7

She was furious. The child was not planned, and she did not want it. She blamed Michael Aparo; somehow he had tricked her. She was not going to have the baby. She was going to get an abortion.

“I was in pain,” Aparo says. “I was feeling that I was being totally rejected because of this pregnancy. And this was my child. I was devastated.” He sought help from a psychiatrist. Joyce went with him for one session. It didn’t seem to help. Then “I don’t know why,” Aparo says, “but she changed her mind.”

Though she had changed her mind about giving birth, she had yet to change her mind about being a full-time mother to a baby. In January 1971 she saw her brother Tom, the White Plains construction executive, for the first time after a long separation. She told him how she felt about having a baby. “I told her,” he says, “have the child and I will adopt it.” Without discussing the offer with Aparo, who learned about it only years later, she said she would consider it.

The baby, a girl weighing five pounds four and a half ounces, was born just before four o’clock in the afternoon of February 12, 1971, at Hartford Hospital. She was christened Karin Elizabeth Aparo. Her godfather, she would be told by her mother, as would everyone else, was Archbishop John Whealon.

The pregnancy had been a trying time. Joyce later told Karin that she had been ill through much of it, had spent a lot of it in bed. Hard as the pregnancy had been, the delivery was even worse. She told Karin that she had suffered terrible agony, had been in constant pain and had nearly died during labor and had been seriously ill for weeks afterward.

Good husband and father that he was, Michael Aparo notified his wife’s family. Sister Ina went to the hospital to visit Joyce and her new niece. Joyce, she says, was anything but the proud mother. Rather, she was bitter. She had not wanted the baby in the first place, she said, and now that it was here, she still didn’t want it and was thinking about putting it up for adoption.

Brother Thomas arrived for a visit after the baby had been taken home. What he saw distressed him greatly. Joyce ignored the child, ordered Aparo to change the baby’s diapers, feed her, put her to bed, take care of her. Joyce seemed to have no interest at all in her infant daughter. It was, Tom Cantone thought, time to renew his offer. “I wanted to adopt my niece to get her out of the environment she was living in,” he says. “I told my sister I would take my niece, raise her as my daughter—with the stipulation that my sister would not have any claim or any contact with the child.”

The offer couched in those terms, with those conditions, was something Joyce was not willing to accept. She might be willing to turn the infant Karin over to her brother, but only on condition that she have unlimited rights to visit her, that Karin be told that Joyce was her mother and that Joyce have the ultimate say in her upbringing. Tom Cantone would not agree. He dropped his proposal.

A year later, during another upsetting visit, he repeated it once more when he learned that Joyce had not yet accepted her role as mother and seemed determined to rid herself of this burden. The offer was made with the same conditions. Joyce spurned it. She might not want to raise the child herself, but she was determined to lay down the rules under which she would be raised no matter who did the raising.

So after all, she would raise her daughter or at least have her daughter in the same house. She hired a woman, Jill Smith, to take care of Karin during the day, and she let Michael Aparo do the tending at night. Michael Aparo might think, with all the baby care he was doing, that he was being both mother and father to his child while Joyce was ignoring her, and him, and going back to work, this time in a more important job at the state’s Department of Mental Health. But Michael Aparo was dominated by his wife, she was the strength in their house and that was obvious to anyone who came through their doors.

By the time Karin was two, Joyce finally began to take an interest. Karin was talking by then; Karin was showing signs of absorbing information; Karin was revealing an intelligence beyond the usual; Karin was beginning to function as something other than what Joyce considered a totally dependent creature whose only responses were instinctual and who was only an onerous burden for a smart, ambitious woman. Now Joyce began to see her as a kind of empty slate ready to receive whatever Joyce cared to write on it, an unformed stone waiting to be carved into whatever shape Joyce wanted to carve. She would issue the orders, and the child would follow them to the letter with no deviations. She would lay down the rules, and her child would obey them completely.

Ina Camblor remembers a visit when Karin was about three. By then, she says, Karin was a very quiet child who never laughed, never played and displayed little emotion. She picked the child up, talked to her and tickled her, trying to get her to laugh. Joyce, she says, ordered her to put Karin down. “That,” Joyce said, “is not the way I’m raising my child.”

Ina Camblor said, “Babies need love. I’m a mother, and I know how to raise children. They need love. Until they’re ten, they’re still babies.”

“Don’t tell me how to raise my daughter,” Joyce said.

On another visit she watched as Joyce slapped Karin hard across the face. “Don’t do that in my house,” Ina ordered.

Joyce ignored her, turned to Karin and said, “Don’t you dare cry.” Karin didn’t.

“If you want to slap her on the bottom,” Ina said, “that’s okay. Any parent does that. But to slap her across the face—that’s not right.”

“Mind your own business,” Joyce said. Then she gathered Karin and stormed out of the house. Ina never saw her sister again, did not see her niece again until the day of Joyce’s funeral.

Those slaps across the face in Ina’s house were not isolated incidents. Her earliest memory, Karin says, is of her mother slapping her. She was about four then, and “there were people over to the house. They were in the living room with my mother and father, and my father was offering them drinks. My mother asked me, ‘What are those people doing with Daddy?’ I said, ‘They’re drinking,’ She slapped me across the face and pushed me out of the room.”

It was something Karin grew used to. She says Joyce slapped her across the face almost every day of her life until she was about twelve. They were not simple cuffs; according to Karin and to some who witnessed them, the slaps were hard, were invariably first a backhand across one side of the face and then the palm across the other, and they sent Karin reeling across the room.

Joyce might, then, show little affection, might explode and strike out for little or no reason, might make demands beyond any hope that they could be met, might inflict punishment far beyond any cause, yet she was proud of her daughter, had grandiose dreams for her, perhaps saw a way of reliving her own life and realizing all her unfulfilled dreams through her. Karin was bright and quick and eager to learn. And so, when Karin was just past three, Joyce enrolled her in a Montessori school, where open classrooms replete with a variety of materials available make it possible for a child to progress at his or her own rate.

For the first few months all went well. “Karin,” says her teacher then, Janet Stachelek, “was very bright, and she did very well, and she was a typical happy-go-lucky three-year-old.” There was, though, one disturbing element even then. Karin always came to school immaculately dressed, inappropriately so, the teacher thought, for the kinds of trips the kids took and for the outdoor play and other physical activities that fill so much of the kids’ time in such a preschool environment. She sent notes home to Joyce, even called, asking that Karin be dressed more appropriately. Joyce ignored them.

Then Joyce began to appear, demanding to know why Karin wasn’t reading yet, why she wasn’t doing math, why she wasn’t doing other advanced work. Stachelek attempted to explain that at a Montessori school the children set their own pace, do things when they are ready for them. That wasn’t answer enough for Joyce Aparo. If she couldn’t force the school to push Karin, she would do it herself.

“Karin,” Stachelek remembers, “would come in and say, ‘My mother says I have to do this today,’ instead of ‘I’d like to do this today.’” Stachelek got in touch with Joyce and asked her to ease up on the pressure, just to let Karin play and enjoy herself.

Joyce responded, Stachelek says, by declaring that she had an IQ of more than 140 and Karin took after her, and so her teacher ought to be doing something to use those brains and abilities and push her ahead. Stachelek dismissed those demands because Karin was doing very well on her own.

But the demands kept coming, and the pressure on Karin kept mounting. “One day in Montessori,” Stachelek says, “Karin and I were playing a rhyming game. We were just making simple words that rhyme. And she wrote two sentences that rhymed. I wrote them down on paper for her. To me, it was just a fun thing. But to Joyce it was that Karin had composed poetry, so Karin was forced to bring in a new poem every day. I could just picture the kind of thing she had to go through at night at home.”

There wasn’t much Stachelek could do to make Joyce back off and ease up on the pressures. But there were some things she couldn’t dismiss or ignore, some things that convinced her she had to take some action. The children spend a long day in a Montessori school, often from seven-thirty in the morning until about five in the afternoon, when their mothers arrive to pick them up. One afternoon when Karin was four, Joyce appeared to retrieve her. “She obviously had not had a good day at work,” Stachelek remembers. “But Karin also had had a very long day, she was whiny, hungry, tired, and she wanted to go home. She wasn’t getting her jacket on quickly enough, and before I could even realize what was happening, Mrs. Aparo had backhanded her across the face so hard she flew into the water fountain and cracked her head. I immediately stepped between them and told Mrs. Aparo that her behavior was totally unnecessary. I bent down and put Karin’s jacket on for her. What surprised me was Karin’s response. She didn’t cry at all. She just stood there. A little four-year-old girl with her eyes sparkling with tears but refusing to cry. I asked her, ‘Does your head hurt, honey?’ She shook her head no. Then Mrs. Aparo was immediately contrite. ‘Oh, I don’t know what came over me. I’ve had such a bad day.’

“But the next day when Karin came into school, she had a large bump on the back of her head, and I asked her, ‘Honey, does your head hurt?’ She said, ‘No, my head doesn’t hurt. That didn’t hurt as much as a real spanking.’”

That was enough for Stachelek. She decided to take some action. She put in a call to the Department of Child and Youth Services. Stachelek made that call anonymously. “I knew she would pull Karin out of my classroom or out of the school completely if she knew I had done anything, and I didn’t want that to happen.” Stachelek told the DCYS what had happened, said that she suspected that Karin was being terribly abused, both physically and emotionally, probably more psychologically than physically, and someone ought to go into the Aparo home and investigate.

Somebody did. And Joyce Aparo, well versed in the vocabulary of child abuse, of the department where she had once worked, managed to explain it all away. But she was furious. She suspected somebody at the Montessori school of having made the report. She confronted Stachelek. “She was livid that somebody would have the nerve to suspect her of child abuse. I can clearly remember her telling me that it was just ridiculous. Karin, she said, was on a first-name basis with Archbishop Whealon, and she herself was beyond reproach, and she couldn’t believe that anybody would suspect her of this.”

By then her marriage to Michael Aparo was falling apart. They had moved from their apartment and bought a small house on Wesleyan Street in Glastonbury, near the border with East Hartford. Karin was five then, in her last year at Montessori before entering the first grade in the Glastonbury public school system. What she remembers of those days, before the move and after, are constant battles and arguments between Joyce and Michael Aparo.

According to Aparo, many of those fights were over his objections to Joyce’s treatment of their daughter, though “most of her cruelty at that time was directed toward me. And then there was a time, I think it was November 1976, Armistice Day, Veterans Day, and we were both home on vacation. Karin was holding a small bowl with strawberries, and she stumbled and spilled some of the juice on her T-shirt. Joyce began to act as if the kid had committed murder and really began viciously hitting her. I intervened and pushed her away. And she stumbled and fell and accused me of battering her. And within a matter of days I was served with divorce papers. I have to say I was happy to leave. I would never have initiated the divorce because of my religious convictions. But once she initiated it, I was happy to leave.”

The precipitating cause of the divorce, according to what Joyce told friends, had nothing to do with Karin; it had everything to do with Michael Aparo and his dedication to, she called it obsession with, his religion. “I went over to her house,” a friend recalls, “and Joyce and I were talking, and she said, ‘This is why I’m not with Michael. I can’t take it any longer. And I’ll show you why.’ She took me upstairs, and she showed me a bedroom, and she said, ‘This is why.’ In the bedroom was a prayer stool and an altar and a lot more, what she called his prayer room. ‘He spends so much time up here,’ she told me; ‘he can’t leave it; he hasn’t been able to split from it. There’s just too much religion.’”

For Karin, then five years old, Joyce had a mixture of explanations for the departure of Aparo. “She said my father used to hit her, and once he tried to throw her over the balcony.” There were others. Her father had always regretted his decision not to become a priest, she was told, and the church was still holding him, would not let him loose; he was religion-obsessed and had no time for them, only for his religion. There was yet more. Joyce often told her that the real reason for the divorce was Karin herself, that if it hadn’t been for a child, Aparo might have been able to realize his dream of becoming a priest.

So, five-year-old Karin believed her mother’s lies and had that burden to carry. She carried as well the burden of her mother’s grandiose, outsize expectations, even obsessions. Unwittingly Stachelek opened a door, and Karin passed through into a new world that was to dominate her life and her mother’s fantasies from that time on.

Karin had not been in first grade in Glastonbury’s Naubuc Elementary School for more than a few weeks before Joyce called Stachelek. “She said that the first-grade teacher was hopelessly miserable and that the principal couldn’t seem to understand that Karin was gifted. That’s what she called her, gifted. She asked would I come to the school with her for a meeting and explain to them what Karin had been doing in Montessori. I agreed. It turned into a disaster, with Joyce ranting and raving and screaming at the principal and accusing the teacher of having a blue-collar mentality that she couldn’t deal with. She didn’t want her daughter subjected to this. I tried to get her to ease up a little, but she just wouldn’t have any of it.”

But Stachelek had a suggestion that she hoped might help both mother and child. If Karin was so bored in school, why not find her an outside interest that would challenge her? Music is an integral part of a Montessori school, and Stachelek had noticed that while Karin was in her class, she came sharply awake and was captivated whenever classical music filled the room. She mentioned this to Joyce and mildly suggested that it might be good for Karin to take music lessons, the piano perhaps.

A few weeks later Joyce called to say that she had followed that suggestion. But it wasn’t piano lessons that Karin would be taking. Her daughter, she said, wanted to play the violin, so Joyce had enrolled her in a class at the Julius Hartt School of Music in Hartford, perhaps the most prominent music school in the area, where she would learn through the Suzuki method.

A month later Stachelek got another call. Karin, Joyce said, was a true prodigy. After only four lessons she was playing brilliantly. Stachelek ought to come and hear her. “Mrs. Aparo ordered Karin to play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’ She played and she missed a few notes, which was understandable since she’d only had a few lessons, but the song was certainly recognizable. When she finished, I clapped. But Mrs. Aparo began screaming at me, ‘How could you possibly applaud when Karin was playing so many wrong notes and her teacher says she’s come so far?’ She made Karin play that song again and again, at least four times, and Karin was near tears. Finally she played it perfectly. Joyce was the only one of us who was smiling. And then she sent Karin into the family room to practice the scales.”

Joyce’s battle to conquer the school system intensified as she discovered that Karin had begun playing hooky. At six Karin was a latchkey kid. Joyce went to work early and came home late, and Karin was expected to wait alone in the morning at the school bus stop, then take the bus home at the end of the day, let herself into the house and wait alone until Joyce appeared. But neighbors noticed that all too often Karin started out in the morning, then, before reaching the school bus stop, turned and went back home, let herself in and did not reappear all day. The reason, Joyce maintained, must be both boredom and hatred of teachers who neither understood nor appreciated her. The solution was to put Karin in second grade immediately. She called Stachelek and asked for her support. If Stachelek spent a day observing Karin at home, Joyce said, she would see the truth of Joyce’s claims.

Stachelek, indeed, learned a lot that day, but not necessarily what Joyce expected. She learned, for instance, that every morning before she left for work, Joyce posted on the refrigerator door a list of chores Karin was required to do when she got home from school and before Joyce returned about six, including feeding the cats, vacuuming the living room, general cleaning around the house and setting the table for dinner. If they weren’t done to Joyce’s rigid standards or if they weren’t finished, she made Karin do them again. What Karin didn’t tell Stachelek then, though later she did tell friends, was that if Joyce wasn’t satisfied, she hit her across the face, backhand, then forehand, before that second round of housework could start.

Stachelek learned that if the phone rang while Karin was home alone, she was not to answer it unless it was Joyce giving a special signal: two rings and a hang-up, then one ring and a hang-up, followed immediately by another ring. On weekends and vacations Karin was again left home alone while Joyce went to work; she was not permitted to go outside or play with friends or answer the phone; she was to stay in the house and do what was required of her.

That day Stachelek followed Karin about as she did her chores, watched a little television and made her own lunch. But there was something particularly chilling. Karin spent much time in the closet in her room. She had turned that closet into a fort and filled it with her stuffed animals. It was there that she found comfort and protection. Being alone in the house after dark frightened her, so she went into the closet, into her fort with her stuffed animals; it was the one place where she felt safe.

“I tried to talk to Karin about all this, about why she didn’t go to school and all the rest. She said she didn’t want to go to school because she wasn’t allowed to play with any of the children. Her mother had told her that she couldn’t make any friends because she didn’t want Karin associating with children who were not on her intellectual level. That was the real reason Karin was skipping school.”

Joyce didn’t believe it. Joyce couldn’t be wrong. Joyce was determined to battle the school to get her way, threatening lawsuits, threatening publicity, threatening more. Joyce won the battle. Karin was moved to the second grade.

The victory was short-lived. From the very start it was apparent to the second-grade teacher, Sharon Rickard, that the idea had been a dreadful mistake. “Karin was a sweet, shy kid,” she remembers, “but she didn’t interact socially with the other children. How could she? She was very much a six-year-old, and the others were seven and eight, and at that age there’s a big difference.”

There was the day when she came out of the classroom at the end of school and found Karin leaning against the wall, crying. She asked why.

“I missed my bus,” Karin said.

“That’s okay. It happens. I’ll call your mommy, and she’ll come and get you.”

Panic filled Karin’s face, and she begged Rickard not to make that call. She seemed so terrified that Rickard complied and said instead she would give Karin a ride home herself.

“Mommy’s not home,” Karin said.

Then she’d drop her off with a neighbor, Rickard said.

“You can’t do that,” Karin said. She had to go straight home, and then she would let herself in. She had a key.

That was something Rickard didn’t like. A six-year-old kid with a key going into an empty house just didn’t seem right. “If something happened,” she asked, “what would you do?”

Karin said she’d call a neighbor. Rickard wasn’t quite so sure she would. Nevertheless, she drove Karin home and watched as she unlocked the door and let herself in. The incident left a bad taste.

About the only time Rickard saw Karin animated and excited was the day she arrived at school and told the teacher she was about to have her first communion. “Uncle John,” she said, “is going to do it for me. He’s my godfather, you know.” Who was “Uncle John”? He was, Karin explained, Archbishop John Whealon.

After a couple of months Rickard and others at the school knew that they had to move Karin back into the first grade. The situation was impossible for her. Pamela Merwin, another first-grade teacher, went to the principal. “Listen, no one is thinking of Karin. I want that child in my classroom,” she said.

Karin was moved. “I’ll never forget the first day. The guidance counselor brought her into my class. She had big brown eyes with dark circles under them. She was perfectly dressed. The first thing she said to me was ‘My name is Karin, with an i.’”

As the days passed, Merwin became increasingly concerned about her new charge. “She was always somber, always very depressed, always dressed perfectly. It was almost as if all the outward appearances were of a perfect child and of a perfect family. The way I run my classroom, I try to have a very trusting and open atmosphere so that the children could come and talk to me. They knew I was there for them. There were days when Karin was definitely upset, and you could tell she had been crying even before coming to school. One day I said, ‘Karin, what’s the matter?’ She said ‘Mrs. Merwin, I was so excited about going to see my daddy, and I told my mother, and she flushed my tropical fish down the toilet.’

“This little girl was terribly abused emotionally. I really watched for signs of actual physical abuse, but I never saw any although Karin shared with me specific instances where she was terribly punished and slapped. There was a distinct pattern. On weekends when she went to see her father, she did not come back to school until maybe Wednesday. I suspected it was because Mrs. Aparo kept her home so that the signs of abuse did not show.”

Perhaps. Or perhaps some of that physical abuse had more to do with the fact that neither Karin nor the school was living up to Joyce’s expectations. “Karin’s mother came to me in a parent conference with a wealth of papers that we do in first grade,” Merwin says. “Part of my program is to use positive reinforcement. Even if there was a mistake, I would say, ‘Good, keep trying.’ She came to me with all these papers and threw them at me and was questioning my ability as a teacher. What was wrong with me? How could I accept that kind of work? She would make Karin correct them. One example I’ll never forget. It was for initial consonants. And the picture was of a camel, and Karin had put the c for the beginning sound and the l for the ending sound. Mrs. Aparo shoved that paper in my face and said something about the number of humps it had and it was supposed to be a dromedary. This was the kind of expectation she had for Karin.

“I was worried about Karin taking her own life at some time, if she continued under this pressure.”

That extreme dissatisfaction with what the school was teaching and Karin was learning, expressed to both school and child, never let up. Later, when Karin was learning cursive handwriting, she showed her work to Joyce. Joyce looked at it, raged that the handwriting was awful, made her practice the cursive lettering again and again for hours and threatened to go to the school and force it to send Karin back a grade unless she improved.

It was not just Merwin and others at school who were taking notice that all was not well in the Aparo house. Concerned neighbors had been watching Joyce and Karin for some time and wondering what to do. One neighbor remembers when Karin broke the rules and brought her daughter into the house to play dress-up. The two children played until Joyce suddenly and unexpectedly arrived home. Terrified, Karin hustled the other child down to the basement and hid her until when Joyce was otherwise occupied, she could sneak her out the cellar door.

Another neighbor decided to take some action on her own and called the Department of Child and Youth Services to report that Karin was being left alone after school and into the evening. But she made that call anonymously and was told that because she wouldn’t give her name, the DCYS could do nothing.

Finally, in early June 1978, when Karin was seven, an event occurred that was so blatant it could no longer be ignored. One morning a neighbor, watching her own child heading for school, saw Karin turn away from the school bus stop and return home, unlock the door and disappear into the house. She did not reappear all day. That night the woman told her husband, Richard LaCroix, a Hartford insurance company executive, when he got home. He walked across the street and rang the Aparos’ bell. Joyce, who had just returned from work, opened the door. He told her what his wife had seen. Joyce was furious, railed at him, told him Karin would never do such a thing and slammed the door.

About a half hour later his doorbell rang. Joyce was standing on the stoop, gripping Karin’s arm tightly. “I owe you an apology,” she said.

“I’m not concerned about apologies,” he said, “What I’m concerned about is Karin being left alone. She’s just a little kid.”

“I can assure you it won’t happen again,” Joyce said. She turned on Karin and hit her in the side of the face with a closed fist, then dragged her down the steps and across the street, punching her all the way home.

LaCroix followed across the street. “I couldn’t take what was happening,” he said. He rang the bell. Joyce answered. “I told her that what she was doing was totally inappropriate, and it was no way to treat a child.”

Joyce glared at him. “I’ll show you what this kid did to me today,” she snapped, and then smashed Karin in the face with her closed fist again, knocking her to the floor. Then she slammed the door in LaCroix’s face.

As it happened, LaCroix once had been both a member of the DCYS board and its chairman. When he got back home, he picked up the phone, made a call and filed a formal complaint of child abuse against Joyce Aparo.

So began a three-month investigation by the DCYS. The initial report of the department reads:

On 6/3/78, a referral was received via the Care Line. Caller reported that Karin was left alone, unsupervised, between 3:00 P.M. and 7:00 P.M. Caller was not sure if this happened everyday [sic]. A neighbor witnessed mother punch Karin in the face with her fist because she did not go to school. Another neighbor said Karin was hit in the mouth and it was bleeding. Caller alleged that mother practices witchcraft.

Contacted Joyce Aparo at her place of employment. Immediately upon [my] telling her of the referral, Mrs. Aparo became very defensive. It took a considerable amount of talking to persuade Mrs. Aparo to discuss the allegations. She initially referred me to her lawyer but did open up and converse more freely later on. She confirmed that Karin had missed school one day. Apparently Karin had decided she did not feel like going to school and stayed home that day. No one had called in to say that Karin was absent and the school did not contact the mother to find out what was wrong. This upset Mrs. Aparo very much. When she returned home, a neighbor informed Mrs. Aparo that Karin had stayed home. In the neighbor’s presence, Mrs. Aparo spanked Karin quite hard which resulted in leaving a bruised area. She denied ever hitting Karin in the face with her fist. She raised a valid point in saying that the school social worker or teacher would have noticed some marks on the child’s face if she was punched. She said Karin was not bleeding at all. She accused the caller of being an outright liar. Mother also thought the accusation of her practicing witchcraft was ridiculous.

Mrs. Aparo does admit that her child is left alone every day from 3:30 to 5:00 P.M. because she works. The child is left with several phone numbers in case of emergency. One of the numbers is that of a neighbor about I mile down the road. She also mentioned that her daughter is not a “normal” seven year old in that she had an IQ of 145 and is very mature for her age. It was explained that despite her high IQ, this was really an unsuitable arrangement for her child’s care. Mrs. Aparo said she had tried various alternatives. She did have a live-in person for a period of time but it “did not work out.” She had a 12 yr. old babysitter but Mrs. Aparo felt that the capacity of this person was hardly much more than her own intelligent daughter. She also was going to try day care but this would involve leaving work to transport her child which she was unable to do. Other attempts to hire a babysitter have failed also due to transportation problems and people not willing to sit for 1½ hrs.

Mrs. Aparo mentioned that the lack of supervision of Karin will no longer be a problem in about I week. She is enrolled as a full-time student for the Montessori School in Rocky Hill for the entire summer. It was explained to Mrs. Aparo that this does solve the immediate problem for the time being but more suitable arrangements will have to be made upon resumption of the school year. She said she would continue trying to find an appropriate alternative.…

Conclusion: Abuse has not been confirmed but neglect has been substantiated. This neglect is in the form of lack of supervision of a 7 year old child for 1½ hrs. every day. This immediate problem appears to be temporarily solved.… It was suggested that she contact this agency for suggestions should she have difficulty [in making arrangements once the new school year started]. It was also explained that should we receive another referral of a similar nature at that time, we will become involved (whether we are requested or not) in making more suitable arrangements with potential of the case transferred to treatment.

Over the next several weeks attempts by the agency to interview Joyce Aparo face-to-face rather than by phone were unavailing, Joyce explaining over the phone that her heavy work schedule made such a meeting impossible. The agency did not press.

On September 5 the whole matter was dropped. The DCYS notified Joyce: “I have not received any further inquiry from you regarding the protective services referral of June 5, 1978. Since you have not contacted me, I will assume that you have no further questions. Therefore, I will be closing your case. I apologize for any inconvenience caused by the involvement of this agency.”

A long time later an executive with the agency said, “Look, nobody could have predicted what was going to happen in nine or ten years.” The agency is flooded with calls and complaints, has a limited budget and a small staff. It has to set priorities. At the top of the list are cases involving the major problems that cannot be ignored, such as sexual abuse, patently battered kids and delinquency. Obviously, with Joyce and Karin Aparo, those problems did not seem to exist to the agency. And there was something else. Joyce Aparo was intelligent and motivated, and most important, she knew the special language of the social worker; she had all the right answers, so had a ready explanation for everything. “I don’t want to offer this as an excuse,” the agency executive says, “but if things were as bad as people say, why didn’t the father intervene? Why didn’t some other member of the family? Why didn’t Archbishop Whealon, who was supposed to be so close to Karin, to Joyce, to the family, why didn’t he step in and do something? They all should have been a lot more knowledgeable about the situation than we were.”

Nobody, of course, did anything, then or later. Joyce’s explanations were accepted. And the accusations that she practiced witchcraft were just as easily dismissed when she contemptuously denied them. Yet, neighbors say, she openly told them when she first moved into the house on Wesleyan Street that she was a witch, though she gave no details. Perhaps it was just a way of keeping at a distance neighbors she wanted nothing to do with because she considered them as much beneath her as she thought their children were beneath her daughter.

But the boast was there, and some gave it credence; if they were not adults, then at least other children believed it. Lori DeLucca, a friend of Karin’s until the fourth grade and an acquaintance thereafter, remembers that when they were friends, Karin told her and Shannon Dubois about her closet, about sitting there and meditating for hours, told them that if they sat outside in the dark and stared at the moon, they would be able to leave their bodies. Lori went home and told her mother, who said, “Stay away from that girl. There’s something not right about her.” Lori obeyed, and the friendship died.