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All her life Karin Aparo had been a victim, brutalized physically until she was twelve, and worse, tortured emotionally without end. She was on the verge of being murdered, not physically but emotionally. What had been, what was being done to her was what psychiatrists have come to call soul murder. In his study Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation,* the analyst and clinical professor of psychiatry at New York University Dr. Leonard Shengold defines soul murder as “my dramatic designation for a certain category of traumatic experiences: instances of repetitive and chronic overstimulation, alternating with emotional deprivation, that are deliberately brought about by another individual.” He writes:

The capacity to destroy a soul, hinges entirely on having another human being in one’s power, and this confrontation of the powerful and the helplessly dependent is inherent in childhood.… What happens to the child subjected to soul murder is so terrible, so overwhelming, and usually so recurrent that the child must not feel it and cannot register it, and resorts to massive isolation of feeling, which is manifested by brainwashing (a mixture of confusion, denial, and identifying with the aggressor).… In individuals, psychic murder is founded on the relations between hostile, cruel, indifferent, psychotic, or psychopathic parents and the child prisoner in their charge.

Karin Aparo was that prisoner, and Joyce Aparo was the parent in charge, hostile, cruel, indifferent, psychotic, psychopathic. The home in which Karin was kept was nothing so much as a concentration camp. She was a prisoner, at the utter mercy of a mother whose capricious and often wanton cruelty, ladled out with a shovel and interspersed by occasional drops of kindness, made her a combination commandant and guard. Karin was trapped, unable to find any escape, knowing that even if she managed to flee, her mother would find her no matter what it took, return her to captivity and there subject her to even worse. She was only fifteen, and there were three years lying between her and possible escape to freedom, years that seemed like forever.

Joyce Aparo was a very sick woman. This moment, in 1986, should have been for her a time of celebration, a time of fulfillment. She had achieved in her career much that she had sought. As Michael Zaccaro foresaw, those block grants to the states to aid social programs had come to an end, and the health council on which Joyce sat had been phased out. Zaccaro had left NewMediCo and, with a group of colleagues, started Athena Health Care Associates, to develop and operate nursing homes and convalescent facilities. Joyce Aparo was just what he needed. He made his pitch. She accepted and now was heading Athena’s social services division, earning about fifty thousand dollars a year. The drive to Waterbury, where Athena made its headquarters, was longer than the one to Hartford, but there were plenty of compensations. The work was what she knew and what she enjoyed. She was being paid well for that work, was associating with people she respected. She was doing good for many.

But it satisfied none of what was eating away inside her mind. Nothing could. She was a classic compendium of neuroses and psychoses. The symptoms were there, had been spotted long before by many who came into her orbit. They were growing worse, consuming her and those closest to her.

Her obsession with Archbishop John Whealon, the stories she invented and repeated about her relationship with him, say psychiatrists who have examined her history, have all the earmarks of what is called erotomania. DSM-III-R, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Third Edition Revised), compiled by the American Psychiatric Association, defines it as “an erotic delusion … that one is loved by another [and] the person about whom this conviction is held is usually of a higher status, such as a famous person.” The sickness, though, was not isolated in Joyce alone. While Whealon might dominate her inner life, she attempted, as well, to infect her daughter with the virus, trying to convince Karin that she was loved and desired by Mike Zaccaro, Alasdair Neal, and other men of success and promise.

Erotomania was only one, and perhaps one of the least, of the psychiatric ills that afflicted Joyce Aparo. It would be nearly impossible to look at the relationship of Joyce the mother with her daughter, of Joyce the wife with her husbands, and not see a pervasive pattern of cruel, demeaning, and aggressive behavior—symptoms of what many psychiatrists call a sadistic personality disorder.

From the time she was a child demanding undivided attention from her parents and siblings, through her teen years, when she was flashing a ring and claiming it was a gift from the queen of England, on to her tales of foreign travels and adventures, to having her nose fixed to enhance her beauty, to her constant berating of Karin, with whom she so closely identified, as too fat or otherwise physically unattractive, Joyce Aparo was forever demanding, in the words of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, “reassurance, approval, or praise; [was] inappropriately seductive in appearance or behavior; [was] overly concerned with physical attractiveness; [was] uncomfortable in situations in which she [was] not the center of attention; [displayed] rapidly shifting and shallow expressions of emotions; [was] self-centered; [had] no tolerance for frustration or delayed gratification; [attempted] to control the opposite sex or enter into a dependent relationship. Flights into romantic fantasy [were] common.… Interpersonal relationships [were] usually stormy and ungratifying.” It all added up to an aberration called histrionic personality disorder.

That was not all. Joyce Aparo neatly fitted the descriptions of at least two other major psychiatric disorders. Her unreasonable demands for perfection in everything, both from herself and from Karin, demands that could not possibly be met and that therefore too often meant that things could never be completed satisfactorily, and her preoccupation with compiling detailed rules, lists, schedules, and more, combined with her insistence that they be followed precisely with no deviation, are clear demonstrations of what the manual calls obsessive compulsive personality disorder.

Her reaction to criticism—the rage, shame, even humiliation she felt when either she or Karin was criticized—together with her constant exaggerations of her own and Karin’s achievements and talents, and her conviction that she and Karin were unique and that only very special people could possibly understand them are manifestations of the manual’s narcissistic personality disorder. People with this disturbance, the manual says, are “preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love; [and] lack of empathy: inability to recognize and experience how others feel.” This was Joyce Aparo indeed.

These illnesses, and more, these disturbances did not exist in isolation, wreaking their havoc on Joyce Aparo alone. They were infectious. Her daughter was as much a victim as she, and the effect was devastating. As Karin grew, Joyce passed along the viruses.

Some years later Dr. John Cigalis, a psychologist specializing in personality disorders, and Dr. Walter Borden, a general and forensic psychiatrist, were asked by Karin’s lawyer, Hubert Santos, to examine her and offer their opinions on her mental and emotional state and stability. Cigalis saw her three times in 1988 and once in 1990. Borden saw her about a dozen times between the fall of 1987 and the winter of 1988. Both have testified often in criminal cases, almost always for the defense, so their views perhaps, may be colored, may be biased considering the general purpose of their examinations. But other psychiatrists who have looked at Karin’s past, as re-created by her and others, though they did not personally see her, tend to agree at least in part with Cigalis and Borden.

Karin, all agree, suffered from a multitude of personality disorders. It would have been nearly impossible had she not. She was a battered and abused child, both physically and emotionally, from her earliest memories. The result was what has come to be called post-traumatic stress syndrome, a condition that is given popular currency by the delayed reactions of prisoners of war and especially by Vietnam War veterans after they returned to civilian life and that is common among battered children when they reach adolescence. The trauma is devastating, an event or series of events over which the victim has no control and no ability to change: the captivity and brutal punishment of prisoners, the horrors of a senseless war and the constant battering of the small child. The episodes may appear to have no immediate effect and may be borne stoically during their course. Later, though, the impact hits, and when it does, it can be crushing. The victim is beset by recurring memories, waking and sleeping, of the event or events; as much as he or she tries to avoid them, they cannot be shaken off, there is no escape and it is as though the times were being relived. With that come a marked loss of interest in ordinary things, a feeling of isolation and detachment and estrangement from the world, an inability to feel ordinary emotions like love, a sense that the future holds little or nothing, not career or marriage or children or success.

There were frequent episodes, increasing as Karin grew into adolescence, of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, the starvation and the vomiting after eating, induced by Joyce’s constant haranguing that Karin was too fat, that she ate too much, and then filling the refrigerator with éclairs and other sweets and insisting that she eat them and then vomit.

Karin had all that, and more. There was an induced psychotic disorder, which psychiatrists describe as a delusional system that develops in one person because of that individual’s intimate relationship with someone who has a psychotic disorder with his or her own delusions. Eventually the two people will at least partly share these delusions. Nowhere was this more clearly evident than in the dreams Joyce maintained, and fed to Karin, about her future on the concert stage. A key element here is that the shared delusion is usually within the realm of possibility. It doesn’t matter if one of this pair is healthy, sane, at the beginning of the relationship. If the dominant partner is the one with the delusions, and the relationship is not one that can be easily escaped, then the sane one’s fall is almost inevitable.

Karin was fifteen, and inside, she was assailed by conflicting emotions: She hated her mother because of what her mother had done to her, yet she loved her because she was her mother and she had been taught that one loves one’s mother without question, no matter what. As a result, when questioned by people in authority, often she denied her mother had done anything out of the ordinary and said they got along well.

Karin craved acceptance by her contemporaries, but she had been drilled to believe that she did not need them, that she was better, that she was special, and they were not worthy of her. She believed it, and she did not believe it.

She wanted to be like her friend Shannon, have a family like Shannon’s, but she had been taught, and so believed and disbelieved, that her mother was best for her, her family life the one suited to her.

She wanted love, but with frozen emotions she could not really feel it. She wanted men to come to her aid, to protect and defend her, the role her mother had instructed her was theirs, but men always failed her, always let her down, always abandoned her, as her mother said they would in the end.

She was becoming more like her mother all the time, a thing she wanted and a thing she hated. She had become adept, even better than her mother, at manipulating people to her own use. She was confused, her mind a hornet’s nest of forbidden thoughts and desires she wanted to act out and feared.

She needed help, and she knew she needed it, but there was no way she could get it. One time she went to the school nurse, Maria Bonaiuto, and asked if there was any place she could go to get away from home, any way she could get somebody to take custody of her. All that Bonaiuto could suggest was that she go to Youth Services and ask for help with her problems. Karin said that was impossible because that required parental approval, and Joyce would never give her approval. Indeed, when Bonaiuto approached Joyce about the possibility of counseling for Karin, Joyce flatly rejected the idea. Nobody could counsel Karin, she said, because nobody except Joyce understood Karin.

Karin’s soul was being murdered, and there seemed no escape from the murderer, no hope. Then she met Dennis Coleman.

* Leonard Shengold, M.D., Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation (New Haven: Yale University Press. 1989).