Beyond Obsession (25 page)

The phone rang in the Hudners' house on the Cape. The call was for Karin. The caller was her mother. “She was very angry and she was screaming at me. She told me that she had gone into my room and found notes from Dennis and now she knew we were sleeping together. She was calling me names and she said she was driving up to the Cape right then. And she said that when she got there she was going to take some drastic action.” Karin was terrified. She said she began to cry, and the tears, of fear as much as anything else, flowed for the next forty-five minutes while the Hudners tried to comfort her. They didn't know what was happening; all they knew was that their baby-sitter was extremely tormented.

Six hours later Joyce Aparo arrived. With her was Dennis Coleman. It was his second trip to the Cape that week. Through the hours of that drive Joyce said nothing directly to him about her discovery in Karin's bedside drawer. “She made some sly little remarks that I would never have caught if I hadn't known,” he says. But he knew. Karin had called him as soon as Joyce hung up. She had told him about Joyce's find and Joyce's reaction. As they traveled through the late afternoon and into the evening, he waited for Joyce to attack him. She didn't.

At the Hudners' Karin was sure she knew what to expect when her mother arrived. She was not looking forward to the confrontation. Her first surprise was to see Dennis. She had been sure Joyce would call off her invitation to him. Her second was her mother's demeanor. Joyce was in a good mood. She acted glad to see Karin, acted the loving mother, and said not a word about the letters she had found or the call she had made earlier in the day. “But then,” Karin later said, “my mother had wild and wide mood swings, and she was very unpredictable.”

They left the Hudners' almost immediately, drove to Hyannis and stayed the night in a motel. The next morning Joyce, Karin and Dennis made a detour, driving to Provincetown. Joyce left them alone and went shopping by herself. Dennis and Karin did some shopping on their own.

“We went to Provincetown,” Karin wrote in her diary, “and Denny and I found a very nice diamond ring. $1300.00. He wants to buy it for me. [He did, paying for it in three installments, the final one in November, at which time the store, Thunder Road, sent it to him at Glastonbury and he then gave it to her.] It looks gorgeous on me. I tried it on. We both love it. We are engaged to be engaged. How interesting. Mom would kill me if she ever knew.”

Finished with their shopping, they drove back to Hyannis and then took the ferry across to Nantucket. They were to spend the weekend together on the small resort island.

That evening at the inn Joyce took Karin aside and handed her the letters and notes she had found in Karin's bedside drawer. Until then Joyce had held her rage. Now she vented it, though coldly. Cool it, she ordered Karin. It was all right if she continued to see Dennis, but no more sex. That was over. If she learned that they were still going to bed together, she'd take steps to put an end to the situation, drastic steps if she had to.

But in front of Dennis, Joyce still did not mention her discovery, made no mention, either, of her order to Karin. She was pleasant and friendly and told them to go out and enjoy themselves. They did not. They went to Dennis's room. Karin gave him back the letters, told him what Joyce had said. For more than an hour they debated the future, what they might do. They talked about Karin's running away, about getting married, about her moving in with the Colemans, about Dennis's becoming her guardian. It was something, they decided, they would look into as soon as they got back to Glastonbury. Then they made love; it was, according to Karin's diary and to the markings she later made on the wall calendar in her room, where she noted such things, the fifth time they had gone to bed together.

Through the rest of the stay Joyce did not again mention the letters or her threats. They were much together, went shopping often. Joyce was suddenly in a warm and generous mood. She bought Karin a nineteenth-century Victorian black jacket for eighty-one dollars, a full-length black velvet skirt for her trips to New York and a diamond ring with seven diamonds, one more than the ring Dennis had bought for her. One might say she was competing with Dennis for Karin, but of course she did not know about the other ring then, found out about it only later. Still, that element of competition was there, as it was always when someone who might offer a challenge to Joyce for Karin's affection and loyalty appeared.

It was an idyll, a momentary respite. On the surface everything seemed calm, serene, no trouble. But underneath, the trouble was there. Perhaps the precipitating cause was Karin's fear of what Joyce would ultimately do about her discovery of those letters and diaries left so carelessly in that bedside drawer. She would, being Joyce, do something. Karin was determined to find a way to stop her.

18

He believed everything she said, believed it though he did not see it. He saw a mother who might be overbearing, even in his presence, but who seemed to care and be concerned about her daughter, a woman who was usually nice to him. But Karin was bitter and becoming ever more bitter; Karin was determined and becoming ever more so; Karin's expressed hatred of her mother was palpable and growing. He was in love with Karin. It was, he says, “like I'd never known any other person.” He was willing, he thought, to do whatever she asked. He had told her that, had told her that he would die for her if necessary. Still, he was afraid of just how much she might ask, of where the asking might lead.

She began to put her thoughts into words, words he didn't want to hear, words he wanted to shove from his mind and pretend had never been spoken. “The first time she brought it up,” he says, “it wasn't like ‘Please kill my mother.' It was like, ‘I wish she was dead.' Then gradually it cropped up. Over the course of a few weeks it went from these little dreams she had to she had to kill her mother.”

Dennis suggested an alternate way out. What if Karin ran away? “It's not worth killing somebody over,” he told her. “I'll take you away.”

“I've thought about that,” she told him. “It would never work. She'd find me. She'd track me down. She'd kill me. I'm serious. I'm afraid she'd really kill me.”

The fear was eating away inside him. In one of those notes placed in her window he wrote: “I went to see
Top Gun
again tonight. While there I got sick—again. It's only because I ate food. Went to see the doctor about it. I'm afraid. Bad news. I'm not gonna die, but I'm going to get another ulcer soon because of ‘tension and a crumby diet.' So there it is. All that is only if I haven't already got one. My instructions are to relax and eat
good
food. I feel absolutely horrible.”

Perhaps, he thought, it was still possible to head things off, to make her see another side, to turn her from that increasing determination. He wrote her:

Do you know what your mother did the other day when you played for us? She turned to me and said, “I just can't believe it. She is doing super. That was incredible, and she did it in
one
week. That was great.” Then when you walked back into the room she turned to you and said, “That wasn't too bad.” She then proceeded to remind you of this, that, and a hundred other things. Good story. She
is
terribly impressed by you even though she doesn't let on to you. Always remember that
that
is how she really feels no matter what she
says
. You
did
do great. Actually you're lucky. She supports you and pushes you to no end. Sometimes it's necessary and other times it's a pain. Understand, though, that she is trying her best for you. If my parents ever even cared that I played trombone and had done what your mom is doing to/for you, I could have been a great player. Enough so to want a scholarship through Yale and possibly a career with it. I'm not bad now and that's without
one
lesson
ever
. I hope you can look at what she's doing as being
for
you and not
to
you. She does love you, Karin. It's okay.

It wasn't okay, not for Karin, not as July was turning into August 1986 and they were back in Glastonbury, the vacation ended.

On July 31, right after they got home, it was off to the public library, to research Connecticut's guardianship laws. It was still Dennis's idea that if the search turned up something hopeful, Karin could be dissuaded from more extreme action and agree to run away, to move in with the Colemans and have Dennis as her guardian. She later claimed that Dennis went to the library by himself and only reported back to her afterward what he discovered. Dennis has always maintained they went together. “I was the one who spotted the book,” he says. “I don't think she was even in the same room when I found it. But I found it and took it to her and showed her.”

The language in the statute book was a little ambiguous. What it came down to was that at sixteen, if the situation called for it, a minor could request that a specific person be appointed guardian and the court might well approve that choice. At fifteen, however, while the minor could ask to be placed in the custody of a particular guardian, it would be up to the court whether or not to approve, and that approval was wrapped in a multitude of legal restrictions.

At first glance it looked as though there might be a chance, even though Karin was still fifteen. In her diary on August I Karin wrote, “Den and I have our plot.” He had checked the statutes, and he could become her guardian if things worked out right. She also noted that the house was peaceful and there had been no trouble that evening, except that she had gotten sick after eating steak, ice cream, blueberry pie and grapes. She had to hide that because she thought she couldn't be sick when Joyce was home.

But the more she thought about the idea of guardianship and the more the legal restrictions became clear, the possibility that the plan could work faded. She understood all too well that escape, even if authorized by the courts, wasn't possible. “I was totally unrealistic,” she says, “and there was no way I could do it.” Joyce would certainly come after her and one way or another haul her home, and it was not pleasant to contemplate what would happen then. The next evening she appended a note to the bottom of the previous diary entry, saying that they would not carry out the plan.

They would, then, move on to the next step. Over the next days, expressed by Karin ever more frequently and openly when she and Dennis were together, was her conviction that Joyce would have to die if Karin were ever to be free. Dennis grew increasingly distraught. He says he tried to give her options; she rejected them.

He needed help. He was faced with a dilemma. There was nothing he wouldn't do for Karin, but this was just too much, this was incomprehensible. He went to his father, told his father that Karin was having terrible problems at home, that she was saying it was essential that she get out, that she was even talking about killing her mother and having Dennis help her. It was such an incredible story that his father wasn't sure he was serious. Kids always have trouble at home. Kids are always talking about running away. But murder? That was carrying it too far. If Karin was in so much trouble at home that her mind was even toying with such an idea, Dennis senior said, then she could come live with them; he would even, if necessary, adopt her. But he didn't really believe it could be that bad.

Dennis brought his father's offer to Karin. She turned it down. It couldn't work, she said. As long as Joyce was alive, she could never escape.

But if Joyce were dead, then Karin would be free. And if Joyce were dead, there would be plenty of money to live on. A year before, her mother had told her that if anything were to happen, there would be enough for her and that she wouldn't have to worry about having to live with her father. It all was spelled out in Joyce's will. Karin went to the closet where Joyce kept that will and other important papers, took them out and glanced through them.

Now she wrote to Dennis that they would do what had to be done soon, the sooner the better. School was to start in a month, and her problem should be taken care of long before that. They should get together and look over what she called “the crucial papers. Legal ones I mean.” She had them, and when they examined them, they would be able to see just what they would have in the future.

Karin later said that what she was writing about in that note was her never-ending plan, her fantasy, that she could run away with Dennis. All her notes dealt with that and nothing else, certainly not the murder of her mother. As for the crucial legal papers, she said she could not remember what they were.

Dennis, however, maintains that the note had nothing to do with running away. That plan had vanished. A new one had replaced it. The papers, which he says he himself never saw, were Joyce's will, insurance policies, deeds and other documents. Joyce's estate, Karin told him, was sizable, and she offered to split the proceeds with Dennis if he helped her. Best of all, there was the fantasy that the condo would be hers and they could live there together.

On August 3 the plot became more than talk, more than oblique references in notes. “We had just been shopping, the three of us—Joyce, Karin and me,” Dennis remembers. “We had just come home, and we were sitting in the living room. Joyce asked Karin to make her a sandwich, and Karin went off, first to the bathroom and then to the kitchen. She had a bottle in her hand. I got up and followed her. She said, ‘You wouldn't do it. Now I'm going to do it myself.' I didn't help her then, but I didn't do anything to stop her. She got a plate and put the sandwich on it and carried it back to the living room, and she gave it to Joyce. I thought,
oh, God
.”

Karin had taken a bottle of Joyce's prescription medicine, Seconal pills for her migraine headaches, from the medicine cabinet, carried the bottle into the kitchen, taken the pills from the bottle, crushed them and mixed the powder into the sandwich for her mother. She said later that she had crushed only two, perhaps three or four, just enough to calm her mother down. Dennis says he isn't sure how many pills she crushed for the sandwich, but the bottle was empty when she showed it to him, and there was enough in the sandwich to kill Joyce. What's more, Jill Smith, the woman who had taken care of Karin when she was small and with whom Karin lived for a time during the winter after Joyce's death, says that one night that winter, on a ride home from Hartford to her house, she talked to Karin about the pills, talked about the quantity that Karin had put in the sandwich, perhaps as much as the whole bottle. “You could have killed your mother,” Jill Smith said to Karin. “I know. I know,” Karin replied. And Karin's friend Kira Lintner later said that Karin wrote her a note about the attempt, saying, “I almost had my mom dead.”