1868
In 1868 Wilmington was producing more iron ships than the rest of the country combined.
about 0:07:39The story
Anne Marie Fahey was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1966, the youngest of six children in a working-class Irish family. Her mother was diagnosed with cancer when Anne Marie was about seven and died when she was eight, in the early 1970s. She reconciled with her father in 1984, when she was about eighteen, and he died of leukaemia two years later, so both parents were dead by the time she was twenty. She graduated from Wesley College in Dover, spent a semester in Spain and took a degree in international relations, then went to Washington, D.C., hoping to become a diplomat. In 1991 a friend told her that the office of Delaware congressman Tom Carper needed a receptionist, and she took the job. When Carper was elected governor in 1992 she moved back to Wilmington and became the governor's scheduler.
The family lived in an exclusive Wilmington area called Brandywine 100 and sent the children to Catholic schools. Tom was a star football player, did well academically, graduated from Boston College and its law school in 1974, married his high school sweetheart Kay Ryan and became first a public defender and then a prosecutor. By 1996 he was in private practice, earning $250,000 a year, and had four daughters.
He also had a long history with women. In 1977, three years into his marriage, he began pressuring a Wilmington attorney's secretary to sleep with him. She refused, married another man, and he responded with harassing phone calls, following her, watching her from his office and trying to have her evicted from an apartment block his family owned. He told her this was his town and his state. In September 1980 he asked a man he believed to be a thug to hurt her, saying "hurt that bitch"; the man was an FBI informant. No physical harm came to her and she eventually moved out of state.
In 1981 he began an affair with Deborah McIntyre, a school administrator, which lasted fifteen years. In the summer of 1993 he asked Anne Marie Fahey to lunch. She was single, in her twenties and had just come out of a long relationship. They had dinner at Ristorante Panorama in Philadelphia and their first kiss, and from then on he ordered for her, bought her clothes, gifts and plane tickets and paid for a 32-inch television and an espresso machine in the apartment she took in 1994. He was still married. By 1995 he had also begun an affair with Susan Louth, a secretary at the family firm, and in late 1995 he left his wife. Anne Marie, meanwhile, began dating Michael Scanlon, an MBNA banker introduced to her by the governor, and told her sister she hoped to marry him.
He did not want her going to the shore with friends or to the pub where her family drank, told her she looked like a whore when she wore anything low-cut, and reminded her that the television, the dresses and even the groceries were his. In February he had told his brother Gerard that two people were extorting him, borrowed a handgun and asked whether Gerard knew anyone who could break someone's legs; he also asked about using Gerard's boat if he had to kill them. In April he bought a five-foot Igloo cooler at Sports Authority on Concord Pike for $180.
On 27 June 1996 they had dinner at Ristorante Panorama, the place of their first kiss. They began eating at seven; she wore a Laura Ashley flower-print dress and ate swordfish. Her leftovers were boxed at about nine. They drove to his house at Grant Avenue for groceries, then to her apartment, where he put rice, bananas, spinach, strawberries and soup on the counter and gave her a $400 outfit from Talbot's. He said he checked the air conditioner and used the bathroom and left by ten.
At eleven o'clock, by his later account, McIntyre burst into the great room of his house with the Beretta while he and Anne Marie were watching television. He said she was threatening suicide, that he grabbed for the gun and that it went off, hitting Anne Marie in the head. He did not call police or an ambulance. Instead he wrapped the body in a blanket, put it in the cooler, and the next morning, 28 June, woke his brother Gerard at six o'clock and asked for the keys to his boat. They towed the cooler to Stone Harbor, New Jersey, took Gerard's 25-foot Hydra Sports boat, Summer Wind, out about seventy-seven miles and pushed the cooler overboard. It floated. Gerard said afterwards that the last thing he saw was an ankle and a foot sinking into the water. The trip took eight hours.
Another brother ordered the dumpsters emptied early. That night he had pizza with his daughters, fell asleep, then drove to McIntyre's house on Delaware Avenue and spent the night with her.
Anne Marie was reported missing when she failed to appear for dinner with her brother and her boyfriend on 30 June. Her sister and friends found groceries on the counter, the gift box open on the floor, the bed turned down but unslept in, and her Volkswagen Jetta still outside; only her car keys were gone. He said he had left her at ten and stopped for cigarettes at the Getty station on Lovering Avenue; the station had closed early that night. Detectives searching his house found bloodstains on the woodwork and radiator, a stain near a container of Carbona blood remover he had bought at Happy Harry's, and the fresh carpet.
Over the Fourth of July weekend more than three hundred people searched the park and creek near her apartment, and her family offered a $10,000 reward. Fishermen from Harrisburg found the five-foot cooler floating offshore, with its lid missing and a bullet hole in the side, and kept it to store fish. The FBI intercepted a cargo ship carrying a pint of Anne Marie's donated blood so that her DNA could be matched to the stains in the house.
He died of natural causes in his cell at the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center in 2011, aged sixty-one.