and in landfills, on a boat without an anchor, and in bloodstrains found on Tom Capano's walls. At its core, this is a classic tale of a dangerous affair turned sour. But beyond the core, this mystery that has shaken the highest levels of Delaware politics, and even President Clinton, is about an equally timeless form of treachery: power gone awry. What began as one unbalanced relationship now threatens to topple one of Wilmington's most powerful families -- and to leave another forever grieving. Anne Marie Fahey's disappearance has mesmerized the small city of Wilmington. Partly because of who she was -- the beautiful home grown 30-year-old aide to the popular Delaware governor -- but also because of who the suspect is -- a 48-year-old political power broker of stature and wealth. Though they lived just minutes part -- he in grandeur, she in a $350-a-month third-floor walk-up--their worlds only intersected because of politics and chance. Capano belonged to a family that quite literally built half of Wilmington. The Louis Capano & Sons construction empire, started by Tom's immigrant father, developed most of north Wilmington, the residential sprawl that is home to the city's middle class. The second generation spawned shopping malls, office parks, apartment buildings--and corruption and trouble. The first big Capano scandal was an extortion scheme involving Tom's brother Louis, who now runs the family business and who has also become a focus of the FBPs investigation into Fahey's disappearance. In 1989, Louis Capano, Jr., admitted making illegal campaign contributions to a city councilman, who extorted them in return for favorable zoning votes. The councilman would end up in the slammer, but not Louis, who cooperated in an FBI sting by wearing a wire on his former golf buddy. Three years later, Mario Capano, Tom's developer cousin, helped the FBI in another sting after being suspected of making an illegal contribution to another politician. And in 1991, Tom's younger brother Joseph, also a partner in the construction firm, was charged with kidnapping and raping a 27-year-old woman. He pleaded to a lesser charge of assault and did not serve any jail time. Wilmington is not a town that forgets, To the city's working-class majority, it seemed that the Capanos' clout and money always got them off the hook. Except for Tommy. The oldest brother, he had a reputation around town as the white knight of the family, "the good Capano." A hugely successful municipal bond lawyer, he had become managing partner of the Wilmington office of the prestigious law firm of Saul, Ewing, Remick & Saul. He was a former city solicitor, deputy attorney general for the state, top aide to a former mayor, and chief legal counsel to the previous governor, Republican Michael Castle. But he was also a man whose own grand political ambitions were dashed by his brothers' misdeeds. At one point, he hart to be talked out of running for Delaware attorney general. "You have one problem," his advisers told him. "Your name." But Capano had another problem: Though married, he liked to turn on the charm with women. He was a man who schmoozed for a living, and sometimes, say those women who came into contact with him, he took it too far. "He was a real smooth operator," says one. Adds a male acquaintance, "No one was surprised that he was involved with other women besides his wife. But that it was Annie shocked everybody" When Annie Fahey first met Tom Capano, she had just turned 27. He was 44 and living with his wife and four daughters in an estate that once served as the home of the city's Catholic bishop. As those who attended political fundraisers at his home would recall, Capano had converted the chapel in the house into a billiards room. Her friends believe they met in January '93, shortly after Fahey's boss, Tom Carper, a former five-term Democratic congressman, landed in the governor's chair. Through her own small-town connections--her siblings were friends with Carper's chief of staff--Fahey had landed a job after college as Carper's Washington receptionist. When Carper became governor, he made her his scheduler and brought her back home. She was sitting at her desk outside Carper's chambers when Tom Capano walked in and introduced himself. As the head of Saul, Ewing's bond department, not to mention the counsel to the former governor, Capano would have had ample reason to try to schmooze the new guy. Or at least his pretty scheduling assistant. By February 1994, her diary shows, the affair was in full bloom--an affair that hardly anyone knew about, until Fahey disappeared. It was Saturday night, June 29, when her family realized something was very wrong. No one had heard from Annie since Thursday, which was more than unusual. She handled her own schedule with the same meticulousness with which she ran the governor's. Even though she had planned to take work off Friday, to have her hair done and maybe get a pedicure, it was odd that she hadn't called in--she was compulsive about that, too. By the evening of the twenty-ninth, her sister, Kathleen Fahey-Hosey, whom Annie spoke to almost every day, was getting anxious. Then, at 9 P.M., another person worried about Annie called Kathleen. Michael Scanlan was known to everyone as Annie Fahey's boyfriend. They'd been dating since September, when the governor had fixed them up. Carper--who knew nothing of Fahey's involvement with Capano--remembers that day, a year before Fahey disappeared, when his scheduling assistant looked at him and said, "I just wish I could meet a really nice guy." So Carper came up with the perfect man for the aide he adored: Michael Scanlan, 31, handsome, successful, and available, was the community affairs director for Wilmington's MBNA bank. In that role, he dealt regularly with Carper, who found Scanlan bright, decent, and compassionate--just the kind of guy, Carper decided, that Annie Fahey deserved. Even if his assistant, so giving with others but so tough on herself, thought less of what she deserved. The relationship with Michael developed slowly, normally. Yet by the spring they remodeled his kitchen together. In May she met his family in Rhode Island. By early June, Fahey was talking about marrying Michael Scanlan. Three weeks before she disappeared, she sat on the beach with Kathleen, chatting about who her bridesmaids would be and what they would wear And on June 29, she was supposed to have dinner with Michael and her big brother Robert at the nearby Overbrook Golf Club. But Annie never answered Michael's messages Friday and Saturday, although, when he went by her apartment, he saw her green Volkswagen Jetta out front. After he called Kathleen later that Saturday night, she made a flurry of phone calls to Annie's friends, who hadn't heard from her either. By ten o'clock, Kathleen had called the police and then, with Michael, dashed over to Annie's place. The landlord let them into the tiny apartment. The lights were out, but the air conditioner was on, and there was a strange smell. Kathleen checked the bathroom first. Nothing. In the rest of the apartment, though, things just weren't right. Annie was fanatically neat--but in the kitchen, groceries lay scattered all over the counter. The stench was from rotting fruit. In the refrigerator were two doggie bags from Panorama. The bedroom didn't look the way Annie would have left it either. The bedspread was off the bed, shoe boxes were scattered on the floor, plastic dry-cleaning bags were removed from some dresses in the closet. Folded on the top of her pile of dirty laundry was the Laura Ashley dress that, police later learned, Annie had worn Thursday night. When Kathleen and Michael checked Annie's phone, they realized she hadn't checked her messages since late Thursday afternoon, even though that was another of her compulsions. Finally, they spotted Annie's purse on the chair. Inside was her wallet, her credit cards, her cash. The only thing missing was Annie's keys. And Annie. The Faheys were not a family who panicked. They had been through enough in their lives that they tended not to get melodramatic. Humor, not self-pity, was their weapon of choice. Annie and her five siblings stock together through some trying times. But, as the youngest by almost five years, Annie was affected the most. She had just turned nine in 1975 when their mother, who was so much like her--vibrant, funny, with a laugh that warmed a room--died of cancer at 45. On the day Mrs. Fahey died, Annie's father didn't want his nine-year-old to see her mother's body being carried out of the house. So Annie's uncle, a priest, put her in the basement with the dog. But he forgot to turn on the lights. That episode left her with a claustrophobic fear of the dark--a fear, friends allege, that Capano would later recognize and exploit. Annie's father had battled alcoholism his entire life. When he was left with six kids to raise by himself, his condition deteriorated rapidly, and eventually he lost his small insurance business. Annie relied on her older sister and brothers for the things that other kids took for granted, like love and attention. And lunch money. As a teenager, she learned to make up stories for friends who couldn't call her on the phone. She was too ashamed to say her father hadn't paid the bill. The day the bank foreclosed on their house, she sat on the front porch holding her stuffled animals. Yet of all the children, Annie was the most compassionate to her father, who died of leukemia when she was 20. "Even at his worst," says Robert, "she would greet him with a big hug and kisses." Fahey developed a quick wit and the ability to hide pain. "She was almost never down," says Carper. "She was as effervescent a person as I'd ever met." But underneath was a woman desperately fearful and insecure, a woman vulnerable to an older, supremely confident man like Capano. It was after midnight when Kathleen discovered the letters--five of them, written to her sister on Tom Capano's stationery. She was in one room, Mike Scanlan in the other, both looking for anything that might tell them why Annie was gone. But Kathleen didn't share the clues she was finding with Mike Scanlan that night. It was too much. Her baby sister and Tom Capano? Instead. she called her brother Robert. "Robert," Kathleen whispered, "was something going on with Annie and Tom Capano?" "They're friends," Robert replied. "Robert," Kathleesn aid, softly, so Michael wouldn't hear," these are not letters a friend writes." Kathleen and Michael left the apartment around 6 A.M., only to return at nine. It seemed the only place to go. On the way up the steps, Kathleen touched Michael's hand. "There's something I need to tel you." Then she told Annie's boyfriend about the letters from Tom Capano and the diary she'd also found the night before. Scanlan, she says, listened quietly, then said simply, "Let's go up." At 3:30 A.M. on Sunday -- more than 54 house after Fahey and Capano left Panorama -- two state policemen, one of whom headed the governor's security, knocked on Capano's door. Capano lived alone, having separated from his wife the previous fall, in a home across the street from former governor (now congressman) Michael Castle. Capano answered the door in a housecoat and said his children were asleep upstairs. The troopers asked if he had any idea why they wanted to speak to him in the middle of the night. "Yes," he replied. One of Annie's friends had already called. Capano said he wasn't certain, but on either Wednesday or Thursday he had had dinner with Fahey "He then said," the cops later wrote, "he thought it was Thursday night." Capano explained that he had driven Fahey back from Panorama, and they had stopped at his house just long enough to pick up some gifts he had bought her, some groceries and a silk pantsuit from Talbots (which was found in Fahey's apartment, the seal on the tissue paper unbroken). Capano said he then drove Fahey to her home, went inside for several minutes to check on her ar conditioner and use the bathroom, and left at 10 P.M.He also said he had stopped to buy cigarettes on the way home -- at a Getty station that, the cops later learned, closed at 9:30. Capano also volunteered to the police that his lower of two years was "airheaded" and unpredictable, and he mentioned that she often talked about suicide. But his guess was that Annie "went off somewhere without telling someone and would show up for work Monday morning." Later that Sunday morning, the news that Annie was missing had reached the governor's staff. Carper was the most alarmed. "It was just not like Anne Marie," he says today, "to be out of touch. For any period of time." Monday morning, the staff knew, would be the test. Annie was always the first to arrive at work, usually by 7"30 A.M. The governor remembers the pit he felt in his stomach as the morning wore on with no sign of ANnie. Like the rest of his staff, he kept looking at her desk -- a desk she was so meticulous about that her Post-it Notes Were arranged in order of color and size, and the pennies in her drawer all faced in the same direction. As her brother Robert would later say, it was one of the few things in Annie's life over which she had complete control. What she couldn't control, her family was learning, was her relationship with Tom Capano. In those early days, Annie's siblings had to deal not only with the horror of knowing she was missing but with the ramifications of the secret their sister had kept from them. That burden was quickly complicated by the media. Reporters gobbled up the juicy bits of Annie Fahey's life and her affair with a married man and spat them out in tabloid splendor. No one ever took Capano to task in print for cheating on his wife. He was always the "prominent Wilmington attorney" from the "prominent Wilmington family." But Annie's weaknesses, her "double life," as it was called, even the "news" that she'd had an eating disorder, were offered up with snappy headlines. The exposure, the not-so-subtle blame--it was Annie's worst fear come true. The real story, of course, was much more complicated than a headline. It was a story that Fahey had shared in bits and pieces with various friends, pieces that would only come together after she vanished. Fahey was the kind of friend who was never judgmental, who kept her girlfriends' deepest confidences. Now, suddenly, the case depended on their betraying hers. One of those friends describes the haunting dream she has of Annie coming back and asking her, "Why do they know all my secrets?" In retrospect, Fahey's siblings realize they should have guessed what was happening. In the beginning, she talked almost too much about Capano: "this great guy who'd become like a mentor," as she described him to Robert. She even set up a meeting between Capano and Robert, a commercial real estate executive, in the hope that they could do business together. That Annie couldn't tell any of her siblings the truth about Capano had more to do with how she felt about herself than how she felt about them. She told those friends she confided in that she hated herself for having this affair, that it was the "most shameful thing she'd ever done." She lived in perpetual fear that not only would her brothers and sister find out, but that the governor would find out--and think less of her for it. That guilt stemmed in no small part from her strong Irish Catholic background: Some of the most impassioned entries in Annie's diary were written when she returned from church on Sunday--having sat pews away from Capano and his wife and children. As she later wrote in frustration, when she started going to a different mass, so did he. It started off, like most affairs, hot and heavy. But it wasn't just about sex. Capano gave Fahey everything she lacked in her childhood: attention, love of a sort, and lunch money. He showered her with gifts. But it wasn't really things that she craved. This was a woman fiercely proud of her quirky little apartment, who spent her spare time from her $31,000-a-year job mentoring underprivileged girls. To Fahey, those gifts were a symbol of devotion and security. It didn't take long for some of Annie's girlfriends to begin to wheedle the story out of her. One of them, Kim Horstmann, remembers when Fahey told her about Capano, as they walked the beach at the Jersey shore in the summer of '94. "No one could ever love me like he does," she said. "He makes me feel so safe." Annie was terrified of losing the people she loved, which is one reason why those girlfriends who knew about the affair trod lightly. Yet there was another reason they didn't worry so much: She'd been seeing a therapist. "She loved her shrink," says a friend. "She said that every time she left a session, she felt a little bit better about herself." But in the fall of '94, Fahey suffered two devastating losses--first when her grandmother, the woman who had helped raise her, died, and then when her therapist was killed by a drunk driver. Until the week she disappeared, Annie would bring flowers to the spot on the Delaware road where he had been struck. Through all of this, Tom Capano was not only Annie's lover, he was her rock. By the summer of '95, however, the bloom of the romance apparently began to fade. According to her friends, Capano had always been a jealous and possessive lover, but what was once interpreted by Annie as flattery, even loyalty, now began to bother her. A woman who clipped feminist buttons to her teddy bears, she started to rebel against what she called his "constant control." He didn't want her going to bars with her girlfriends or spending weekends with them at the shore. He was particularly resentful of the trips she made to Dover, the state capital, for her job. According to one friend, in the spring of 1995, Capano set her up on a job interview--to be his brother Louis's receptionist. An offer was made--they'd match her salary and provide her with a beautiful apartment for free. (Fahey's friends say that Capano would often criticize her little place.) Fahey turned down the job, which, friends say, infuriated Capano. That episode, they believe, started to shake some sense into her. Around the same time, Capano started making noises about leaving his wife of 23 years--another thing that worried Fahey. "Annie did not want him to leave his wife for her," says one friend. "It was more guilt than she could deal with." Fahey also started to believe that, in the long run, he was just too old for her, and since he had four daughters, she would never really come first. These were rational thoughts that could have meant the end of it. But by September '95, three things had happened, at roughly the same time, that would turn an unhealthy relationship into a toxic one. Fahey started to pull away from Capano. He left his wife. And she met Michael Scanlan. Soon they were seen all over town, laughing and holding hands. In November and December, Capano "was truly going ballistic," says a friend. He'd call Fahey incessantly, e-mail her at work constantly, and park outside her house to see if she'd been with Scanlan. (Friends say he'd call her later with a report on what she was wearing.) It got to the point where she stopped reading her e-mail, because to do so would acknowledge that she'd gotten his messages. Finally, he resorted to an old tactic--gifts. But Annie started turning them down. Friends say that he then threatened her with her worst fear: exposure. Now that he was separated, he had less to lose. But Fahey had plenty. She had made a decision not to tell Scanlan about Capano. As she'd later write in her diary, "I don't want him to run." All through those months, Fahey apparently found that she could appease Capano, calm him down, by occasionally agreeing to see him. Always, in these visits she'd downplay her relationship with Scanlan. Always, she'd leave with the assurance that Capano wasn't going to tell on her. After she'd see him, things would be tranquil for a few days, and then it would start up again. He'd leave furious messages belittling her. "After all I've done for you ..." he'd say. "You whore ... I left my wife for you." And she wouldn't even sleep with him anymore, as he complained to one of her friends. It was during these months that Fahey was diagnosed with bulimia. By January, things were slipping way out of control. On the twenty-seventh--exactly six months before she vanished--Fahey turned 30. It was also the night of Wilmington's Grand Gala. Underwritten by Scanlan's bank, it was the social event of the year, and Annie and Mike's official "coming out" as a couple. That day, one of her best friends from the governor's office was with Annie at her apartment during what started as a giddy day--her birthday, her first black-tie. She'd bought a beautiful black gown and had her hair done up like a movie star's. But as she excitedly got ready, the phone rang nonstop. It was Capano--threatening to show up. "I'll humiliate you," he told her. "I'll tell Michael Scanlan everything. In front of everyone." And by the way, he added, her Lexus would be delivered shortly. He had offered her her favorite car for her birthday, an offer she had emphatically declined, partly in panic over how she'd ever explain owning a Lexus to her family. When he'd bought her an expensive TV, she told her brothers and sister she had won it. "Please don't. Please don't," she begged him. Capano never showed at the gala and never delivered the Lexus either. Mike and Annie were the toast of the party: The next day she told her sister and brothers, who were crazy for Scanlan, it was the "most wonderful night of my lite." But Capano wouldn't let go. Between March and May, according to her friends, he instigated a series of frightening episodes. On one night, Scanlan dropped Fahey off after a date, and when she entered her apartment alone, Capano was on the fire escape, banging on the kitchen door. When she finally let him in, he was "in a rage," she later told at least one friend. He angrily collected some of the gifts he had given her--from the Calphalon cookware and the dresses to the TV, even a bottle of salad dressing--and removed them from her apartment. "No man is going to watch the TV I gave you or see you in the dresses I bought for you," he reportedly fumed. The next day, he returned all of the items to her, with profuse apologies. To her hairdresser, Fahey confided a story of a night that Capano "went crazy" when they were sitting in his car and she told him that it was over. He starting "screaming and yelling and calling her a slut and a bitch" and "grabbed her by the neck," the woman told the FBI. "He told Anne Marie that she has ruined his life because he left his wife for her, and now she is rejecting him." Fahey "jumped out of the car and ran into her apartment." Another episode was relayed by Jill Morrison, a co-worker. Morrison told the FBI that one night, Capano had picked Fahey up for a drive, "then locked the doors of the car and refused to let [her] out." He drove to his garage, "locked the garage doors, and refused to let [Annie] out of the garage until she had listened to what he had to say about her attempts to dissolve their relationship." Later, when she told her friend of this incident, it was with a particular chill: One of the many secrets she shared with Tom Capano was the story of the day her mother died--and how she had been left in the dark basement. Capano, say Fahey's friends, always knew which buttons to push. But sometime around late April to early May, Fahey started to tell her friends that things with Tom Capano were finally under control. "She felt that they had come to an understanding," says Kim Horstmann, "that they'd always love each other, but that they would be friends," Capano was unusually quiet over the next month or so. Today; her friends believe that he used that time to regain her trust. Her friends also believe that by mid-June, Annie had made enormous strides. She thought she had her bulimia under control. She had clicked with a new therapist, a woman named Michele Sullivan. And she talked constantly, and adoringly, about Scanlan. Still, it seemed too good to be true. The very last line written in her diary was about him: "Michael is the most wonderful person," she wrote. "This is the first 'normal' relationship I've ever had, and I can't screw it up!" On Thursday, June 27, at 4:30 P.M., Fahey sent her final e-mail to the governor's staff, reminding them that she had the day off on Friday. No one knew that she had dinner plans with Capano that night--with the possible exception of Michele Sullivan, with whom Annie had a 5 P.M. appointment. Sullivan later told the FBI that Fahey was afraid of Capano because he had stalked and threatened her. She encouraged Fahey to report him to the authorities. Sullivan also said that "the only reason" Annie would have accompanied Capano to dinner would be to break off the relationship and that she was trying to help Annie Fahey "develop the confidence" to do just that. Less than an hour after Fahey left her therapist, she was with Capano at Panorama. The fact that Annie Fahey worked for the governor went a long way in helping the investigation. It was just a matter of days after she disappeared when Bill Clinton, who'd known Tom Carper for years, called the Delaware governor--first to "express his concern as a friend," as Carper remembers it, then to ask "if he could be of any help." He sure could, Carper replied. "And literally within a week, the FBI became very heavily involved." Shortly after, Tom Capano was publicly named a suspect. His cadre of high-priced defense attorneys responded by angrily pouncing on the FBI. Invoking Richard Jewell--the new best friend of suspects everywhere--they painted Tom Capano as a scapegoat and a victim of political pressure. Days later, on July 31, a team of FBI agents showed up at Capano's door, with warrants to search his house and two cars, in an effort to find, among other things, any "objects which could be used to dismember or conceal body parts." They dug up his back yard, brought in trained dogs, and removed two vanloads of items from his home--including, it would later be revealed, mops, brooms, vacuum cleaners, sections of dry-wall, a "small axe with fibers," a broken fireplace poker, and a bottle of blood remover. Two weeks later, they returned with a fourth search warrant--for Capano himself. His blood was taken, his pubic hairs clipped. That same month, teams of feds and police in protective gear combed through two Delaware landfills. In January, it was revealed through unsealed FBI affidavits that bloodstains were found in Capano's family room and laundry room. A stain on the backseat of his Jeep Grand Cherokee also tested positive as blood. On the Sunday after Annie disappeared, one of Capano's neighbors, the FBI reports, saw him cleaning out another car, a Chevy Suburban he'd borrowed from his wife. That neighbor, George has learned, was Capano's former boss, Congressman Mike Castle. (Castle says he told authorities he wasn't sure what Capano was doing.) The FBI's theory of the case was this: that Capano took Fahey "without her consent" from the restaurant to his home; "that he killed her at his residence and then attempted to clean evidence relating to the cause of her death in his laundry room and then removed at least some of that evidence in his black Jeep Grand Cherokee." Then more details of those mysterious searches of Delaware dump sites began to emerge. Several local news outlets reported that employees of Louis Capano, Tom's construction mogul brother, told the FBI that on the morning of July 1, Louis instructed them to immediately empty three of his company's dumpsters--days ahead of schedule. Fahey's siblings believe that Annie never made it home to her apartment, and that someone paid a visit to it after she'd been killed, messing it up to make it look as though she'd been abducted. At 11:52 that night--two hours after Capano says he dropped off Fahey--someone dialed [a]69 from Fahey's telephone, reaching the number of her last unchecked message, from Michael Scanlan at 10 P.M., asking her to meet him at a pub. New details have also surfaced about Capano's activities in the days following Fahey's disappearance. On Sunday, June 30, four police officers questioned Capano a second time. As the FBI later wrote, "Capano's demeanor had changed since the night before, and he seemed very agitated." Authorities later learned that the day before, Capano had replaced the carpeting in the family room of his home--a room where bloodstains were later found on the woodwork and the radiator. His maid informed the FBI that Capano had also replaced the sofa in the family room--though both the rug and the couch, so far as she knew, had been in fine condition. George has also learned that at approximately noon on Sunday--only hours before the cops made their second visit--Capano went to a local drugstore asking for "the best" stain remover they had. He was sold a bottle of Carbona Blood and Milk Remover, according to the person who waited on him--a purchase that matches Capano's credit card records. He returned to the same store days later to purchase a large bottle of bleach, a transaction that, sources say, was recorded on a store video. The FBI is investigating one other previously unreported lead. In the days after Fahey's disappearance, another Capano brother sold a boat that had been kept at a marina in New Jersey. The 25-foot fishing boat was sold, sources say, without an anchor. The buyer was told it had recently been "power-cleaned." Capano's lawyers released a statement after the FBI's affidavits were unsealed, calling them "unsubstantiated self-serving statements" and adding that "the FBI's attempt to characterize the June 27th dinner date as a prelude to a kidnapping and murder is preposterous." They also released several affectionate letters written by Fahey to Capano in June. Capano, his lawyers wrote, "is devastated by Anne Marie's disappearance and, like everyone else, he hopes she will be found safe." As of late January, no arrest has been made in the case. The body of Anne Marie Fahey has never been found. The blood found in Capano's house and car is still being analyzed. "It all comes down to the blood," as experts keep saying. But without a sample of Fahey's blood for comparison, the results could be inconclusive. Until recently, it was believed that such a sample did not exist. But George has learned that in the weeks before she disappeared, Fahey donated blood--it was something she did regularly but didn't talk about. That final secret of Fahey's may lead to a break in the case. Sources say the blood she gave was tracked down to a commercial vessel somewhere in the Atlantic. Fahey's sample was returned to Wilmington over Labor Day weekend and given to the FBI, which has yet to announce any results. Today, while members of one Wilmington family find themselves under increasing suspicion, the members of another struggle with their grief. In August, while the feds were searching landfills, Fahey's siblings faced their own bleak task: cleaning out Annie's apartment. In September, Capano moved out of the house Fahey may have died in, and the Faheys forced themselves to walk through it. "We had to," says Kathleen, who was the last to believe they'd never see Annie again. "There has been so little closure." By the New Year, Fahey's desk at the governor's office was finally cleaned out. "If only she had told us ..." Tom Carper has said. If only Annie Fahey knew the power she had. ~~~~~~~~ By LISA DEPAULO Research assistance provided by Rob Wherry. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |