Beyond Obsession

by Hammer, Richard;

  “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?

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  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?”

  “No.”

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

  “No.”

  Santos took her this far. Now he was preparing to take a crucial step, the gamble that would be the main thrust of his defense. If it worked, he could change the whole course and tenor of the trial. He had nothing to lose. He had been laying the groundwork for it day after day, with those questions, to which answers were not permitted, about a priest, about childhood abuse, about other aspects of Karin’s life with her mother. Now he tried to swing wide the door and get it all in.

  “Where did you grow up?” he asked.

  “In East Hartford.”

  “What did your mother do?”

  Before Karin could answer, Thomas rose and objected. It was as though he suddenly understood what Santos was attempting. This line of questioning, he said, was not relevant.

  It was absolutely relevant, Santos said, and he asked that the jury be sent out so he could explain why. The jurors filed out. Now Santos showed his hand. What he intended to do, he said, was go into the history of Karin’s relationship with her mother and father, to develop in detail the psychological and emotional abuse to which she had been subjected from her earliest age until the day of the murder and beyond. His purpose was to explain Karin’s conduct in August 1986, when those first discussions of murder arose. “What Karin did,” he said, “when she made that sandwich and when the lights were flicked was not with intent to commit murder, but rather she was acting out all the frustration that developed over the years of child abuse.” By showing this, he said, he would be able to rebut the state’s claim that she was engaged in any conspiracy at all, and he would explain why she acted the way she did after the murder, why she covered for Dennis and why she had sex with him.

  He intended, he told Corrigan, to have Karin testify to everything she remembered about her mother through all the years, and then he would corroborate her stories of all the abuse with the testimony of teachers and others who were witness to it, or its results, and with hospital and social service reports. And then he would bring in the psychiatrists, who “are prepared to testify that the defendant suffers from a mental disease or defect. She fits the profile of a battered child, and her conduct before and after the murder was consistent with the result of that abuse. We will show, that she did not have the mental state to commit the crime nor the specific intent to conspire and participate in it. The experts will rebut the state’s claims that she did. The whole history of mental and physical abuse is essential to our defense. And the centerpiece is the lie that someone else was her father, and not Michael Aparo.”

  Thomas was outraged. He didn’t see what such testimony, or evidence, had to do with this case. “She says, ‘I didn’t do it,’ so how is this relevant? What Mr. Santos is trying to do is present a mutually exclusive defense, and that is not permissible. She is not entitled to this defense. She could have pled not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity, and then she could present this testimony. But she took the witness stand, and she denied everything.”

  Corrigan asked whether Santos was preparing to offer an insanity defense.

  Santos said, “We might. We don’t have to make that decision at this point. We will decide at the time of Your Honor’s charge to the jury.” At this point all he wanted to do was lay out the relationship with Joyce Aparo and show how what Karin did in 1986 was the culmination of that relationship and why she was acting it out. “Our purpose is to show that she never conspired and that her conduct after the murder was consistent with and the result of the years of abuse and the effects that had on her. If the testimony we offer is credible, then it has the possibility of raising a reasonable doubt whether she actually conspired and helped Dennis Coleman plan and commit the crimes charged between August 1986 and August 1987. The state says, if she didn’t conspire and didn’t abet, then why cover up? The
defense says, this is a troubled young girl who did some things that can be construed as consistent with guilt but are actually the result of abuse.”

  By not committing himself to a particular line of defense, Santos was keeping all his options open. If Corrigan refused to allow this testimony, Santos was sure he would have solid grounds for an appeal should Karin be convicted. If Corrigan permitted him to put everything he wanted on the record, let the jury hear it all, then at the end Santos could judge the effect and decide where he wanted to go. He could continue to maintain that Karin was not guilty of any crime because she had done nothing. This would compel the jury to decide only on the counts of the indictment whether or not she was guilty of the crimes charged. If she was guilty, she would be sentenced, at Corrigan’s discretion, to up to eighty years in prison, and Corrigan had the reputation of a fair trial judge and a very stiff sentencer. Or Santos could decide to use the evidence as mitigation. This would allow the jury to acquit her on the murder and conspiracy counts and to find her guilty of a lesser offense, manslaughter, as it could not do if the original plea stood; she would then be subject to a much less severe term in prison. Or Santos could decide to change the plea to not guilty by reason of diminished capacity, mental disease or defect, the insanity defense.

  He would have, then, very wide latitude to make a decision once that testimony was on the record. It was an audacious step, one the prosecution did not seem to have anticipated or prepared for. But it was one that Santos had obviously been planning to take, without revealing it to anyone before, and in so doing put Joyce Aparo on trial in place of her daughter.

  Thomas tried his best to prevent Santos from following along this path. It seemed as though he suddenly realized where this might be heading, and he wanted to stop it before it got out of control, before all his careful planning for the state lay in ruins. So he argued vehemently that the testimony Santos intended to present was irrelevant unless the defense changed its plea. To no avail. Corrigan thought about it, called a recess and then, when he returned, announced that he was going to permit Santos to pursue this line, to lay out for the jury Karin’s story of the history of Joyce Aparo’s abuse of her, to bring in Archbishop Whealon’s name at last and the effect all that abuse and all those lies had on her; he was going to let Santos call witnesses to back up Karin’s story and then, perhaps, allow him to call his experts to give their psychiatric opinions.