25

All the conspiring, all the planning, all the scheming had come to nothing. Early the morning of August 5 Joyce Aparo’s Volkswagen Jetta was found, not in the Bronx but down a hill beside the home of the police chief in Bernardston, Massachusetts. By afternoon her body had been discovered a little distance away. Karin never got home that morning to clean the condo. That night Glastonbury police stenographer Beverly Warga overheard the incriminating telephone conversation between Karin Aparo and Dennis Coleman and overheard another as they sat talking in the police station near her desk a few hours later. Within a few days Karin had turned over to the state police the “I will ‘do the deed,’” note, and on August 12, the day of her mother’s funeral, she had gone to them with what she said was Dennis’s confession to her, down to the smallest detail, given only an hour before in the bathroom at the home of her closest friend Shannon Dubois, that he had murdered Joyce Aparo. Dennis never got to start classes at Central Connecticut State University. The day he was to begin, Friday, August 7, he drove instead to the Glastonbury incinerator and dumped the clothes he had worn two days before and everything else he took from Joyce Aparo’s car. Less than a week later he was arrested and charged with her murder.

He was in jail over the weekend, until his $150,000 bond could be posted. On Monday, August 17, he was released and sent home, to wait for what would come. As soon as he was back home, he went to the phone and called the Duboises’ number and asked to speak to Karin. “I was very upset, and I wanted to talk to her. I asked if I could see her that night.”

During that call she told him everybody was putting pressure on her not to see or talk to him again. Still, she wanted to see him and talk with him, and they arranged to meet at the Gallery restaurant. Karin arrived first, with Shannon and a few others. Dennis drove up a little later. She saw him as he entered, got up and went to meet him. They walked out together to his car, got in and drove away.

They drove into South Glastonbury, by his house. He was sure they were being followed. They kept driving around until they lost whoever was behind them, then turned onto a field near the Connecticut River and parked out in a deserted area behind a barn in the woods. They stayed there for about two hours.

She asked him what jail was like. It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad, he said. They talked about what lay in store for him. “If I went to jail,” he says, “would she be around when I got out. Writing and things like that. She told me that she had found out from one of the police officers that the victim’s next of kin had a lot to do with the person’s final sentence if they were convicted and that when it came down to it, when she went to court, she would make sure that I stayed out of jail, she would try to keep me out of jail as long as possible.” They talked about all that had happened in the past ten days. She talked about turning the note over to the police, told him they had found it and taken it from her when she sat on the bed and they heard the sound of paper crinkling. She told him about going to the police with his confession and so turning him in.

“It didn’t upset me very much,” he says. “I knew she had done that, and I told her not to worry. Whatever happened, I wouldn’t ever say anything about her part. I told her I didn’t want to see her go to jail and I would take all the blame. I had already told her before that if the police started to ask her any questions or started to consider her as a suspect, she should give a statement and lay the blame totally on me.”

She agrees that he did not seem disturbed by what she had done. “He really seemed like the same old Dennis,” she says. “I had very mixed feelings about him. He was all I had left, and I didn’t want to lose him. But he had killed my mother. I didn’t know how to deal with those two things.”

And then they made love. “We hadn’t had sex in a while,” she says, “and so we did.” One of the reasons she had sex with him that night, she later said, was that she was afraid of him, afraid of what he might do to her if she didn’t.

“She asked me to make her pregnant,” he says.

She says she never asked him to do that.

After a while they drove back to the restaurant, parked in the post office parking lot nearby, and Dennis took her inside to her friends and then left.

With Dennis gone, Shannon wanted to know what had happened, why Karin had even gone with him, what they had talked about all that time. “She said he accused her of turning him in. She said she told him she had to because the police made her. She said she was afraid because he was angry with her; she was afraid he would do something to her because of that and because they were all alone away off by the river.”

They did not see each other again until Saturday. Then Dennis called her. He was going down to Mystic to spend the day on his father’s boat. She agreed to go along. They spent the day and the evening together. They made love again. Then he drove her back to Glastonbury and dropped her off.

It was months before he saw her again. Alex Markov had long since departed on his concert tour. She would not see him again. She had put the violin away, along with all those fantasies that her mother had conjured and they had shared. She had been arrested by then. He had talked to the police by then, had finally told them about her. Both were out on bond with the stipulation that they not see each other, speak to each other or communicate in any way.

They had one brief telephone conversation. Shannon called and said that Karin wanted to speak to him. He got on the phone. “It was maybe thirty seconds long,” he says. “I said hello, and she told me to write to her. I didn’t.”

But she wrote to him. Soon after their last meeting, during a time when he was still determined to protect her, before he decided to talk to the police, he received a note. It was inside a formal card whose cover contained the printed message “To thank you for your kindness and sympathy at a time when it was deeply appreciated.”

He opened the card. Inside, she had written him a short note, addressed to “my Denny.” She was sorry about all that had happened. She would try to keep him busy for the next quarter of a century. She was sure things would work out. She begged him not to believe all he heard about her because half of it just wasn’t true. She still loved him and forgave him for loving her.

There was one more letter. It was a long one. She wrote it on August 20. He received it a few days later.

She began by calling him “dearest.” She asked how her love was making out and hoped he was well. It was nearly ten-thirty in the evening as she was writing, and she was listening to a song on the radio whose lyrics went: “I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you.” Those lyrics, she said, were true. She was sitting there remembering the time when the romance between the two of them was just beginning, when he was eighteen, young and sweet, and she was just falling in love with him. She was remembering all the things they had done together, ordering clothes for her from Victoria’s Secret, going to Cape Cod and Nantucket and Boston. They had had so much fun, and he shouldn’t worry, because they would still have fun together. “I really believe,” she wrote, “that we’ll turn out O.K. Even if we both have to spend 25 years in jail.” But she didn’t think that would happen. She had always been sure she would have a good life. The psychics had predicted it, and she was certain that they were right.

“Let’s spend this good year together, O.K.?” she told him in that letter. “Then, next year, we’ll worry about court.” Unless forced to, she would not testify against him. But if the worst happened, he could depend on her to do what she could to make his life bearable. She would visit him as often as possible and write to him; she would bake him cookies, cakes and breads, would send him books and a lot more. And when he got out, they would make a good life together and do all the things they had planned and dreamed of. They would go to London, and they would see Venice in the year 2013. Above all, she didn’t want him to miss New Year’s Eve in 1999; they would party like crazy that night, to celebrate the changing of the millennium. Their children would be part of that new age; they wouldn’t know anything about what had happened, and she and Dennis would be special for those children, just as they were special for each other now. “I love you, Denny. So damn much it hurts,” she wrote.

She was feeling very lonely. She might have his voice on tape, but that wasn’t enough. She might have a lot of people around her, helping her, but she didn’t have the one person she wanted, him. He should always stay close to her and never leave her. If she had to testify against him, she would, but only because she didn’t want his lawyer to tear her apart when she got on the witness stand, and above all, she didn’t want to go to prison. She wanted to thank him for making her the tape and for taking care of the ferret, Meegan, whom she adored. She promised that before September 1 she would give him a gold chain, with all her love and apologies, to wear around his neck. What lay ahead for them now was his going to court and her going back to school, and during recesses they would somehow manage to have lunch together at a Chinese restaurant.

“God, I love you, Den. You’re my sweetie. My endless love,” she wrote. She was sorry that words couldn’t say precisely what she meant, and she was sorry that she had lied to him about Alex Markov. But he should ignore what she had told him and think only about what he felt. “God will be with you, Dennis. If not we’ll be together in hell. Forever.”

She loved him and missed him, wanted and needed him and thanked him for things he had sent her. She signed it, “Humbly, Karin.”

And then she added a postscript: “You can send the Victoria’s Secret clothes back!”