34

The jury deliberated, and deliberated, and did not reach a verdict, and the days passed.

Hubert Santos was, he said, not optimistic. He looked dour. He wandered the corridor, back and forth between the empty courtroom and the locked small office a hundred feet away where his client waited. He had taken a big chance. He had not used an insanity defense; he had not used all that evidence on abuse as mitigation, to ask that the jury be allowed to consider a lesser charge, manslaughter. He had decided to go for broke, either conviction on the indictment or acquittal. Now he was worried.

John Bailey kept coming up from the state’s attorney’s office and paced nervously about the area around the court. He couldn’t understand what was taking the jury so long. There was no question in his mind what the verdict ought to be and would be. If he had been on the jury, he said, it would have taken him ten minutes. He was confident, but he was puzzled.

Reporters and court personnel sat around, read books and newspapers and magazines, engaged in idle conversation and waited. And speculated. Like much of the public outside, they were nearly unanimous in the view that Karin was guilty. Most thought a conviction would come. Some thought Karin would go down on both the accessory and the conspiracy counts. Others weren’t so sure. All that testimony on abuse, despite Corrigan’s charge, would have an effect. The jury, they said, would not want to send Karin away for sixty years; that was what conviction as an accessory would probably mean. Not after all those stories. It might acquit her on that. But surely it would convict on conspiracy. After all, there was all that testimony, and even if one had hesitations about Dennis, who could not believe Shannon, or Warga, or the meaning of all those letters?

By the end of the first week there was still no verdict, and the jury was sent home for the weekend. It was to resume deliberations on Monday. An acquaintance remarked to Santos that he found this practice a little odd. In New York, in other states, once a jury begins deliberations it continues to deliberate, weekends included, until it reaches a verdict or is hopelessly deadlocked, and it is usually sequestered during the process, taken to lunch and other meals by a bailiff, the food and lodging on the state. In Connecticut the jurors go home every night, take weekends off, join the crowds of spectators, reporters and court personnel for lunch at fast-food wagons parked outside the courthouse or at other fast-food joints down the block, the neighborhood lacking good restaurants, and pay their own way.

Santos replied that he thought the Connecticut method the right way. Unbroken deliberations and sequestering, he said, might lead to a verdict but not necessarily to justice.

Since when, the acquaintance said, did courts and trials have anything to do with justice? That might be a by-product, but in reality they had all to do with what evidence got in and what was kept out and with the relative abilities of opposing counsel. Courts were a stage on which the lawyers played the leading roles and vied for the best reviews.

Another week passed, and still no verdict. Now and then the jury asked for rereading of testimony, for rereading of Corrigan’s instructions. But that was all. There was little sense that the jury was coming close or even that it might be so deadlocked that it would never reach a decision. Observers began to try to read meaning into the way the requests were framed, into the way this juror or that looked at Karin during those brief court appearances. Was that young juror actually ogling her? Was the scowl on that one’s face indication of displeasure with her or with something else? Were the yawns and fidgeting yet another indication of boredom or impatience or what?

At midafternoon on Thursday, June 28, the third week of deliberations nearing an end, the word suddenly resounded. The jury was coming in. There was a verdict.

Thomas and his assistants took their places. Santos, his assistant, Hope Seeley, and Karin moved to the defense table. Reporters and spectators rushed in to grab every seat. Judge Corrigan in his black robes appeared and settled behind the bench.

The door opened. The jury filed in. The foreman, a burly man in his late thirties, an engineer for Northeast Utilities, looked at Karin, gave her a smile and a wink.

“Has the jury reached a verdict?” Corrigan asked.

“We have, Your Honor,” the foreman said.

“As to count one of the indictment, accessory to murder, how do you find?”

“Not guilty.”

Karin Aparo let out a gasp, clutched Santos’s hand, began to cry.

Among the spectators there was stunned silence, heads began to shake in disbelief.

“As to count two, conspiracy to commit murder, how do you find?”

“We are deadlocked. We are unable to reach a verdict on that charge.”

The vote on conspiracy, jurors later said, was seven for acquittal, five for conviction; among those five were three of the four women on the panel. A few days later one of the jurors who had been for acquittal on the conspiracy charge said he thought that he had made a mistake, that he should have voted for conviction, but “Well, I guess I’ll have to live with that.”

On the sidewalk outside the courtroom later the jury foreman and several of his younger male colleagues gathered before microphones to talk about what they had done. The foreman said he had decided that Karin was not guilty even before the state had finished its case. Dennis Coleman, he said, “was a very self-centered individual. This boy was already twisted. To turn around and say he felt no animosity toward her, that is to me a direct lie.” He was convinced, he said, that Dennis Coleman was a liar who had tried to implicate Karin Aparo in order to get his own sentence reduced. The case, he added, should never have been brought to trial in the first place, and the state should not even consider retrying her on the charges on which the jury hung because any reasonable jury would acquit her on those as well. The other jurors nodded their agreement.

Somebody asked if the jurors thought Shannon Dubois was lying. No, they just believed she was confused, so much so that she mixed up what Dennis told her and thought it had come from Karin.

And then suddenly Karin Aparo appeared in their midst. The foreman saw her coming. He grinned at her. “Did you catch my wink?” he asked.

She nodded and smiled back. “Thank you so much.” She gestured toward the other jurors. “I just owe them my life,” she said.

The foreman put his arms around her and hugged her, stroked her hair and her shoulders. One of the other jurors grinned and said, “We read your diary.”

“I’m so embarrassed,” she said.

The whole thing was a spectacle no one, not even the oldest and most jaded courtroom veteran, could remember having witnessed before. An acquitted defendant might nod and smile at his jurors in the courtroom. But a gathering on the street outside? A physical embrace?

That night, Karin and several friends went to a popular Hartford restaurant to celebrate. The festivities were on the house.

By that night, too, public outrage was reaching a crescendo. Callers were flooding the switchboards of the local television and radio stations, of the newspapers and of State’s Attorney Bailey’s office. Those calls were nearly unanimous in condemning the verdict as a miscarriage of justice and demanding that she be retried on the conspiracy counts. The majority of those calls came from women. No one in the area could remember such a public reaction to a trial and a verdict before. “We’ve had people let us know what they thought on cases before, but never anything like this,” said an attorney in Bailey’s office. “It was absolutely amazing. We’ve gotten so many calls, a hundred in one day alone. What really stands out is the anger. They don’t want this to be dropped.”

The Glastonbury police chief was “shell-shocked. I never would have believed it.”

A former neighbor of the Aparos on Butternut Drive shook her head. “I can’t believe she could have got off. We’re all so upset.”

While some who had testified in Karin’s behalf were relieved and pleased for her, they had mixed emotions. “It’s about time the abuse of Karin Aparo stopped and this evil woman is put to rest where she can’t hurt anyone,” Sandra Yerks said. “Joyce Aparo was an evil, vicious lady who hurt a lot of people. The only thing I feel badly about is the young boy, Dennis Coleman.”

Dennis Coleman. Some reporters rushed to the Hartford Correctional Center the day after the verdict to find out what he thought. “My reaction was shock,” he said. Karin, he said, had learned from her mother “how to manipulate people. She did that with me. In a very subtle way, she did that to the jury, too. There’s a very strong urge in me to let people know what happened. I’m not some kind of monster. She was just as guilty as I was. If there was any justice, she should have been found guilty.”

Over the next weeks the public outcry over the verdict did not let up. It grew. The pressure on John Bailey to retry Karin on the conspiracy count was unrelenting. After hesitating, he announced that indeed, the state was going to do just that.

Hubert Santos was indignant. His client had been subjected to enough. She should be free to pick up her life and go on. To retry her would be double jeopardy.

Into court went Bailey and Santos. Santos demanded that the charge be thrown out. He lost. He demanded that if she were tried, it should be as a youthful offender, behind closed doors, the record sealed, because she had been fifteen when the alleged conspiracy began. Again he lost. Just before Christmas 1990 the court ruled that because of the seriousness of the charges, Karin Aparo’s peers would judge her once more, as an adult, on the charge that she conspired to murder her mother. Santos, though, brought forth more appeals on more grounds, to more and higher courts. He was not sanguine about the possibility of blocking another prosecution. Nevertheless, he was determined to take every legal step on Karin’s behalf.

But at some point, no one is quite sure when, Karin Aparo will go on trial again, to hear once more the stories of how she conspired with Dennis Coleman to have her mother killed. Once more a jury will decide her fate. In the meantime, she will spend her time going to school during the day and working at the bank in the evening, trying to live some kind of life with her future still in doubt. While she waits in this limbo, there is at least the comfort of knowing there are some who believe in her and upon whom she can lean. There are new friends, from the bank and from school. There is a new boyfriend, a young man who appeared with her during the final days of her trial and whom she sees often. There is Hubert Santos who, after his initial doubts and uncertainties, came to believe implicitly in her and her innocence and, going far beyond what one would normally expect of an attorney, has sought every possible means in his efforts to protect and defend her. He has become, in many ways, something of a surrogate father, a role he has accepted willingly.

But she can no longer look to Archbishop John Whealon for the advice and counsel he gave all her life, who was at the center of her life from childhood, and at the center of Joyce Aparo’s fantasies. At the beginning of August 1991, the intestinal cancer that had afflicted him for decade, leading to numerous hospitalizations and surgery, sent him once again to the hospital. He died during another operation.

One day in the fall of 1990 I was sitting with Dennis Coleman in a private conference room at the Hartford Correctional Center. He was still there. The state had not yet found a place to move him. He could not go back to the state penitentiary at Somers. He had been told, and the state knew, that a posse was waiting for him. Because he had testified for the state, the other convicts had sentenced him to death. If he appeared there again, the sentence would be carried out. So he remained for a while in this limbo. He had begun to study, to take college courses leading to a degree. He wanted to be moved to a more permanent place where he could use what he knew. He had ideas, he said, about revamping the state’s computer system, and if he got a chance, he would like to put them into practice. He had other plans as well. Before Thanksgiving he was to marry. Margaret, the young woman who had become his constant companion in his final months of freedom, who had sat with his family at his sentencing hearing, who had appeared again when he was called to testify against Karin, would become his bride, would wait for him on the outside while he spent however many years the state of Connecticut decided were essential to serve the ends of justice, fitting punishment for the crime he had committed. There would be conjugal visits, but there would be no hope of a real life for them until he reached middle age.

The conversation came around to Karin and all that had happened. He had put her behind him now, he was sure. She had been his past, and she had been his ruin. Margaret was his present and his future, whatever that held for him. But he could never truly escape Karin Aparo no matter how long he lived. She would cast her shadow across his life.

Did he really mean, he was asked, what he had said in court, that what he felt for her now was only apathy?

He thought about that for a time, then slowly shook his head. “Not really,” he said.

What did he feel?

He took his time. “I feel sorry for her,” he said at last. “I feel pity for her. And I’m the last person who should ever feel pity for anyone.”