Beyond Obsession (27 page)

“Don't promise freedom,” she wrote, “when you don't have the keys to the cage. It's not fair!”

Then she added that he should not pay attention to what she was writing; he should just forget it and go to work in the morning, work hard and not think about her. He should go away and let her cry for a few days and get things in order, get her life in order.

“God,” she concluded, “the pain is unbearable. It hurts so Goddamn much.”

Dennis responded. He wrote that even though he had promised, he just couldn't go through with the plot to kill her mother. He reiterated the offer his father had made that if things were that bad, the Colemans were ready to offer sanctuary, adding that he had been so distraught when he had discussed it with his father, that he had broken down and cried. Perhaps, he suggested, the answer was not to carry out the plot but rather for Karin to seek psychiatric help to get her through these times.

She was furious. She wrote back that her initial reaction to his letter was utter rage. If he had been realistic, he should have known that there was no way they could really have murdered Joyce, that there was no way she could have just stood by and let him do it. What it came down to was that they were teenagers, and all teenagers, she realized, hated their parents at some point; it was just a normal part of growing up. Their problem was that they had carried it beyond the point of mere rebellion and had planned to act out that anger in a violent way. She asked him to thank his father for the offer of sanctuary, but she couldn't accept it because she wasn't going to hurt her mother by doing that. In the future she would just be the rebellious teenager behind Joyce's back. Besides, there was always tomorrow, and she could look forward to that. If the situation at home did become unbearable, perhaps she would take up the offer of a place to stay, but only for a night.

Yes, she said, she had wanted him for her guardian, because she wanted to spend her life with him. But the only way her life would turn out right was for her mother to raise her. To conjure up the idea of living with Dennis in a house and having lots of money was just the fantasy of a teenage girl smitten with love. He ought to understand the thing about dreams, that, after all, they were only dreams. She certainly didn't need a shrink to tell her that. She just needed a place where she could go when she got angry.

She wasn't mad at him, she assured him, for what he hadn't done, for not having come across the lot when the lights were flicked and carrying out their plan. It was right of him not to do it. She was mad at him, though, because he hadn't come across and talked to her through her window. She had wanted to tell him how glad she was that he hadn't done what they had planned. She was hurt that he had misunderstood her.

She had listened to “Desert Moon” on the tape he made for her, had then carried her Walkman across and put it in his window and let the tape play continuously, had stood there and listened to him sleep for sometime. She was hurt, and she wanted him to know it. She was furious and then hurt and then understanding and then sympathetic. She felt fifteen then, and as she was writing this note, she felt forty. She was afraid he was tiring of her and losing interest.

Most important, she ended, they should put this whole thing behind them and start over, be happy and in love the way they had been. Joyce, she assured Dennis, still loved him, and “I still love you Dennis Coleman.”

So the plot to murder Joyce Aparo and gain Karin Aparo her freedom in August 1986 came to an end.

19

Early in September 1986 Dennis received a letter from his friend Chris Wheatley. Wheatley had gone off to Syracuse University as a premed student, telling friends he dreamed of the day when he could help people as a doctor in a hospital emergency room. The letter from college was a rambling one, filled with news, the embarking on a new adventure. The main reason for the letter, he wrote, was that he was broke. He'd already borrowed more than he should have from his father and couldn't ask him for any more, especially since, he said, he'd lost the money gambling. Could Dennis send him a couple of hundred? Dennis did, and later sent him more when Wheatley asked again. “I found out later,” Dennis says, “that he hadn't lost money betting; he'd gotten a girl in trouble, and he needed it to pay for an abortion.”

In the course of that letter Wheatley wrote, “So, Dude, how's your woman? Is her mother still alive?”

Joyce Aparo was, indeed, still alive and, as autumn approached, in no immediate danger. She either had been unaware of or had blinded herself to the plot that nearly took her life during those first weeks of August. She probably would not have taken it seriously in any case. The plotters, after all, were mere children; she was an adult, she was trained in social work and psychology and she had always totally dominated and controlled one of the conspirators. Besides, her life was full; she had little time for anything beyond her immediate conscious concerns. The demands of her job at Athena Health Care were exhausting. Her jewelry designing business was booming; she was becoming a nuisance around the Glastonbury post office with her demands. One employee in the post office remembers how everyone groaned when Joyce Aparo walked in the door. It always meant trouble.

And there was still trouble at home. There was always trouble at home. Joyce's nagging at Karin continued unabated. Nothing Karin did was the way Joyce wanted it done.

“Whatever your mom says, or does,” Dennis wrote near the end of August, the plot now put aside, “can't be helped. Just remember that it will end soon. She can say what she likes, but it won't affect our lives together. Not in the long run. When she gets angry, just know in your mind that it'll all blow over quickly and that I'm here waiting for you … forever. Because it means so much. Think of the long run. Please trust in us, and
hope
for us.”

A little later he wrote, “I wish you could cope with your mom without getting upset.”

Later still: “Right now I really feel bad about your state of affairs. Karin, do whatever you do only for you. Appease your mother for just a while longer. But know in your mind that what she says, or what she does, doesn't, shouldn't and won't ruin your life. You keep your dreams and ambitions alive—if you lose everything else: your violin, me (never), or anything else, never lose your dreams. Devote your life to them.”

Again: “Your mother is too unstable, self-centered and ignorant to be an obstacle to us. She may call me what she likes, and I don't care, because any opinion she has about me, or much of anything else is warped. Why she feels as if the whole world is out to get her is beyond me. Why should
it
or
anyone
care about her? I couldn't imagine being so closed and self-centered. She considers me to be ‘that kind of company.' I consider her to be
no
kind of company.”

Another time he wrote: “These ‘bad times' with your mother go in cycles. There was Nantucket and now there's now. I understand. They will pass and you'll live. At this rate, I figure there are about one of these every 1½ months. Or about 8 a year—tops. Don't worry, you'll make it and I'm
always
and
forever
here for you.”

Letter after letter from Dennis, advising, cautioning, entreating, understanding, agreeing, followed complaint after complaint from Karin. It became something of a ritual. Karin would relate to Dennis another of Joyce's foibles, follies, impossible demands. Dennis would try to calm her with one of his letters.

Karin was back in school, a high school sophomore now, her days filled with all the usual chores, the violin demanding more time, and now school work, too, and babysitting for the Hudners a couple of evenings a week. It was hard to find the time for Dennis. She made the time.

“During school are we gonna have midnight visits or what?” Dennis wrote. “It'll be hard during autumn with leaves on the ground, and during winter with the snow. Feet make tracks in snow, you know.”

The midnight visits, trekking across the parking lot, were not to be. In September Dennis's mother met a man and thought she was in love. The man was from Michigan. In order to be with him, she sold the condo on Butternut Drive, packed up her belongings and moved west. Her younger son, Matt, went with her, though he returned before too long. Dennis packed up his clothes, the intricate model house he had been building for years, carving shingles the size of eraser heads and painting each individually, fitting every piece meticulously, never finishing, and all the rest of his personal effects and moved in with his father and stepmother in the house that had been his grandparents' in South Glastonbury.

That first night in what was now his permanent home, he wrote a sad letter to Karin:

I miss you already. We all had a very nice dinner and I told my mom I loved her. I don't think Matt will stay out there. To tell you the truth, I don't think my mom will either. She's already decided that if she doesn't like it, she's gonna come back. What hurt the most was looking out my window for the last time, out at your window, and I backed out of my spot for the last time. It made me miss you. We'll still be together just as much as always. Please stay with me now and forever. In many ways, you're all I've got to hold on to. I'm supposed to be pulling away from my family. That's what happens at my age. And it still really hurts to have lost all my friends. I feel I'm moving through one chapter in my life and starting another. Besides you, I'm all alone in my life.

To the end of that letter, he appended one of his love poems:

I had a dream

And it would seem

I only dreamed of you

Forever I could always dream

And only dream of you

Try as I might to get in the dream

The dream would only have you

I don't know what this obsession with

You has got to do with my dreams

But if I were you I'd know what

I'd do … I'd go to you with my life

And to you I would give

My promises, my hopes, and my dreams

To make life what it seems
.

We'll travel together, on the road of life

While stopping along the way

So I won't take for granted my own wife

And we'll love now, day by day
.

I love you
.

It was a drive of several miles to see Karin from then on, to pick up the notes she left for him in their mailbox, to leave notes for her. It was not easy. Still, they found ways. There were notes waiting for Dennis in that mail slot often; “Wanna fuck?” she scribbled in the course of one, to which he appended, “Hi Kar—Now that you put it that way, YEA!!!!!—Love, Den.” Or another, in which she told him to think of the two of them when he was in bed that night, adding a postscript, “Thanx for the fuck.”

The quality of their sex was changing, though. “I know what you're saying,” Dennis wrote that fall. “You're saying, ‘But I'm too embarrassed to ask about kinky sex.… I'm afraid of what he'd do.' I'll tell you what I'd do. I'd give more than all the kinky sex you could take in a week. I'm here for
anything … forever
.”

They tied each other to the bed with nylon hose. Dennis bought handcuffs, drilled holes in the posts of his bed, and they locked each other to the posts with those cuffs. Karin asked for and Dennis bought a metal dildo. Karin wrote an illustrated letter, detailing their sexual activities. “It wasn't one of us taking the lead,” he says. “It was mutual.”

They had their arguments, of course. Dennis was filled with an almost unreasoning jealousy if Karin talked to somebody else, looked at somebody else. He was even jealous when she paid attention to his brother:

Call me insecure maybe, or call me anything you like, but it
is
the way I feel. I love you so much. Something like this shouldn't and won't come between us, but please just try to put yourself in
my
place. Reverse the roles, so that every time your sister came over I turned around and ran to her to talk to, or do things for her. To be more excited around her than you. It just really hurts, and really tears me up. You're not trying to do it on purpose, I know, but please understand.… You say that you like him because there's so much of me. That means I'm not enough, or possibly you prefer the package it comes in with him.… You're upset because you're afraid that I don't trust enough in us to be secure about this. I understand that, and I do believe in us … forever. I do, I do, I do. Do you even want to know what I'm afraid of? I'm afraid that you have the room in your heart to like someone else right now, or ever. I'm afraid that you have the capability to put me in the background be it only for a few minutes.… I'm not mad, I'm scared, literally, to tears. I only ask as much as I give to you.… I'm very sorry and very much in love with you. Karin, I need you so much. I'm out of words. Stay with me forever.

Karin could be jealous, too, but in her jealousy she was stone, not tears. One day early in the fall, she says, she was in Dennis's room, cleaning it for him, when she found a note he was writing to Chris Wheatley. In what was an attempt to show Wheatley that he was still his own man or in a fit of braggadocio, he wrote that he was going to spend a weekend with one of his former girls and, if possible, have sex with her. Dennis was in tears when Karin faced him with that note, begged forgiveness, swore that it wasn't true, that he would never betray her in any way. The discovery of the note gave her another hold over him.

The most serious argument and the closest they came to an irreconcilable difference, though, arose in November, over one of Dennis's closest friends and a member with him of the rock group. His name is Mike, and he was close not merely to Dennis but to Karin as well. “I used to sit with her for hours outside school,” he says, “and she would just talk and talk and talk and talk about her relationship with Den. I used to talk to her practically every day, buddy-buddy, take walks outside, talk about this, talk about that. It was like she couldn't talk to me enough, like I was her best friend.”