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

0:00 She had dinner with them in Philadelphia one night in June 1996. By that weekend, her family knew something was wrong. What happened to Ann Marie Fahey took over a year to unravel, and it ended with one of Delaware's most powerful men on trial for a murder he almost got away with. [Music] It's Philadelphia. June 27, 1996.

0:46 Ann Marie Fahey is at a nice restaurant having dinner with a man 14 years older than she is. She's 30. He's married with four daughters at home. By the time that dinner ends, nobody at the table, including her, has any clue it's the last real conversation she'll ever have with anyone. And I want to start there with that dinner because this case makes more sense once you understand who these two people were before that night, not only what happened after it. Ann Marie grew up in Wilmington, the youngest of six kids in a tight Irish Catholic family. Her mom died of lung cancer when Ann Marie was just nine. Her dad died of leukemia when Ann Marie was 20.

1:30 Around that same stretch, the one therapist that she really connected with, that she really was able to open up with, died also in a car accident. By her mid-twenties, she'd lost both parents and the one person helping her carry that weight. But she still got up every day and went to work. She was the appointment secretary for Delaware's governor, Tom Carper. That is where she met Thomas Capano in 1993. Capano was basically Delaware royalty. His father, an Italian immigrant, built a real estate and construction empire. And Capano grew up the golden oldest son, shipped off to Archmere Academy, a prep school that seems to have personally manufactured half of Delaware's political class.

2:14 He became a state prosecutor, then Wilmington city solicitor, then legal counsel to the governor, then a partner at a top firm. Delaware is tiny in terms of who actually runs things. So everybody in that world knew Capano and called him the same thing, a fixer, the guy who could make your problem disappear with one phone call. Underneath that reputation, Capano had a pattern people around him either ignored or they quietly accepted. During his 26 year marriage to his wife, K, with whom he had those four daughters, he was reportedly involved with at least eight different women. His longest running affair was with Deborah McIntyre, who happened to be married to one of Capano's own law partners and was a personal friend of his wife.

2:59 It's a level of tangled that would make a really good TV show, I think. And that one relationship had been going on for over 15 years by the time Anne Marie showed up. There's an earlier episode too. Back in 1981, Capano became obsessed with a different woman, had someone harass her and reportedly talked about killing her before backing off. That was over a decade before anyone in Anne Marie's life ever heard his name, meaning that the capacity was sitting there long before she ever walked into that office. She would often have lunch with Capano and those lunches turned into an affair in early 1994 when Anne Marie was just 28 and he was 44. She kept a diary, honestly one of the most heartbreaking primary sources in True Crime because you can watch her talk herself in and out of this relationship in real time in this diary. In April 1994, she wrote that she was in love with a married man, that she fantasized about a life with him, that he was gentle and intelligent.

4:00 Two days later, she wrote, "It was over and blamed herself for it." Then back and forth, that's kept going for two years. By April 1996, months before she died, her tone had completely flipped. She called him a controlling, manipulative, insecure, jealous maniac and wrote that for an entire year she had let him control every decision in her life. Around that same time, she started seeing someone new, a colleague named Michael Scanlon, a devout Catholic guy and that relationship wasn't even physical yet. Scanlon had no idea Anne Marie was involved with anyone else. Her psychiatrist later testified that Anne Marie feared Capano might kill her once he found out what was going on and discovered that she was moving on. Six weeks before that last dinner, Deborah McIntyre bought Capano a 22-caliber barretta pistol at his request. Anne Marie was reported missing three days after that dinner.

4:56 When investigators pieced together, mostly from Capano's own family that turned on him later on, is that he shot her at that rental house and at the rental house by the way that he kept for his affairs. Then he called his youngest brother Gary for help. Gary owned a fishing boat. It was called the summer wind. They packed Anne Marie into a large cooler, drove to the New Jersey coast near Stone Harbor and motored about 60 miles into the Atlantic. The cooler wouldn't sink. So Gary fired a shotgun slug into it and it still wouldn't sink. It kept floating. With Anne Marie's body inside of it, Capano allegedly pulled it back in, removed her body, waited her down with a boat anchor chain before letting her go. A fisherman named Ken Chubb found that exact cooler floating on July 4th, days after the murder. He patched the bullet holes and used it casually for over a year before he saw some coverage on the news of Capano's arrest and realizing what he'd been hauling his lunch around in. He turned it over to the FBI. A receipt later proved Capano bought an identical cooler on April 20th more than two months before the murder, which turns a defense argument about a sudden accident into a much harder conversation about planning and premeditation. This case stalled for over a year. Nobody, no weapon, nothing solid enough to charge him. In October 1997, federal agents raided Gary Capano's house and found drugs and guns sitting right there. Facing real federal charges

6:29 of his own, Gary started cooperating that November and so did his brother, Lewis. Capano was arrested, November 12th, 1997. DNA testing on blood stains at that rental house came back consistent with Anne Marie, though by today's standards, that statistical certainty was pretty modest. A sign of how early we still were in the DNA era. Investigators also traced a barcode on that cooler straight back to Capano's credit card purchase, so ordinary retail record keeping ended up doing as much work here as the DNA did. Deborah McIntyre ended up being the hinge, the whole trial swung on. She admitted buying the gun and testified under immunity after admitting she lied to a grand jury earlier.

7:11 The defense spent a long time trying to get her to admit that she'd been in the room and fired the gun herself, and she denied it every single time. While in jail awaiting trial, Capano allegedly tried to arrange a burglary of her house to scare her into silence and separately tried to hire someone to kill both McIntyre and his own brother, Gary, so neither one of them could testify. The trial opened October 26th, 1998 and ran for 12 weeks. Partway through, the defense admitted Capano had disposed of the body, but argued her death was a tragic accident. Against his own lawyer's advice, Capano took the stand for eight days and testified that McIntyre had burst in on him and Ann Marie, threatened suicide with the gun, and then it went off accidentally during the struggle.

7:58 Under cross-examination, all that Delaware charm that carried him through decades of his political life came apart. When the prosecutor brought up his daughters, Capano screamed and called him a heartless, gutless disgrace of a human being. Right there and in front of the jury, the judge had him removed. After three days of deliberation, including a rare emergency Sunday session, the jury convicted Capano of first degree murder on January 18th, 1999. Ten days later, they voted 10-to-2 to recommend death, and the judge sentenced him to die by lethal injection. It became the first murder conviction in Delaware history secured without a recovered body or weapon. Years later, Delaware Supreme Court upheld the conviction but throughout the death sentence, since it hadn't been decided by a unanimous jury. Rather than fight that battle again, prosecutors let it go, and in 2006, Capano was resettanced to life without parole. He spent the rest of his life in a Delaware prison, in September 2011. At age 61, he was found dead in his cell during a routine check. Cardiac arrest tied to heart disease made worse by obesity. The judge who sentenced him said years later that Capano basically ate himself to death, and once his appeals ran out, it felt like a slow suicide by food. Debra McIntyre remarried and quietly rebuilt to life working at a non-profit in Wilmington.

9:25 When a reporter reached out around the 20-year anniversary, all she said was that she had no interest in talking about the case. Michael Scanlon, the man Ann Marie had been falling for right before she died, eventually left the corporate world to become an assistant headmaster and then later a photographer. Ann Marie's body was never found. Her family never got the one thing that every family in a case like this wants most. Somewhere to actually go and visit her. What's left is a diary, a cooler, a stranger fished out of the water, and a small Delaware world that watched one of its own golden sons turn out to be a monster. Thanks for listening to 10-minute murder, bingeable true crime stories. I'm Joe, I'm the host, and here's an email subject. My husband thinks I'm morbid. Joe, I found your show about four months ago on a recommendation from a coworker and now I'd listen to two or three of my drive-in every morning. My husband, the other day, caught me listening in the kitchen last week and said, "Why do you listen to this stuff?" Like I'd been caught doing something wrong.

10:40 I don't have a good answer for him. I just find it interesting how ordinary everybody is, right up until they're not. Anyway, the Kendall-Francée wall once stuck with me for days. The part about the house is what got me. How does the whole family live like that and nobody says anything? Do you ever get burned out on it? Like, does it ever get to be too much and you have to take a week off of murder? Thanks for the mornings. Angela, Bowling Green, Kentucky. Angela, thank you for the email, thank you for listening, and tell your husband to take a chill pill. JK, I don't think people say that anymore, but honestly, I'm kidding. But there are people in this world that don't... they cannot fathom how people consume true crime. Now, they watch the documentaries and listen to the podcasts and read the blogs and all of those things. They don't understand how people like you and I are interested with the world of true crime. For me, like Angela said, it's the human interest part.

11:36 It's the part about what makes these people tick. What takes an ordinary person seemingly ordinary person and turns them into a killer? What makes a serial killer? Was it their background? How they were raised? Did they get bonked on the head too hard when they were younger? All of these things add up sometimes to being an absolute monster and that's the interesting part of it to me. And the second part of your email, do I get burned out on it? Burned out, I would say, is the wrong word to describe it. I don't ever lose interest in it, but I do think sometimes that researching these cases gets to be too much for my brain. So I do take many brain vacations from true crime. But burned out, no, I don't, I don't ever lose interest in true crime itself.

12:21 Hey, if you're a brand new listener to this podcast, welcome. Super pumped that you're here. Make sure you hit subscribe wherever you're listening right now. And also go back and check out the back catalog of 10 Minute Murder. If the episodes are too short for you, like you'd like to have a little more than 10 minutes, you can listen to my other podcast. It's a lot longer. True crime blueprints available in most places that this one is. You can search for that or you can go to the show notes of this episode and I've got links for you can check out True Crime Blueprint. And that's going to do it. That's your episode for today. Thank you again for listening to 10 Minute Murder. See you next time.