Beyond Obsession (40 page)

Even Santos was not pleased with his own performance. On the sidewalk outside court at the end of that last day, he asked an acquaintance what he thought, how he thought it had all gone. The acquaintance said he thought Dennis had made a believable witness, that he had been direct and forthright, obviously well rehearsed. What, Santos asked, was the opinion of his own performance? The acquaintance said he thought Santos had been uncertain of where he was going, had struck out wildly and often blindly, and it had shown. There had been, for example, that strange demand that he be allowed to show the move
Friday the 13th
to the jury because Dennis had watched it hours before committing the murder, a demand Corrigan rejected out of hand. The general feeling among spectators and the press was that Santos probably had done little damage in his cross-examination.

Santos shook his head sadly, gloomily. “I know,” he said.

Finally there was Shannon Dubois. She was a little nervous, but she told her story directly and with few hesitations, remembering the details with almost total recall. She told of Karin's phone call informing her of the murder on the morning after and the plea that Karin needed her. She told of the moment when she asked Karin outside the Coleman house, “Who could have done it?” and then, “Do you know?” and Karin's reply, “Yes, I know. It was Dennis.” And then Shannon described how Karin led her up to Dennis's room and showed her the evidence in the duffel bag and how Karin told her “that on five different nights they had planned to kill her mother.”

“Why,” Thomas asked, “did you ask Karin if she had anything to do with it?”

“Because,” Shannon answered, “she told me that Dennis had done it and she knew how he had done it.”

“What else did she say?”

“She said she had talked to Dennis on Monday night before the murder. She said she told him she didn't want to be there when it happened and that she would come home early on Wednesday and clean everything up and then call the police.”

Then Karin left with the people from Athena, and Dennis arrived home from work and asked her if she knew what had happened, and she said yes, because Karin had told her. And that night, with Karin staying at her house, Karin asked if she had talked to Dennis and she said, “Yes, and he told me in detail everything,” and sketched out what Dennis had said.

“Oh,” Karin replied, “that's what he told me last night.”

She had finally gone to her parents and to the police when “I was all by myself for the first time and I got very upset and it all came out.”

Santos was gentle with her on cross-examination, as he tried to shake her testimony and score a few points. She was not to be shaken, though. His only score dealt with Karin's transportation back to Glastonbury. Shannon had told the police that Karin had told her that she had been delayed in getting back to Glastonbury because her car was blocked in the Markovs' driveway. Santos noted that Karin did not have a car then.

Late in the morning of Friday, May 31, the state rested. It had called sixteen witnesses. It had not called Kira Lintner or Christopher Wheatley. Thomas apparently thought that both were impeachable, that any testimony they gave would be suspect and self-serving. He decided to pass them by. He had not called many others who might have supported and amplified the testimony presented. He had not wanted to go in for overkill. Still, he had presented a strong case and, many thought, a convicting one. Dennis Coleman might be a suspect witness, a convicted murderer and so, perhaps, not to be believed, as the credibility of felons is invariably in doubt. Yet his testimony seemed direct and persuasive, far from self-serving, for he did not try to shirk his own responsibility for what he did. And so one was forced to ask the questions, Did he have a reason to lie? How would lying possibly help him? Santos maintained that he had invented his story to help the prosecution and in so doing help himself; if Karin were convicted on his testimony, then perhaps the board of pardons might look more kindly on his applications for early release. Further, Santos held, Dennis was seeking revenge on Karin for what she had done to him, for all her lies, for all her ill use of him, for cuckolding him with Alex Markov by attempting to implicate her in the murder. Still, one was forced to wonder: If he had not done the murder at her urging, how would killing Joyce Aparo have helped him win back Karin and sideline Alex Markov, especially if he had read that July 1987 diary, as Santos insisted he had, and discovered what she was writing there about him and Markov?

But Dennis had not been the state's only witness to put Karin at the center of the conspiracy, to point to her as an accessory to the deed. Dennis might be suspect, his word doubted, but could one doubt the testimony of Beverly Warga regarding the overheard conversations or, especially, the testimony of Shannon Dubois, Karin's best friend, a young woman who had nothing to gain by telling anything but the truth?

32

What would Santos offer as a defense? Most of the spectators who filled the small courtroom day after day, who lined up early in the morning in hopes of seats on one of the hard benches, who remained in line outside throughout the day, praying that someone would leave and a seat become vacant, those who had heard the state's case firsthand and most newspaper readers, television viewers and radio listeners who tuned in for reports about it all during the day and viewed daily with avid fascination pictures from inside the courtroom on television news in the evening seemed convinced now of Karin Aparo's guilt, convinced that conviction was inevitable. How would Santos deflect and turn that feeling? Would that even be possible?

His initial intention was to lay out for the jurors and spectators, those in the courtroom and those beyond, the tragedy of Karin's childhood and youth, the abuse physical and psychological. He planned to do this by parading before the court a succession of witnesses who would testify to what they had seen or heard over the years, the neighbors, teachers, friends and mere acquaintances who presumably would have unbiased views. By the time they were through, the court, and the world beyond, would be awash in sympathy for Karin Aparo.

There was just one problem with this strategy. It was not going to be offered as mitigation, enabling the defense to change its plea to, perhaps, guilty of a lesser charge, manslaughter. Karin and Santos had no intention of abandoning their stand that she was not guilty of any involvement in her mother's murder. The testimony about abuse would be offered only to explain why she had acted as she had in the summer of 1986, when the original and aborted conspiracy to murder began, and to explain why she had acted as she had in August 1987 after the murder, to show her state of mind.

But if Santos followed this tack, Thomas was certain to object and to object strenuously, with some strong legal reasoning to support him. It was one thing if Karin was admitting guilt and offering this testimony in mitigation. It was another entirely if it was to be used for another purpose, merely to show state of mind and to buttress the claim of innocence. For the court to allow this, Santos had to have laid a groundwork. But if he pursued this strategy, he would not have done that. And there are many legal experts who think the court would have been legally justified in blocking him.

Hope Seeley, the young and gifted attorney who was helping Santos with the case, who had become a staunch supporter of Karin's, came up with an alternative plan. Lead off with Karin, she suggested. Her testimony would show that the defense was not changing its plea and was not citing abuse as mitigation. The plea would remain not guilty, but Karin's testimony about what she endured would reveal her contentions on why she had acted as she had and would lay the essential groundwork for the witnesses about abuse to support her allegations.

Santos bought the idea.

His defense began on the ninth day of the trial, Monday, June 4, with the defendant herself, Karin Aparo. As she stepped slowly toward the witness box, she appeared frightened, nervous, biting her lips. Santos led her through her version, which at the beginning at least jibed with Dennis's, of the meeting of the two and how they became lovers, led her to the beginning of August 1986, where the stories diverged.

Her diary entry “We have a plan”? The plan had nothing to do with murder. “Dennis and I wanted to run away,” she said.

The diary entry “Dennis and I have our plot” and the note at the end “Update: will not carry out our plan”? That had nothing to do with murder either. It had to do with running away, and the note at the end meant “I was totally unrealistic, and there was no way I could do it.”

When she wrote to Dennis that “I will do whatever is necessary,” she wasn't writing about murder. “I was telling Dennis that I was going to tell my mother that I wanted to leave. But there was no way it could have happened.”

That, she said, running away with Dennis, was what all those letters were about; they had nothing to do with a plan to commit a murder.

Yes, she had crushed some pills and put them in her mother's sandwich, she admitted. But that was because Joyce was angry with her and Dennis because she had found a note from him in Karin's window and was demanding that they stop their affair. So Karin had taken just two pills Joyce used for migraines and mixed them with the relish. Just two pills. Just enough to calm her down.

“Was it your intention to kill your mother?” Santos asked.

“No, it wasn't.”

“What were your feelings toward your mother?”

“They were mixed. At times I really loved her, and at other times I was very afraid of her.”

“Why did you want to run away?”

“Life with my mother was very difficult. She was very mean, psychologically, emotionally and physically. She'd tell me things and I'd find out they weren't true. She told me that my dad wasn't my dad, that it was somebody else.”

She talked about Dennis, and she talked about Alex Markov and how Joyce told her, “I wouldn't mind if Alex got you.” By the end of June 1987, she said, “my relationship with Dennis was falling apart. I was sleeping with Alex in the middle of June. I felt I had to break up with Dennis. He didn't want to. So I decided to separate.” By July she was spending ever more time with Alex and her feelings toward Dennis were very mixed. She still loved him, but he was too possessive.

She gave her version of the events of late July until the murder, saying she had never asked Dennis to murder Joyce and had nothing to do with it. During all those calls the morning after the murder he never told her that he had killed her mother, nor did she ask him if he had.

The call to Dennis from the Glastonbury police station that evening, overheard by Beverly Warga? “Did you know, or had Dennis told you by then, that he killed your mother?”

“No. He did not tell me then.”

At Dennis's house, in his room that night, she was feeling a little uneasy because she had just learned that her mother was dead, and her stomach was bothering her, so they went right to bed and went to sleep and never talked about anything. It was only in the morning that Dennis took her down to his car, the Triumph Spitfire, and opened the trunk and showed her the plastic garbage bag with her mother's car license plates and other papers. Even then he did not tell her he had murdered her mother, though now she believed he had. She said to him, she told the court, “Throw all that stuff out. If I didn't see it, I don't know about it.” She said those same words to him when he took her back upstairs, opened his closet and showed her the duffel bag with Joyce's purse and the black clothes.

About then, she said, she asked him why, “and he said because she was making me go with Alex.”

She called Archbishop Whealon to tell him of the murder and ask him to conduct the funeral service. She called Shannon, “who used to be my best friend.” When Shannon reached the Coleman house, Karin testified, she told her everything she knew. Shannon asked, “Were you involved in it?”

Karin replied, “No.”

Shannon said, “Did you have any idea this was going to happen?”

Karin said, “I had no idea.”

“Do you know who was responsible?”

“No.”

“Was it Dennis?”

“No … yes.”

Shannon said, “I don't believe you.”

Santos proceeded to take her through the by now familiar ground of how she found Dennis's note and turned it over to the police, through the funeral, where she had seen her mother's body for the first time, seen the marks and the bruises and the distorted features, and had gone into shock, and how afterward, in the Duboises' bathroom with Dennis, “I wanted to tell him what I had seen on my mother, and I wanted him to explain.” That was the first time, she said, that Dennis told her the details of the murder.

“Seeing my mother made me decide I was going to tell the police about Dennis. I didn't want to be the one to turn Dennis in. I still loved him. I was so confused. I had conflicting feelings regarding Dennis. He said he killed my mother because I was sleeping with Alex. I loved my mother because she was my mom, but I was afraid of her and I didn't know how to put all of that together.”

She had gone with him and had sex with him twice after he was released from prison, and she did so, she said, because “he was all I had left and I didn't want to lose him.”

“Why did you show so little emotion after your mother's death?”

“Because it didn't hit until later.”

“Why did you lie and coyer up for Dennis Coleman?”

“I was afraid and I was still in love with him and I didn't know what to do.”

“Did you conspire with Dennis Coleman to kill your mother?”

“No.”

“Did you beg Dennis Coleman to kill your mother?”

“No.”

“Did you entreat Dennis Coleman to kill your mother?”

“No.”

“Did you solicit Dennis Coleman to kill your mother?”