WILMINGTON, Del. -- Two teenagers plead guilty to killing their newborn son. The husband of an heiress is implicated in a murder-for-hire scheme.
A politically connected lawyer from one of the state's most influential families is put on trial for the murder of the governor's scheduling secretary.In tiny Delaware, 1998 has been the Year of the High-Profile Crime, with accusations, charges, pleadings and trials getting national attention.
"There's never been a year like this in my 15 years of practicing," said Wilmington defense lawyer John Malik. "Never have I seen such a continuous period of time with this many dramatic cases."
In March, Brian Peterson, who was then 19, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the death of his newborn son and agreed to testify against his former sweetheart, University of Delaware freshman Amy Grossberg.
Peterson said Grossberg ordered him to get rid of the baby's body shortly after his birth in a Newark motel in 1996.
A month later, Grossberg also pleaded guilty to manslaughter, admitting she was reckless in not getting medical attention before the child's birth.
Peterson was sentenced to two years in a minimum security facility. Grossberg got 2 1/2 years.
Then, there is the case of Thomas Capano, a wealthy attorney and former state prosecutor who went on trial this year for the death of Anne Marie Fahey, the scheduling secretary for Gov. Thomas Carper.
Capano acknowledged his three-year affair with Fahey but maintained that he had taken her home after they dined at a Philadelphia restaurant in June 1996 and never saw her again.
That story changed in a Wilmington courtroom in October, when his lawyers admitted Capano had dumped Fahey's body at sea after she died in an accident -- which last week he blamed on another mistress, Deborah MacIntyre.
Capano said a jealous MacIntyre found him and Fahey together and accidentally shot her. Capano says he tried to protect himself and MacIntyre by dumping Fahey's body at sea, in what he described as "the most cowardly, horrible thing I've done in my life."
MacIntyre denies even being at his house that night.
Last April, New Castle County police spent days looking for Debra Puglisi after her husband, Anthony Puglisi, was found dead in their home near Newark.
Then, she called police herself -- saying she had been held hostage in Donald Flagg's home for four days after he killed her husband. When Flagg went to work at a local auto plant, she said she wriggled free of the ropes binding her and called 911.
Flagg has been indicted on charges of murder, kidnapping and sexual assault. His lawyers say they will rely on an insanity defense when his trial begins in April.
And, finally, there is the matter of Christopher Moseley, husband to an heir to the du Pont family fortune. He is being held in Nevada on a charge he conspired to arrange the contract killing of his stepson's girlfriend in a Las Vegas motel.