18

He believed everything she said, believed it though he did not see it. He saw a mother who might be overbearing, even in his presence, but who seemed to care and be concerned about her daughter, a woman who was usually nice to him. But Karin was bitter and becoming ever more bitter; Karin was determined and becoming ever more so; Karin’s expressed hatred of her mother was palpable and growing. He was in love with Karin. It was, he says, “like I’d never known any other person.” He was willing, he thought, to do whatever she asked. He had told her that, had told her that he would die for her if necessary. Still, he was afraid of just how much she might ask, of where the asking might lead.

She began to put her thoughts into words, words he didn’t want to hear, words he wanted to shove from his mind and pretend had never been spoken. “The first time she brought it up,” he says, “it wasn’t like ‘Please kill my mother.’ It was like, ‘I wish she was dead.’ Then gradually it cropped up. Over the course of a few weeks it went from these little dreams she had to she had to kill her mother.”

Dennis suggested an alternate way out. What if Karin ran away? “It’s not worth killing somebody over,” he told her. “I’ll take you away.”

“I’ve thought about that,” she told him. “It would never work. She’d find me. She’d track me down. She’d kill me. I’m serious. I’m afraid she’d really kill me.”

The fear was eating away inside him. In one of those notes placed in her window he wrote: “I went to see Top Gun again tonight. While there I got sick—again. It’s only because I ate food. Went to see the doctor about it. I’m afraid. Bad news. I’m not gonna die, but I’m going to get another ulcer soon because of ‘tension and a crumby diet.’ So there it is. All that is only if I haven’t already got one. My instructions are to relax and eat good food. I feel absolutely horrible.”

Perhaps, he thought, it was still possible to head things off, to make her see another side, to turn her from that increasing determination. He wrote her:

Do you know what your mother did the other day when you played for us? She turned to me and said, “I just can’t believe it. She is doing super. That was incredible, and she did it in one week. That was great.” Then when you walked back into the room she turned to you and said, “That wasn’t too bad.” She then proceeded to remind you of this, that, and a hundred other things. Good story. She is terribly impressed by you even though she doesn’t let on to you. Always remember that that is how she really feels no matter what she says. You did do great. Actually you’re lucky. She supports you and pushes you to no end. Sometimes it’s necessary and other times it’s a pain. Understand, though, that she is trying her best for you. If my parents ever even cared that I played trombone and had done what your mom is doing to/for you, I could have been a great player. Enough so to want a scholarship through Yale and possibly a career with it. I’m not bad now and that’s without one lesson ever. I hope you can look at what she’s doing as being for you and not to you. She does love you, Karin. It’s okay.

It wasn’t okay, not for Karin, not as July was turning into August 1986 and they were back in Glastonbury, the vacation ended.

On July 31, right after they got home, it was off to the public library, to research Connecticut’s guardianship laws. It was still Dennis’s idea that if the search turned up something hopeful, Karin could be dissuaded from more extreme action and agree to run away, to move in with the Colemans and have Dennis as her guardian. She later claimed that Dennis went to the library by himself and only reported back to her afterward what he discovered. Dennis has always maintained they went together. “I was the one who spotted the book,” he says. “I don’t think she was even in the same room when I found it. But I found it and took it to her and showed her.”

The language in the statute book was a little ambiguous. What it came down to was that at sixteen, if the situation called for it, a minor could request that a specific person be appointed guardian and the court might well approve that choice. At fifteen, however, while the minor could ask to be placed in the custody of a particular guardian, it would be up to the court whether or not to approve, and that approval was wrapped in a multitude of legal restrictions.

At first glance it looked as though there might be a chance, even though Karin was still fifteen. In her diary on August 1 Karin wrote, “Den and I have our plot.” He had checked the statutes, and he could become her guardian if things worked out right. She also noted that the house was peaceful and there had been no trouble that evening, except that she had gotten sick after eating steak, ice cream, blueberry pie and grapes. She had to hide that because she thought she couldn’t be sick when Joyce was home.

But the more she thought about the idea of guardianship and the more the legal restrictions became clear, the possibility that the plan could work faded. She understood all too well that escape, even if authorized by the courts, wasn’t possible. “I was totally unrealistic,” she says, “and there was no way I could do it.” Joyce would certainly come after her and one way or another haul her home, and it was not pleasant to contemplate what would happen then. The next evening she appended a note to the bottom of the previous diary entry, saying that they would not carry out the plan.

They would, then, move on to the next step. Over the next days, expressed by Karin ever more frequently and openly when she and Dennis were together, was her conviction that Joyce would have to die if Karin were ever to be free. Dennis grew increasingly distraught. He says he tried to give her options; she rejected them.

He needed help. He was faced with a dilemma. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for Karin, but this was just too much, this was incomprehensible. He went to his father, told his father that Karin was having terrible problems at home, that she was saying it was essential that she get out, that she was even talking about killing her mother and having Dennis help her. It was such an incredible story that his father wasn’t sure he was serious. Kids always have trouble at home. Kids are always talking about running away. But murder? That was carrying it too far. If Karin was in so much trouble at home that her mind was even toying with such an idea, Dennis senior said, then she could come live with them; he would even, if necessary, adopt her. But he didn’t really believe it could be that bad.

Dennis brought his father’s offer to Karin. She turned it down. It couldn’t work, she said. As long as Joyce was alive, she could never escape.

But if Joyce were dead, then Karin would be free. And if Joyce were dead, there would be plenty of money to live on. A year before, her mother had told her that if anything were to happen, there would be enough for her and that she wouldn’t have to worry about having to live with her father. It all was spelled out in Joyce’s will. Karin went to the closet where Joyce kept that will and other important papers, took them out and glanced through them.

Now she wrote to Dennis that they would do what had to be done soon, the sooner the better. School was to start in a month, and her problem should be taken care of long before that. They should get together and look over what she called “the crucial papers. Legal ones I mean.” She had them, and when they examined them, they would be able to see just what they would have in the future.

Karin later said that what she was writing about in that note was her never-ending plan, her fantasy, that she could run away with Dennis. All her notes dealt with that and nothing else, certainly not the murder of her mother. As for the crucial legal papers, she said she could not remember what they were.

Dennis, however, maintains that the note had nothing to do with running away. That plan had vanished. A new one had replaced it. The papers, which he says he himself never saw, were Joyce’s will, insurance policies, deeds and other documents. Joyce’s estate, Karin told him, was sizable, and she offered to split the proceeds with Dennis if he helped her. Best of all, there was the fantasy that the condo would be hers and they could live there together.

On August 3 the plot became more than talk, more than oblique references in notes. “We had just been shopping, the three of us—Joyce, Karin and me,” Dennis remembers. “We had just come home, and we were sitting in the living room. Joyce asked Karin to make her a sandwich, and Karin went off, first to the bathroom and then to the kitchen. She had a bottle in her hand. I got up and followed her. She said, ‘You wouldn’t do it. Now I’m going to do it myself.’ I didn’t help her then, but I didn’t do anything to stop her. She got a plate and put the sandwich on it and carried it back to the living room, and she gave it to Joyce. I thought, oh, God.”

Karin had taken a bottle of Joyce’s prescription medicine, Seconal pills for her migraine headaches, from the medicine cabinet, carried the bottle into the kitchen, taken the pills from the bottle, crushed them and mixed the powder into the sandwich for her mother. She said later that she had crushed only two, perhaps three or four, just enough to calm her mother down. Dennis says he isn’t sure how many pills she crushed for the sandwich, but the bottle was empty when she showed it to him, and there was enough in the sandwich to kill Joyce. What’s more, Jill Smith, the woman who had taken care of Karin when she was small and with whom Karin lived for a time during the winter after Joyce’s death, says that one night that winter, on a ride home from Hartford to her house, she talked to Karin about the pills, talked about the quantity that Karin had put in the sandwich, perhaps as much as the whole bottle. “You could have killed your mother,” Jill Smith said to Karin. “I know. I know,” Karin replied. And Karin’s friend Kira Lintner later said that Karin wrote her a note about the attempt, saying, “I almost had my mom dead.”

But Joyce did not die from the pills. She took one bite of the sandwich and made a face. “The damn relish has gone bad,” she said. “Throw it out, and the two of you go to the store and buy some fresh relish.”

Karin and Dennis did as ordered. In the car an anguished Dennis talked about what he had witnessed. Karin told him that since he wouldn’t do it, she’d had to make the attempt herself. She should never have put it to him anyway.

Dennis spent a sleepless night. “I was distraught. I was a wreck,” he says. Until that moment in the living room he had thought that it was just talk, that Karin couldn’t possibly be serious about killing her mother. He had tried to head her off whenever she came too close to the idea. It hadn’t worked. Now he knew she meant it. The next morning he got up, got into his car and sped out of the parking lot without glancing in the direction of her window, without making any gesture toward it, as he normally did on his way to work. He just had to get out of there, get away, fast.

Sometime during the day his brother showed up at the office. Karin had come across the lot late in the morning and handed Matt a letter for Dennis. Since Matt was driving into Hartford, he decided to drop off the letter and not let Dennis wait until he got home to read it.

In the stillness of her room that morning, after he had sped away without a backward glance toward her, she wrote him that long letter about abandonment. “Where are you?” she began. “Have you stopped talking to me?” If, indeed, he had, she wrote, she understood. She had asked him to do something that never should have been asked of anyone, certainly not of someone she loved as she loved him. Now she wanted him to know she didn’t really want him to do it. She didn’t want him to have to live with the memory of committing such an act, murder. He had suffered enough as it was, and she didn’t want to add to the suffering. Joyce, after all, was her mother, and she would deal with Joyce herself. But what really hurt her was that he had driven away that morning without even saying a word to her. She related then the story of the seventh birthday that never was and of her father’s abandonment in that time of crucial need. She ended, “You both left when I needed you most … and you didn’t even say goodbye.”

If she wrote that letter to make him feel guilty, to turn him back into more than just an ally, into someone to help her do what she believed had to be done, she succeeded. Reading it, Dennis felt himself torn apart. “I felt I was dealing with a horror,” he says. “She was playing on me, making me see it from her point of view. That’s the way it came across when I got that letter. It was an emotional appeal.” He could not abandon her as everyone had in the past. He would be there for her from then on, would do whatever she asked without question.

He read the letter several times. He dialed her number, and they talked. He was sobbing into the phone. She seemed cold and distant. When he hung up, he felt he had to answer her letter. During breaks through the day he wrote a reply he titled “Love and Death”:

I read every note you gave me and remembered us in a simpler time. Our first kiss, our first meeting, and most special to me, the first time I ventured forth beyond limit of restraint and held your hand. The feelings that shot through me at that second. Today those same feelings have flourished to the point that I cry at the thought of you—every night. My heart feels like it’s going to burst from the fullness in and around it. My innocent attraction has taken me like a tide and I lie happy and helpless in its wake. A love I have never felt, or even dreamed of. A girl I scarcely know yet I dream of. Karin Aparo—before you I felt love and life slipping to loneliness. My life was becoming void and my heart unable to love. Already had I lost the capability of trust. Consider it one of your greatest achievements to have me trust once again.

I love you. I want you. I need you. What more can I say? Any sacrifice I will make. My life is yours. Forever from now, my only goal is to make you happy in any way I must. Don’t be afraid to ask. If you don’t, how will I know you still need me. Soon—for you—I will give my soul to something black. Please, all I ask in return is that you keep my heart in the light. My soul I can do without. You I cannot. Today you almost took both our lives. Don’t scare me like that again. When I saw that bottle empty, you can’t imagine how incredibly terrified I became. I can honestly say, I’ve never been that scared. Please … promise me. I love you Karin. I’m here for you. Always. You know I would kill for you. You could ask nothing more, yet I could give nothing less.

I had a talk with my mom about things for you. Any time you need to you can stay here for as long as you like—she said so. There could even be the possibility (she kind of offered) to have you come live with us, permanently. If anything starts to look bad over at your house, don’t wait. Come right over, whether I’m home or not. My mom said so. We can work things out dear.

When he arrived home, he put that letter in their secret mailbox. When Karin reached home later that afternoon, Dennis’s letter was waiting for her. But she was not the only one who read that introspective struggle with love and death, that offer to die for her.

Joyce was furious. She summoned Karin into the living room and for an hour berated her. “She told me if I had anything more to do with Dennis, she would cancel me,” Karin says. “She said she was not going to let me ruin my life over Dennis. Then she asked me to call Dennis and get him over.”

While she waited for Dennis to appear, Karin picked up some odd pieces of stationery she was using as a diary until she bought a new book, and she scribbled some rambling reflections. Joyce had found the note in the window, so Karin was in permanent trouble. She wondered if the trouble came out of teenage rebellion. Her eyesight was changing, and she had to see an ophthalmologist. She had been so upset at Dennis that morning when he raced out of the parking lot without a word to her, so hurt and angry that she had written him the note about her seventh birthday and given it to Matt to pass on. Dennis had called, had been in tears, but she had refused to cry. She and Joyce were going to visit Archbishop Whealon, who was ill in the hospital. She weighed 116 pounds, which was too much, yet she craved ice cream. “Am in love with Denny,” she concluded, “very much so. Miss Alasdair!”

When Dennis arrived, he says, there appeared to him to be nothing out of the ordinary. Joyce acted toward him as she always had. It was just their usual evening together. But, then, Joyce rarely, if ever, spoke severely to Dennis. “She never expressed anything to me but that she liked me and had a good opinion of me,” he says. “All I ever knew about her thinking anything different was what Karin told me she said.” Of course, Joyce rarely criticized or became angry at outsiders unless she thought they posed a threat, a danger to her of one kind or another. Because Dennis was hardly more than a boy, she considered him no threat; he was someone she could handle. She saved her rages for those close to her, like Karin, or for those such as neighbors who publicly criticized and thereby humiliated her.

Karin says, however, that Joyce sat both of them down on the couch in the living room and then told Dennis that Karin had better things to do with her life than sleep with him. She ordered them to stop. Karin says that they agreed, that they would just see each other socially but there would be no more sex. Joyce seemed satisfied with that, she says. They, of course, had no intention of keeping that promise.

Whatever happened that evening in the Aparo living room, whether Joyce spoke only to Karin or to both of them, gave her orders only to Karin or to both of them, the determination that Joyce had to go, and go without delay, became even more entrenched, although Karin later said that all they were ever talking about, that all they were ever planning, that the only determination was about her running away. Murder, she claimed, was not on her mind.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. For within days Karin and Dennis had devised a new plan. This time it would not be Karin acting on her own. This time they would work in concert. It was now the second week of August 1986.

It would go this way: Of an evening Karin would lure Joyce into the kitchen of the condo. Initially it was decided that Dennis would be lurking in a nearby closet, ready to come to her aid. Before it was over, Joyce would be dead, Karin doing the killing and Dennis supporting her in a claim of self-defense. Then that scheme was dismissed, and a new plan emerged, though with essentially the same elements. In this one Dennis would be watching from his window across the way. At the appropriate moment, when Joyce was distracted, Karin would take a kitchen knife and kill her. She would then flick the lights in the kitchen on and off to summon Dennis, and he would come running. The police would be called. Dennis would tell them that he had heard loud noises and come rushing across the parking lot. As he arrived, Joyce was viciously attacking Karin. In self-defense Karin had grabbed a knife and acted to protect herself.

When they finally agreed on this method, Karin wrote another note to Dennis, telling him, “I will do whatever is necessary. It is a decided thing and I will do it even if you won’t help me. It is just another thing to do on my ‘priority list’ & right now it has a very high billing.” As for the lights, she would take care of them, unless, that is, he wanted to help.

Out of nowhere, a non sequitur, she added that she had his socks, that school began on September 3 and she had her school schedule, was going to be taking chemistry even though she hadn’t finished algebra.

Then, on a line by itself, she wrote, “My God, do you realize what we’re thinking?”

Now Karin announced that she couldn’t carry out the plan herself. Joyce was her mother, she said, and much as she hated her and wanted to escape from her, she couldn’t kill her. Dennis said, “Okay. I understand. I could do it.”

So the plan was revised once more. Joyce and Karin were going out for a day. When they got home, Karin would get Joyce into the kitchen. Karin would flick the lights on and off. Dennis would be watching from his window. When he saw the signal, he would come across the parking lot, enter the condo, take a knife and stab Joyce to death. The police would be summoned. Karin would tell them that Joyce had been attacking her. She had screamed. Hearing the screams, Dennis had raced across the lot to her aid. Joyce was strangling her. He had tried to help Karin, but Joyce was raving and could not be stopped. The only way he could stop her and save Karin was to grab the nearest implement at hand and go at Joyce. Unfortunately that implement happened to be a kitchen knife, and he had killed Joyce. He hadn’t wanted to, hadn’t meant to, but it was the only way to stop Joyce and save Karin.

Dennis agreed. Anything to placate Karin, anything to help her. “But I was a wreck. I didn’t know what to do,” he says. “I wanted to talk to someone, so I called Denise and I made a date to see her that night.”

Then he waited and watched. It grew later. Dusk settled and then darkness. He heard Joyce’s car pull into the parking lot. She and Karin had spent the evening at dinner with Archbishop Whealon, who was home from the hospital. These had been long and, for Karin, excruciating hours, filled with apprehension. She was sure she knew what would happen when they reached home. Dennis had said, “If I promise you something, I’ll do it, no matter what.”

Dennis says: “I was watching from the window right across the lot, and then I saw the lights go on and off. I thought, Oh, god. I went over to the phone and called Denise and said, ‘I’ve got to talk to you.’ I left right away, and we went to a bar, and I told her everything that was going on. She couldn’t deal with it. You can’t deal with something like that. I was freaked out.”

He also talked to his friend Christopher Wheatley and told him what Karin wanted done. Unlike Denise, Wheatley didn’t seem to be bothered by the idea. He listened, did not try to talk Dennis into walking away from the whole thing, merely listened and made no comment.

The lights in the Aparo condo had been flicked on and off by accident. Entering the condo’s kitchen, Joyce had switched them on and immediately switched them off again. “I got scared,” Karin says. “I thought Dennis would come over and do it then. So I went over and locked the glass doors and drew the curtains so he couldn’t come in. And then later he told me he didn’t even try.”

Late that night, sitting at the desk in her room, Karin wrote to Dennis. What had she learned from the events of the day? she asked. She had learned that if she ever ran away from home and moved in somewhere else, Joyce would take revenge and would make sure, at the very least, that she didn’t get info a good college. She would, for instance, go down to Yale and talk to the deans, talk to Alasdair Neal, and relate in detail the stories of Karin’s delinquencies so that they would never want to speak to her again. Even now they probably wanted to have nothing to do with her because the word was spreading that she had a bad reputation; even as far away as California they must know that she had done things no girl her age should have done.

She had had a miserable evening, sitting with Archbishop Whealon and eating ice cream and wanting to talk to him, but she had been unable to do so.

What was left for her now? she asked. “Just more shattered dreams, eh? Remind me never to get my hopes up again about anything.” She’d listened to too many promises only to see them broken. Promises were like water, a flood one day, a drought the next. People shouldn’t make promises unless they intend to keep them, she told him. Maybe Dennis could not have done anything but what he did—which was nothing. “I told you that you wouldn’t be able to. But you denied me.… I didn’t ask you this time. You offered.”

One thing was certain, she wrote: Any possibility that she could ever get away was gone now. Joyce wouldn’t let her break free. If she tried, Joyce would have her committed to juvenile hall as a delinquent. Yes, she wanted to leave because she was terrified of her mother, but she knew there was no way she could.

“Don’t promise freedom,” she wrote, “when you don’t have the keys to the cage. It’s not fair!”

Then she added that he should not pay attention to what she was writing; he should just forget it and go to work in the morning, work hard and not think about her. He should go away and let her cry for a few days and get things in order, get her life in order.

“God,” she concluded, “the pain is unbearable. It hurts so Goddamn much.”

Dennis responded. He wrote that even though he had promised, he just couldn’t go through with the plot to kill her mother. He reiterated the offer his father had made that if things were that bad, the Colemans were ready to offer sanctuary, adding that he had been so distraught when he had discussed it with his father, that he had broken down and cried. Perhaps, he suggested, the answer was not to carry out the plot but rather for Karin to seek psychiatric help to get her through these times.

She was furious. She wrote back that her initial reaction to his letter was utter rage. If he had been realistic, he should have known that there was no way they could really have murdered Joyce, that there was no way she could have just stood by and let him do it. What it came down to was that they were teenagers, and all teenagers, she realized, hated their parents at some point; it was just a normal part of growing up. Their problem was that they had carried it beyond the point of mere rebellion and had planned to act out that anger in a violent way. She asked him to thank his father for the offer of sanctuary, but she couldn’t accept it because she wasn’t going to hurt her mother by doing that. In the future she would just be the rebellious teenager behind Joyce’s back. Besides, there was always tomorrow, and she could look forward to that. If the situation at home did become unbearable, perhaps she would take up the offer of a place to stay, but only for a night.

Yes, she said, she had wanted him for her guardian, because she wanted to spend her life with him. But the only way her life would turn out right was for her mother to raise her. To conjure up the idea of living with Dennis in a house and having lots of money was just the fantasy of a teenage girl smitten with love. He ought to understand the thing about dreams, that, after all, they were only dreams. She certainly didn’t need a shrink to tell her that. She just needed a place where she could go when she got angry.

She wasn’t mad at him, she assured him, for what he hadn’t done, for not having come across the lot when the lights were flicked and carrying out their plan. It was right of him not to do it. She was mad at him, though, because he hadn’t come across and talked to her through her window. She had wanted to tell him how glad she was that he hadn’t done what they had planned. She was hurt that he had misunderstood her.

She had listened to “Desert Moon” on the tape he made for her, had then carried her Walkman across and put it in his window and let the tape play continuously, had stood there and listened to him sleep for sometime. She was hurt, and she wanted him to know it. She was furious and then hurt and then understanding and then sympathetic. She felt fifteen then, and as she was writing this note, she felt forty. She was afraid he was tiring of her and losing interest.

Most important, she ended, they should put this whole thing behind them and start over, be happy and in love the way they had been. Joyce, she assured Dennis, still loved him, and “I still love you Dennis Coleman.”

So the plot to murder Joyce Aparo and gain Karin Aparo her freedom in August 1986 came to an end.