Beyond Obsession (36 page)

On September 3 Dennis showed up at Norris's office, in a small house set a little way back from New London Turnpike in Glastonbury. Norris and Cavanaugh were waiting. The diary was handed to Dennis. Norris and Cavanaugh waited while he read it slowly. “This wasn't someone else sullying the reputation of Karin Aparo,” Norris says. “This wasn't someone saying bad things about Karin. I don't think Dennis would have listened to anyone. It had to be in Karin's own hand. It had to be Karin who burst the bubble herself. As he read it, the tears just flowed down his face. Until that moment it had been inconceivable to him that Karin would ever do anything to harm him, that she would ever have set him up and that he might have been a victim of her.”

When he finished reading, when he discovered at last that Karin had lied to him about the number of times she had slept with Alex Markov, that she had lied to him about her feelings for Alex Markov, that she had lied to him about her concern for him, that she had used him and taken advantage of him and then written about that in her diary, that all she had promised him was a fiction, that if the diary was what she really felt and believed, the murder itself had been without meaning, he was stricken, in shock. He looked at Norris, a plea in his eyes. The lawyer nodded encouragement. Dennis began to talk. He went back to the time he and Karin had met, talked about the summer of 1986, talked about the last weeks of July and beginning of August 1987 as he had lived them. When he stopped talking some days later, he had put Karin Aparo at the center of a conspiracy to murder, had made her its core and its reason. He gave Cavanaugh, and John Bailey, what they wanted in detail, enough detail so that when added to what Shannon Dubois had already told them and what Chris Wheatley and Kira Lintner had given them, they could charge her with conspiracy to murder and accessory to murder.

What he also did was give his attorney something to bargain with. Not much, but something. Dennis was going to go to prison for a long time. No one doubted that; no one argued with that. The question was, How long? Would it be for the rest of his life, or would he someday, with some life still ahead of him, be free? Norris began to deal. If Dennis testified against Karin, and he would be the major witness, what was the state willing to give? The state, Bailey replied, would not ask for the maximum, would not ask that he be sent away for eighty years; that would mean, if Connecticut precedents were followed, he would have to serve at least forty before he was released. Rather, the state would recommend a prison term of forty-two years, meaning he could get out in about twenty.

Norris tentatively accepted. He kept some options open, though, by entering a not guilty plea at a preliminary hearing at the end of September. Had he entered a guilty plea, Dennis could have been sentenced immediately, or as soon as a probation report was compiled, and sent to the state penitentiary without delay. This way no one worried that free on the $150,00 bond, he was likely to run; he would have a little time before the steel doors slammed behind him and the long years of his youth vanished in the limbo of a cell and bars. “There was no rush,” Norris said. “He was going away, no doubt about it. But I figured I'd try to keep him out as long as I could.”

It was also to the advantage of the state at that moment, though it would never admit it, to have Dennis enter a not guilty plea, be still free, remain not convicted. As a witness against Karin, he might appear as a self-confessed killer, but he would not appear as a convicted one, which would cast ever more doubt on his credibility.

As he was doing his bargaining, as he was meeting often with Dennis, Reese Norris was a troubled man, and not only because of the impossibility of his client's situation.

There was something wrong, and it was not just that Dennis had committed a murder. It went beyond that. Norris sensed it the first time he sat down with Dennis over the dining-room table in the Coleman home and listened to his confession of murder. Dennis was calm; Dennis was forthcoming; Dennis was articulate. Yet something was missing; something just wasn't there. Norris didn't know what. But he was enough disturbed and confused by it to call Gerald Faris, a man with a Ph.D. in clinical psychiatry, an expert in the study of schizophrenic children, whose specialty was diagnosing, evaluating and treating personality disorders over the long term.

He asked Faris to see Dennis, but not necessarily to search out and discover some mental disease or defect that he might use as a defense. It was not his intention then to use an insanity defense when and if Dennis came to trial. For one thing, he had been in practice long enough to know that insanity defenses rarely work, that juries seem to have a built-in bias and skepticism when they are told that a defendant is not guilty because he didn't know what he was doing, that he didn't know right from wrong, that he couldn't help himself because of something in his psychological makeup. For another, there was the nature of the crime itself. It was horrifying, not a shooting or a stabbing in which the victim died in an instant, but a strangulation that took perhaps twenty minutes, minutes in which the victim struggled and suffered intolerably. Thus, even if a jury bought the diminished capacity idea, the details of the murder, when spelled out, would undoubtedly work against any leniency.

Norris sent Dennis to Faris because he wanted to know what, if anything, was wrong with Dennis and because he was convinced that if Dennis were to survive this horror and the nightmare years that lay ahead, he was going to need a lot of help. Faris was not a forensic specialist, a man used to dealing with people charged with crimes and looking for reasons that might be used in court, either for or against the defense, depending on who did the hiring. He had never even appeared in court as a witness before. He was simply a therapist who tried to deal with the problems afflicting his patients.

Faris saw Dennis for the first time a few weeks after his arrest, and he continued to see him at least once a week, usually more often, for the next two years and more. When Dennis arrived for his first session, Faris saw a pleasant, friendly, articulate, calm, matter-of-fact all-American boy. Yet, Faris said, he had the immediate feeling, which grew stronger session after session, that this was all surface and that the expressions of turmoil, intense feelings of rage, betrayal, guilt, self-hatred that began to emerge were only an inch beneath that surface, if not on the surface itself. Something was missing. It was all intellectualizing. And then, Faris said, he understood that inside, there was a blank. “Dennis was not blocking his feelings. Inside, he is empty and dead. His inner world is a dead and empty one.” All that surface friendliness, everything that he revealed to the world “is an unconscious procedure he has learned from us. He hides. He almost has to appear typical.”

They talked. “His whole mind,” Faris said, “was on Karin. He talked about her constantly. No matter what the subject was, everything came around to Karin.” Faris gave Dennis a battery of psychological tests. “Can you imagine taking an ink blot test and coming up with Karin no matter what? It's very difficult to do.” But, then, Dennis told Faris, “Karin was more meaning than I was.”

Karin might betray him, Karin might lie to him, but still, he came back to her. He needed her desperately, Faris said, “to fill in the blanks, to take away his sense of being dead. Are we talking about a mature concept of love? No, because mature love requires an integrated personality, and Dennis was anything but.” That was as apparent in his attachments to girls before Karin as it was with Karin, apparent in the fact that he never had crushes but always developed intense, clinging relationships from which he could not free himself without agony. “It is very clear that Dennis lost himself in this relationship, and that was very easy for him to do. He was totally compliant and vulnerable because of the inner terror that gripped him.” Thus a mere suggestion from Karin was enough to compel him to act in order not to lose her. “She told him to enroll in college, and he did. If she had told him to go to Montana and raise sheep, he would have. If Karin had asked him to kill himself, there is no doubt in my mind that he would have done it.”

Faris was fascinated enough by what was unfolding in his treatment room to discuss the case and his diagnosis and to seek some advice from another expert. He called Dr. Rima Brauer, a psychoanalyst who often serves as a control and consultant to other analysts. It was not an unusual step, especially when one therapist is confronted by a difficult or an unusual situation. They talked often, Faris going over his notes in detail. Brauer confirmed his feelings.

Finally, both concluded that while Dennis knew what he was doing when he murdered Joyce Aparo, that while he was aware of the consequences, he had little choice. “As summer wore on,” Faris said, “and it became clear to him that she would leave him if he didn't commit murder, it was do it or die. His will was subjugated to her. He lost any capacity to act of his own free will.” He was, at the end, Faris said, “the vehicle and not the driver” or, as Brauer said, “the gun and Karin pulled the trigger.”

It was not for more than a year, not until September 1988, that Reese Norris learned what the psychiatrists were thinking. It was then that Faris called to say that while he had agreed to take on this case only for the purpose of treating Dennis, he now thought it appropriate to tell the lawyer what he and Brauer had diagnosed. Dennis Coleman, they said, had a borderline personality disorder, he was an “as if” personality, as defined by Helene Deutsch.

Norris read up, thought a lot and then told the state's attorney and the court that he was amending Dennis's plea. He was now going to offer a psychological defense of his client, though he didn't tell John Bailey or James Thomas, who was handling the prosecution, that he still had no intention of going to trial. What he was hoping was that with such a defense the state might agree to a better deal. He was praying it would agree to a plea of manslaughter, which would mean a maximum of a twenty-year sentence, with Dennis out in ten. He hoped, but he knew that wasn't a very realistic hope. Still, maybe he could win the state to agree to something less than forty-two years.

28

In Hartford Hubert Santos was trying to frame a defense for his client, Karin Aparo. It was not an easy job. The public perception of her had hardened; she was, in the phrase repeated widely, a girl with no heart, a vicious, unfeeling, sexually promiscuous teenager who for some unknown reason had manipulated a nice, popular, all American boy into murdering her mother and then had turned on him.

Reese Norris had done a good job in swaying opinion toward sympathy for Dennis and antipathy toward Karin. Norris, with nothing to lose, since there was no argument over his client's guilt or that Dennis was going to prison for what he had done, and fond of publicity anyway, gave interviews, on and off the record, articulating Dennis's story and reasons.

Santos kept his silence, as was his way. A onetime public defender, once corporation counsel for the city of Hartford, in private practice since 1974, he was widely considered one of the best and most expensive criminal lawyers in Connecticut, his retainers in important cases ranging upward of a hundred thousand dollars. He is an unprepossessing, rather ungainly man in his mid-forties, about six feet tall, though his perpetual slouch, sometimes with shoulders hunched, sometimes with stomach thrust forward, makes him appear shorter. His trousers are usually a little too long and baggy; his jackets, rumpled and just a trifle ill-fitting. It appears to be a deliberate costume, designed to enhance an image of the common man little concerned with clothes or other material things. His graying, thinning hair is close-cropped in a manner more appropriate to another era. He wears his spectacles low on his nose and often takes them off when he reads, takes them off and waves them to make a point. On his round, pleasant face there is invariably a slightly whimsical or sometimes a skeptical expression, and that can be heard in his orator's voice. He tends to be overdramatic, can be rambling, sometimes seems indecisive and uncertain, occasionally looks toward judge, jury, spectators for what seems to be help, as though he had lost himself. It is all a piece of the manner in which he has garbed himself, as is his willingness to try the unorthodox, if he thinks there is a chance it might work. What stands out as much as anything is a passionate devotion to the defense of his clients, and in that defense he will risk the anger of a judge by overstepping the bounds of courtroom propriety, doing so as if by accident, as if the heat of the moment had caused the slip, though again one senses that he does so with a certain calculation and deliberateness. In the courtroom all his devices and techniques come together, and by the end of a trial he emerges as the most commanding and dominating figure on the scene. He has won victories when causes seemed hopeless. People said that for what Santos did, his fees, no matter how high, were low. If you could afford him, he was the man to get.

Karin Aparo got him. Meeting his fee was not much of a problem. Her mother's estate, more than three hundred thousand dollars, to which she was the sole heir, remained in limbo as long as she was under indictment for her mother's murder, and she would lose all rights to it if she were convicted since under the law one cannot profit by a crime. But there was a way around this. Karin waived all rights to her mother's estate. It then devolved on the next of kin, Joyce's mother, Karin's grandmother. An arrangement was made whereby once the grandmother, Rose Cantone, had come into the proceeds, she agreed to simply send the money to pay Karin's legal costs and other expenses. It might be shading the intent of the law, but it was strictly legal. Ironically, Joyce Aparo's money was going to pay for the defense of the daughter charged with her murder.

That defense was not without its problems. For one thing, there was that public perception of Karin, so masterfully orchestrated by Norris. Nothing could be done about that. Even if Karin decided to tell her side, it might have little effect; it was too late, and the damage was already done. Besides, telling it could well dissipate the impact it might have when and if she came to trial. And it seemed certain that one day she would stand trial. Santos made a calculated decision. It was time to stop all the leaks, all the rumors, all the distortions. He asked the court to institute a gag order, preventing anyone involved in the case—the prosecution and its witnesses, the defense and its—from saying anything in public, to the press or anyone. The court agreed. The gag order went into effect. It didn't stop the rumors and speculations, didn't stop the press from recapitulating what was already on the record, but it sealed the lips of those who had once been so free with anyone who approached.