Beyond Obsession

by Hammer, Richard;

  On July 10 Karin and Alex made love twice more. Dennis called her, and, she wrote, she was very happy to hear from him.

  During that week Dennis tried to keep himself occupied. He had his job at Tallwoods to fill part of the day. He called Karin often. During one of those calls she mentioned that she had seen a diamond ring at the Jewelry Store in Woodstock she loved and wanted very much to have. It was only $327. Dennis sent off a money order that day.

  And Joyce Aparo helped fill the empty hours. As Karin’s affair with Alex Markov intensified, Joyce began to pay increasing attention to Dennis; it became almost a courtship. She called him several times and asked if he would go with her to the supermarket and help bring the groceries home. She called him and asked him to go to the movies with her. She invited him to have dinner with her, once at Blacksmith’s Tavern. “It wasn’t like with the mothers of other girls,” he said a long time later. “She’d invite me over and I’d get there and she’d be in the shower, and then she’d come out wrapped in a towel, and she’d just walk out into the living room. She was like that. Then after a while she’d get dressed.”

  Asked if he thought she might be trying to seduce him or, perhaps, entice him into making a move toward her, something that would give her a weapon he could never deflect with which she could end his relationship with Karin, he looked shocked and surprised. “She never made advances or anything like that,” he says. “But right on the edge of things. But she was the mother of the girl I was in love with, so I never even thought anything like that. Besides, I thought she was a nice person. There were things about her that I didn’t like, but she was also a nice person, at least to me.”

  During their evenings together and during their dinner at Blacksmith’s Tavern she talked much about Karin, about her hopes and dreams for her daughter, telling Dennis that she wanted only the best for Karin and that nothing should come in the way of her realizing that ambition to become a great concert violinist. He did not mention that he knew Karin no longer had such ambitions, that she was aiming in a different direction now. And, he says, “I never got the impression that she was warning me off. According to Karin, she was trying to break us up, but she never said anything to me face-to-face about it. Maybe once or twice she told me we should cool it, but that was all.”

  What was really on his mind in those days was the future, a good future that was soon to arrive, he was certain. “All I could think of was that she was going to be going back to school pretty soon, and I was going to be at school again, and we were going to get back together really again and have time, and I couldn’t wait until the day school started.”

  On July 15 Karin was back in Glastonbury, at the desk in her own room once more. She was extremely glad to be back, she wrote in her diary. She and Alex had made love once more before he drove her home; it was either the thirteenth or fourteenth time, she wasn’t positive, and it had been a wonderful experience. They had talked about her staying over in Rowayton, but the elder Markovs’ being home she felt ruled out the possibilities. The ring Dennis had bought for her had arrived, and she was ecstatic about that.

  Her next entry in the diary was four days later, July 19. She had been to Rowayton with Shannon on Sunday, had seen Alex that day. She had also been with him the previous one, and over the weekend they had made love six times, bringing the total, she wrote, to twenty. Michael Zaccaro had been to the condo for dinner that evening, and she had cooked a herbed fennel lamb and corn sage cakes, which were wonderful. “So much to think of & to do!” she wrote at the end of that page.

  Karin went to Rowayton that Sunday not only with Shannon but with Joyce as well, in Joyce’s car. Shannon remembers it clearly. “We had gone to the beach for the day and to meet Alex,” she says. “On the ride back we got into the car when we were in the Markovs’ driveway and Mrs. Aparo noticed that there was no gas, or the gas gauge was on empty. She had told Karin to fill up the tank, and she got angry, and she yelled and screamed at Karin for not getting the gas when she had been told to. But she got the car started, and we found a gas station and filled up. On the way back, Karin reached back and grabbed my hand and held it very tightly because she was afraid of her mother and what her mother might do when we got home.”

  Joyce did nothing, perhaps because Michael Zaccaro came to dinner. And that night Shannon slept over, taking Karin’s room while Karin slept with Joyce. “During the night,” Shannon says, “I heard laughing and talking between them, and I thought it was strange because Mrs. Aparo had been so angry earlier and now she seemed happy.”

  The next evening Karin and Shannon went to the movies together. They talked about Joyce’s response to the empty gas tank the previous day, about her unreasonable rage. “Gee, Karin,” Shannon said, “she treated you so awful I just wanted to push her out of the car and drive away.”

  Karin said, “Well, I think I can deal with it. There’s no more physical abuse. I think I can make it for two more years, and then it’s off to college and I’ll be okay. Things are getting better.”

  At least that’s what Karin told her best friend. But she was saying something else to Dennis Coleman. According to him, soon after her return from Woodstock, relations between mother and daughter turned even worse, as bad as they had ever been, and they were going downhill. “I asked her right after she got back, ‘Are you all right?’ She just sort of freaked out. She turned around and said it was bad. And she started to push.” For the first time in nearly a year she began to talk about killing Joyce. The situation in the Aparo house was intolerable, she said. Joyce was forcing her to stay in Rowayton more and more often, she told him, and she didn’t want to but had no choice. And the violin was becoming an increasing source of tension, Joyce putting ever more pressure on her about it, forcing her to practice longer and longer hours, criticizing with ever more severity. “She told me the situation was desperate,” he says. Her only hope of escape, the only hope she and Dennis had to be together again as they had been, she told him, was for Joyce to die. “I told her this was not a good idea. But she kept at it. She didn’t stop.”

  It became, in those weeks toward the end of July, a ritual incantation, recited with fervor whenever Karin and Dennis were together: Joyce was coming between them; Joyce was trying to break them up; Joyce was forcing her to go to Rowayton and be with the Markovs when all she really wanted was to be with Dennis; Joyce was trying to force her to sleep with Alex. Escape, freedom, the only chance for them to be together again was for Joyce to die.

  Every once in a while the song changed, a change that ripped through Dennis and sent him reeling into a nightmare world. They went for a long ride one afternoon. “I asked her if she was in love with Alex, and she didn’t say anything, and I asked her again, and she said yes, and the bottom sort of dropped put of me. I dropped her off at her house and drove away, and then I drove back, and I sat outside her bedroom window and cried for about five hours, and she didn’t know I was there, or she pretended she didn’t know. She didn’t come to the window.”

  Writing in her diary on July 26, Karin noted that she and Dennis had driven up to Boston the morning of the previous Saturday, had lunch, bought a lot of clothes, taken one of those old-fashioned tintype photographs and just had fun. After Dennis had dropped her off at home, she drove down to Rowayton. She stayed the night and slept with Alex for the twenty-first time. When she told Joyce that she was staying over, Joyce wanted to know whether the Markovs were going to be there. Karin told her they were. Joyce said that was fine, then, because if it were just Alex and Karin alone in the house, Karin would look like a slut. There had been a good party for Alex, but Karin had to leave early because she had Joyce’s car and Joyce wanted it. Joyce had seen her wearing the ring Dennis had ordered from Woodstock, had said she didn’t like it, and she didn’t like the one from Thunder Hole he had bought for her a year earlier, and she told Karin to take them off.

  The last entry in the diary was written on July 28. The first item she thought worthy of ment
ion was that she had slept with Alex again, for the twenty-fourth time, which, she noted, added up to once for each year of his life. This particular session, though, had been special; he had held on to her when they were through as though he really cared for her. Still, she had promised him that she wouldn’t get attached to him. Then she turned to Dennis, writing that he was desperate and on the verge of suicide; that was too bad, but she wasn’t really sorry for him. He might have a lot of problems, but she couldn’t understand why he had let her bother him so much. Perhaps Alex had given her a false sense of security. Her car had died and was beyond repair. But she didn’t really mind because she could just ride her bike whenever she wanted to go somewhere or even walk; besides, they were about to buy a new Volkswagen Fox. She was looking forward to the trip to Binghamton over the weekend for Alex’s concert, particularly because she would get to wear a special white dress when she went to receptions with him. They had made love three more times that day.

  The pressure on Dennis was mounting; it was unbearable, and he felt unable to resist. He was not sleeping or eating. He was still losing weight. He was too pale, his eyes red-rimmed and haunted. He didn’t know what to do, and he felt he knew all too well what she expected him to do.

  On July 28 they took another ride. As they were returning to her house, Karin says she asked, “What would you do if I told you I’d slept with Alex twenty times and not just once?”

  “I’d drive off the road and kill us both,” he said.

  “No,” she said, “it was only that one time.” Later she said, “I wanted to tell him the truth, but I couldn’t because I was afraid he was really going to drive off the road and kill us.”

  23

  July 28–August 5, 1987: Karin Aparo’s Story

  She loved Dennis, and she loved Alex. Alex was going away, and so she was going to lose him. But she would still have Dennis, and she wanted him. She wanted and expected everything to be as it had been before. “We would have the rest of the summer together, and that was what I wanted,” she said.

  And, she says, she loved her mother, and “we were getting along good. She approved of my relationship with Alex. We weren’t having any trouble.”

  After Dennis’s suicidal threat in the car, she worried more and more about him. On Thursday night, July 30, she was packing for the trip to Binghamton. It was a trip she was looking forward to. It was to be her last time that summer with Alex Markov, and she intended to make the most of it.

  Dennis appeared outside her window. He was distraught. She moved about the room, taking her things from drawers and putting them into suitcases, talking to him all the while. She and Joyce would be leaving in the morning, she said, driving to Greenwich for an anniversary party at a nursing home that evening. From Greenwich they would travel to Binghamton for Alex’s concert, and they intended to be back home in Glastonbury on Tuesday morning.

  “I don’t want to go,” she told him, “but I have to. Mom’s making me go, and I don’t want to.”

  “Then don’t go,” he said.

  “I have to. Mom says I have to. But you don’t have to worry. This is the last time I’ll have to be with Alex. Then that’s over, and we’ll have the rest of the summer for us.”

  Outside the window Dennis was crying uncontrollably, begging her not to go, pleading with her to stay home and be with him.

  “I lied to him,” Karin says. “I did want to go. I was looking forward to the concert and the reception afterwards and being with Alex. But Dennis was so jealous, and I didn’t want him to think I wanted to be with Alex. I was afraid of what he might do.”

  She sent Dennis away, assuring him passionately that she loved him and would be with him always once she returned.

  On Friday, July 31, she and Joyce drove to Greenwich and that evening went to the nursing home party. She called Dennis from one of the offices during that party, without Joyce’s knowledge. The reason she called him, she says, was that she was worried about her two cats, Godfrey and Winston. “Mom had said I wasn’t to worry about the cats because they could take care of themselves. But the weather was very hot, and I was afraid they would run out of water. So I called Dennis and asked him to please go into the house and feed Godfrey and Winston; otherwise they might not make it through the weekend. He had his own key. He had made a copy before of mine. He said okay, he would take care of them.”

  The only other thing they talked about, she says, was when she was coming home. “I told him we’d be home on Tuesday, which was August 4.”

  On Saturday, August I, she, Joyce and Albert and Alex Markov drove to Binghamton. They stayed in a hotel for three days. “Alex had a rehearsal and then a concert and then a reception party afterwards. I had a very good time. Alex was the soloist, and the reception was held in a big hall, and everybody, got all dressed up. It was wonderful.”

  Early in the morning of Tuesday, August 4, they left Binghamton for Rowayton, Karin and Alex in one car, Joyce and Albert Markov in another. They reached the Markov house about four in the morning and went to bed. “My feelings toward my mother were very good then,” she says. “We had a good weekend together.”

  About nine-thirty that morning Joyce woke her, told her she was leaving for Saybrook, where she had a business appointment, and then would be driving home. Karin, she said, should stay on in Rowayton for another day. Joyce would drive down in the Volkswagen Jetta that Athena was leasing for her and pick her up on Wednesday (Karin’s car had gone to the scrap heap).

  About three o’clock that afternoon Karin called Dennis to tell him they were back, but not in Glastonbury. They had reached the Markovs’ very early in the morning, she told him, and she was going to stay on until Wednesday. There was no need for him to go back to the Aparos’ condo to see to the cats, she said, because Joyce would be home and would take care of them herself.

  “Why are you staying?” Dennis demanded. “You’re supposed to be back here. You told me you were coming back today.”

  “There isn’t anything I can do about it,” she said. “Mom is making me stay over.” That wasn’t true, but she says, “I didn’t want Dennis to be mad.”

  As they were talking, Dennis mentioned that he had left a note for her when he had been in the condo over the weekend. “I hope,” he said, “she doesn’t find it.”

  “Where did you leave it?” Karin asked.

  “Between the sheets of your bed.”

  She told him not to worry. Joyce wouldn’t find it because she never looked there.

  Later that afternoon Joyce called Rowayton to tell Karin that she was home and that she was making out a list of things for Karin to do. The whole house was filthy, she said, and she wanted Karin to clean it when she got home on Wednesday. The best thing would be if Alex would drive her up to Glastonbury in the morning; otherwise Joyce would drive down late in the afternoon and get her.

  Soon after that call from Joyce, Karin phoned Dennis again. She told him Joyce was home, was complaining that the house was dirty and demanding that Karin clean it. Joyce intended to pick her up on Wednesday afternoon. Dennis was very unhappy about the delay in her return. He complained that she should already have been home. He sounded upset.

  At midevening Karin called Joyce, who told her that Shannon had called, they had spoken for about a half hour, and Shannon wanted to see Karin when she got back to Glastonbury. Joyce said that was all right with her, but before they got together, Karin had to do the laundry. “Then my mom said she was very tired and she was going to bed early.”

  About nine that evening Dennis called. “He said he didn’t understand why I wasn’t there. He said, ‘If she’s making you stay there, she’s coming between us. I think I should kill her. When you come back, you’ll never have to go to Rowayton again.’”

  According to Karin, all these calls were made from and received in the Markovs’ living room, and Alex was in and out all the time.

  After the last call from Dennis she stayed up for a while, then, very tired, went to
bed.

  About eleven the next morning the phone rang. It was for her. The caller was Michael Zaccaro. He told her that Joyce’s car had been found abandoned in Massachusetts.

  24

  July 28–August 5, 1987: Dennis Coleman’s Story

  There is a different version of what happened that week. On July 28, after their traumatic ride, Dennis returned to the Aparo condo and stood outside Karin’s window. “She began pressuring me,” he says. “She began telling me that she couldn’t live with her mother any longer. She was crying and saying she couldn’t take it any longer, and she was begging me to kill her mother. And I was standing outside, and I was crying, too, I was so upset about what had happened and what was happening and what she wanted me to do and that she was so upset.”

  He stood outside the window for fifteen or twenty minutes, Karin inside crying and pleading with him, Dennis crying and trying to discourage her, to find some way to turn this thing, the idea of murder, aside. Then, he says, Karin came up with a plan. The way to kill Joyce, she proposed, was to cut the brake lines on her car; that way she wouldn’t be able to stop, would have an accident at some speed, for she was a fast driver, and would be killed. “She was pleading with me to do it, and I was telling her I was not sure it was a good idea and I was afraid I was going to get caught. She assured me I wouldn’t.”