The Cooler That Wouldn't Sink: The Anne Marie Fahey Story

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She had dinner with them in Philadelphia one night in June 1996.

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By that weekend, her family knew something was wrong.

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What happened to Ann Marie Fahey took over a year to unravel, and it ended with one of

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Delaware's most powerful men on trial for a murder he almost got away with.

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[Music]

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It's Philadelphia. June 27, 1996.

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Ann Marie Fahey is at a nice restaurant having dinner with a man 14 years older than she is.

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She's 30. He's married with four daughters at home.

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By the time that dinner ends, nobody at the table, including her, has any clue it's the last

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real conversation she'll ever have with anyone.

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And I want to start there with that dinner because this case makes more sense once you understand

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who these two people were before that night, not only what happened after it.

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Ann Marie grew up in Wilmington, the youngest of six kids in a tight Irish Catholic family.

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Her mom died of lung cancer when Ann Marie was just nine.

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Her dad died of leukemia when Ann Marie was 20.

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Around that same stretch, the one therapist that she really connected with, that she really

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was able to open up with, died also in a car accident.

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By her mid-twenties, she'd lost both parents and the one person helping her carry that weight.

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But she still got up every day and went to work.

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She was the appointment secretary for Delaware's governor, Tom Carper.

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That is where she met Thomas Capano in 1993.

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Capano was basically Delaware royalty.

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His father, an Italian immigrant, built a real estate and construction empire.

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And Capano grew up the golden oldest son, shipped off to Archmere Academy,

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a prep school that seems to have personally manufactured half of Delaware's political class.

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He became a state prosecutor, then Wilmington city solicitor, then legal counsel to the governor,

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then a partner at a top firm.

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Delaware is tiny in terms of who actually runs things.

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So everybody in that world knew Capano and called him the same thing, a fixer,

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the guy who could make your problem disappear with one phone call.

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Underneath that reputation, Capano had a pattern people around him either ignored

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or they quietly accepted. During his 26 year marriage to his wife, K,

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with whom he had those four daughters, he was reportedly involved with at least eight different women.

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His longest running affair was with Deborah McIntyre, who happened to be married to one of

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Capano's own law partners and was a personal friend of his wife.

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It's a level of tangled that would make a really good TV show, I think.

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And that one relationship had been going on for over 15 years by the time Anne Marie showed up.

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There's an earlier episode too. Back in 1981, Capano became obsessed with a different woman,

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had someone harass her and reportedly talked about killing her before backing off.

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That was over a decade before anyone in Anne Marie's life ever heard his name,

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meaning that the capacity was sitting there long before she ever walked into that office.

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She would often have lunch with Capano and those lunches turned into an affair in early 1994

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when Anne Marie was just 28 and he was 44. She kept a diary, honestly one of the most heartbreaking

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primary sources in True Crime because you can watch her talk herself in and out of this relationship

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in real time in this diary. In April 1994, she wrote that she was in love with a married man,

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that she fantasized about a life with him, that he was gentle and intelligent.

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Two days later, she wrote, "It was over and blamed herself for it."

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Then back and forth, that's kept going for two years. By April 1996, months before she died,

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her tone had completely flipped. She called him a controlling, manipulative, insecure,

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jealous maniac and wrote that for an entire year she had let him control every decision in her life.

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Around that same time, she started seeing someone new, a colleague named Michael Scanlon,

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a devout Catholic guy and that relationship wasn't even physical yet. Scanlon had no idea

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Anne Marie was involved with anyone else. Her psychiatrist later testified that

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Anne Marie feared Capano might kill her once he found out what was going on and discovered that

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she was moving on. Six weeks before that last dinner, Deborah McIntyre bought Capano a 22-caliber

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barretta pistol at his request. Anne Marie was reported missing three days after that dinner.

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When investigators pieced together, mostly from Capano's own family that turned on him later on,

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is that he shot her at that rental house and at the rental house by the way that he kept for his

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affairs. Then he called his youngest brother Gary for help. Gary owned a fishing boat. It was called

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the summer wind. They packed Anne Marie into a large cooler, drove to the New Jersey coast near Stone

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Harbor and motored about 60 miles into the Atlantic. The cooler wouldn't sink. So Gary fired a

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shotgun slug into it and it still wouldn't sink. It kept floating. With Anne Marie's body inside of

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it, Capano allegedly pulled it back in, removed her body, waited her down with a boat anchor chain

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before letting her go. A fisherman named Ken Chubb found that exact cooler floating on July 4th,

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days after the murder. He patched the bullet holes and used it casually for over a year before he

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saw some coverage on the news of Capano's arrest and realizing what he'd been hauling his lunch

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around in. He turned it over to the FBI. A receipt later proved Capano bought an identical cooler on

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April 20th more than two months before the murder, which turns a defense argument about a sudden

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accident into a much harder conversation about planning and premeditation. This case stalled for

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over a year. Nobody, no weapon, nothing solid enough to charge him. In October 1997, federal agents

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raided Gary Capano's house and found drugs and guns sitting right there. Facing real federal charges

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of his own, Gary started cooperating that November and so did his brother, Lewis. Capano was arrested,

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November 12th, 1997. DNA testing on blood stains at that rental house came back consistent with Anne

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Marie, though by today's standards, that statistical certainty was pretty modest. A sign of how early

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we still were in the DNA era. Investigators also traced a barcode on that cooler straight back to

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Capano's credit card purchase, so ordinary retail record keeping ended up doing as much work here as

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the DNA did. Deborah McIntyre ended up being the hinge, the whole trial swung on. She admitted

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buying the gun and testified under immunity after admitting she lied to a grand jury earlier.

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The defense spent a long time trying to get her to admit that she'd been in the room and fired

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the gun herself, and she denied it every single time. While in jail awaiting trial, Capano

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allegedly tried to arrange a burglary of her house to scare her into silence and separately tried

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to hire someone to kill both McIntyre and his own brother, Gary, so neither one of them could testify.

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The trial opened October 26th, 1998 and ran for 12 weeks. Partway through, the defense admitted

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Capano had disposed of the body, but argued her death was a tragic accident. Against his own lawyer's

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advice, Capano took the stand for eight days and testified that McIntyre had burst in on him and

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Ann Marie, threatened suicide with the gun, and then it went off accidentally during the struggle.

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Under cross-examination, all that Delaware charm that carried him through decades of his political life

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came apart. When the prosecutor brought up his daughters, Capano screamed and called him a

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heartless, gutless disgrace of a human being. Right there and in front of the jury, the judge had him

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removed. After three days of deliberation, including a rare emergency Sunday session, the jury convicted

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Capano of first degree murder on January 18th, 1999. Ten days later, they voted 10-to-2 to recommend death,

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and the judge sentenced him to die by lethal injection. It became the first murder conviction

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in Delaware history secured without a recovered body or weapon. Years later, Delaware Supreme Court

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upheld the conviction but throughout the death sentence, since it hadn't been decided by a unanimous

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jury. Rather than fight that battle again, prosecutors let it go, and in 2006, Capano was

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resettanced to life without parole. He spent the rest of his life in a Delaware prison,

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in September 2011. At age 61, he was found dead in his cell during a routine check. Cardiac arrest

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tied to heart disease made worse by obesity. The judge who sentenced him said years later that

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Capano basically ate himself to death, and once his appeals ran out, it felt like a slow suicide by

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food. Debra McIntyre remarried and quietly rebuilt to life working at a non-profit in Wilmington.

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When a reporter reached out around the 20-year anniversary, all she said was that she had no

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interest in talking about the case. Michael Scanlon, the man Ann Marie had been falling for right before

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she died, eventually left the corporate world to become an assistant headmaster and then later a

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photographer. Ann Marie's body was never found. Her family never got the one thing that every family

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in a case like this wants most. Somewhere to actually go and visit her. What's left is a diary,

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a cooler, a stranger fished out of the water, and a small Delaware world that watched one of its own

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golden sons turn out to be a monster. Thanks for listening to 10-minute murder,

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bingeable true crime stories. I'm Joe, I'm the host, and here's an email subject. My husband thinks I'm

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morbid. Joe, I found your show about four months ago on a recommendation from a coworker and now I'd

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listen to two or three of my drive-in every morning. My husband, the other day, caught me listening in

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the kitchen last week and said, "Why do you listen to this stuff?" Like I'd been caught doing something wrong.

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I don't have a good answer for him. I just find it interesting how ordinary everybody is,

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right up until they're not. Anyway, the Kendall-Francée wall once stuck with me for days. The part about the

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house is what got me. How does the whole family live like that and nobody says anything? Do you ever get

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burned out on it? Like, does it ever get to be too much and you have to take a week off of murder?

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Thanks for the mornings. Angela, Bowling Green, Kentucky. Angela, thank you for the email,

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thank you for listening, and tell your husband to take a chill pill. JK, I don't think people say that

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anymore, but honestly, I'm kidding. But there are people in this world that don't... they cannot

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fathom how people consume true crime. Now, they watch the documentaries and listen to the podcasts

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and read the blogs and all of those things. They don't understand how people like you and I

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are interested with the world of true crime. For me, like Angela said, it's the human interest part.

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It's the part about what makes these people tick. What takes an ordinary person seemingly

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ordinary person and turns them into a killer? What makes a serial killer? Was it their background? How

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they were raised? Did they get bonked on the head too hard when they were younger? All of these things

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add up sometimes to being an absolute monster and that's the interesting part of it to me.

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And the second part of your email, do I get burned out on it? Burned out, I would say, is the wrong

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word to describe it. I don't ever lose interest in it, but I do think sometimes that researching these

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cases gets to be too much for my brain. So I do take many brain vacations from true crime.

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But burned out, no, I don't, I don't ever lose interest in true crime itself.

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Hey, if you're a brand new listener to this podcast, welcome. Super pumped that you're here.

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Make sure you hit subscribe wherever you're listening right now. And also go back and check out the

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back catalog of 10 Minute Murder. If the episodes are too short for you, like you'd like to have

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blueprints available in most places that this one is. You can search for that or you can go to the

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show notes of this episode and I've got links for you can check out True Crime Blueprint.

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And that's going to do it. That's your episode for today. Thank you again for listening to 10 Minute

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Murder. See you next time.