Beyond Obsession (37 page)

In private Karin was insisting to Santos and to those close to her that she was innocent. She had never asked, or begged, Dennis Coleman to murder her mother. She had not even been in or near the condo when the murder was committed; she had been far away, in Rowayton.

As the evidence in its possession grew to what seemed ever more damaging proportions, the state made a decision. It was sure that if the case went to trial, it would win a conviction on all the counts of the indictment: accessory to murder and a two-pronged conspiracy to murder, one conspiracy beginning in the summer of 1986 and extending to August 5, 1987, and the second and overlapping one beginning on or about July 15, 1987, and extending to the day of the murder. But trials are expensive and time-consuming. The state dropped hints that it might be willing to offer a deal if Santos were ready to listen. Any good lawyer is always ready to hear what the other side has to offer, so Santos asked just what the state had in mind. If Karin pleaded guilty, he was told, she would be sentenced to fourteen years. That meant she would be out of prison in about seven; she would still be young, in her twenties, and would have most of her life ahead of her.

On its face it seemed an irresistible offer. Santos urged her to accept. Santos's law partner urged her to accept. Others urged her to accept. They argued with her, implored her, tried to convince her it was the best way. Karin adamantly refused. She was innocent, she proclaimed, so why should she have to go to prison? She would stand trial, and she would be acquitted.

So that was out; there would be no deal. Santos had to maneuver in other directions. He explored a dozen. Because the first prong of the alleged conspiracy had begun when she was fifteen, she should be tried as a youthful offender, not as an adult. It was an argument that on its face had considerable merit. But the court thought not enough, that the nature of the crime, murder, overrode the fact that one part of the conspiracy had begun when she was, under law, a juvenile. Besides, there was the second part of the indictment, accessory to murder. She had been sixteen, an adult for purposes of the law, when the murder took place. Therefore, she was not entitled to be treated as a youthful offender. Santos appealed and appealed, and lost and lost.

He asked that she be granted accelerated rehabilitation and put on probation, citing the example of Christopher Wheatley, and in a hearing he brought her aunt and uncle and teachers and others who knew her, and had known Joyce, to ask that his petition be granted. The court listened and then said no.

He asked for a change of venue, claiming, with some justification, that because of all the publicity, so much of it adverse to his client, it would be impossible to pick an unbiased jury and give her a fair trial in Hartford. His motion was denied.

He took other tacks, every one he could think of, every precedent he could find in the lawbooks. He lost them all.

So there would be a trial, and he would have to prepare. And he would have to formulate a defense when that day came. Like Norris, he turned to the psychiatrists for help. Only, unlike Norris, he did not seek shrinks who specialized in treatment and were strangers to the courts. Santos went to men who knew their way around the legal system and whose opinions he could use when the day came that he needed them. He went to forensic specialists.

Those two experts were the psychologist John Cigalis and the psychiatrist Walter Borden. They interviewed her, talked with her, listened to her and gave her a battery of psychological tests. And then they reported their findings.

Though Karin, in Cigalis's opinion, was “cold, unemotional, stand-offish, anxious, hypervigilant, mildly paranoid, overly controlled in feelings, very difficult to relate to on a personal level,” though “she was extremely angry, to the point of homicidal wishes toward her mother” and though she suffered from a variety of borderline personality disorders, she was telling the truth when she said, “I did not assist Dennis Coleman in the murder of my mother,” and was in no way involved in the murder.

Borden agreed. All her actions, all those letters before and after the murder, even her sleeping with Dennis twice following the murder, all of which to the layman might seem consistent with involvement and guilt, were actually consistent with her psychological profile as a battered child. She slept with Dennis, wrote to him, called him after the murder, Borden said, and Cigalis seconded, not because she was part of the plot but because she felt a certain degree of responsibility: Joyce and Dennis would never have met had it not been for her, and if they had not met, there would have been no murder. But, Borden insisted, she had actually played no role in the murder.

Neither Cigalis nor Borden, though, made any mention, if they even knew, of the crises that were overwhelming mother and daughter in July 1987—the imminent departure of Joyce's favored Alex Markov and the more important departure of Karin's violin—and what effect those crises may have had on the events that ensued. But they both were uncompromising in their view that on the basis of everything they had learned about her, through interviews and psychological tests, Karin had told them the truth and she was not guilty.

Before the trial was to begin, with those reports in hand, Santos filed notice that he might, just might, rely on a psychiatric defense. He wasn't sure, but he wanted to be on record that he was holding that option open.

With that notice the state had the right to bring in its own psychiatric experts to examine Karin and offer their opinions, to counter Cigalis and Borden. It decided not to exercise that right.

Psychiatry, of course, is an inexact science. Nowhere is it more inexact than in dealing with criminal cases. There the psychiatrists are ubiquitous. Some are employed by the state and some for the defense, and invariably they come up with conflicting opinions, reflecting the positions their employers hold. The state's experts say the defendant knew precisely what he or she was doing and was completely sane and responsible for the act. The defense's experts say, not so. The defendant didn't do the deed and played no part in its doing, or suffered from such severe mental defects or emotional disturbance as to be unaware of what was being done and of the consequences, or was unable to control himself or herself from doing the deed and so was not responsible for it.

Nowhere was this dichotomy more clearly evident than in this case. Dr. Faris and Dr. Brauer said Dennis acted only because of Karin's manipulation of and control over him. Dr. Cigalis and Dr. Borden said, nonsense, Dennis did it on his own, and Karin played no part. A state-appointed psychiatrist concluded after examining Dennis briefly that he was perfectly sane and normal and knew precisely what he was doing. He offered no opinion about Karin's role. But then neither he nor any expert on the state's side talked to her.

One was left to wish only that somehow Cigalis and Borden had spent time with Dennis Coleman, that Faris and Brauer had spent time with Karin Aparo and then that Cigalis, Borden, Faris and Brauer had spent time together, comparing notes, arguing, listening—an idle and futile dream, on a par, perhaps, with Joyce Aparo's fantasies.

29

Trial dates came, and trials were postponed, and so trial dates passed, and the cases against Dennis Coleman and Karin Aparo dragged on inconclusively for more than two years. It was as though no one wanted to bring either of them to final judgment, as though no one wanted to write a finish to this tragedy.

Dennis remained free on bond. He did not go to college as he had once planned. He got a motorcycle, and he roared around Glastonbury, his red hair flying, a sight to be recognized and pitied. He kept his appointments with Dr. Faris. He was in and out of Reese Norris's office. He worked on his model house, carefully shaving shingles, adding to it slowly. He wandered often through the woods behind his father's home, creating campsites, carving trails, spending long hours in loneliness. He spent time with old friends, who had returned to him in this time of trouble. He played a few gigs with his rock group. He took a trip now and then just to get away for a few days. John Bailey remembers a summer evening when he and his wife were vacationing on Martha's Vineyard. They were in a bistro when he felt someone staring at him. He looked up. On a balcony, eyes focused on him, was Dennis Coleman. Dennis tried drugs, smoking marijuana, taking cocaine, LSD, more, was stoned every day, trying to blot out the memories of what had happened and what would happen. And he waited.

One day late in the fall of 1987 he took a large box and went to his room and slowly took from his walls all the photographs and all the memorabilia of his time with Karin Aparo. He put everything into that box, which he took and stored in the attic. His room suddenly looked a lot larger and a lot barer.

Karin Aparo, too, waited, tried to create a new life for herself. In September 1987 she went back to Glastonbury High School, to begin her junior year. She remained only a few days. The cruelty of those who knew her, who knew about her was unbearable. She left. She transferred to a high school in Hartford where nobody knew her, though many knew about her. She was anonymous. She rarely saw the people who had been friends with her mother and with her, Michael Zaccaro, Jeff Sands, and others. She lived for a time with the woman who had taken care of her when she was small, Jill Smith. It did not work out. Smith was something of a spiritualist, sometimes held séances in her home. She was persuaded that Karin had brought evil vibrations into her home. She asked Karin to leave. Karin found an apartment for herself in the south end of Hartford. She got a part-time job in a bank; she did well, and the people liked her there, though initially they were a little leery. She gave up the violin and talked more about a career as a psychologist, a psychiatrist, even as a nursing home administrator. She planned to go to college when she graduated from high school, first to Central Connecticut and then, when everything was finished and when she was free, as she was convinced she would be, to Yale or some other good university. She, too, waited.

After their last meeting, that trip to Mystic and Dennis's father's boat in the week he got out of jail, Dennis and Karin did not see each other again until January. Then it was in court. The state of Connecticut some years earlier had abandoned the grand jury system as the way to hand down indictments. Instead, it has instituted what it calls probable cause hearings, held in open court during which the state lays out the outlines of its case, calls enough witnesses and presents enough evidence to show there is probable cause to bring the defendant to trial. Karin's probable cause hearing was held on January 5, 1988, in a small courtroom on the third floor of the pedestrian-modern criminal court building in Hartford, a three-story structure. To the rear of the first floor, across a hall from each other, are the offices of the state's attorney and of the public defender. In the center of the building is an atrium that rises from ground to ceiling. On the second and third floors, ringing the atrium, are the courtrooms; those on the third floor are reserved for jury trials, sentencings, major arraignments and important hearings. The courtrooms are small, holding fewer than a hundred people. They have no windows, only stark brick walls and light-colored benches and carpets.

“I came up the steps into the hallway outside the courtroom,” Dennis says, “and she was standing there. It was the first time I'd seen her. And I didn't care what she did, I still loved her. I thought in the months before that I hated her, but everything came into balance then, and I still loved her. I sat up there on the witness stand, and I testified against her, and when I looked at her, I knew I still loved her.”

The court heard Dennis and Shannon and the police and a few others, and it decided there was probable cause to bring Karin Aparo to trial.

30

Then no more delays were possible. In the fall of 1989 it was announced that trials would be held before the end of the year, first Karin's and then Dennis's. The last thing Norris wanted, naturally, was a jury trial for Dennis, a trial at which, despite whatever psychiatric testimony he might bring in as mitigation, all the details of the strangling would be spelled out. But neither did he want Dennis to go to prison for forty-two years. He met with Bailey and prosecutor Thomas. They discussed and argued and finally came to an agreement. If Dennis would change his plea to guilty, the state would not hold him to the terms of the original compact: that he accept those forty-two years. A hearing on the sentence would be held in open court. Norris could present whatever evidence he wanted, could, in essence, present what would have been the defense in a trial. He could ask the judge to impose a lesser sentence, but no less than thirty years. The state would still ask for forty-two years. It would be up to the judge to make the final determination.

Just before Thanksgiving the hearing began. It lasted three days, with one break for the holiday and then another while Judge Raymond Norko considered what he had heard and what he should do. Norris was given latitude, and he used it. He spent a day with Detective Cavanaugh, who testified to all he had discovered about the crime and the relationship between Dennis and Karin. He spent another day eliciting testimony from Shannon, Kira Lintner, and his two psychiatrists, Faris and Brauer. Then it was up to Norko. He was to announce his decision on Tuesday, November 28.

On Monday Dennis tried to prepare. It was to be the last night he would spend in his father's house, in his own room, in his own bed. It was to be his last night of freedom. He left the house early in the afternoon and wandered through the woods, stopping at the campsites he had carved out, following the trails he had created. It was dark by the time he returned home. He went to bed early.

On Tuesday morning, just after ten, he was back in court. He was dressed neatly in a dark suit. He wore a dark raincoat over it. His red hair was neatly combed. His face was too thin, thinner than it had ever been, almost hawk-like. It had no expression, no show of emotions. His eyes appeared lifeless, hopeless. With him were his father, mother, stepmother and brother. They all looked lost and helpless, stricken, especially Dennis's mother, on the edge of collapse. With him, too, was a tall, attractive blond girl. Her name was Margaret. Matthew Coleman had met her in New Haven a few months before and brought her home because; she said, she wanted to meet his brother, Dennis. It was something that happens often in notorious murder cases: the sudden appearance of young girls attracted to the murderer, for one reason or another. From then on she rarely let Dennis out of her sight. Some of his friends thought she was manipulating him just as Karin had. She said she was in love with him and he was in love with her and they planned to marry.