Case file 0026
Anne Marie Fahey: The Conviction, the Changed Sentence and the Body Never Found
The punishment changed on appeal; Thomas Capano’s murder conviction remained.
Anne Marie Fahey's murder led to the 1999 conviction of Delaware lawyer Thomas Capano. The FBI's historical account says the jury rejected his explanation that another woman had accidentally shot Fahey. His original sentence was death, but that was not the punishment that remained in place. [S1]
What the jury heard
The FBI describes testimony that Capano had asked another woman to obtain a gun weeks before the killing. When the case reached trial, his explanation changed: he claimed the gun discharged during an encounter involving that woman and Fahey, and that he disposed of Fahey's body afterward. The jury convicted him of murder on January 17, 1999. [S1]
That rejected explanation belongs in the account as the defense version described by the agency, not an established reconstruction of an accidental death.
A sentence set aside
In 2006, the Delaware Supreme Court vacated the death sentence because the process had allowed the sentencing judge to determine eligibility without a unanimous jury finding of a statutory aggravating circumstance. It remanded for a new penalty hearing; the ruling did not overturn the murder conviction. [S2]
Delaware's attorney general then announced that prosecutors would not pursue another penalty phase. The February 2006 statement said Capano would spend the remainder of his natural life in prison. [S3]
The distinction between guilt and punishment explains the two outcomes. A successful challenge to the capital-sentencing procedure did not produce an acquittal.
What remained unrecovered
The FBI records that Capano's sentence became life without parole and that he was found dead in his prison cell in 2011. It also says Fahey's body was never found. [S1]
The prosecution supplied a judgment about her killing. It did not supply her family with recovered remains. Both facts belong at the end of the account.