Prominent Lawyer Faces Death For Killing Mistress

WILMINGTON, Del. - A politically connected lawyer who had an affair with the governor's secretary was convicted yesterday of murdering her and dumping the body at sea in a case that exposed lurid details about Delaware's elite.

Jurors deliberated for three days before deciding Thomas Capano was guilty of killing Anne Marie Fahey, who was Gov. Thomas Carper's scheduling secretary.

Without a body, a weapon or any concrete evidence to prove how Fahey died, prosecutors used circumstantial evidence during the 12-week trial to show Capano had planned her death. Jurors had to believe the crime was premeditated to convict him on the sole charge of first-degree murder.

Capano could be sentenced to death.

He stared stone-faced as the verdict was read to a silent courtroom. Outside the room, people who couldn't get inside clapped and cheered. Capano's mother, Marguerite Capano, and Fahey's sister, Kathleen Fahey-Hosey, both burst into tears.

Jurors are scheduled to begin to hear testimony Wednesday in the trial's sentencing phase.

Capano admitted he stuffed Fahey's body in a cooler and threw it overboard from his brother's boat. But he insisted that another mistress had accidentally shot Fahey at his home in a jealous rage and that he got rid of the body to protect the woman.

Prosecutors ridiculed that story and said Capano, a married man, killed Fahey because she wanted to end their secret three-year affair.

The trial had Delawareans transfixed, exposing sensational details about some of the most influential people in this usually staid financial center, with its tightly interlocking circles of law, politics and business.

Capano is a former prosecutor and legal counsel to the governor's predecessor, and his family operates a construction business that has built houses all over the Wilmington area. During the trial, Delaware's chief deputy attorney general took a leave of absence after acknowledging on the stand that he and Capano's other mistress had a sexual encounter that Capano arranged.

The trial also split Capano's close family. His brothers Gerard and Louis, who helped him dispose of evidence, testified against him, while his brother Joseph testified in his behalf.

Prosecutors introduced passages from Fahey's diary, including the final entry, made a few months before she disappeared, in which she called Capano "a controlling, manipulative, insecure, jealous maniac."

Prosecutors also relied on the testimony of Gerard Capano, who said his brother had complained of being extorted and asked whether he could use Gerard's boat if he killed someone. Gerard Capano testified that he took his brother in his boat 60 miles off the New Jersey coast to get rid of the body and that they shot the cooler to try to make it sink.

A week later, fishermen found a pinkish-stained cooler with a slug hole in it. There was no sign of the body or the gun.

Fahey, 30, disappeared after she and Capano dined at an elegant Philadelphia restaurant on June 27, 1996. Capano long maintained he didn't know what happened to her.

But bloodstains were found in Capano's house and on the back seat of his Jeep. And investigators learned that Capano had replaced a rug and received help from one of his brothers in getting rid of a bloodstained sofa not long after Fahey vanished.

In a stunning turnaround, Capano admitted at his trial that Fahey was killed at his house and that he disposed of her body the next day. But he said that another mistress, Deborah MacIntyre, shot Fahey, and he panicked and "basically made the wrong decision."

He said he lied to protect MacIntyre, a former administrator at Wilmington's prestigious Tatnall School. She carried on an 18-year affair with Capano, who had worked with her husband.

MacIntyre denied she shot Fahey and said she wasn't even at Capano's house that night. Instead, she testified that Capano had her buy a gun for him a month before Fahey disappeared.

In closing arguments, prosecutor Colm Connolly called Capano's story of one mistress killing another "ludicrous." If Fahey died accidentally, Capano could simply have called authorities, Connolly said.

"If anybody was going to be given the benefit of the doubt, it was the defendant, with his political connections," he said.

While in prison awaiting trial, Capano was indicted on charges he tried to have MacIntyre and Gerard Capano killed.

As testimony about the death of her sister ended, Kathleen Fahey-Hosey remarked: "We have been surrounded by some very evil people."