UBC: Rule, ...And Never Let Her Go

And Never Let Her Go: Thomas Capano: The Deadly Seducer by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



One of the things that reading Man-Apes or Ape-Men?: The Story of Discoveries in Africa reminded me of is how important taxonomy is. The way human beings are wired means that (1) it's hard for us to talk about things we don't have names for and (2) we understand the world by categorization and comparison, so being able to put like things together in groups is an incredibly powerful conceptual tool. It's true in biology and geology and meteorology; it's true in literary studies, where if there's a theory I have an allegiance to, it's genre theory, precisely because it lets you talk about why it's meaningful that some texts have certain things in common, like "revenge tragedy" or "comedy of manners." And, at least for me, it's true in criminology.

I've already, semi-flippantly, christened one genre of murder "why buy the cow?" and my exemplar is Chester Gillette. I'm calling this other genre of murder, which has many things in common with "why buy the cow?", "every woman's nightmare," and my exemplar is Thomas Capano, the subject of . . . And Never Let Her Go.

Capano is everything I was talking about in my review of The I-5 Killer, a man who obsessively stalks and harasses and ultimately murders a woman for the crime of trying to end their relationship. He would not leave Anne Marie Fahey alone, and although she was scared of him, the sad thing is, she wasn't scared enough. Capano was a monster, and the two things about him that horrified and repulsed me the most were that (1) after he murdered Anne Marie Fahey, he lied about her, calling her "ditzy" and "airheaded" and suggesting she was absolutely the type of woman who would just waltz off for a weekend, skipping a dinner date with her family and boyfriend, and not tell a soul, when she was not, when she was anything but. He habitually lied about the women he pursued, claiming it was they who came onto him, and they who were obsessive and clingy (and also sluts, don't forget sluts), and he told much worse lies than calling Ms. Fahey an airhead, but for some reason, I found that particular example of his lies just loathsome. And then (2), when he was in prison and trying to finesse and finagle his way around the rules (because rules do not apply to Thomas Capano), he not only allowed, but encouraged his teenage daughters to talk on the phone with, write letters to, and send their pictures to a sex offender, specifically convicted of indecent exposure to a minor (I looked the man up. He's in the sex offender registry of Florida and Delaware.), so that the man would do Capano favors. And not even big favors, like the guy he tried to get to burgle and vandalize his lover's house, or the guy he tried to get to put out a hit on Capano's brother for testifying against him. Not big favors. Little favors. For little favors, just so that Thomas Capano wouldn't have to obey the rules, this proudly overprotective father was coming very very close to pimping out his daughters. Again, not the worst thing he did, but for me personally, vile.

Capano reminded me, in a number of very creepy ways, of Ted Bundy, particularly in the way that being subject to the rules that apply to the defendant in a criminal trial drove them both just nuts, and I think the biggest difference between them is that Capano was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a devoted, loyal, wealthy, powerful family, and he parlayed that into a lot of personal power. (He made a kind of side-career out of "fixing" things for his brothers when they were caught doing drugs or bribing politicians or stalking, kidnapping, and raping their ex-girlfriends. And when he was caught, early on, harassing and stalking a young woman, his connections to Delaware's old-boy network let him slide out of trouble as smooth as silk.) It took a lot longer for Capano to come up against someone he couldn't make do what he wanted, and so he got caught for his first murder instead of, y'know, his thirtieth.

The "Bechdel Test fail" label applies to Capano, just as it applies to Bundy and Woodfield, but that's a much more overarching categorization; Capano is different from Bundy in important ways, too, particularly in the fact that he murdered Fahey because she was under his control and trying to escape. Bundy murdered strangers; Capano murdered someone he claimed to love deeply and then disposed of her body the same way he would a toy he'd broken, dumping her body off the Atlantic coast in a spot known as Mako Alley.

This is a very good book--Rule has a very complicated story to tell, and she lays it out probably as clearly as is possible. There was just one place where she made a false step, and it's so weird and jarring that I'm actually going to discuss it. Capano's long-time lover, Deborah MacIntyre, who he made buy the gun that he intended to use to murder Anne Marie Fahey (and meanwhile MacIntyre has no freaking idea that Fahey exists; she thought Capano had left his wife for her and that he was faithful to her, while he was actually involved with Fahey and with at least one other woman), when she finally realized, because of his relentless pressure on her to commit perjury to protect him that when Capano said "love," what he meant was jealousy, in exactly the way that a little boy is jealous of his toys and won't share them with his siblings, she released the lawyer Capano had told her to hire and found her own. The new lawyer worked in partnership with his wife, who was his paralegal, and there's this weird weird moment where Rule says:

Debby liked the Bergstroms and felt protected for the first time in many long years. They were no-nonsense people who were demonstrating that they cared about what happened to her. Dee, particularly, was intuitive about Debby's feelings. Women know how other women feel, although it is almost impossible to explain this to a man.
(Rule 447)

Okay, first of all, bullshit. There's nothing about having two X chromosomes that makes you magically "intuitive" about the feelings of other people with two X chromosomes. I have two X chromosomes, and I'm about as intuitive as a cinderblock. There are experiences that women are more likely to have in common with other women than they are with men--sexual harassment springs to mind (although I am of course not saying that men are never sexually harassed)--and thus more likely to understand, but that's not what Rule says, which leads to the second problem: what exactly is the "this" that is almost impossible to explain to a man? Over the page, the second half of this weird little alien inclusion may explain the "this":

Dee Bergstrom understood Debby's anguish and explained to her husband and the all-male prosecuting team that very few women would be able to turn off overnight a love that had lasted for two decades. Often to their own detriment, women cling to memories of how they perceived their relationship. For the moment, Debby was fragile, but she was doing her best to break free of Tom.

"We don't wake up one morning," Dee told them, "and just say, 'I don't love him anymore.'"
(Rule 448)

But that doesn't actually help at all. Why would men not understand that it's hard, even in the face of excruciatingly cruel and obvious betrayal, to stop loving someone you've loved for nearly half your life? That horrible situation is not exclusively the property of women and any human being with functional empathy should be able to understand it.

If it's that, looking objectively at Capano and MacIntyre's relationship, the male prosecutors didn't understand why she loved him in the first place, well (a) that's not what Rule says, (b) that's an excellent question, and (c) it has much less to do with sex/gender and much more to do with the relationship between an abuser and their victim, and that relationship can be between two men, two women, or an abusive woman and a male victim just as much as it can be a relationship between an abusive man and a female victim.

If she's trying to say something about the particular way in which gender expectations and socialization constructed the relationship between Capano and MacIntyre, and the way in which Dee Bergstrom, as another woman socialized with the same expectations as MacIntyre, could grasp that more easily than a group of people socialized male--and, as part of that package, not taught to take women's emotions into account--then she needed to say it much more carefully. Because what she did say jarred me straight out of her story--and it stands out, because in this 650+ page book, that's the only time she tries to draw that "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" line. Everywhere else, she recognizes that Capano was a manipulator and a user, and that men were his victims, too, although not to the same extent.

No one was his victim to the extent that Anne Marie Fahey was, and one thing that this book does excellently well is make you understand the terrible loss, both Anne Marie Fahey's own loss, the life she was finally putting together, facing her demons, getting the help she needed, but then the loss of her to everyone who knew her. What Capano ripped apart can never be repaired, and Rule shows that very very well.



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