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 before 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.”

There were services first in the funeral chapel. It was packed, all the seats filled, people standing at the back and along the sides. The open coffin rested in front of the altar. Karin and Alex Markov sat in the first row. Ina Camblor, her brother, Thomas Cantone, and their mother, Rose Cantone, sat across the aisle.

One of those people standing was Carol Parkola. She arrived just before the services were to begin. There were no seats, so she stood at the rear of the chapel. She was perhaps Joyce Aparo’s oldest continuing friend. They had met while college freshmen and had maintained their friendship through the years. Carol lived in Florida now, but she returned to Connecticut for a two-week visit every August, and during those weeks she and Joyce talked often on the phone, had lunch and dinner together, spent time at each other’s homes. This August Carol was making her annual pilgrimage north. “I got in, and I was going to call Joyce,” she remembers, “but my sister and I spent the Tuesday on a boat down at the shore and it was late when we got home. So I said, ‘Well, I’ll call her tomorrow night,’ because I couldn’t call her during the day because she was at work, ‘and we’ll get together for dinner.’ But something came up, and I didn’t call, and then my father and I were listening to the news with half an ear, because the national news was over and I wasn’t that interested in the local news. And we both said, ‘What did he say? Did he say Aparo? He couldn’t have.’ Then the newspaper came the next morning, and I just, well, I couldn’t believe it. For a long time I felt so guilty, and I kept saying to myself, ‘What if I had only called her, would I have had her on the phone and then the person who did it couldn’t have and she’d still be alive?’”

All she could do was go to the funeral. At the funeral chapel “I found Michael [Aparo], who was the only one I really knew, and I spoke to him, and he said, ‘Have you spoken to Karin?’ I said no, so he took me down to Karin. He wasn’t even sitting with her. There was a boy sitting next to her; I found out later it was Alex Markov. I was so upset and I was trying to compose myself and talk to her without breaking up and it was all I could do to tell her how sorry I was, and this kid Karin was sitting there and she was not the least bit broken up or upset. She just kept talking to this guy.

“When the service was over, I was standing at the back of the funeral home while they were taking the coffin out the other way, and she came out past me, and she couldn’t have been more than a few feet from me and she was laughing and talking with this guy and she wasn’t broken up at all. I said to my mother later, ‘I can’t understand it, she wasn’t upset at all.’ Then somebody pointed out the sister to me, and I went over and spoke to her, and she was all, like ‘Oh, my poor sister,’ she was just all broken up and crying so hard she couldn’t speak to me, and her brother was holding her up and helping her out. That day you would have thought they were this close, extremely close; only I knew they hadn’t even had anything to do with each other for years and years.”

From the funeral home the procession wound its way to the cemetery. There, as he had in the chapel, Archbishop Whealon conducted the service. When he finished, the prayers for the dead said, the services over at the graveside, just as people were getting ready to leave, Karin rose and went to the funeral director. She told him to start filling in the grave immediately. He was stunned. It shouldn’t be done, he said, until after everyone was gone. Karin wanted it done then. She wanted no delays. He finally agreed. But except for a shovelful, to show that he was complying, the grave was not filled until the cemetery cleared.

The mourners filed from the cemetery toward the waiting cars. Karin, with Alex Markov at her side, moved toward the limousine that had been rented for her. As she was about to get into it, Lori DeLucca, who had known Karin since fourth grade and had once been a close friend, remembers distinctly, for it was something she could not forget, Karin’s turning to the crowd and saying, “Will everyone clap as I make my grand exit?”

The mourners gathered at the Duboises’ that afternoon. There was nowhere else to gather. Though Joyce’s mother, sister and brother appeared for the funeral, gathered around Karin and offered her their support, support that increased in the time ahead, they had been estranged from Joyce for years, and Karin had little fondness for them. She would not hear of their receiving those attending the funeral. The proper place was where she was, and that was at the home of the Dubois family.

Soon after she reached the house, Karin went into the kitchen. Lori DeLucca happened to be in the room. Karin picked up the phone and dialed. “I need to talk to you,” she said into the mouthpiece. “I’m okay. But, oh, boy.” She hung up, turned to Lori and said, “Dennis will be stopping over pretty soon.”

Dennis had not seen Karin since the moment he left his home for work the morning after Joyce’s murder. Later that day she had settled in with the Duboises. They had spoken briefly on the phone once or twice, including the call in which she had given him the names of Reese Norris and Hubert Santos as criminal lawyers who might be able to help him, but that was all.

It was not long before Dennis Coleman arrived. He had not been at the funeral services. He and Karin greeted each other. Lori DeLucca and several others saw them standing in a hallway, then walk away and disappear into a bathroom.

Out in the living room Jeff Sands looked around and saw that Karin was missing. Somebody said she was in the bathroom with Dennis. He walked that way and spotted them through the open door. It was the first time he had ever seen Dennis Coleman, though over the week since the murder he had heard his name often and had become increasingly suspicious of him, increasingly convinced that Dennis was the murderer of Joyce Aparo. “They seemed to be a little agitated,” he remembers. “I stuck my head in and said, ‘Is everything all right, Karin?’ She said, ‘Yeah, no problem.’” Sands walked on.

The door closed. How long they were in that bathroom behind the closed door is a matter of dispute; a few years later it became of critical importance.

Soon after they entered, Alex Markov approached the door, knocked on it, said, in his thick Russian accent, “Karin, I’d like to talk to you.”

From behind the door Karin said, “Not right now, Alex.”

Markov continued to stand by the door, knocked a couple of times more, repeated the request and was met with the same reply.

What happened in that bathroom, as what happened on other occasions and what was said, depends on who is doing the telling.

Says Dennis Coleman: “She started asking me questions about the murder. They were the same questions she had asked over the phone from the police station. I couldn’t understand why she was asking those questions when she already knew all the answers. We were in there about five minutes, that’s all.”

His estimate of the time, at least, is supported by Lori DeLucca and a few others who saw them enter and then saw them depart.

Says Karin Aparo: “I wanted to tell him what I had seen on my mother, and I wanted to him to explain it all to me. He did. This was the first time Dennis told me the details of how he had murdered my mother, and it took him more than fifteen minutes to do it.”

Jeff Sands agrees with Karin’s estimate of the time. He saw her disappear into the bathroom, and then he strolled back to the living room. He says that he next saw her emerging from the area around the bathroom fifteen or twenty minutes later.

However long they were in that bathroom, eventually the door opened and Karin and Dennis emerged. Alex Markov was standing right beside the door. The three of them walked into the living room. There Karin turned to Dennis and said, “Does Denny need a hug?”

Dennis looked at her and said, “From you?”

She nodded and said, “I guess so.” Then she put her arms around him and held him close. They moved to the couch and sat next to each other. Karin, says someone who was watching, seemed very warm toward Dennis.

From across the room Jeff Sands was watching carefully. “Karin looked a little funny,” Sands says, “and I walked by, and she stands up very casually and says, ‘Oh, Jeff, I think I need a breath of fresh air. Would you walk outside with me?’”

Out in the backyard Karin turned to Sands and said, “Jeff, I know something, and I need help.”

Sands said, “Anything to do with the murder?”

“Yes.”

“Karin,” he said, “do you want a criminal attorney?”

“No.”

“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“Dennis just confessed to me. What should I do?”

Sands said, “You’ve got to go to the police and tell them. If you don’t, you’re committing a crime, and the police can charge you with being an accessory or obstructing justice or something. So you have to tell them.”

She offered no argument. They went back into the house to tell Al and Susan Dubois they were leaving, though not why and to find Mike Zaccaro, who was due at a local bank to sign some credit papers on a nursing home Athena was about to open; Sands had promised to drive him to that appointment. Sands took Zaccaro aside and told him that Karin was going with them and that he would explain in the car.

As they were starting out, Shannon Dubois saw them. She went up to Karin and said, “Where are you going?”

Karin said, “I’m going to the police.”

And then, Sands remembers, “Shannon made some reference to loyalty and friendship. It stuck in my mind, like, what in the world is she talking about?”

On the way to the bank in Glastonbury Zaccaro learned where Karin was going, and why. “She told us,” Zaccaro says, “that Dennis did it because Joyce was preventing them from spending the rest of their lives together. She knew about it afterwards because Dennis told her, but she had nothing to do with it. The way she told it, it was a very plausible story.”

Sands dropped Zaccaro off at the bank. Then he and Karin drove around for a few minutes before heading for the command post at the Naubuc school. It was only a few blocks from the bank, and Zaccaro intended to walk there, go in and talk to the police before Karin appeared.

As they drove toward the school, Sands said to Karin, “I’ll go in there with you as a friend. But I’m not representing you because I’m not a criminal attorney. Are you at all worried about the statement you’re going to make? Is there any way it can incriminate you? Any problem at all? Because if there is, we’ll just put you on hold and get somebody in here to represent you.”

She shook her head. “No, “she said, “there’s no problem. I’ll go in and tell the police that Dennis has just confessed this thing to me, and I can’t live with this.”

Zaccaro reached the command post just as Sands and Karin were driving up. They waited while he went in to prepare the way. Cavanaugh and Revoir were there. “I told them,” says Zaccaro, “that Karin was coming in to see them, that she had something she wanted to say. But I said that Jeff and I were concerned that they might use something she might say against her. If that were the case, if they had reason to believe that Karin might have had a significant involvement, then she should have a criminal attorney with her and it could wait until we got one. Cavanaugh said no, if what she said was the truth, they wouldn’t use it against her. It wasn’t that they didn’t have any suspicions, but they would not use anything she said against her, if it was the truth.”

So Zaccaro went out and brought Karin and Sands in to meet with Cavanaugh and Revoir. They were led into an empty classroom. Revoir took out paper and pencils and began to set down whatever statement Karin was prepared to make.

The first thing Karin asked was if she was going to have to testify in court. Cavanaugh said she would. She accepted that. Then she gave them what they wanted. She told them that Dennis Coleman had confessed to her that afternoon in the Duboises’ bathroom that he had murdered her mother. She told them he had laid it out for her in explicit and excruciating detail, and she repeated those details for the state cops. Among other things, she said, Dennis told her it had happened at one fifty-six in the morning. He told her about the yellow paper towel stuffed in Joyce’s mouth. He told her other things that had not been released to the press, that were not common knowledge, that only the murderer and the investigators could have known. She was with Cavanaugh and Revoir for more than three hours; it took her that long to give her statement in a preliminary form, then have Revoir write it down in longhand for her to sign; it ran to fifteen pages. In it she gave the police the missing pieces from the puzzle or at least enough of them so they now had probable cause to move against Dennis Coleman.

“Afterwards,” Sands says, “Cavanaugh got up and kissed Karin and said, ‘You gave us the murderer, you’ve given him to us, thank you, this is great.’ Cavanaugh was very supportive and talked to Karin about a victim support group and the programs they had to help, because this was going to be a tough time for her.”

“I didn’t suspect her then,” Cavanaugh says. “I didn’t want to suspect her then.”

Still, there were a few troublesome factors, some of which were immediately apparent, others not quite so evident until sometime later. As they looked back, both Cavanaugh and Revoir were struck by the way Karin was able to recite the details of her mother’s murder, details that were horrifying, yet show almost no emotion as she did so. That was one thing. Another was how much she knew; she said that the first time she had ever heard the particulars, all the minutiae of her mother’s murder, down to the last detail, even to the precise time, one fifty-six in the morning, that her mother had stopped breathing, was that afternoon in the bathroom.

As the two cops read and reread Karin’s statement, both of them realized that she and Dennis must have spent at least fifteen minutes, and probably more, alone behind the closed doors of the bathroom for him to have told that much and for her to have absorbed it so thoroughly. That was how long she said they were alone together. But later not merely Dennis Coleman but several others said that he and Karin had been in that bathroom behind the closed doors for no more than five minutes, hardly time enough for him to have said all she claimed.

Just as Karin and Sands were getting ready to leave, Cavanaugh called Sands to the phone. There was a call from Al Dubois. Dennis, he told Sands, was still at the house. He was just hanging around, and they couldn’t get rid of him. He was waiting for Karin, and he seemed to be growing more and more agitated all the time.

One thing was certain then. Nobody was going to let Karin Aparo return to the Dubois house that night, not with Dennis Coleman waiting for her, not after what she’d just done, what she’d just said about him.

“Being the nice guy that I am,” Jeff Sands says, “I offered to take Karin home to our house and let her stay overnight. Now my wife was suspicious of Karin from the first moment she heard about Joyce being murdered, especially when she heard about that phone call from the police station to Dennis. So I take Karin home, and my wife, Patty, takes one look, and you can see the reaction in her face. ‘Hi, Karin. What are you doing here, guys?’

“I explain the whole situation quickly, which doesn’t make Patty feel any better, because now she’s worried about Karin. And then she’s worried about this Dennis, this killer looking for Karin, and God knows if he’ll figure out she’s at our house. I say to Patty, ‘Dennis wouldn’t kill anyone else.’ I don’t know whether she believed me or not.

“So we get Karin settled, and we order a pizza, and then my wife says, ‘Gee, Jeff, I’m having trouble getting the comforter down from the spare bedroom closet. Can you come up here a minute with me?’

“We get upstairs. Now Patty is very demure, and she’s very straitlaced and never uses foul language. But we get up to the room, and under her breath she says, ‘What the fuck are you doing? How could you bring her here? She’s a murderer.’

“I say, ‘Patty …’

“She says, ‘All right, she’s associated with a murderer. Dennis could be looking for her. Anything could happen.’

“I say, ‘It’ll be okay. She can sleep in the spare bedroom. It’s separated from the rest of the house.’

“She says, ‘It won’t be okay. You’re staying up all night. You’re not sleeping. You’re going to protect us. It’s your responsibility.’

“Our house is a colonial, with a guest room on the right on the top of the stairs and our room and the baby’s room off to the left. I sat on the bottom of those steps all night while Karin slept in the spare bedroom, even though I never thought our family was in danger from either Dennis or Karin.”