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.
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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.
Norris spoke eloquently for Dennis, castigated Karin for enslaving Dennis, for taking away his will and giving him no option but to “do the deed” or die. He noted that Dennis had cooperated with the state and would be a major witness in the “final act of this tragedy” when he testified against Karin. Dennis had to pay for his crime, yes, but how much should he be asked to pay, considering all that the court now knew? The minimum sentence in Connecticut for murder was twenty-five years in prison. Norris asked the court to send Dennis away for thirty years. If he served even two thirds of that time, not unusual in the state, “he will be my age when he gets out. He will have lost the best years of his life.” But, Norris added, no matter what the sentence, Dennis’s file should be flagged to alert the prison authorities that he required special ongoing psychiatric treatment. Further, he was very concerned about Dennis’s safety. He ought not to be sent to the state’s maximum security prison at Somers, an overcrowded place inhabited by hard-core career criminals, where violence was the rule rather than the exception. Some better, more fitting place should be found for Dennis, someplace where his life would not be in danger and his many talents could be put to use profitably.
Jim Thomas spoke for the state. The crime, he said, “was murder, pure and simple.” Dennis had acted with intent, and he had known what he was doing. His explanations of why and all the opinions of the psychiatrists didn’t mitigate what he had done. “It is easy to look at him and feel some mercy, but there was no mercy for Joyce Aparo. This is a horrendous, horrific case. It is a brutal, brutal case. The state asks for the maximum under the bargain it made with the defendant, a sentence of forty-two years. Any sentence less severe will not serve the people of the state of Connecticut.”
Then Judge Norko, a tall, burly, balding blond man who bore a remarkable resemblance to the football quarterback Terry Bradshaw, who had been a public defender before going on the bench, looked down at Dennis. He seemed as stricken as anyone. He noted that he had been the judge who arraigned Dennis on August 14, 1987. “You and I,” he said, “made eye contact that day, and I cannot forget it.”
A few nights before, Judge Norko had been reading a mystery story in bed before going to sleep. He came across a passage that b
urned in his mind, a passage he paraphrased as “No crime is so detestable as a murder. It contaminates and pollutes all the lives it touches, and no one can ever be the same again.”
This case, he said, was especially disturbing. Dennis was not a child of poverty, nor were any of the others involved. They all were children of the middle class. Yet he had listened to some of them testify, and “watching them sent chills up my spine. They spoke of murder as if it were a candy bar to be reached on a shelf. Why none of your friends tried to reach out and stop this tragedy is beyond me. Why did they let you do it? Why there was no parent, no educator, no one in the church, no one in the community you could turn to I’ll never know.”
He shook his head. One could see tears glistening in his eyes as he said, “When I sentence you, part of me goes with you. I don’t forget I’m sending you to Somers, probably one of the most dangerous places on earth. I’ve wrestled about this, slept on it, woke on it. Everyone would agree whatever I do to you, I’m throwing away your youth. Indeed, I accept Mr. Norris’s recommendation that we find a better and more suitable place for you than Somers.”
He looked at Dennis, seated beside Norris, staring intently at the judge. “Dennis,” he said, “resolve to yourself to survive and come out and become a citizen like the rest of us. Don’t lose all hope. There are peers of yours who should go to jail. But I can’t do anything about those agreements that they made with the state. Now, before I pass sentence, do you have anything you wish to say to the court?”
Dennis rose slowly. He stood rigid and looked at Norko. He spoke in a very low, soft voice. “If I could turn back time, I would. I’m not a cold-blooded person, and this was not cold-blooded. It was the opposite. It was passion. I felt very much like it was a choice between committing suicide or committing murder. I can’t tell you how much I regret it.”
That was all. He stood there, Norris standing beside him. Norko looked down at papers before him. He looked back at Dennis. He shook his head. The back of one hand wiped across his eyes. And then he passed sentence: for the murder of Joyce Aparo, thirty-four years in state prison, for conspiracy to commit murder, twenty years in state prison, the sentences to run concurrently. “Dennis,” he concluded, “do what you can. Use your mind to survive up there. There is hope.”
Two deputies moved quickly to Dennis, one on either side. They marched him out through a side door in the courtroom. A few hours later he was in a prison van on his way to the state penitentiary at Somers.
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The trial of Karin Aparo was supposed to begin a few weeks later. It didn’t. It was rescheduled for early January 1990. It was postponed again. It was scheduled for late spring. Santos asked for another delay. He had another case to try in New London that would take most of the summer. Would the court agree to reset the date for the Aparo trial in early fall? Judge Thomas Corrigan made a phone call to the court in New London. That trial was put off.
Finally, in late April, the time had come for Karin Aparo to face and be judged by her peers. Court convened on the third floor of the criminal court building in Hartford, diagonally across the atrium from the courtroom in which Dennis Coleman had spent his last moments of freedom five months before. The first order of business, perhaps as important as any, was the picking of the twelve men and women and the alternates who were the ultimate judges of the facts. Santos estimated it would take him at least a month to find a panel that could hear this case without bias. What he did not want, he said, were jurors who lived in cocoons, who isolated themselves from the world and knew nothing about anything. He wanted an intelligent group, he said, men and women who were concerned about events around them but whose opinions were not forged in cement, who could listen to the evidence with open minds and make independent judgments. It would not be easy to find such jurors, considering all the publicity that had surrounded the murder, and though he still thought that he should have gotten a change of venue, that the trial should have been held in some other part of the state, in Stamford, say, he would try.
He tried. He succeeded. And as he had guessed, it took him nearly a month before he had a jury of the kind he wanted, the kind he hoped to get or perhaps the best he could hope for: eight men, several in their thirties, a few older, and four middle-aged women. Most were white, and they were a cross section of the area’s middle class. Santos was satisfied.
Jim Thomas, the prosecutor, didn’t seem to care much. On the state’s attorney’s staff for a dozen years, about six feet, a little thick in the middle, dark hair immaculately groomed, though it grew shaggy as the trial went on, his mustache neatly trimmed, he was an orderly, unexcitable man with a reputation for preparing well, though with little flair for courtroom dramatics. He was supremely confident, certain that he had a case he could not lose, that any jury, once it had heard the evidence he would present, could come to only one verdict. His major concern, he told someone, was overkill. He was not going to parade scores of witnesses before the jurors to recite variations on the same stories, the same details over and over again, and perhaps bore the jury and even turn it against him and the state. He wanted to lay out the evidence rapidly and tellingly, with as little redundancy as possible. It was a surprising game plan to many who heard it. Overkill is a thing most prosecutors fear not at all; the more witnesses telling the same story, the better, for it makes those stories and details impregnable. If judges, defense counsel, spectators and even jurors get tired of hearing the same evidence from a dozen different mouths, get bored, begin to know what the witnesses will say even before they say it, so much the better. Most prosecutors will pile the evidence on with the trowel, will call a halt, and then reluctantly, only when a judge tells them, enough, it’s not necessary to hear that story again.
The jury, one to which Santos had few objections and about which Thomas did not seem much concerned, was finally in place and ready to hear testimony at ten in the morning on Monday, May 21, 1990. The jurors peered with interest at the defendant, some of the younger men on the jury with what seemed more than passing interest. The Karin Aparo who sat at the defense table across the well of the court was hardly the same Karin Aparo who had been arrested nearly three years before. Then she had been sixteen, a teenager with short dark hair, a little plump, the plumpness accentuated by tight jeans and tight jacket. Then her manner had been arrogant and self-confident; then her face had borne an expression of superiority. Now she was nineteen, and in the intervening years she had been groomed and coached well by Santos and his legal assistant, Hope Seeley, and others. Now she was a slight, almost fragile young woman, who sometimes looked about twelve. Now she wore long, loose print skirts, white blouses and flowered sweaters or long, flowing dresses. Now she wore little makeup and large, nearly rimless glasses that covered much of her face. Now her hair was long, partly gathered in a ponytail held by a large white ribbon tied in a huge bow at the back of her head. Now she seemed vulnerable, even a little frightened, biting her lower lip often, her smile, which came now and then, nervous. She was the picture of innocence. Miss Goody-Two-Shoes, somebody called her.
Thomas began, as prosecutors must, by calling witnesses to prove that a crime had been committed, that Joyce Aparo was dead and had been murdered. There was Dr. Peter Adams, the Massachusetts medical examiner, who did the autopsy on the body of Joyce Aparo, to testify that she was killed by “ligature strangulation.” In cross-examination Santos tried to suggest that Joyce had been raped or had had sex before her death, something nobody before had ever suggested. Adams would have none of it.
There was Police Chief Peter Brulotte, beside whose house in Bernardston the car was found.
There were Glastonbury police officers who told about their initial investigations, the searches of the Aparo condominium, how they had sealed it once they learned of the murder, who talked of their initial meeting with Karin and her lack of reaction to the news her mother was dead.
There was Charles Revoir of the state police, the only member of the major crimes sq
uad to appear; Thomas decided not to call James Cavanaugh, who had headed the investigation for the state police, or any of the other state cops who had conducted separate and overlapping investigations into a dozen or more areas, who had roamed from the hills of New Hampshire to the lakes of upstate New York to Fairfield County and into Manhattan and beyond in search of leads, in search of evidence. Cavanaugh had since retired; besides, the prosecutor thought one state cop was enough. Why inundate the jury with repetition or with testimony that might not seem relevant? Revoir appeared not once but several times, to tell how the investigation was conducted, to tell of how Karin had turned the “I will ‘do the deed’” note over to him and Cavanaugh, of how she had come to them the night of her mother’s funeral with Dennis’s confession, and a lot more, until the day he arrested her.
There was the Glastonbury police secretary, Beverly Warga, to relate the conversations she had overheard, the phone call from Karin to Dennis and then their discussions in her office when they were returned for more questioning that first night.
There was a security agent from the telephone company to read into the record the number of calls between the Markov residence in Rowayton and the Tallwoods Country Club in Hebron and the Coleman home in Glastonbury on August 5.
There was Michael Zaccaro, to talk about Karin’s actions those first days, of the discovery of Dennis’s note, of how he and Jeff Sands had gone with her to the police when she related Dennis’s confession, and to discuss his own role as executor of Joyce’s estate. It was during Santos’s cross-examination that the first signs of a possible defense arose, as he questioned Zaccaro about Joyce’s penchant for inventing stories, particularly about Karin’s brilliance as a violinist. And it was then that another element entered.
“Did you know if Mrs. Aparo permitted Karin to attend church?” Santos asked.
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