Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Reviews
"Thumbsucker" by Walter Kirn
A sworn enemy of novelistic pain relief takes a jittery poke at American kitsch and credulousness.
By Adam Goodheart
[11/02/99]

Dear Mr. Blue
Rarin' to go
Even after I lost 79 pounds, my husband isn't interested in sex. What if someone else makes a pass at me?
By Garrison Keillor
[11/02/99]

Book Bag
Funny pages
The deadline poet and author of "The Tummy Trilogy" picks five books that made him laugh.
By Calvin Trillin
[11/01/99]

Ivory Tower
The luau wars
Dartmouth Greeks tried to improve their reputation with a non-offensive Hawaiian luau. The leis never even made it off the rack.
By Robert Ito
[11/01/99]

Reviews
"Silent Stars" by Jeanine Basinger
A massive tome on the silent era's greatest performers fails to come up with much that's fresh.
By Steve Vineberg
[11/01/99]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Capano had left his wife the previous autumn, just when Fahey had begun to date Michael Scanlan, a quiet, handsome and highly moral man her own age. Anne Marie thought she might marry Mike someday -- but only if Capano could be persuaded to stay quiet about their affair. To that end, she had maintained a friendly e-mail correspondence with Capano and occasionally agreed to dinner invitations. She had even allowed him to lend her money and buy her small gifts. But she would not resume their intimate relationship. Her anxiety about his obsessive behavior -- his phone calls and e-mails, his questioning of her friends, his constant driving past her apartment to see whose car was parked in her driveway -- caused her to increase her reliance on the only power she had left: a defiance of Capano's desire to feed her. She would go to dinner, but she would not eat.

Fahey's psychiatrist, Michelle Sullivan, testified at the trial that Fahey had been making progress in facing her problem with Capano. Sullivan theorized that the only reason Anne Marie agreed to go out to dinner with Capano that last night was to finally make a definitive break with him. But Capano had to have his own way. His needs were non-negotiable. If Anne Marie wanted to leave him for another man, if she could no longer be cajoled with gifts and wheedling or subdued with threats of exposure, she would have to die. As the trial would prove, his arrogance had developed into delusions of omnipotence; he assumed he could get away with murder.

How does a man who has always had everything he wanted, who has succeeded at everything all his life, who has the power to obtain virtually anything he desires by merely opening his checkbook -- how does such a man develop a murderous level of obsession with the one young woman out of 20 who eludes his grasp? We can understand how Capano developed the arrogance, his confidence in his own abilities and righteousness. His illusions about his inherent superiority are not surprising. But the disproportionate, killing rage -- where did that come from? A man so confident, rich, successful -- why didn't he just shrug his shoulders and move on to the next conquest?

No less than four current books attempt to tell the story of Capano's life, the murder he committed and how he was brought to justice over the course of two and a half years of investigation and trial. The facts that have emerged are presented competently -- and lurid facts they are -- but none of these authors is able to answer the question of the true source of Capano's capacity to kill. A story like this is a testament to our inability to even explain the origin of evil, much less control its manifestations.

Virtually everyone associated with Capano suffered, innocent and complicit alike. Testimony during the trial destroyed the personal reputations of Keith Brady, Delaware's assistant attorney general, and Deborah MacIntyre, a quiet, independently wealthy and highly respected private school administrator, who turned out to be another of Capano's secret mistresses. She had participated in a threesome with Capano and Brady, and once agreed to have sex with a casual date while Capano watched them from outside her living room window. MacIntyre bought the gun Capano used to kill Fahey, and her testimony was pivotal in proving that the murder was premeditated.

To prevent MacIntyre from testifying, Capano tried to persuade jailhouse pals to arrange a burglary of her house in order to prove to her that he could "get to" her, even from inside the prison lockdown unit where he was held without bail for months before his trial. He provided another inmate with an elaborate plan of MacIntyre's home, including the number for her burglar alarm, and a list of instructions detailing where to find valuables and MacIntyre's stashes of sex toys and pornographic videos. Drawing an arrow to the huge floor-to-ceiling mirror in her bedroom, where he and MacIntyre liked to watch themselves having sex, he wrote that it "must be shattered" by the burglars: "ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED." Meanwhile he was writing MacIntyre melodramatic, manipulative and self-pitying love letters, which included his fantasies of her having sex with other men, "down on all fours, taking it doggy style." At the same time, in chatty letters to yet another mistress, he criticized MacIntyre's appearance and contemplated destroying her credibility by telling the court that she "swallowed and loved it."

Capano, supremely confident of his own ability to charm and manipulate the jury, eventually took the stand himself -- in defiance of his own million-dollar defense team's advice. In a bizarre, last-ditch attempt to deflect the weight of the evidence, he blamed the murder on MacIntyre, but the tale he told was riddled with absurd inconsistencies and improbabilities. Most say his arrogant insistence on testifying was the act that sealed his fate.

Next page | Putting a hit out on his own brother