Remembering the Capano case

Some names you don’t forget so easily.

Today we are reminded of two of them.

Tom Capano.
Anne Marie Fahey.

It was another time, another era, especially when you do what I do for a living.

This was before Twitter. Before Facebook. Hell, even before Nancy Grace.

Still, it’s hard to describe the day-to-day mystery that swirled around the connected lawyer from a pre-eminent Delaware family, and the young woman connected to him who had gone missing.

I’ll always remember Anne Marie Fahey for her smile. And I’ll never forget Tom Capano for the feeling that this was a guy who likely had very rarely in his privileged life ever heard the word “no.”

Fahey was the secretary to Delaware Gov. (now U.S. senator) Tom Carper. Capano was a high-profile Delaware lawyer who moved in the highest echelon of the power elite in the tiny state. He had worked in the state attorney general’s office as a prosecutor, was legal counsel to Gov. Mike Castle and also an aide to Wilmington Mayor Daniel Frawley.

Fahey went missing in 1996. Turns out just after she had dinner with Capano. Investigators immediately turned their sights on the lawyer. It was revealed Capano and Fahey had been intimately involved. She was ready to move on. He was not.

It took 17 months as prosecutors slowly built their case, but eventually they squeezed Capano’s brother and got him to turn on his sibling. Tom Capano was arrested as he was driving to the airport.

The region devoured every detail of the sensational case. It turns out Capano shot Fahey to death, stuck her body in a huge cooler, and dumped it in the ocean off the Jersey shore.

There is still not one day that I visit the beach, sit there and look at the water, that I don’t think of Anne Marie Fahey.

And how Tom Capano could possibly have done what he did.

Tom Capano was found dead yesterday in his prison cell where he was serving a life sentence for the murder of Anne Marie Fahey.

They should dump his body in the ocean.

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