31

The trial of Karin Aparo was supposed to begin a few weeks later. It didn’t. It was rescheduled for early January 1990. It was postponed again. It was scheduled for late spring. Santos asked for another delay. He had another case to try in New London that would take most of the summer. Would the court agree to reset the date for the Aparo trial in early fall? Judge Thomas Corrigan made a phone call to the court in New London. That trial was put off.

Finally, in late April, the time had come for Karin Aparo to face and be judged by her peers. Court convened on the third floor of the criminal court building in Hartford, diagonally across the atrium from the courtroom in which Dennis Coleman had spent his last moments of freedom five months before. The first order of business, perhaps as important as any, was the picking of the twelve men and women and the alternates who were the ultimate judges of the facts. Santos estimated it would take him at least a month to find a panel that could hear this case without bias. What he did not want, he said, were jurors who lived in cocoons, who isolated themselves from the world and knew nothing about anything. He wanted an intelligent group, he said, men and women who were concerned about events around them but whose opinions were not forged in cement, who could listen to the evidence with open minds and make independent judgments. It would not be easy to find such jurors, considering all the publicity that had surrounded the murder, and though he still thought that he should have gotten a change of venue, that the trial should have been held in some other part of the state, in Stamford, say, he would try.

He tried. He succeeded. And as he had guessed, it took him nearly a month before he had a jury of the kind he wanted, the kind he hoped to get or perhaps the best he could hope for: eight men, several in their thirties, a few older, and four middle-aged women. Most were white, and they were a cross section of the area’s middle class. Santos was satisfied.

Jim Thomas, the prosecutor, didn’t seem to care much. On the state’s attorney’s staff for a dozen years, about six feet, a little thick in the middle, dark hair immaculately groomed, though it grew shaggy as the trial went on, his mustache neatly trimmed, he was an orderly, unexcitable man with a reputation for preparing well, though with little flair for courtroom dramatics. He was supremely confident, certain that he had a case he could not lose, that any jury, once it had heard the evidence he would present, could come to only one verdict. His major concern, he told someone, was overkill. He was not going to parade scores of witnesses before the jurors to recite variations on the same stories, the same details over and over again, and perhaps bore the jury and even turn it against him and the state. He wanted to lay out the evidence rapidly and tellingly, with as little redundancy as possible. It was a surprising game plan to many who heard it. Overkill is a thing most prosecutors fear not at all; the more witnesses telling the same story, the better, for it makes those stories and details impregnable. If judges, defense counsel, spectators and even jurors get tired of hearing the same evidence from a dozen different mouths, get bored, begin to know what the witnesses will say even before they say it, so much the better. Most prosecutors will pile the evidence on with the trowel, will call a halt, and then reluctantly, only when a judge tells them, enough, it’s not necessary to hear that story again.

The jury, one to which Santos had few objections and about which Thomas did not seem much concerned, was finally in place and ready to hear testimony at ten in the morning on Monday, May 21, 1990. The jurors peered with interest at the defendant, some of the younger men on the jury with what seemed more than passing interest. The Karin Aparo who sat at the defense table across the well of the court was hardly the same Karin Aparo who had been arrested nearly three years before. Then she had been sixteen, a teenager with short dark hair, a little plump, the plumpness accentuated by tight jeans and tight jacket. Then her manner had been arrogant and self-confident; then her face had borne an expression of superiority. Now she was nineteen, and in the intervening years she had been groomed and coached well by Santos and his legal assistant, Hope Seeley, and others. Now she was a slight, almost fragile young woman, who sometimes looked about twelve. Now she wore long, loose print skirts, white blouses and flowered sweaters or long, flowing dresses. Now she wore little makeup and large, nearly rimless glasses that covered much of her face. Now her hair was long, partly gathered in a ponytail held by a large white ribbon tied in a huge bow at the back of her head. Now she seemed vulnerable, even a little frightened, biting her lower lip often, her smile, which came now and then, nervous. She was the picture of innocence. Miss Goody-Two-Shoes, somebody called her.

Thomas began, as prosecutors must, by calling witnesses to prove that a crime had been committed, that Joyce Aparo was dead and had been murdered. There was Dr. Peter Adams, the Massachusetts medical examiner, who did the autopsy on the body of Joyce Aparo, to testify that she was killed by “ligature strangulation.” In cross-examination Santos tried to suggest that Joyce had been raped or had had sex before her death, something nobody before had ever suggested. Adams would have none of it.

There was Police Chief Peter Brulotte, beside whose house in Bernardston the car was found.

There were Glastonbury police officers who told about their initial investigations, the searches of the Aparo condominium, how they had sealed it once they learned of the murder, who talked of their initial meeting with Karin and her lack of reaction to the news her mother was dead.

There was Charles Revoir of the state police, the only member of the major crimes squad to appear; Thomas decided not to call James Cavanaugh, who had headed the investigation for the state police, or any of the other state cops who had conducted separate and overlapping investigations into a dozen or more areas, who had roamed from the hills of New Hampshire to the lakes of upstate New York to Fairfield County and into Manhattan and beyond in search of leads, in search of evidence. Cavanaugh had since retired; besides, the prosecutor thought one state cop was enough. Why inundate the jury with repetition or with testimony that might not seem relevant? Revoir appeared not once but several times, to tell how the investigation was conducted, to tell of how Karin had turned the “I will ‘do the deed’” note over to him and Cavanaugh, of how she had come to them the night of her mother’s funeral with Dennis’s confession, and a lot more, until the day he arrested her.

There was the Glastonbury police secretary, Beverly Warga, to relate the conversations she had overheard, the phone call from Karin to Dennis and then their discussions in her office when they were returned for more questioning that first night.

There was a security agent from the telephone company to read into the record the number of calls between the Markov residence in Rowayton and the Tallwoods Country Club in Hebron and the Coleman home in Glastonbury on August 5.

There was Michael Zaccaro, to talk about Karin’s actions those first days, of the discovery of Dennis’s note, of how he and Jeff Sands had gone with her to the police when she related Dennis’s confession, and to discuss his own role as executor of Joyce’s estate. It was during Santos’s cross-examination that the first signs of a possible defense arose, as he questioned Zaccaro about Joyce’s penchant for inventing stories, particularly about Karin’s brilliance as a violinist. And it was then that another element entered.

“Did you know if Mrs. Aparo permitted Karin to attend church?” Santos asked.

“We never talked about that,” Zaccaro replied.

“You knew that Mrs. Aparo was a Roman Catholic?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see religious articles in the condo when you were cleaning it out?”

“Yes. When we were cleaning it out, we found a replica of a bishop’s hat in the nightstand in Joyce’s bedroom.”

“At Mrs. Aparo’s funeral, did any priest preside?”

Before Zaccaro could answer, Thomas was on his feet with a sharp objection. Judge Corrigan sustained it.

John Whealon’s name had not yet entered the record. But it was apparent that Santos was going to keep trying to get it in and that before the end of the trial he would find a way. That there had been some kind of relationship between the archbishop and Joyce Aparo was, at that moment, something of an emerging secret, though becoming more open all the time. Those involved with the case were well aware of stories and the rumors, as were many people around the courthouse and most members of the media. But word was only just beginning to leak beyond those confines to the general public. Santos was determined that before he was done, the rumors would have wide currency, would be known by anyone who bothered to read a newspaper or listen to the news on radio or television. They would be, if not the opening wedge, certainly a central element in his defense, in the portrait he planned to paint of Karin as a child abused beyond measure, not merely physically but, more important, psychologically, by a pathological mother. What could be more devastating to a Catholic child than tales that her mother had had an affair with a priest? He would accomplish this by trying to bring that priest’s name to the surface with questions to any and every prosecution witness who might have some knowledge. He repeated his question to Detective Revoir: “Did a priest preside at the funeral of Joyce Aparo?” Thomas objected before Revoir could answer, and the objection was sustained. When Karin’s onetime friend Lori DeLucca was called to testify about Karin’s behavior at the funeral and about her observations of Karin and Dennis at the Duboises’ house later, Santos once again asked about a priest at the funeral. Another objection sustained. Every time he posed a question relating to the priest, Thomas objected, and Corrigan sustained the objection. It became clear that if Santos were to succeed, he would have to do so with his own witnesses during the defense case.

Still, he got some unexpected help in spreading the word and preparing the public at large for what was to come. The evening before Zaccaro’s appearance, this writer appeared on a local television news show. The show’s producer asked if I had heard the rumors about Whealon and Joyce. I had. She asked if I might find some way to air them. She and a lot of others, she said, were very tired of the way the newspapers and television and radio stations were hushing this thing up. It was time to get the stories into the open and let Whealon or others have the opportunity to respond. During the program I responded to a question by saying I had heard the rumors from a great many people and had no way of knowing if they were true, but to me the importance lay not in whether they were true but in the effect such stories told to her by her mother must have had on Karin Aparo all through her life. There was, naturally, an immediate and angry response, a torrent of phone calls to the station from outraged listeners. Santos, though, was not upset. The next morning he had a wink and a broad smile when he saw me.

On the fourth day of testimony, at just before three in the afternoon, Dennis Coleman was called to the witness stand. The courtroom was packed. Among the spectators was Dennis’s brother, Matt, who had left Connecticut within hours of Dennis’s sentencing and gone to the West Coast and had recently returned. With him was Margaret, proclaiming that she and Dennis were now engaged and planning to marry if and when the state gave them permission. There were crowds lined up outside the entrance hoping for a seat, hoping that someone would leave so they could enter.

Dennis Coleman was much changed from the moment at the end of November, when he was marched out of a nearby courtroom to go to prison. The six months had not been good to him. His hair was longer and fuller. He had grown a mustache, red like his hair, perhaps in an effort to make himself look older. It didn’t help. He had put on weight, had filled out some, but there was a puffiness, a flabbiness about his face. And his eyes were lifeless, devoid of anything. He was wearing a white shirt, open at the neck, and black pants, gathered at the cuffs. He was imprisoned now not at the maximum security facility in Somers but at the correctional center in Hartford a few miles from the courthouse, a jail used mainly to house prisoners waiting for trial, waiting for sentence, waiting to be sent somewhere more permanent, serving short terms. He had been moved in anticipation of his testimony, to have him at easier access to the courthouse than Somers, nearly an hour’s drive to the north. But he had been moved for another reason. He wrote to a friend a few weeks after his arrival at Somers that things were not as bad as he had expected. The other convicts were pretty much leaving him alone, he was not being hassled and he expected that it would work out. He was wrong. He was different from most of the other prisoners. For one thing, he was white; for another, he was middle-class; for yet another, his had not been a crime growing out of poverty, out of need. Within a few more weeks he was the target of the other convicts, particularly the hard-core, violence-prone inmates. He was assaulted and beaten, for reasons known only to those who beat him. His arm was broken. He was battered. And then he was threatened. The word spread that he was going to testify for the state against Karin Aparo. It mattered not that he had good reason to testify against her. By testifying, the reasoning held, he was siding with the state, and at Somers it was always us against them, the cons against the state. He was, then, a traitor or worse. If he testified, he was told, he would be killed. So he was moved to Hartford, for the state’s convenience and for his protection.

He entered the courtroom with his wrists overlapped in front of him, as though he were manacled. Karin watched him from the moment he appeared through a side door. She could not take her eyes off him. He glanced at her, then quickly looked away. Over the next hours, as she stared at him, he looked at her and then away in a moment. Their eyes rarely met.

He was on the witness stand for five days. He had been coached well by Reese Norris and Jim Thomas, and he told his story—from his meeting with Karin through the murder of Joyce and beyond—fluently and, it seemed to most observers, with conviction and convincingly, though in a voice rarely tinged with emotion. As he came to the moment of the murder, as he described how he strangled Joyce Aparo, Karin began to weep. There was a brief recess so she could gather herself. Then, as he picked up the details and proceeded through them, she put her head on the defense table, and her body shook with deep sobs. There was another recess. (Later, when the jury, during deliberations, asked for this testimony to be reread, she broke down again at those precise points.)

“Why,” Thomas asked as he concluded his direct examination, “are you testifying against Karin?”

“I had my story to tell,” Dennis said. “It was the right thing to do, considering all the circumstances.”

“Have your feelings toward Karin changed?”

“Yes, but not in a single day.”

“What are your feelings toward her now?”

“Well,” Dennis said, “for a long time after I’d been found out …” He shook his head, not finishing his thought. Then: “Today, more or less my feelings are apathy, not hate.”

It was Hubert Santos’s turn at him now. Santos struck in a dozen different directions. He asked about the deal Dennis made with the state so that his sentence would be reduced from a possible eighty years to thirty-four. “And the board of pardons can reduce that sentence to whatever it wants, correct?”

“I believe so,” Dennis said.

“And you can appeal to the board of pardons to have that sentence reduced after you serve four years, and you can make such appeals every year after that, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“And you intend to do that.”

“I most certainly do.”

Santos turned in another direction. “Do you believe in God?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever tell people that you were an agnostic?”

“Yes. Many people. That was true at the time. It’s not true anymore.”

“And when did you find God?”

“In January.”

Dennis did not say how he found belief then, nor did Santos ask. Santos’s point was to say that if Dennis did not believe in God, then his oath to tell the truth, “so help me God,” was meaningless.

“Why,” Santos asked, a question to which he returned again and again, “did you murder Joyce Aparo?”

“There were many, many reasons. It all really comes down to that Karin said it had to be done.”

“Was that the sole reason?”

“There were many factors. But it all comes to that.”

“She asked you to do it?”

“No, she begged me.”

“There was no other reason? What about the life insurance?”

“The life insurance was not my concern. That was Karin’s reason. We were going to split the money and live in the condo. But the insurance had nothing to do with my motivation.”

“When you murdered Joyce Aparo, did you have suicidal thoughts?”

“They were not suicidal thoughts. They provided an alternative. The choice was suicide or murder.”

“Was it a cold-blooded murder?”

“No. It was not cold-blooded. It was a crime of passion. It was for Karin and for life. It was not against Joyce. I liked Joyce Aparo.”

“Did you ever express a dislike of Joyce Aparo to Karin?”

“I may have.”

“Did you ever tell Karin that you considered her mother unstable?”

“Yes.”

“That you considered her self-centered?”

“Yes.”

“That you considered her ignorant?”

“Yes.”

“That you considered her close-minded?”

“Yes.”

“What opinion did she have of you?”

“I don’t know. She never expressed anything to me but a good opinion. All I knew about what she felt was told to me by Karin.”

“Did you go out with Joyce Aparo socially in the summer of 1987 when Karin was in Rowayton?”

“Occasionally.”

“Did you have conversations with her? And did those conversations center around Karin?”

“Mostly about Karin, yes.”

“Did she tell you that Karin was having a good time in her relationship with the Markov family?”

“She may have.”

“What did they center on, these conversations?”

“Karin’s future, mainly.”

“Did that future include you?”

“No.”

“Did it bother you that Karin was with Alex Markov?”

“Yes, it did.”

“Did you have a good time when you were with Mrs. Aparo?”

“Yes. It was pleasant.”

Santos turned to the reason why Dennis had finally agreed in September 1987 to cooperate with the police and tell his story about Karin’s involvement. “Is it not the real reason that you decided to cooperate because you looked at Karin’s last diary entry and then you were informed that she wanted to get rid of both you and her mother? When you heard that, you wanted to kill yourself?”

“Yes, briefly.”

“And kill Karin?”

“Yes, briefly.”

“On August third, you went into the Aparo condo?”

“Yes.”

“Did you go into Karin’s room?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see pictures on her dresser?”

“Yes.”

“Of her with Alex Markov?”

“Some with, some without.”

“You knew that she kept diaries and papers in her bedside table in a drawer. You opened the drawer and held the diary. You read it, and you learned the number of times she had sex with Alex Markov. Isn’t that true?”

“I did not read the diary.”

“Well, were you read the last page of the diary before you agreed to cooperate?”

“Portions of it.”

“What part?”

“That she had sex with Alex Markov twenty-six times.”

“And you said you murdered Joyce Aparo out of love for Karin?”

“Yes.”

Just what kind of love Dennis had for Karin was Santos’s next tack. “You were in love with her throughout the relationship?”

“Yes.”

“Was the act of tying her to the bed with nylons and having sex with her love?”

“It was love and passion.”

“You tied both arms to the top of the bed and her legs to the bottom and then had sex. This was love?”

“It was love and passion.”

“Did you buy a pair of handcuffs?”

“Yes.”

“And did you drill holes in your bed and attach one set of handcuffs to the holes and the other to her wrists?”

“Yes.”

“And this was an act of love?”

“It was an act of passion.”

“Did you buy a metal dildo to have sex with Karin?”

“Yes.”

“And this was an act of love?”

Dennis turned bright red. “I’m trying to recall the circumstances” was all he could say.

“Was it love to ask Karin to write you obscene letters?”

“I don’t recall asking her to do that.”

Santos grilled Dennis for more than two hours about various letters of late July and early August 1986, demanding that he put precise dates on them since most of them were undated. The questioning went back and forth, Dennis uncertain about which letters came first or second or third, becoming more and more lost and confused, and the spectators and jurors becoming just as confused. (Later Matt Coleman commented, “I learned one thing listening to all that. I’m never going to write a letter again without putting a date on it.”)

Finally, when Judge Corrigan tried to put a stop to it, asking, “Is there a point to be made in all this?” Santos’s answer brought down the wrath of the court.

“The point,” he replied, “is that the witness is lying.”

Corrigan was furious. He glared at Santos. “You are out of order, Mr. Santos,” he raged. “You are not to characterize the witness’s testimony. The court is not interested in your opinions, and they have no place in a court of law. Another outburst like that, and this court will be forced to take some action.”

Santos bowed his head. “I apologize, Your Honor,” he said meekly. But he had made the point he wanted to make.

Now Santos wanted to know whether Karin really had the kind of influence over Dennis that he said she had, really had that overwhelming effect on him. “You were not eating, you were not sleeping, you were not feeling well, you were walking around like a zombie, isn’t that what you said? What did you mean by that, feeling like a zombie?”

“I meant basically that my life revolved around her and she was removing herself from my life. There was no way I could resist doing whatever she asked.”

“If she asked you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you have done that?”

“No.”

“If she asked you to go to Washington and kill the President, would you have done that?”

“No.”

“If she had asked you to kill your mother, would you have done that?”

“No. There would have been no point in doing any of those things.”

“But you say she asked you to kill her mother and you did that.”

“Yes.”

There was not an area of Dennis’s testimony that Santos did not probe, not try to impeach with questions that were often rambling and confusing, not just to Dennis but to the spectators and the judge as well, who broke in more than once to wonder just where Santos was going.

There was even the inevitable question about the Catholic Church and the immediate objection from Thomas, sustained by Corrigan.

When Dennis Coleman finally left the stand, most of those who had listened to those five days of testimony, to all the cross-examination by Hubert Santos seemed to think he had made a credible witness, that he had borne up well under the intense strafing from the defense counsel, that there had been little hesitation in saying he couldn’t remember precise dates and times of letters and phone calls, even some events and that he had inflicted major, perhaps fatal, damage to the defendant.

Even Santos was not pleased with his own performance. On the sidewalk outside court at the end of that last day, he asked an acquaintance what he thought, how he thought it had all gone. The acquaintance said he thought Dennis had made a believable witness, that he had been direct and forthright, obviously well rehearsed. What, Santos asked, was the opinion of his own performance? The acquaintance said he thought Santos had been uncertain of where he was going, had struck out wildly and often blindly, and it had shown. There had been, for example, that strange demand that he be allowed to show the move Friday the 13th to the jury because Dennis had watched it hours before committing the murder, a demand Corrigan rejected out of hand. The general feeling among spectators and the press was that Santos probably had done little damage in his cross-examination.

Santos shook his head sadly, gloomily. “I know,” he said.

Finally there was Shannon Dubois. She was a little nervous, but she told her story directly and with few hesitations, remembering the details with almost total recall. She told of Karin’s phone call informing her of the murder on the morning after and the plea that Karin needed her. She told of the moment when she asked Karin outside the Coleman house, “Who could have done it?” and then, “Do you know?” and Karin’s reply, “Yes, I know. It was Dennis.” And then Shannon described how Karin led her up to Dennis’s room and showed her the evidence in the duffel bag and how Karin told her “that on five different nights they had planned to kill her mother.”

“Why,” Thomas asked, “did you ask Karin if she had anything to do with it?”

“Because,” Shannon answered, “she told me that Dennis had done it and she knew how he had done it.”

“What else did she say?”

“She said she had talked to Dennis on Monday night before the murder. She said she told him she didn’t want to be there when it happened and that she would come home early on Wednesday and clean everything up and then call the police.”

Then Karin left with the people from Athena, and Dennis arrived home from work and asked her if she knew what had happened, and she said yes, because Karin had told her. And that night, with Karin staying at her house, Karin asked if she had talked to Dennis and she said, “Yes, and he told me in detail everything,” and sketched out what Dennis had said.

“Oh,” Karin replied, “that’s what he told me last night.”

She had finally gone to her parents and to the police when “I was all by myself for the first time and I got very upset and it all came out.”

Santos was gentle with her on cross-examination, as he tried to shake her testimony and score a few points. She was not to be shaken, though. His only score dealt with Karin’s transportation back to Glastonbury. Shannon had told the police that Karin had told her that she had been delayed in getting back to Glastonbury because her car was blocked in the Markovs’ driveway. Santos noted that Karin did not have a car then.

Late in the morning of Friday, May 31, the state rested. It had called sixteen witnesses. It had not called Kira Lintner or Christopher Wheatley. Thomas apparently thought that both were impeachable, that any testimony they gave would be suspect and self-serving. He decided to pass them by. He had not called many others who might have supported and amplified the testimony presented. He had not wanted to go in for overkill. Still, he had presented a strong case and, many thought, a convicting one. Dennis Coleman might be a suspect witness, a convicted murderer and so, perhaps, not to be believed, as the credibility of felons is invariably in doubt. Yet his testimony seemed direct and persuasive, far from self-serving, for he did not try to shirk his own responsibility for what he did. And so one was forced to ask the questions, Did he have a reason to lie? How would lying possibly help him? Santos maintained that he had invented his story to help the prosecution and in so doing help himself; if Karin were convicted on his testimony, then perhaps the board of pardons might look more kindly on his applications for early release. Further, Santos held, Dennis was seeking revenge on Karin for what she had done to him, for all her lies, for all her ill use of him, for cuckolding him with Alex Markov by attempting to implicate her in the murder. Still, one was forced to wonder: If he had not done the murder at her urging, how would killing Joyce Aparo have helped him win back Karin and sideline Alex Markov, especially if he had read that July 1987 diary, as Santos insisted he had, and discovered what she was writing there about him and Markov?

But Dennis had not been the state’s only witness to put Karin at the center of the conspiracy, to point to her as an accessory to the deed. Dennis might be suspect, his word doubted, but could one doubt the testimony of Beverly Warga regarding the overheard conversations or, especially, the testimony of Shannon Dubois, Karin’s best friend, a young woman who had nothing to gain by telling anything but the truth?