Beyond Obsession (16 page)

When she was about twelve, Karin remembers, Joyce gave her a present, a pink dress that had been hers. But, she warned, “never wear it when you go to visit Archbishop Whealon, because it may remind him of a summer night long ago.”

There were the days when she would come home from a visit with the archbishop and Joyce “would ask me if the nuns at St. Mary's had said anything about the remarkable resemblance between me and the archbishop. She said they were always commenting on that resemblance.” Karin would go to her room then, take the autographed photograph of Whealon she kept on a shelf, hold it beside her face and look into the mirror, trying to see the resemblance, wondering if indeed there was a connection. She did it alone, and she did it in the presence of her friend Shannon Dubois, asking if Shannon, who had been told the story of the presumed parentage, noticed a resemblance.

Sandra Yerks, who knew Joyce and Karin later, remembers evenings, not one but several, during which, with Karin in a chair across from them, she sat on a sofa with Joyce in the living room. “Joyce,” she recalls, “said that Archbishop Whealon was Karin's father and that he was Karin's godfather, and that she knew how to satisfy him, and that Karin would learn how.”

That secret, that “revelation” by her mother, ate at Karin like a malignancy. She was, after all, a Catholic and a believing one. She believed that when a priest took his vows, pledged himself to a life of celibacy, those vows were not taken lightly, were never broken. Sex was outside the life of a priest; he was father to his congregation, not natural father to any member of it. For a priest to have sex, to father a child, was a mortal and unforgivable sin, and the child of his union must necessarily be steeped in that sin, must be beyond redemption. It was a belief Karin was forced to live with until her mother's death and beyond, until a day more than a year after that death when she went to Archbishop Whealon and finally asked him directly if he was her father. He told her he was not. She believed him.

But the damage had been done. It was irreparable.

10

There was another side to Joyce Aparo, another world, one in which she was admired and respected and in which she accomplished much that was good. Through the 1970s she became an increasingly important and powerful figure in the state's welfare bureaucracy, rising to ever-higher positions in the departments of Human Resources, Mental Health, Social Services and Welfare. By the end of the decade she had become a health planner for the State Health Coordinating Council, with wide powers over the nursing home industry.

Jeff Sands, only a couple of years out of law school and working as an associate lawyer at Wiggin & Dana in Hartford, specializing in the law dealing with nursing homes and other special care facilities, met Joyce Aparo for the first time in 1981, and they quickly developed a close professional relationship. “Health care is one of those regulated industries where you can't sneeze without going to a regulator and getting approval. Now Joyce was in the planning department of the Health Department, which was charged with coming up with the rules and the methodology that would be used by the state for approving projects, and she was really incensed that Connecticut for a long time had systems in place that discouraged people from building or developing new and innovative programs for the elderly or for people with special injuries who needed long-term care. She tried to do something about it because she cared a lot about those people. She really authored a lot of the systems that we still use today, coming up with how and when and where nursing homes and other long-term facilities should be approved.”

In the process she became Connecticut's leading authority on demographics and found herself able to predict what the future would hold, what would be required in the years to come. Both people who worked with her and outsiders say that she saw, before almost anyone else, the explosion in the elderly population and the spiraling need for facilities to take care of many in that aging group, and she set in motion means to deal with it.

“I thought she was very dedicated,” Sands says. “She was always willing to take your phone call, always wanted to discuss an issue. She was very encouraging. Almost any developer who came into Connecticut—and there are an awful lot of big developers in the long-term health care field—would call Joyce. Every inquiry went in one way or another through her office. But she would not talk to anyone until she got references. She would call me, she would call other people she knew and trusted and she would talk to someone only if the references checked out and she thought these people were going to be okay for the state. It was a personal task for her. If you were okay for the state, then she would give you the secrets of the need methodology and the secrets of the regulatory process and tell you who you should hire as your attorney. There were two or three of us that she trusted and put on her good list. And she would tell you who you should hire as your accountant and what towns you should go to and who you should talk to in those towns. She had a wealth of information, but she didn't want to be affiliated, even by a phone call, with some schleppy developer who would come in and ruin what she was trying to accomplish. I always had a high regard for her in that position. It was kind of neat to see that somebody in the state government had those kind of personal ethics.”

And those ethics, that rigid moral sense, at least in her professional life, were essential. For they brought her power, and she gloried in the power to manipulate people and events. It meant more to her than money. “If you think about this whole thing of one person trying to design the health care planning process in the state of Connecticut,” Sands says, “you realize that there's a lot of money involved, and it's very lucrative for some people. Here these people are going to spend all that money on the preparatory development of nursing home facilities, and here's Joyce handpicking who comes in and does it, and then handpicking who their representatives are, and then always being in there, kind of in the background, when the projects get built or developed. But everybody knows that it was her hand that put the players in place and made it all happen. She loved it, to kind of manipulate the scene. But then when it was done, there was this nice thing built and the elderly were being cared for, so it was all for a good purpose, and never for her own personal gain, certainly not financially.”

What she had was power, power enough so that those whom she favored, who gained her ear and earned her confidence and support, profited handsomely. “If she was your friend, she'd do anything for you,” Sands says. “From time to time, she'd call me and say, ‘Jeff, what are you working on? What projects? How can I help you?'

“I'd say, ‘Well, I'm having a hard time with zoning down in
X
or
Y
town.'

“She'd say, ‘I think that's a good project. I happen to know the first selectman down there. I'll give him a call, see if I can talk to him, tell him I think it's a good idea.'”

There was, though, something about the way she dealt personally, face-to-face that intrigued and even bothered Sands and others who met with her. “She was very nice,” he says, “but she was always a little strange. She didn't ever talk directly to you. She would even refer to herself in the third person. She was one of those people who talk a little to the side. And she would talk in riddles. Sometimes she'd call and she'd say, ‘Here's an idea I have. What do you think about it? Do you think it will work in practice? Let's sit down and talk about it.' But it was never that easy; it would never be that kind of question. It would always be kind of ‘Well, if one were to do this and think about that and do this and do that, how would you react?'

“I'd say, ‘Are you asking me how do I react to it or what? Do you want to do this?'

“She'd say, ‘Well, I don't know exactly about doing it. I'm hypothesizing.'

“It was always this kind of funny communication. Nice enough. Always got to the bottom line eventually but got to it circuitously.”

It was during these years, at the beginning of the 1980s, in her position of power and influence, that she met two men who were to play crucial roles in her life and the life of her daughter in the years ahead. One was Michael Zaccaro, about fifteen years younger than she. The other was Ed Murphy, about fifteen years older.

Zaccaro, then in his mid-twenties, was running the Connecticut operations of New Medical Associates, known as NewMediCo, a New England health care management and development firm. It was only natural that he and Joyce Aparo would come into contact, she the regulator and he the developer. That contact blossomed into close association and friendship. Zaccaro had much that she could use. “Mike,” says a friend, “is one of the best people with numbers I've ever seen. He can do things quicker in his head than you can do them on your calculator. So Joyce leaned heavily on him to test her different formulas, to see what was possible. When you look at the needs in the health care field, it finally comes down to population samples. You take a thousand people sixty-five and over, how many are going to need nursing home beds in any given year? It's really statistical analysis, and Mike was brilliant at it.”

Joyce used him extensively. A deep friendship developed. Zaccaro was not married then, did not marry until shortly after Joyce's death, and there were rumors that what they had was more than just friendship. Zaccaro denies it, as do many who know him and knew her. Their relationship, says Jeff Sands, who was close professionally and personally to both, “was something like mother-son. It certainly didn't extend to a romance.” Nevertheless, NewMediCo was a major beneficiary of her powers, and when Zaccaro and several others left NewMediCo and formed Athena Health Care Associates, the new company became one of her pets.

Her relationship with Ed Murphy was something else. A man with an appetite for strong drink and good times, he was a nursing home administrator in Darien. He and she met at some business affair in 1981. Both had been married before. They were soon seeing each other socially. Taken with her, Murphy proposed. Joyce accepted, then backed out. Murphy proposed again. The pattern was repeated several times, Joyce accepting and rejecting, perhaps wondering whether a new marriage would be any better than the two previous ones.

Her relationship with Michael Aparo was still full of friction. He remembers one weekend when Karin was with him and he received news that his father had suddenly been taken ill and taken to the hospital. He and Karin rushed there, to be with his mother while they waited to learn his father's condition. Joyce called the hospital, got Aparo and ordered him to return Karin to her immediately or she would call the police and file charges against him for kidnapping. “I felt helpless,” he says, “and I left my mother alone in the emergency room in order not to create a scene by the police coming to arrest me for kidnapping.”

Later, in April 1982, as Joyce was in the midst of her internal debate over whether to marry Murphy or not, Aparo's father died. He collected Karin and prepared to take her to the funeral home. As they were about to leave, Joyce called and “told me that ‘unless you bring Karin home immediately, I will send the police to the funeral home.' I left my mother alone—I'm ashamed to say it because I probably should have let the police come—but I left her and my own father's funeral to bring my daughter back home to avoid that scene.”

But then Joyce's fury with Michael Aparo had eaten away at her since before their divorce. Maybe, she reasoned, she would have better luck with Ed Murphy, and she finally accepted his proposal. In the spring of 1982 they married, and Joyce and Karin left Glastonbury and moved into Murphy's house on the grounds of the nursing home in Darien.

It was not, despite what Karin or Joyce wrote to Archbishop Whealon during the courtship, something that made Karin happy. She was eleven, and she was being taken away from the home in which she had lived much of her life. Bad as that homelife may have been, there was nothing to assure her that the change would make much difference. She was also being taken away from her school and her friends to a place where she knew nobody. She was being forced to give up her violin lessons with Constance Sattler at Hartt, though Joyce told her that it was time, anyway, to move on, that she was too good, that she needed really professional instruction and Joyce would find her a new and expert teacher. Worse was the situation in the small house Murphy occupied. “He had adopted four or five kids who were older than Karin and more grown-up, in their late teens and early twenties,” says Zaccaro. “They were kind of rowdy. They didn't like the fact that Joyce and Ed got married, and then Joyce and Karin moved in, and they sort of made life close to living hell for them down in Darien.”

The wedding of Joyce Aparo and Ed Murphy took place in the home of Sandra Yerks, a friend of Murphy's and a colleague in the nursing home. It was a small ceremony, a handful of friends and associates of Murphy and Joyce in attendance. Yerks remembers Karin arriving for the wedding, “wearing a white dress, like a woman of twenty-five, not a child, never smiling, prim and proper, not at all part of what was going on.” Yerks suggested that Karin go upstairs to be with her children. Joyce vetoed that, telling Karin to stay right where she was.

“That night we left to go to a party,” Yerks remembers. “No one cared where Karin was going to stay. My husband and I made sure she stayed at our house with our children. When we got home, it was very late. The kids were still up and taking advantage of the fact that their parents were out. They were jumping on the bed and doing all sorts of things they shouldn't have been doing. The minute she saw me, all Karin kept saying was, ‘Please don't tell my mother. Please don't tell my mother.'

“I said, ‘Oh, for heaven's sake, Karin don't worry about it. I'm not going to tell.' And I yelled at her as I did at my four children.