Beyond Obsession

by Hammer, Richard;

  Love,

  Den

  P.S. I’ve been eating more lately,

  and haven’t felt sick—good?

  Sands looked up at her. “Why did you throw this away?”

  Karin said, “I was scared.”

  Sands turned to Zaccaro and Butler and asked them to leave the condo for a while because he had to talk to Karin privately. They left.

  When they were alone, Sands told her she had to turn the note over to the police immediately. The police had been in and out of the condo since Joyce’s murder. They had searched it thoroughly. They must have found that note and then put it back between the sheets to see whether she would try to destroy it or give it to them. If she didn’t turn it over, a lot of suspicion would fall on her. At the very least, she might be charged with hindering prosecution, a potentially serious crime. If she had anything to worry about, he said, he would get her a criminal lawyer.

  Karin offered little resistance. She said that she didn’t need a criminal lawyer, that she had nothing to hide, that she was just upset because the note was from Dennis. Until then Sands had never heard of Dennis Coleman.

  Sands held the note and started for the door. Karin followed. He drove her to the command post at the Naubuc Elementary School. When they arrived, Revoir was outside in the parking lot. Sands walked up to him and said that Karin had found a note in the apartment from her friend Dennis Coleman, and they thought Revoir ought to have it. Revoir led them inside, took the note and read it, with interest and a little surprise. Sands had been wrong in his surmise. As it happened, the police had not come upon the note. During their searches of the apartment they had barely looked in Karin’s room.

  Where had she found it? Revoir asked.

  Between the sheets of her bed.

  What did it mean, the deed and the plan?

  Dennis had been having problems with his stomach, she said. They thought perhaps he had an ulcer. She had one, and maybe he did, too. The plan, she explained, was that he was finally going to see a doctor. There was just one thing, she said. She didn’t want Dennis angry at her and thinking she was trying to make trouble for him if somebody happened to read the note the wrong way. So, if they asked him about it, would they tell him that they had been in her bedroom with her, that when she sat down on her bed, they all heard paper crinkling and wanted to know what the sound was, so she was forced to reach between the sheets, take out the note and give it to them?

  Revoir agreed to pass on that explanation when he talked to Dennis Coleman. He decided not to press her at that moment on whether the note might really have another, more sinister meaning, though he was pretty sure the one she had given was made of whole cloth. Revoir was pretty sure he knew what the note was really about, and the fact that it had been left in Karin’s bed indicated to him that she might know a lot more than she was letting on.

  Revoir knew the law and knew the limits it placed on him. If he pushed too hard, alarm bells would go off, Jeff Sands would call a criminal lawyer and the possibility of any further cooperation from Karin would come to a sudden end.

  Revoir also suspected that Karin might have more to say. The way the note had been found, her open display of it, and her lack of resistance to the idea of turning it in led him to wonder if perhaps she was setting Dennis Coleman up to take a fall.

  The thing to do, then, was bring Dennis in, show him the note, tell him Karin’s tale of how it had been found, see what he had to say and look for inconsistencies.

  Dennis Coleman was a little late getting home from the Tallwoods Country Club that afternoon. He had stopped on the way to take care of an errand that he knew should have been done before, at least a day, if not two days, earlier. The stop had been at the Glastonbury town dump. The errand had been to toss a couple of bulging plastic garbage bags into the compactor.

  Soon after he reached his father’s house in South Glastonbury, the state cops showed up and asked him if he would accompany them to the command post to answer a few more questions. For three hours that afternoon and on into the evening, they went over the story he had told them two days before. And they found the inconsistencies.

  He had an explanation for the note, of course. The “deed” he was writing about meant that he was finally going to get a doctor’s appointment to see about his stomach troubles.

  As for the “plan,” he and Karin were always making plans for what they would do, how they would manage to be together. That’s what the note was all about. The plan “was our plan for the future,” he said. The thing about marrying the right way meant “She was romantic. She wanted a formal proposal, a formal ring, horse-drawn carriage, down on my knees, that kind of thing. Because the first time I proposed to her, I gave her a paper ring.”

  He had left the note between the sheets of her bed because it was something he did all the time. They were always writing notes and letters to each other, sometimes three or four in one day, and leaving them in the other’s room. This was just another of those notes. He had left this one between the sheets of her bed, which was where he often left notes, either on Sunday, August 2, or Monday, August 3, he couldn’t remember which because he was in and out of the apartment, feeding the cats and doing the other things Joyce and Karin had asked him to do while they were away. She had told him she would be home on Tuesday, and he was sure she would find it then.

  They let all that hang for the moment. They turned to the night of the murder. He had told them when first questioned that he was with his friend Frank Manganaro. But they had talked to Manganaro, and he had told them that yes, he had seen Dennis that night, but it had been at the home of another friend, Kira Lintner, and Kira’s boyfriend and their mutual friend Chris Wheatley had been with them, too. Manganaro said they had spent the evening drinking some beer and watching three horror movies; he remembered one, Friday the 13th, but he couldn’t remember others. He and Kira had left about midnight, to go out and buy a Garfield mug. Dennis and Chris had remained behind.

  That was right, Dennis admitted. He had been so upset about Joyce that he’d gotten things mixed up. Actually Frank was right. What he said was exactly what they had done. The one thing he wasn’t certain about, he said, was the chronology. He was sure he’d left Kira’s about eleven-thirty and had gone straight home to bed because he had to be up early to be at work at seven in the morning.

  It was early evening before the police finished with him. By then Dennis Coleman knew he had become the prime suspect in the murder of Joyce Aparo. Indeed, the cops had asked him directly if he had killed her. He had denied it, but he was sure they didn’t believe him. He was badly shaken, and it showed in his face when he walked through the door. His father took one look at him and asked, “Dennis, do you need legal help?”

  “Yes.”

  Dennis Coleman, Sr., asked his son just one more question. “Did you do it?”

  Dennis Coleman, Jr., nodded his head yes.

  His father turned and went to the phone.

  The lawyer Dennis Coleman, Sr., called that night was Maurice Hatcher Norris. In his late thirties, balding, of medium height, Reese Norris is a man with a zest for battle, with a dramatic courtroom style, a man who has realized his childhood dream. “I always wanted to be not just a lawyer,” he says, “but a courtroom lawyer, and a criminal lawyer at that.” That was what he had become.

  This was a dream he worked hard to achieve. A native of New Jersey, graduate of Rutgers, he had gone on to the University of Connecticut Law School. As a student he went to work as an intern in the federal public defender’s office, for free when it turned out that the public defender had no funds for interns. By the time he was graduated, Norris had handled briefs and assisted on enough cases to begin creating a reputation. At that point he turned to the other side and became an assistant United States attorney in Connecticut, a job he held until, in 1978, he struck out on his own. In the years since, he has become one of the most successful, and expensive, criminal lawyers in southern New England, a lawyer
who has lost only about a half dozen of the hundred or more cases he has handled that have gone to trial, many of his victories coming in cases that seemed at first unwinnable. The result has been that he is able to afford the expensive custom-made Porsche sports car he loves, whose license plate reads “NT-GLTY,” and other cars, the large sprawling house on several acres in Glastonbury where he lives with his wife and two children and the good clothes he wears, just about all he wants.

  Norris met with Dennis for the first time the following morning. It is not, of course, a defense attorney’s job to do the police’s work for them or to see that legal justice is served. It doesn’t matter whether the client is guilty or innocent, for under the law every person has the right to the best counsel he or she can get. The attorney’s job is to defend the client as best as he or she can. Norris listened to his new client, who told the lawyer he had done the deed but told him little else, identified no one else as having been involved in any way.

  While they were sitting at the Colemans’ dining-room table during this initial conference, the telephone rang. It was for Dennis. He took it, listened, said into the phone, “Mr. Norris is here with me now.” When he returned to the table, he told Norris that the caller had been his girl friend, Karin Aparo. She knew he was in trouble, he said, and so she had asked Aldor Dubois, at whose house she was staying, if he knew the names of any criminal lawyers. Dubois had mentioned two, Reese Norris and Hubert Santos, a man in his forties with whom Norris had worked when he was a volunteer intern and Santos was a senior attorney in the federal public defender’s office; Santos, now in private practice, is considered one of the state’s most prominent and inventive criminal lawyers. Karin was calling to pass on those recommendations. Later, when she needed a lawyer of her own, she turned to Santos.

  When the conference was over, Norris began making some preliminary inquiries of his own. As far as he could see, the police might have their suspicions, but they had no solid evidence to back them up. The best strategy at that moment, he decided, was to stonewall.

  So on Monday, when the police arrived at the Coleman house, Norris was ready for them. The police wanted to interview Dennis again. Norris said no way. They could sit there as long as they wanted and talk about the weather or the baseball scores or anything they wanted, but not about Joyce Aparo or anything to do with her. They wanted to search Dennis’s room. Norris said to go try to get a search warrant, and if they did, he would go to court and argue that they had no probable cause for the issuance of such a warrant.

  For the moment the police were stymied. They had a suspect, Dennis Coleman. But that was all. As for putting together a solid, convicting case, all they had was a lot of talk from a lot of people, an overheard phone call and a note that might mean nothing or everything. It was not enough.

  4

  Karin, Sands, and Zaccaro devoted the early part of Saturday, August 8, to the grim task of making the necessary arrangements for Joyce Aparo’s funeral. They had no choice; no one else could do it. Their first stop was a funeral home, to see about shipping Joyce’s body from Springfield and to set a time and place for the service and burial, which they did in consultation with Archbishop John Whealon. Then they proceeded into the home’s showroom to select a coffin from among the dozen or more on display, standing open both to reveal the texture of the interior and, according to those who know, to calm the fears of the mourners that the boxes they are viewing are not empty. What happened then caused both to begin to suspect that Karin was not as innocent as she proclaimed, that she was somehow involved in the murder of her mother. For they were stunned by her actions, by her lack of emotion.

  “She was so cold,” Zaccaro remembers, “that it was almost unbelievable. When the undertaker took us around to show us the coffins, she didn’t look at the boxes; she looked at the price tags and chose the cheapest one. We finally persuaded her to upgrade at least a little.”

  Sands was still at this point finding rationalization for Karin’s behavior. “She was,” he said, “concerned about the cost of the funeral and how she was going to pay for it, and she seemed upset by that.”

  The undertaker asked about the notice in the paper, whether she wanted one in the Hartford Courant and what it should say. Did Joyce have any relatives and, if so, who should be included? Neither Sands nor Zaccaro knew much about Joyce’s personal history; she rarely discussed it. They knew that within recent years she had been married to and soon divorced from a man named Ed Murphy, for both knew Murphy and had been involved with Joyce and him during the courtship, marriage and breakup. Now they discovered that not only did she have another former husband, Michael Aparo, about whom they were aware, but that both her mother, Rose Cantone, and her sister, Ina Camblor, lived in nearby South Windsor, and that there was a brother, Thomas Cantone, a construction executive in White Plains, New York. But Karin wanted no mention of any of them in the obituary. “She was so hysterical about it,” Sands says, “that we told the funeral director in front of Karin, don’t include them. After we’d made all the arrangements, I went back in and said, ‘Look, do me a favor. We don’t know who these people are. Could you please track down their addresses and phone numbers, because we’re going to need them anyhow, and prepare the notices for the Courant and the other papers, and include those names? I don’t think it’s right not to have those people in there. I think they’d be very offended.’”

  They were. The funeral home managed to track down Joyce’s sister, Ina Camblor, in South Windsor. “They called her,” Sands says, “and told her that Karin didn’t want her included in the obituary. The next day I’m out mowing the lawn and I get a call and I come to the phone and it’s Ina Camblor, and who I don’t know from Adam. And the phone call starts, ‘You no good son of a bitch …’ She was livid. She was screaming and yelling about the idea that she wouldn’t be included in the death notice. I calmed her down, and I told her, ‘Look, the situation was that Karin was hysterical at the time, and you can understand that. She wasn’t thinking straight. The reason you got called at all was because we wanted to make sure you got into the death notice.’ After about ten minutes she calmed down, and then she gave me her brother’s name and her mother’s and everything.

  “To me, it was absolutely amazing because Karin had indicated to us that there had been a real estrangement between her mother and her family. Ina Camblor readily admitted that there had been a real freeze between Joyce and her family, for whatever reason, she didn’t go into it, but that Karin was her blood, her family, and whenever there was a crisis, her family came together. They would be there for Karin, money, shelter, whatever she needed.”

  From the funeral home Karin, Sands and Zaccaro went back to the condominium, to choose the clothes in which Joyce would be buried. “We went into her closet,” Zaccaro says, “and we went through a lot of things. Then Karin picked out this sleazy green pants outfit. It was about the cheapest thing there. Jeff and I picked out a very nice dress. Karin said no. She said she wanted that dress for herself. Eventually Jeff and I persuaded her to choose at least a dress for Joyce to be buried in.”

  The undertaker took one look at that dress when they returned and was incensed. It wouldn’t do at all, he told Karin. It was just too garish. He demanded that she go back home and pick something more appropriate. She did, but the experience was distressing enough to him that in the time that followed he related it to many of his friends.

  Susan and Shannon Dubois took Karin shopping for an appropriate dress for her to wear the next day. On the way back to the house Karin was alone in the rear seat of the Duboises’ car. The sky was dark, rain pouring down. Karin began to cry. She had not shed many tears until then. These were the first that either Shannon or Susan Dubois had witnessed. Shannon reached over the seat and held her hand, tried to say comforting things to console her. She turned to her mother and said she was sure Karin was crying because suddenly she was struck by the thought of Joyce lying out in the rain under the bridge in Bernardston bef
ore her body was found.

  Joyce’s funeral was scheduled for Wednesday, August 12, exactly a week after she was murdered. A few days before the funeral the Markovs appeared at the Dubois house. To everyone’s astonishment, Karin announced that she was leaving with them. Alex was giving a concert in Philadelphia, and she intended to be there. She would be back in time for the service. It might not be seemly, but she didn’t seem to care. She did ask Jeff Sands what he thought, and Sands told her it was not a bad idea for her to get away for a few days. She went.

  As she had said, she was back in Glastonbury in time for the funeral. In the morning Alex Markov rode with Karin in the lead limousine to the funeral chapel and then with her behind the hearse to the cemetery. At the funeral chapel Joyce’s closed coffin was in a private room. Karin went into that room with Archbishop Whealon and a few others. To the shock of some who were there, she went to the funeral director and demanded that the coffin be opened and left open. He was reluctant. She insisted. He opened the casket. Karin stood over it, staring down at her mother’s body, walked around and looked at the body from every angle. It was the first time she had seen her mother since that morning in Rowayton when Joyce set out on her final errands. “I was in shock,” Karin said later, “I didn’t know what to do.” She saw a dark mark around the neck, where the panty hose had been wrapped and tightened to strangle, saw purple bruises all the way down the chest, saw bruises and blotches on the arms between the wrists and elbows, noted the ring still on her mother’s finger and that “her face was distorted, it looked out of shape.”

  To Jeff Sands, she looked emotionally shaken, leaning against Archbishop Whealon as if for comfort. But others saw something else in that scene. One later said, “Karin acted like she wanted to make sure Joyce was really in there.”