The Murder of Anne Marie Fahey: How a Lawyer Was Convicted Without a Body

During the summer of 1996, the mystifying disappearance of a Delaware woman with direct connections to the state’s highest office dominated national newspaper headlines. Anne Marie Sinead Fahey was last seen alive at a Philadelphia restaurant on the evening of June 27, 1996, with a wealthy attorney from a prominent real estate dynasty.

The highly-organized Fahey was working for then-Delaware Gov. Thomas Carper as his scheduling secretary when she was reported missing. The 30-year-old’s sister had gone to check on her and found the single woman’s apartment in a state of utter disarray. Her purse was located on the kitchen counter, and her green Volkswagen Jetta was parked nearby.

“If someone asked for a list of famous no-body cases, the Fahey murder is always going to be up there,” former federal prosecutor Tad DiBiase tells A&E + Investigation. “What makes that case stand out is the killer—who he was and what influence he had.”

Amid the disorder of her mussed apartment, Fahey’s sister found her personal diary along with letters from the offices of Thomas Capano, a charming, well-known Delaware lawyer. Capano had worked as both a state prosecutor and a public defender before eventually serving as part of former Delaware Gov. Michael Newbold Castle’s legal counsel.

Like Fahey, Capano—who was married with four daughters—worked for Carper’s administration as one of the governor’s key advisors.

“Capano was a pretty high-profile person in Delaware politics,” DiBiase explains. “There’s not a lot of no-body murders that involve people who were sort of well-known in their local communities before the no-body murder happened. Most of the people involved in these types of cases are sort of anonymous people. This was an individual who was very well-known and very well-regarded within this small legal and political community he was part of in Delaware.”

When federal and state investigators read Capano’s letters to Fahey and her diary entries, they learned that the 46-year-old lawyer and the governor’s scheduling secretary had been involved in a tumultuous three-year on-again, off-again romantic relationship. Only few knew about the affair, which coincided with the dissolution of Capano’s marriage.

From Fahey’s journal entries, investigators discovered she had tried to end the affair several times, citing Capano’s extreme bouts of jealousy, his ever-increasing need for control and his maniacally obsessive behaviors.

Capano quickly became the prime suspect in Fahey’s disappearance. In police interviews, Capano denied ever hurting Fahey and said they parted on good terms following their meal on June 27, 1996. It would be more than a year before he’d face arrest.

DiBiase says investigators painstakingly reviewed toll records, seized emails from servers at Capano’s office and the governor’s mansion, and analyzed gun purchase records as they continued to try to connect the lawyer to Fahey’s fate.

They looked into his financial records and searched a pair of landfills in hopes of finding some sign of the missing woman. Behavioral analysts were even asked to develop a psychological profile for Capano, and forensic teams found traces of Fahey’s blood on woodwork in his home as well as his car’s radiator cover. Investigators confirmed that the blood found in Capano’s home and vehicle belonged to Fahey after comparing it to blood she’d recently donated.

Days after the murder, Capano also purchased a bottle of Carbona Stain Devils Blood and Dairy remover, investigators learned, along with a cheap rug he used to replace some of the beige wall-to-wall carpeting in his home.

FBI agents also uncovered a 10-page letter Capano had written, detailing aspects of his relationship with Fahey. In the letter, he claimed he’d spent the day after the murder with one of his younger brothers, Gerard, in Stone Harbor, N.J.

In November 1977, hoping to get him to cooperate with their ongoing homicide probe, Gerard was arrested during a federal sting and charged with drug and weapons offenses. Agents convinced Capano’s other brother, Louis, to talk, and he recounted helping his brother destroy evidence of the killing.

But it was Gerard who admitted to federal officials that he helped Capano dispose of Fahey’s body. Gerard then admitted to being on Capano’s boat on June 28, 1996, when the two brothers drove more than 60 miles offshore to dispose of the cooler.

When it wouldn’t sink, Capano shot holes in the cooler, Gerard explained, per court docs. When that still didn’t work, Fahey’s body was removed from the cooler, weighted down with two anchors and dropped into the shark-infested waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Fahey’s remains were never found, but the hole-riddled cooler Capano tossed into the ocean was. A group of fisherman plucked it from the drink, plugged the holes and used it for their catches. The cooler was turned over to FBI agents a year later, when one of the fisherman learned of the murder.

“It used to be ‘no body, no crime,’ and definitely ‘no conviction,’” DiBiase says. “Not for Mr. Capano.”

Capano was arrested on November 12, 1997, and charged with first-degree murder as he tried fleeing the United States. Capano later blamed Fahey’s death on the actions of one of his other lovers.

But on January 17, 1999, jurors convicted him of Fahey’s murder and he was sentenced to death. Years later, under appeal, his sentence was commuted to life in prison. In 2011, at age 61, Capano was found dead inside his prison cell after having a heart attack.

According to Vickie Jensen, a criminology professor at California State University, Northridge, Fahey’s repeated attempts to leave Capano created a simmering tension over time that ultimately threatened the controlling lawyer’s sense of masculinity.

“The point at which a homicide like this is most likely to happen is when the threat to the control is the greatest, and most often, that is the point at which the victims are very overtly trying to leave the relationship,” Jensen tells A&E + Investigation. “The killing, that is the ultimate act of control for these men.”

Jensen was quick to note that while abusive control certainly tends to escalate to violence, the available data shows that “there are a lot fewer homicides” compared to the instances of domestic violence being reported to police.

“If a man’s masculinity is threatened, men have physically and crude means of power and control, so when we talk about that specific class of abuser and the homicide that comes out of that abuse, if you dig in, you are going to find a threat to their manhood immediately preceded the killing,” Jensen adds. “If that threat includes a threat to the abuser’s financial status or social reputation, it’s a dangerous recipe that results in killings like this one.”