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Trial dates came, and trials were postponed, and so trial dates passed, and the cases against Dennis Coleman and Karin Aparo dragged on inconclusively for more than two years. It was as though no one wanted to bring either of them to final judgment, as though no one wanted to write a finish to this tragedy.

Dennis remained free on bond. He did not go to college as he had once planned. He got a motorcycle, and he roared around Glastonbury, his red hair flying, a sight to be recognized and pitied. He kept his appointments with Dr. Faris. He was in and out of Reese Norris’s office. He worked on his model house, carefully shaving shingles, adding to it slowly. He wandered often through the woods behind his father’s home, creating campsites, carving trails, spending long hours in loneliness. He spent time with old friends, who had returned to him in this time of trouble. He played a few gigs with his rock group. He took a trip now and then just to get away for a few days. John Bailey remembers a summer evening when he and his wife were vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard. They were in a bistro when he felt someone staring at him. He looked up. On a balcony, eyes focused on him, was Dennis Coleman. Dennis tried drugs, smoking marijuana, taking cocaine, LSD, more, was stoned every day, trying to blot out the memories of what had happened and what would happen. And he waited.

One day late in the fall of 1987 he took a large box and went to his room and slowly took from his walls all the photographs and all the memorabilia of his time with Karin Aparo. He put everything into that box, which he took and stored in the attic. His room suddenly looked a lot larger and a lot barer.

Karin Aparo, too, waited, tried to create a new life for herself. In September 1987 she went back to Glastonbury High School, to begin her junior year. She remained only a few days. The cruelty of those who knew her, who knew about her was unbearable. She left. She transferred to a high school in Hartford where nobody knew her, though many knew about her. She was anonymous. She rarely saw the people who had been friends with her mother and with her, Michael Zaccaro, Jeff Sands, and others. She lived for a time with the woman who had taken care of her when she was small, Jill Smith. It did not work out. Smith was something of a spiritualist, sometimes held séances in her home. She was persuaded that Karin had brought evil vibrations into her home. She asked Karin to leave. Karin found an apartment for herself in the south end of Hartford. She got a part-time job in a bank; she did well, and the people liked her there, though initially they were a little leery. She gave up the violin and talked more about a career as a psychologist, a psychiatrist, even as a nursing home administrator. She planned to go to college when she graduated from high school, first to Central Connecticut and then, when everything was finished and when she was free, as she was convinced she would be, to Yale or some other good university. She, too, waited.

After their last meeting, that trip to Mystic and Dennis’s father’s boat in the week he got out of jail, Dennis and Karin did not see each other again until January. Then it was in court. The state of Connecticut some years earlier had abandoned the grand jury system as the way to hand down indictments. Instead, it has instituted what it calls probable cause hearings, held in open court during which the state lays out the outlines of its case, calls enough witnesses and presents enough evidence to show there is probable cause to bring the defendant to trial. Karin’s probable cause hearing was held on January 5, 1988, in a small courtroom on the third floor of the pedestrian-modern criminal court building in Hartford, a three-story structure. To the rear of the first floor, across a hall from each other, are the offices of the state’s attorney and of the public defender. In the center of the building is an atrium that rises from ground to ceiling. On the second and third floors, ringing the atrium, are the courtrooms; those on the third floor are reserved for jury trials, sentencings, major arraignments and important hearings. The courtrooms are small, holding fewer than a hundred people. They have no windows, only stark brick walls and light-colored benches and carpets.

“I came up the steps into the hallway outside the courtroom,” Dennis says, “and she was standing there. It was the first time I’d seen her. And I didn’t care what she did, I still loved her. I thought in the months before that I hated her, but everything came into balance then, and I still loved her. I sat up there on the witness stand, and I testified against her, and when I looked at her, I knew I still loved her.”

The court heard Dennis and Shannon and the police and a few others, and it decided there was probable cause to bring Karin Aparo to trial.