Caspersen at Brown University, his alma mater. By George Simian.
It was the shot heard ‘round the world for the Wasp Old Guard of New Jersey horse country, the Rhode Island shore, and Jupiter Island, Florida. On Labor Day morning last year, while the rest of the country was wondering whether to spend the final day of summer lying on the beach or firing up the grill, Finn M. W. Caspersen, the immensely wealthy 67-year-old former chairman and C.E.O. of the Beneficial Corporation, had other things on his mind.
He said good-bye to Barbara, his wife of 42 years, around 10 a.m., at their 6,500-square-foot waterfront estate, on three acres on a peninsula in Westerly, Rhode Island. Then he drove his green, four-door 2007 Mercedes the mile or so to the office he shared with Fred Whittemore, a retired Morgan Stanley partner, and Robert McCormack, a former Morgan Stanley colleague of Whittemore’s and a founder of Trident Capital, a venture-capital firm. Caspersen, Whittemore, and McCormack were all wealthy and semi-retired, and they occupied their time with making sure their money was well invested. The Westerly office was more or less their clubhouse. “We used to laugh we had the office in order to have a place for phone calls without having to upset our wives,” Whittemore says. The small gray shingled building was next to the relatively new, $41 million Shelter Harbor Golf Club, which the three men, along with four other founding partners, had conceived and built.
Oddly, Caspersen had not the slightest interest in golf and never played. His passions ran instead to the more esoteric sports of Olympic-level horse jumping, four-in-hand horse-drawn-carriage driving, and competitive rowing. (The Princeton National Rowing Association’s Finn M. W. Caspersen Rowing Center is named for him, thanks to his generous donation.) During Caspersen’s 20-year reign as the driving force behind the U.S. Equestrian Team, from 1982 to 2002, American riders and drivers earned 71 medals, including 25 gold, in the Olympics, World Championships, and Pan American Games.
Caspersen was also a major contributor to any number of prominent New Jersey politicians, mostly Republicans, including former governors Thomas Kean and Christie Todd Whitman and also Kean’s son Thomas Kean Jr., currently a state senator. In 2000, Caspersen and his wife donated $602,250 to political campaigns, making them the eighth-largest political donors in the U.S. that year, according to Mother Jones magazine. Finn had also opened his considerable checkbook to such institutions as the Peddie prep school (whose wealthy alumni include former U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s Walter Annenberg and Finn himself), Drew University, and Harvard Law School, to which he gave $30 million, making him the single largest donor to the school.
He was also an ardent conservationist, and when the opportunity arose to buy some 288 acres of undeveloped land in Westerly from Narragansett Electric, at the turn of the millennium, Caspersen and his partners pounced on it, in order to prevent a developer from building 270 homes there. They paid $2.9 million for the parcel. “We did it in Wall Street fashion,” Whittemore recalls. “We put together an L.L.C. [and] we got the government to pat them [Narragansett Electric] on the fanny to reduce the price by about a million.” Then they signed up around 320 members—who paid between $100,000 and $175,000 each—and donated a conservation easement to the Weekapaug Foundation for Conservation. (Whittemore and McCormack were founders and important financial backers of the foundation, and Caspersen was its chairman until shortly before his death.) Whittemore says the club founders took a $750,000 tax deduction and signed an agreement not to develop homes around the golf course. They also took out a loan of around $5 million from a local bank to add to the money they had raised to build the course, a clubhouse, and other buildings. They hired Michael Hurdzan, of Hurdzan/Fry Environmental Golf Design, to design the course. He is the only golf-course architect in America with a doctorate in plant science. “We did it with an environmental bent,” explains Richard Anthony, who worked for Caspersen to get the club off the ground. The clubhouse opened in July 2004, and the 18-hole course was completed in early 2005.
Around 11 a.m. on Labor Day, Whittemore saw Caspersen at their office, where Whittemore was meeting with an architect he had hired to renovate a building. A few days before, Caspersen had sent five or six suits to the cleaners and asked Whittemore to sign a document that made him a trustee of Caspersen’s living will.
“He was very cheery in his usual way,” Whittemore says of Caspersen, whom he would often see at his desk, looking at his computer screen. He was “obsessed with all the details he could find out on the computer,” as are so many people, Whittemore remembers. Unbeknownst to Whittemore, Caspersen had brought with him to the office a blued-steel .38-caliber, five-shot Smith & Wesson revolver, which he usually kept in a suitcase in a closet in the master bedroom of his house. Caspersen had an impressive collection of antique guns, but the Smith & Wesson revolver wasn’t one of them.
Soon, Whittemore left the office with the architect. By 12:45, Caspersen had also left, after sending his wife a text message to say he would be coming home after stopping by the reservoir near the golf course, which, he explained, “they are talking about enlarging.” Two or three days earlier Caspersen had asked the golf club’s general manager, Gerard O’Callaghan, for the keys to the lock on the fence surrounding the reservoir. Then, at 1:54, Finn texted his wife, “At reservoir. Love you. Am going home.”
Unsettled, Barbara Caspersen noticed that the revolver was missing. She tried her husband’s cell phone, but got no answer. She called 911 and told the police that her husband’s car was at the Post Road office and urged the officers to go there. The police got no answer from Finn’s cell phone either. When they arrived at the office building, they saw his Mercedes parked in the driveway and drew their service weapons. The Mercedes was unlocked, and nothing unusual was inside. By this time, Barbara had arrived at the building and expressed concern “about where [her husband] was and his state of mind,” according to Edward St. Clair, captain in the Westerly Police Department. She explained he was on medication for an increasingly life-threatening array of health problems. (Later, after talking to Dr. Bernard Davidoff, an internist from Morristown, New Jersey, the police established that Caspersen had “suffered from severe depression and was taking antidepressant meds, heart meds, liver meds, kidney meds and diabetes meds.”) They entered the building and checked the office: Caspersen wasn’t there.
The canine unit was summoned to see if a scent could be picked up. The officers began to fan out from the office toward the golf course. They figured Caspersen could not have gotten too far on foot, since his various ailments and chemotherapy treatments for cancer had severely hobbled him in recent years. “He couldn’t stand up for very long,” Whittemore says. “He couldn’t walk very far.” When he would have dinner at the shingle-style clubhouse or go there to visit the extensive wine cellar, he would be dropped off at the front entrance rather than walk from the parked car.
As the police were making their way to the edge of the golf course by the reservoir, they saw Gerard O’Callaghan motioning to them to come to a small pump house. When O’Callaghan had heard that Caspersen was missing, he remembered about the reservoir-fence key and went looking for him by the water. “We immediately went over and saw Finn Caspersen lying on the ground area next to a large green generator,” Patrolman Christian Fiore recalls in the police report. It was 3:01 p.m.
Caspersen was wearing a white checked dress shirt, a blue-and-red vest, gray dress pants with pink-and-blue suspenders, and brown penny loafers with no socks. According to the police report, there was “severe trauma” to the back of his head. His upper torso was lying on rocks and against an aluminum ladder; his left arm, with a closed fist, lay across his chest, and his right arm was extended outward, also with a closed fist.
The Smith & Wesson revolver was under his right foot.
One shot had been fired, leaving four bullets in the gun. The detectives determined that Caspersen had been sitting on the ground when he shot himself in the head. “On his person,” St. Clair says, the police found his BlackBerry, his driver’s license, and $360 in cash. There was a handwritten note in the pocket of his dress shirt. According to the police, the note said that Caspersen “was tired, diminished and in constant pain, and that he did not want to be a burden to his loving family.”
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