One Capano brother dismissed from civil suit
Martha
murderer of Anne Marie Fahey, was dismissed by a Superior Court judge
from the Fahey siblings' wrongful death suit. Joseph is the Capano who
bought the anchor to replace the one lost when it was used to weight
down Fahey's body after it was thrown into the ocean. The judge also
threw out two of the four counts against developer Louis J. Capano and
his five corporations. Louis is the one who helped dispose of the
bloody couch from Thomas's house, using one of his corporations'
Dumpsters.
Nine counts remain against Thomas Capano, three of the original four
against Gerard (whose boat was used to dispose of the body; he
accompanied and assisted Thomas in this). The count of concealing
evidence against Joseph, Louis and Gerard was also thrown out because it
is not recognized under Delaware law.
Martha
kkramer
http://www.msnbc.com/news/305413.asp#BODY
The case against Thomas Capano
Sept. 1 — Thomas Capano was accused of killing his mistress in cold blood.
But Capano was a wealthy, respected attorney, and with no body and no
weapon, only one person could help investigators — the suspect’s youngest
brother, Gerry. In his new book, “The Summer Wind: Thomas Capano and the
Murder of Anne Marie Fahey,” author George Anastasia recounts the shocking
twists and turns of a murder investigation that made national headlines.
Read an excerpt from the book.
CHAPTER ONE:
The cooler wouldn’t sink. It was floating out there in the middle of
the Atlantic Ocean, bobbing on the water. Mocking him.
Tom Capano looked at it for a long time; then he turned to his
brother Gerry. Gerry looked away. He had made it clear that he wanted no
part of this. But Tom needed him. Maybe for the only time in his life, he
needed his younger brother’s help.
They were out there together, and they had to finish what they had
started.
Tom cursed.
The cooler was an Igloo marine model, a fisherman’s ice chest. It
was about four feet long, two feet high, and two and a half feet wide, made
of heavy-duty white plastic. Tom had wrapped a large metal chain around it
and secured it with a padlock, but that and its contents still weren’t
enough to make it sink. The cooler stood out against the blue-green sea,
floating calmly about thirty feet away from them.
They were standing on the deck of the Summer Wind — which was the
name of Gerry’s sports fishing boat, and also the title of a melancholy
Frank Sinatra song of fleeting romance and the heartache of lost love. But
that was the irony that would have been lost on Tom Copano as he stood
staring at the damn ice chest, willing it to go down.
“I can’t fucking believe you did this,” Gerry Capano shouted. “Why
did you get me involved in this? I can’t fucking believe it.”
They were about sixty miles out, southeast of the southernmost tip of
New Jersey. It was late on a hazy Friday morning at the end of June in 1996,
the kind of day sailors and fishermen describe as “snotty.” There was a
slight wind blowing out of the southeast. The waves were two to four feet.
The sun was trying to break through the heavy mist.
During the ride down to the shore that morning, Tom had assured his
brother that everything would be all right. “I’ll never let anything happen
to you,” he had said. But now, as he stood at the back of the small boat, he
had nothing more to say to his brother.
Gerry cut back on the dual engines that powered the twenty-five foot
Hydra Sport. He reached for the shotgun he kept in the boat’s small
wheelhouse: a twelve-gauge Mossberg, silver with a black stock. Gerry kept
the gun on board to kill sharks. He used deer slugs. They were more
effective than buckshot.
Gerry aimed at the cooler and fired once. There was a dull thud as
the slug pierced the plastic. The brothers looked at one another.
Now blood was seeping out of the bullet hole. But the cooler was
still bobbing on the ocean’s surface. It wouldn’t sink.
Gerry cursed in frustration and anger. He powered the engines and
swung the boat around toward the cooler, gently pulling alongside. Tom
reached over and grabbed for the chain, pulling the ice chest hard against
the Summer Wind.
Gerry cut back on the engines and allowed the boat to idle. He
reached down, grabbed the boat’s two anchors, and brought them to his
brother.
“You’re on your own,” he said.
Tom was fighting to get the chain and padlock off the cooler. Gerry
walked away, toward the bow of the boat. For three or four minutes he stood
looking out at the sea. In the distance, he could see another small fishing
boat, but otherwise they were alone.
He heard chains and anchors clanging and Tom struggling. Occasionally
his brother would pause and vomit over the side. Gerry didn’t know if this
was because he was seasick — Tom had a weak stomach; he hated boat rides —
or because of the work at hand.
“Are you done yet?” Gerry yelled at one point.
Tom did not answer.
He had gotten the chain off and had the lid of the cooler opened. He
was sickened by what he saw inside. It was the body of a woman. She was
tall, with long, thick hair and a large, oval face. Once she had been
beautiful, but now her features were distorted. She had been dead for
several hours, stuffed inside the cooler before rigor mortis had set in.
Along the side of her head, above her left ear, her hair was matted and
discolored where the blood from a bullet wound — a wound Tom had inflicted
several hours earlier — had coagulated. Her hair, which was auburn, had
turned a dark reddish purple around the small head wound.
Using nylon rope he had found on board, Tom Capano secured the
anchors and the chain to the body. Then he tilted the cooler and allowed the
remains of the woman he had once loved to slip out into the water. Gerry
turned when he heard the splash. He saw part of a calf and a foot disappear
into the ocean as the now-anchored body began its slow descent. It would
take several minutes to reach bottom. They were at a depth of about 200
feet, Gerry knew; he often fished for shark there.
The area was known as Mako Alley.
“I can’t fucking believe you got me involved in this,” he said again.
Tom Capano didn’t hear him. He was throwing up over the side of the
boat.
The brothers said very little else that morning. Gerry got a
Philips-head screwdriver out of his toolbox, took the lid and one of the
handles off the Igloo cooler, and threw them into the ocean. Next he got a
hose and washed out the chest, rinsing away the pools of blood that had
settled on the bottom of the plastic container.
Minutes later the “Summer Wind” was heading due west, toward shore,
at about twenty-five knots. At that point, Tom Capano flung the cooler — now
missing a lid and a handle, and with a bullet hole through its side and
bottom — into the water.
Gerry pushed the boat to full throttle. The white Hydra Sport 2500
bucked, then lurched forward, skimming the top of the noontime sea. The
Capano brothers never looked back.
If they had, they would have seen the large white Igloo cooler
bobbing on the water.
It wouldn’t sink.
This was a clash of two generations and two cultures; a story of love and
betrayal, of wealth, greed, power, and treachery bubbling beneath the thin
veneer of respectability that money and political clout can provide.
It is a surreal story, a soap opera with an outlandish script. Even
some of the jurors to whom the story was later presented seemed perplexed by
it all. They heard all the testimony, viewed all the evidence, assessed all
the witnesses — and it was still as if the story were some kind of dream, or
nightmare: A rich, powerful, and secretly obsessive lawyer carries on a
clandestine two-year affair with a beautiful young gubernatorial aide. He is
in his mid-forties, married, with four teenage daughters. She is in her late
twenties, model-thin, anorexic, and conflicted. She is a flirt who enjoys —
indeed, seeks out — the attention of older men. But she is racked with
guilt — guilt rooted in a troubled upbringing and a staunch Irish Catholic
background. She tries to end the affair. He kills her. This was a clash of
two generations and two cultures; a story of love and betrayal, of wealth,
greed, power, and treachery bubbling beneath the thin veneer of
respectability that money and political clout can provide. Before it is
over, the story is more Jerry Springer than jurisprudence.
Brother against brother, lover against lover — the story of the
investigation and conviction of Thomas J. Capano for the murder of Anne
Marie Fahey is a tale of the values and morals of America at the end of the
twentieth century. If the 1990s were, as Vanity Fair has proclaimed, “The
Tabloid Decade,” then the Capano trial was a signal headline for this era
when all vestiges of public shame seemed to have faded away.
Self-centered and self-absorbed, Tom Capano testified for eight days
at his own trial, confident he could talk his way out of a murder rap. It
was his final miscalculation.
His first was believing that the cooler would sink.
They got back to Stone Harbor, New Jersey, around three that
afternoon. All told, the boat trip had taken about five hours, hours that
the Capano brothers would be hard-pressed to account for once the
investigation started to narrow in on what had happened that morning.
But it would be months before they would have to deal with those
particulars. And it would be Gerry more than Tom who agonized the most over
the events; Gerry, the youngest brother, the wild one, the one who was
always breaking the rules and getting into trouble.
It was Gerry, as it turned out, who had a conscience, who couldn’t
live with what he had done. Tom, who had killed the woman and stuffed her
body into the ice chest, had already begun blocking it out as they drove
home from the Jersey shore to Wilmington.
Tom, the oldest brother, the one they called the golden boy, thought
he could get away with murder.
A billboard at the city limits proclaims Wilmington, Delaware, “A
Place to Be Somebody.” It is a small-town vanity that captures both the
charm and the hubris of the city, population 71,000, that sits along the
Delaware River opposite southern New Jersey and just below Philadelphia.
Wilmington is a small, even incongruous spot in the megalopolis that
stretches from Boston to Washington, D.C.
Over the last twenty years, by virtue of some canny legislation,
Wilmington has become the improbable corporate capital of America, if not
the world. Half of the country’s Fortune 500 companies are based there. It
is a financial Disneyland, though its steel and glass and plastic cityscape
is strangely lacking in humane qualities. So dependent is the city upon its
new crop of finance company denizens that its very identity is defined by
their presence.
Where once it was the DuPont Company that set the city’s tone, now it
is MBNA Corporation, First USA bank, Mellon, Chase Manhattan, and a handful
of other financial giants. Today’s downtown Wilmington has been rebuilt
around those institutions and the liberalized banking laws that brought them
to the city. Banker-friendly legislation passed in the 1980s, including a
big cut on taxes levied against financial houses and the gutting of prickly
consumer laws, turned Wilmington — the only city of any size in Delaware —
into an attractive haven for big banking companies eager to expand their
credit card operations.
What could be more American, after all, than buying on credit?
Plastic is so much better than cash. America’s credit card debt rose from
$100 million in the late 1980s to nearly $500 million in the early 1990s,
and Wilmington basked in the glory of it all.
The modest skyscrapers that sprung up here were a tribute to
corporate America and to the 17.5 percent interest rate that guarantees most
credit card consumers a lifetime of debt. Rodney Square, the European-style
piazza that opens onto Market Street in the heart of the downtown business
district, is surrounded by the old and the new edifices that define
Wilmington. The elegant, five-star Hotel DuPont sits across the square from
the stately, classical Daniel L. Herrmann Courthouse. The other two sides of
the square are lined by the old Wilmington Trust Building and the public
library, classic examples of beaux arts architecture that date from the
1920s.
But on the corners of the square, jutting up behind the older
buildings, are the shiny glass-and-concrete monuments to the new players.
The headquarters of MBNA, the largest credit card issuer in the country,
stretches over two blocks and will soon include the courthouse building
itself, which MBNA will occupy once the city finishes construction on a new
justice center a block away. First Union, Corestates, and Mellon Bank occupy
the other corners. A block away is the Chase Manhattan Centre, and towering
over the southern end of the downtown, a few blocks below Rodney Square, is
the pristine First USA building.
Always looking to be good corporate citizens, MBNA executives
spearheaded the drive to refurbish the city’s Grand Opera House, the
centerpiece of a still questionable attempt to pump life back into Market
Street after dark. The Opera House is now the locus of all that is
distinguished, all that is high society, in the city. It is the venue for
the Grand Gala, the annual fundraising soiree that brings out the city’s
best and brightest, or at least its most powerful and wealthiest. The
black-tie affair is like a senior prom for those who make up the city’s
elite and those who dream of joining them.
Not to be outdone, First USA has given the city its Riverfront Arts
Center, where crowds lined up for months not too long ago to view the
blockbuster Nicholas and Alexandra exhibition, a celebration of historic
wealth, power, and ostentatious elegance that played well in local social
and political circles. The Czar would have fit right into Wilmington
society.
The development along the waterfront has also included Frawley
Stadium, home of the Wilmington Blue Rocks, the city’s minor league baseball
team. Tickets are at a premium; the quaint, Norman Rockwell-like ballpark is
one of the best seats in town during the summer.
Built in the image of its new masters, Wilmington is modern, neat,
and conservative, and it’s locked up tight by 6:00 PM.
By that time the stores that line Market Street have been shuttered,
and the office workers have headed to their homes in neighborhoods north and
west of the downtown area, staying clear of the poorer sections of the city
where many African-American families have somehow managed to miss out on the
boom. At the same time, the executives who run the big companies have gotten
into their BMWs and Jeep Cherokees and Volvos and headed out to Greenville
or one of the other trendy, upscale suburbs, where cappuccino bars, gourmet
specialty shops, and mailboxes stuffed with Eddie Bauer and J. Crew
catalogues announce that life is good and interest rates are solid.
Wilmington is urban lite. There are still the remnants of the city’s
once solid, ethnic, middle-class neighborhoods, areas that fifty years ago
were cultural enclaves for the city’s Italian, Irish, Polish, and
African-American blue-collar workers. There are also poverty-stricken,
crime-ridden neighborhoods that would rival those of Philadelphia or New
York. And finally there are the gentrified areas, which look a lot like
Alexandria, Virginia, or Haddonfield, New Jersey — neighborhoods of large,
sprawling Victorian-style homes on tree-lined streets with manicured lawns
and cobblestone sidewalks. Neighborhoods that offer city life with suburban
security — though all on such a small scale that “urban” seems too strong a
word to describe it.
Wilmington isn’t New York or Philadelphia. What’s more, it doesn’t
want to be. More Southern in temperament and attitude than Baltimore or
Washington, Wilmington has long operated in its own social, political, and
cultural time zone. Outsiders consider the place quaint, provincial, marked
by a civility that disappeared in most of America’s cities back in the
1950s. People on the streets actually smile at strangers, say hello, and
pause to engage in conversation. Everyone, it seems, knows everyone else.
‘If somebody said we want to get the ten most influential people in the
state to a meeting to discuss getting something done, Tom Capano would have
been one of those ten.’
This was the Wilmington of Thomas J.
Capano as he returned from Stone Harbor on the afternoon of June 28, 1996.
He was a player, one of the people who made things happen.
“He was part of the power structure in the city and the state,”
recalls Celia Cohen, a longtime political writer who is now working on a
book about the history of Delaware politics. “At that time, if somebody said
we want to get the ten most influential people in the state to a meeting to
discuss getting something done, Tom Capano would have been one of those ten.
He was intelligent, extremely self-confident, and he knew how to make things
happen. People trusted him. And he had a track record to back him up.
Capano could pick up a phone and call an executive at any one of the
city’s financial houses. He could walk into the mayor’s office unannounced.
He could meet with the governor or the state’s only congressman or with
either one of its U.S. senators.
He was forty-six years old, the oldest son of one of the wealthiest
families in the city. His father, the late Louis J. Capano, had built many
of the suburban housing tracts that sprung up around Wilmington during the
construction boom of the 1960s and 1970s. The family fortune stemmed from
the construction company Louis Capano had founded, and from the real estate
holdings in which he had wisely invested and on which Louis Capano Jr., one
of Tom’s younger brothers, had expanded.
But while Louis Jr. was clearly the family moneymaker, Thomas Capano
had been the pride and joy of his immigrant parents, Louis and Marguerite
Rizzo Capano. He was the son who was going to take the family to the next
level — not financially, but socially and politically. There was a daughter,
Marian, who was five years older than Tom, and there were three younger
brothers, Louis Jr, Joe, and Gerard.
Louie and Joe were rough-and-rumble characters, happy to work in the
construction trades, anxious to follow in their father’s footsteps. Gerry,
who came along late in life — he was thirteen years younger than Tom, eleven
younger than Joe — was the spoiled baby of the family, a big kid who never
really grew up.
Tom was the smart one, the one who was always reading books. Tom was
the standout student-athlete at Archmere Academy, the private, boys-only
Catholic prep school he attended in the mid-1960s. He was the president of
the student council, one of the senior class leaders, a delegate to Boys
State. He starred on the football and track teams. He went on to Boston
College, and then to the college’s law school.
“Every mother loves her children equally,” Marian Capano Ramunno
would recall sadly after everything fell apart for her brother. “But there
is always one child who is easier to like. Tom was easy to like. He never
gave my parents a bit of trouble. He was the golden boy.”
There was a standing joke within the family. Marguerite Capano, like
any mother, would brag about the accomplishments of her sons, whatever they
might be. Louie did this. Joey did that. Gerry did the other. But when she
referred to her oldest son, it was always as “My Tommy.” After they had all
reached adulthood, the others in the family would mock Tom and chide their
mother.
“His name is Tommy, Ma,” they would say with a laugh. “Not ‘My
Tommy."
Louis Capano Sr. cried when his oldest son graduated from law school
in 1974. It was a dream fulfilled. Wealthy by dint of his own hard work,
Louis Capano always felt like an outsider in the social and political
circles that defined Wilmington. He had come to this country as a boy from
Italy with his father, Thomas, after whom he would name his first son. The
elder Thomas Capano was a stone mason from a small village in Calabria who
had brought his family to America to find a better life. His relatives had
settled in the Wilmington area earlier, but while they found opportunity,
they also encountered institutional bigotry.
Louis Capano Sr., who dropped out of school as a teenager to learn a
trade, was a carpenter. One of his first jobs as a carpenter’s apprentice
was to build the outhouses that were still in use behind many of the row
houses in Wilmington’s Little Italy. The immigrant Thomas Capano and his son
Louis were men who worked with their hands. They were good at what they did,
but sometimes that didn’t seem to be enough.
Through the early 1960s there were still deed restrictions in some
areas of the city that prohibited the sale of property to Italians or Jews.
Blacks, of course, weren’t even considered. There was no way they would be
able to buy a home in those neighborhoods. In fact, it wasn’t until the
urban riots of 1968 — when the Delaware National Guard occupied the city for
nearly a year — that the rights of African Americans were tacitly recognized
and their status as second-class citizens began to erode.
Even after the Capanos and dozens of other Italian families accrued
substantial wealth and moved from the cramped quarters of the city’s Little
Italy to larger homes in the immediate suburbs, they still faced
limitations. For years, Italians — along with other ethnic groups — were
denied membership in the Wilmington Country Club. Louis Capano was one of
several prominent Italian Americans who helped fund and build the Cavalier
Country Club so that he and his friends would have a place of their own. It
was a small victory that provided some satisfaction, but it reinforced the
feeling that Italians were outsiders, not part of the mainstream, not
worthy.
But Thomas Capano, the grandson and the son of Italian immigrants,
was a lawyer. He could move in circles that had been forever closed to his
father and grandfather. He would have the status and the prestige, the
social standing, they had been denied.
He would have it all.
During the ride back from Stone Harbor, Gerry and Tom had agreed on an
alibi of sorts, an explanation for why they had gone down to the shore that
morning. Gerry wrote it all down on a yellow Post-it note and put the note
inside his checkbook.
The brothers got back to Wilmington at a little after 5:00 P.M. on
June 28, 1996. They were riding in a Chevy Suburban that Tom had
unexpectedly borrowed that morning from his estranged wife, Kay. First they
stopped at the Acme parking lot near Trolley Square, the trendy shopping
center a few blocks from the center of town. Gerry had left his pickup truck
there that morning.
Gerry got in his truck and followed Tom back to the house on Grant
Avenue. This was the house Tom had moved into in September after separating
from Kay. It was a stately two-story in a neighborhood of well-kept,
expensive homes. Mike Castle, the congressman and former governor, lived
across the street.
During the ride back from Stone Harbor, Gerry and Tom had agreed on
an alibi of sorts, an explanation for why they had gone down to the shore
that morning. Gerry wrote it all down on a yellow Post-it note and put the
note inside his checkbook.
At Grant Avenue, Tom asked for another favor. He needed to get rid of
a couch. Stained with blood, it was still in what Tom called the “great
room,” the den/dining area where the murder had occurred. He needed Gerry’s
help carrying it out of the house.
The brothers entered the house through the garage. As they did, Gerry
saw a rug that had been rolled up and partially cut in pieces. Like the
couch, the rug was stained with dried blood.
Gerry didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t want to know.
He helped carry the couch to the garage. It was a large, rose-colored
four-seater with a woven pineapple-like design in the fabric. Gerry noticed
the stain right away. It was about shoulder high against one of the back
cushions. He told Tom he should cut the stain out before they dumped the
couch.
Tom got a knife and cut deep into the cushion, hollowing out the area
and pulling away the fabric and the discolored interior He threw the
remnants into a trash bag near the rolled-up rug. Then he and Gerry lifted
the couch onto the back of the Chevy Suburban and headed out to a
construction site off Foulk Road near Route 202, where Louis J. Capano &
Associates had a contract to renovate an office complex for First USA.
They got to the construction site at a little before 6:00 P.M. No one
was around. Gerry tried to rip one of the legs off the couch to make it look
damaged, so that no one would be surprised to see it discarded. Then he and
Tom heaved it into a large dumpster. Gerry climbed up and threw some debris
around, covering the couch.
Tom watched in a daze. He had been awake for nearly thirty-six hours,
and there was still more to do.
After Gerry left, Tom went back to Grant Avenue, threw the rug and
the trash bags from the garage into the back of the Chevy, and headed over
the Delaware Memorial Bridge to Penns Grove, New Jersey, where the family
owned a Holiday Inn. He pulled up to a trash bin behind the hotel, where he
discarded the rug and the trash bags.
Fifteen minutes later he was back in Wilmington. He bought gas for
the Suburban, filling the tank, then drove directly to his wife’s house on
Seventeenth Street, where Kay and their four daughters — Christy, sixteen,
Katie, fourteen, Jenny, thirteen, and Alex, eleven — lived. The two oldest
girls had recently returned from a trip to Italy with their uncle Louis and
his wife, Lauri Merten, a professional golfer. Tom was anxious to see his
daughters — even after the separation, they had remained close. He stopped
by the house on a regular basis, and the girls spent most Saturday nights
with him at Grant Avenue. In fact, one of the reasons he had rented the
large house was so that each of his daughters would have her own room and
could entertain friends during the time they spent with him. He had put a
phone and a boom box in each bedroom. There was a big-screen television in
the great room on the first floor, and another in the recreation room in the
basement. He had put a pool table in the dining room right under the
chandelier.
He was always amazed at his girls, at how easily they got along, at
how they always seemed to attract crowds. Wherever they went, they seemed to
be the center of attention. Others might have described the Capano girls as
spoiled and pretentious; Tom Capano saw them as privileged and special. Like
their father, they gave off an aura of entitlement.
A generation after their parents and grandparents had been shunned
and discriminated against, the Capanos took pride in being a part of the
society that had once looked down on them. Their membership in the
Wilmington Country Club proved it: They had arrived.
When he got to Seventeenth Street, the girls told Tom Capano that
they’d rented a movie and ordered some pizzas. Kay was out. Tom ate a slice
and then fell asleep, surrounded by his beautiful young daughters, who
laughed and giggled as they watched a romantic comedy.
Capano awoke with a start at around 10:30 P.M. He said good night to
the girls, told them he would pick them up the next day, and headed out the
door. He drove two blocks to a home on Delaware Avenue, pulled into the
driveway, opened the back door with a key, and punched in the alarm code.
Then he headed up the steps to the second-floor bedroom suite, where he knew
Debby Maclntyre would be waiting.
She was already in bed. She had been expecting him for an hour. They
were both tired. They kissed and fell asleep, slipping easily into a routine
established during the fifteen years that they had been secretly seeing one
another. The next morning they made love and then went downstairs and had
breakfast.
Tom told her he had to run some errands and that he’d be calling her
later. He said he’d decided to replace the rug in the den of his home on
Grant Avenue. He said he was looking for something smaller, maybe an
Oriental.
It was a little after 11:00A.M. on Saturday, June 29, 1996.
Investigators who would later recreate Tom Capano’s actions in the
hours following Fahey’s murder were amazed at the callousness of it all.
Eight hours after dumping the body of a woman he professed to love into the
Atlantic Ocean, Tom Capano happily shared a pizza and fell asleep watching a
movie with his unsuspecting teenage daughters. Twelve hours after that, he
made love to another mistress, a woman he would ultimately try to frame for
the murder that would soon consume his life. In the span of thirty-six hours
Capano had shot Fahey, disposed of her body, had sex with Maclntyre, and
then carefully and meticulously set out to remove all evidence of his crime.
And never once, those who saw him during that period said, did he
show any sign of remorse or sadness.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpt from the “Summer Wind: Thomas Capano and the Murder of Anne Marie
Fahey” by George Anastasia courtesy of ReganBooks, copyright 1999.
Martha wrote in message <37D00C...@erols.com>...
Martha
> Martha, did the info you saw include WHY the suits were dismissed against the
> brothers? Is it because they cooperated with the prosecution? Or because they
> *technically* didn't participate in "wrongful death?
>
> PattyC
The only thing I understood from it was that the judge felt that some of
the actions the brothers took did not qualify under Delaware law as
"concealing" evidence--the replacement of the anchor, for example,
although I guess you could argue that he was helping to conceal the fact
that the original anchor was missing. The one who got rid of the couch
is still in the suit for having put the couch in the dumpster, as I
understand it, but he's off the hook for having the dumpster, once it
contained the couch, emptied. I don't think they're exactly
technicalities but more refinements?
Martha
PattyC4303
>Joseph Capano, one of the two younger brothers of Thomas Capano,
>murderer of Anne Marie Fahey, was dismissed by a Superior Court judge
>from the Fahey siblings' wrongful death suit. Joseph is the Capano who
>bought the anchor to replace the one lost when it was used to weight
>down Fahey's body after it was thrown into the ocean. The judge also
>threw out two of the four counts against developer Louis J. Capano and
>his five corporations. Louis is the one who helped dispose of the
>bloody couch from Thomas's house, using one of his corporations'
>Dumpsters.
>
>Nine counts remain against Thomas Capano, three of the original four
>against Gerard (whose boat was used to dispose of the body; he
>accompanied and assisted Thomas in this). The count of concealing
>evidence against Joseph, Louis and Gerard was also thrown out because it
>is not recognized under Delaware law.
>
>Martha
I was disappointed the other night when I did not get to see the 20/20 (I
think) show (that Stef kindly posted about, or I would not have known), because
my cable went out. This murder fascinates me. Partly because we vacation in
Stone Harbor each summer, and were there when Fahey went missing. Of course,
when we later learned she'd been deep sixed there, made the story seem all the
more interesting.