10

There was another side to Joyce Aparo, another world, one in which she was admired and respected and in which she accomplished much that was good. Through the 1970s she became an increasingly important and powerful figure in the state’s welfare bureaucracy, rising to ever-higher positions in the departments of Human Resources, Mental Health, Social Services and Welfare. By the end of the decade she had become a health planner for the State Health Coordinating Council, with wide powers over the nursing home industry.

Jeff Sands, only a couple of years out of law school and working as an associate lawyer at Wiggin & Dana in Hartford, specializing in the law dealing with nursing homes and other special care facilities, met Joyce Aparo for the first time in 1981, and they quickly developed a close professional relationship. “Health care is one of those regulated industries where you can’t sneeze without going to a regulator and getting approval. Now Joyce was in the planning department of the Health Department, which was charged with coming up with the rules and the methodology that would be used by the state for approving projects, and she was really incensed that Connecticut for a long time had systems in place that discouraged people from building or developing new and innovative programs for the elderly or for people with special injuries who needed long-term care. She tried to do something about it because she cared a lot about those people. She really authored a lot of the systems that we still use today, coming up with how and when and where nursing homes and other long-term facilities should be approved.”

In the process she became Connecticut’s leading authority on demographics and found herself able to predict what the future would hold, what would be required in the years to come. Both people who worked with her and outsiders say that she saw, before almost anyone else, the explosion in the elderly population and the spiraling need for facilities to take care of many in that aging group, and she set in motion means to deal with it.

“I thought she was very dedicated,” Sands says. “She was always willing to take your phone call, always wanted to discuss an issue. She was very encouraging. Almost any developer who came into Connecticut—and there are an awful lot of big developers in the long-term health care field—would call Joyce. Every inquiry went in one way or another through her office. But she would not talk to anyone until she got references. She would call me, she would call other people she knew and trusted and she would talk to someone only if the references checked out and she thought these people were going to be okay for the state. It was a personal task for her. If you were okay for the state, then she would give you the secrets of the need methodology and the secrets of the regulatory process and tell you who you should hire as your attorney. There were two or three of us that she trusted and put on her good list. And she would tell you who you should hire as your accountant and what towns you should go to and who you should talk to in those towns. She had a wealth of information, but she didn’t want to be affiliated, even by a phone call, with some schleppy developer who would come in and ruin what she was trying to accomplish. I always had a high regard for her in that position. It was kind of neat to see that somebody in the state government had those kind of personal ethics.”

And those ethics, that rigid moral sense, at least in her professional life, were essential. For they brought her power, and she gloried in the power to manipulate people and events. It meant more to her than money. “If you think about this whole thing of one person trying to design the health care planning process in the state of Connecticut,” Sands says, “you realize that there’s a lot of money involved, and it’s very lucrative for some people. Here these people are going to spend all that money on the preparatory development of nursing home facilities, and here’s Joyce handpicking who comes in and does it, and then handpicking who their representatives are, and then always being in there, kind of in the background, when the projects get built or developed. But everybody knows that it was her hand that put the players in place and made it all happen. She loved it, to kind of manipulate the scene. But then when it was done, there was this nice thing built and the elderly were being cared for, so it was all for a good purpose, and never for her own personal gain, certainly not financially.”

What she had was power, power enough so that those whom she favored, who gained her ear and earned her confidence and support, profited handsomely. “If she was your friend, she’d do anything for you,” Sands says. “From time to time, she’d call me and say, ‘Jeff, what are you working on? What projects? How can I help you?’

“I’d say, ‘Well, I’m having a hard time with zoning down in X or Y town.’

“She’d say, ‘I think that’s a good project. I happen to know the first selectman down there. I’ll give him a call, see if I can talk to him, tell him I think it’s a good idea.’”

There was, though, something about the way she dealt personally, face-to-face that intrigued and even bothered Sands and others who met with her. “She was very nice,” he says, “but she was always a little strange. She didn’t ever talk directly to you. She would even refer to herself in the third person. She was one of those people who talk a little to the side. And she would talk in riddles. Sometimes she’d call and she’d say, ‘Here’s an idea I have. What do you think about it? Do you think it will work in practice? Let’s sit down and talk about it.’ But it was never that easy; it would never be that kind of question. It would always be kind of ‘Well, if one were to do this and think about that and do this and do that, how would you react?’

“I’d say, ‘Are you asking me how do I react to it or what? Do you want to do this?’

“She’d say, ‘Well, I don’t know exactly about doing it. I’m hypothesizing.’

“It was always this kind of funny communication. Nice enough. Always got to the bottom line eventually but got to it circuitously.”

It was during these years, at the beginning of the 1980s, in her position of power and influence, that she met two men who were to play crucial roles in her life and the life of her daughter in the years ahead. One was Michael Zaccaro, about fifteen years younger than she. The other was Ed Murphy, about fifteen years older.

Zaccaro, then in his mid-twenties, was running the Connecticut operations of New Medical Associates, known as NewMediCo, a New England health care management and development firm. It was only natural that he and Joyce Aparo would come into contact, she the regulator and he the developer. That contact blossomed into close association and friendship. Zaccaro had much that she could use. “Mike,” says a friend, “is one of the best people with numbers I’ve ever seen. He can do things quicker in his head than you can do them on your calculator. So Joyce leaned heavily on him to test her different formulas, to see what was possible. When you look at the needs in the health care field, it finally comes down to population samples. You take a thousand people sixty-five and over, how many are going to need nursing home beds in any given year? It’s really statistical analysis, and Mike was brilliant at it.”

Joyce used him extensively. A deep friendship developed. Zaccaro was not married then, did not marry until shortly after Joyce’s death, and there were rumors that what they had was more than just friendship. Zaccaro denies it, as do many who know him and knew her. Their relationship, says Jeff Sands, who was close professionally and personally to both, “was something like mother-son. It certainly didn’t extend to a romance.” Nevertheless, NewMediCo was a major beneficiary of her powers, and when Zaccaro and several others left NewMediCo and formed Athena Health Care Associates, the new company became one of her pets.

Her relationship with Ed Murphy was something else. A man with an appetite for strong drink and good times, he was a nursing home administrator in Darien. He and she met at some business affair in 1981. Both had been married before. They were soon seeing each other socially. Taken with her, Murphy proposed. Joyce accepted, then backed out. Murphy proposed again. The pattern was repeated several times, Joyce accepting and rejecting, perhaps wondering whether a new marriage would be any better than the two previous ones.

Her relationship with Michael Aparo was still full of friction. He remembers one weekend when Karin was with him and he received news that his father had suddenly been taken ill and taken to the hospital. He and Karin rushed there, to be with his mother while they waited to learn his father’s condition. Joyce called the hospital, got Aparo and ordered him to return Karin to her immediately or she would call the police and file charges against him for kidnapping. “I felt helpless,” he says, “and I left my mother alone in the emergency room in order not to create a scene by the police coming to arrest me for kidnapping.”

Later, in April 1982, as Joyce was in the midst of her internal debate over whether to marry Murphy or not, Aparo’s father died. He collected Karin and prepared to take her to the funeral home. As they were about to leave, Joyce called and “told me that ‘unless you bring Karin home immediately, I will send the police to the funeral home.’ I left my mother alone—I’m ashamed to say it because I probably should have let the police come—but I left her and my own father’s funeral to bring my daughter back home to avoid that scene.”

But then Joyce’s fury with Michael Aparo had eaten away at her since before their divorce. Maybe, she reasoned, she would have better luck with Ed Murphy, and she finally accepted his proposal. In the spring of 1982 they married, and Joyce and Karin left Glastonbury and moved into Murphy’s house on the grounds of the nursing home in Darien.

It was not, despite what Karin or Joyce wrote to Archbishop Whealon during the courtship, something that made Karin happy. She was eleven, and she was being taken away from the home in which she had lived much of her life. Bad as that homelife may have been, there was nothing to assure her that the change would make much difference. She was also being taken away from her school and her friends to a place where she knew nobody. She was being forced to give up her violin lessons with Constance Sattler at Hartt, though Joyce told her that it was time, anyway, to move on, that she was too good, that she needed really professional instruction and Joyce would find her a new and expert teacher. Worse was the situation in the small house Murphy occupied. “He had adopted four or five kids who were older than Karin and more grown-up, in their late teens and early twenties,” says Zaccaro. “They were kind of rowdy. They didn’t like the fact that Joyce and Ed got married, and then Joyce and Karin moved in, and they sort of made life close to living hell for them down in Darien.”

The wedding of Joyce Aparo and Ed Murphy took place in the home of Sandra Yerks, a friend of Murphy’s and a colleague in the nursing home. It was a small ceremony, a handful of friends and associates of Murphy and Joyce in attendance. Yerks remembers Karin arriving for the wedding, “wearing a white dress, like a woman of twenty-five, not a child, never smiling, prim and proper, not at all part of what was going on.” Yerks suggested that Karin go upstairs to be with her children. Joyce vetoed that, telling Karin to stay right where she was.

“That night we left to go to a party,” Yerks remembers. “No one cared where Karin was going to stay. My husband and I made sure she stayed at our house with our children. When we got home, it was very late. The kids were still up and taking advantage of the fact that their parents were out. They were jumping on the bed and doing all sorts of things they shouldn’t have been doing. The minute she saw me, all Karin kept saying was, ‘Please don’t tell my mother. Please don’t tell my mother.’

“I said, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Karin don’t worry about it. I’m not going to tell.’ And I yelled at her as I did at my four children.

“The next morning, when Joyce and Ed arrived back at the house, the woman walked in and took one look at Karin. It was May, and she had on a pair of slacks and a shirt. Joyce insisted that she go and change immediately because she was not appropriately dressed.”

For Karin, then, little had changed. The dress code, always to look like a lady, now in clothes that were often identical to those that Joyce wore, if in smaller sizes, was rigidly enforced. So was the rule that other children were not her equals, that all contact with them was to be avoided. So was the rule that a multitude of household chores was to be done as soon as school was over, that there was to be no dallying on the way home. The other kids in school in Darien, seeing her for the first time, made fun of her. It was childish cruelty but affecting enough that Karin often called Sandra Yerks and asked her to take her home from school because she was not feeling good, had a stomachache, had a headache, had some other ailment. Yet when she got home, she was constantly tormented by the Murphy sons. There was nowhere to flee.

Yerks remembers that one day Karin arrived at her office carrying a book of raffle tickets for a school charity. “What do I do with these?” she asked.

Yerks told her, “Honey, I’ll tell you. It’s not a problem. Walk up Brookside Road. Ring the doorbells, and ask the people if they’d like to buy a raffle ticket for the school. Then cross the street and go down the other side. I’ll bet you can sell something.”

Karin, Yerks says, grew excited by the idea. She went out, went up and down the street, rang the bells and within a half hour had sold all the tickets. She went back to Yerks and told her.

“As she was explaining to me what she did,” Yerks says, “Joyce walked into my office and asked what was going on. We said, ‘Look, Joyce, look what happened,’ and we told her. Well, she chastised that child to the point of humiliation. She asked Karin to leave the room, and then she laced into me because I was making her daughter common by having her go out and sell raffle tickets.”

Still, in Karin’s isolation there was always music to fill the empty hours, music into which to escape, music she could play knowing this was something that won her mother’s approval. Ed Murphy watched with dismay. He couldn’t understand it. “There were the violin lessons and the piano lessons and the bloody French horn lessons and the tennis lessons,” he complained. “Finally, I said, ‘Knock it off. She can play the violin if she chooses. But everything else stops.’”

Joyce paid no more attention to that order than she did to anything else Murphy said. Above all, though, it was the violin that was the thing, that was essential. She found Karin a new teacher, one she was sure would be the right one to train her for a career on the concert stage. His name was Albert Markov. He lived in nearby Rowayton, an enclave in Norwalk on Long Island Sound, with his wife, Marina, and his son, Alexander. All three had left the Soviet Union in 1976 and emigrated to the United States. All three were violinists of considerable note. Marina played with the New York City Opera Orchestra. Alex had captured a number of prizes in violin competitions beginning at the age of nine, when he began performing publicly in Russia. In 1982, when he was nineteen, he won the Gold Medal at the Paganini International Violin Competition in Genoa, Italy, an award that carried with it a European concert tour, including a performance on Paganini’s own violin in Genoa. A year later he made his New York debut at Carnegie Hall, playing unaccompanied solo violin as well as violin trios with his mother and father; The New York Times critic John Rockwell said of Alex that his playing was “inspired” and that “a talent he most surely is.”

Albert also played frequent concerts around the country, as he had done in his native Russia, to considerable acclaim. Albert Markov was not only a concert soloist but a teacher with a growing reputation. He had taught his son, had been, in fact, Alex’s only teacher, and since arriving in the United States, he had been teaching others at the Manhattan School of Music, where he was attempting to propagate his own methods. In contrast with the traditional teaching that stressed hand positions and fingering, he was concerned with giving his students a more direct sense of where on the strings the tone lies.

Now Karin Aparo joined the ranks of Albert Markov’s students, journeying to New York with Joyce to take lessons at the Manhattan School and making the shorter trip from Darien to the Markov home in Rowayton for private lessons there.

Before long the formal relationship of teacher to student and teacher to student’s mother had turned into one of friendship. Joyce discovered that Albert Markov shared her passion for long hikes on rocky slopes searching for rare and semiprecious stones, and soon they began to go off for a day now and again on rock climbing and hunting expeditions.

Until Joyce’s death, Albert Markov remained not only Karin’s teacher but also another father, a man she could look up to, admire and respect, a man who was not slow with his advice to her.

All was not well with the newly wedded Murphys. Hardly had the marriage been consummated before trouble erupted. It was as though Joyce, once she had won, once she had captured Murphy, had abandoned all her feminine poses and turned once more into a virago. “I knew on the second day,” Murphy says, “that I was in trouble.”

He had no idea how much trouble. Murphy, who liked to lift a glass with friends, overimbibed on occasion, perhaps on too many occasions for his new wife. Indeed, once was one time too many for Joyce. More than once was intolerable. He found himself under attack, assailed as an incorrigible alcoholic.

Joyce soon added another charge. Says Yerks, it was not long after the wedding before Joyce began to charge Murphy with being not merely a drunk but a homosexual as well, a charge she repeated again and again, in front of Karin, in front of Murphy, in front of everyone. Murphy just sat there and took it, without response. She had, Joyce claimed, walked in on Murphy having sex with another man on their living-room sofa.

Yerks remembers vividly a night when she received a panicky call from Joyce at the Murphy house. Joyce was in an uncontrollable rage. Yerks sped to the home, was greeted by a terrified Karin. She put her arms around the girl to comfort her. Joyce raced out of the living room and attempted to drag Karin away, screaming that Murphy had come home drunk and was in the bedroom at that moment. She was going to force Karin into that bedroom and “uncover Murphy and let Karin see what was going on.” Yerks stopped her.

About nine o’clock on a Sunday evening some months later Yerks and her husband had just settled in to watch a movie on television when the phone rang. A soft, calm voice said, “Sandy, this is Joyce.”

Yerks said, “Hi, Joyce. How are you?”

“I thought I would call to tell you that I am going to run the Mercedes off a bridge.” With that the line went dead.

Yerks was frantic. She knew that Murphy had just flown off to Texas, that Joyce was home with Karin and Murphy’s adopted sons. She knew, too, that there had been considerable and mounting friction in the house between Joyce and Karin on one side and the boys on the other. This time that antagonism must have boiled over. She ran to her husband and shouted, “We’d better get to the Murphys’.”

It took them only minutes to drive to the house, but during those minutes Joyce had called the police, and they had arrived. There were several patrol cars parked outside and cops in the living room. They had taken one of the Murphy sons into custody on Joyce’s complaint, were holding him and trying to calm Joyce down and restore the peace. The Yerkses rushed into the house. Karin ran up to Sandy Yerks and put her arms around her. Joyce glared at Karin and ordered her away. Karin walked over to the corner and stood there.

One of the cops approached Sandy Yerks. “Can you help us calm this lady down?” he asked. “If you can, we’ll release this kid in your custody and you can take him home.”

Yerks tried. “But,” she says, “Joyce was off the wall; she was just out of her skull.” She ran into the bedroom, and Yerks and Karin followed. Joyce was yelling, screaming and threatening everyone. She picked up the phone and started to dial. Yerks said something calming. Joyce turned and threw the phone at her. She kept screaming, “They tried to kill me.”

Then she turned on Karin, ordered her to go pack her belongings, pack Joyce’s things, too, and load them in the car. “We’re leaving this minute,” she shouted.

Karin obeyed, packed and loaded the car. When the car was ready, Joyce ordered her to unpack it, she’d changed her mind. Karin did as she was told. Once the car was unloaded and the luggage back in the house, Joyce demanded that Karin pack it again. “Five times that night,” Yerks says, “from ten-thirty at night until five-thirty in the morning, she made Karin pack and take the bags out to the car and load it and then unload it, then reload it and unload it again and again.”

Joyce and Karin did not leave that night.

By the summer of 1983 the Murphy household was a bomb, fuse lit and burning inexorably, ready to explode. Joyce and Ed Murphy had been married little more than a year, and Murphy was regretting every moment more and more. The woman he had courted was not the woman who was his wife. The woman he had courted had been all smiles and warmth, understanding and helpful, sharing his profession and his interests; the woman to whom he was married was scowls and ice, scathing and demeaning, bitter and in a constant rage, demanding subservience, sharing nothing. Joyce hated her stepsons, who returned that hatred. They vented their wrath not only on Joyce but on Karin, tormenting her, brutalizing her. Murphy had come to adore his stepdaughter, but there was little he could do to help her; she was cowed and dominated by her mother, fearful of doing anything that would incur her mother’s fury; when Joyce was around, he says, “it was like shutting off the TV, blank.” And she was terrified of the adopted sons.

Joyce’s rage mounted, at everything and everyone. She was gone often on business, commuting frequently to her office in Hartford with the health planning agency, going around the state checking on new nursing homes. Her days were long; the pressures on her to oversee a burgeoning industry, to make sure that it hewed to the regulations, to ensure that only the best developers got into the field, to visit every new home as it opened and to make repeated visits to existing homes to check on them, were demanding. She was on the edge, teetering, trying to do her job, trying to do what she thought best to raise her daughter, trying to manage a house distant from her job, a house that contained youths she despised and a man for whom she had contempt. It was an impossible situation. By the time she got back to Darien at the end of the day, she was exhausted, and that exhaustion only seemed to magnify any failing, real or imagined, of others, served only to send her off into paroxysms, send her lashing out in word and deed at Murphy, at his sons, at Karin, at the world. Finally she decided she needed a place of her own, so that she would not have to make that trip every night. With three thousand dollars advanced by Murphy to help with the down payment, she bought a condo on Butternut Drive in Glastonbury, where she spent several nights a week.

But when she was in Darien, any peace that existed in the Murphy house during her absence, though there wasn’t much of that for Karin, with the Murphy boys always there, always at her, vanished. Her orders and demands to Karin became sterner, and the punishments harsher. Her tongue lashed Murphy, and sometimes her fists as well, and she began to talk divorce.

Then the bomb exploded. It was inevitable.