Beyond Obsession (13 page)

Karin had not been in first grade in Glastonbury's Naubuc Elementary School for more than a few weeks before Joyce called Stachelek. “She said that the first-grade teacher was hopelessly miserable and that the principal couldn't seem to understand that Karin was gifted. That's what she called her, gifted. She asked would I come to the school with her for a meeting and explain to them what Karin had been doing in Montessori. I agreed. It turned into a disaster, with Joyce ranting and raving and screaming at the principal and accusing the teacher of having a blue-collar mentality that she couldn't deal with. She didn't want her daughter subjected to this. I tried to get her to ease up a little, but she just wouldn't have any of it.”

But Stachelek had a suggestion that she hoped might help both mother and child. If Karin was so bored in school, why not find her an outside interest that would challenge her? Music is an integral part of a Montessori school, and Stachelek had noticed that while Karin was in her class, she came sharply awake and was captivated whenever classical music filled the room. She mentioned this to Joyce and mildly suggested that it might be good for Karin to take music lessons, the piano perhaps.

A few weeks later Joyce called to say that she had followed that suggestion. But it wasn't piano lessons that Karin would be taking. Her daughter, she said, wanted to play the violin, so Joyce had enrolled her in a class at the Julius Hartt School of Music in Hartford, perhaps the most prominent music school in the area, where she would learn through the Suzuki method.

A month later Stachelek got another call. Karin, Joyce said, was a true prodigy. After only four lessons she was playing brilliantly. Stachelek ought to come and hear her. “Mrs. Aparo ordered Karin to play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.' She played and she missed a few notes, which was understandable since she'd only had a few lessons, but the song was certainly recognizable. When she finished, I clapped. But Mrs. Aparo began screaming at me, ‘How could you possibly applaud when Karin was playing so many wrong notes and her teacher says she's come so far?' She made Karin play that song again and again, at least four times, and Karin was near tears. Finally she played it perfectly. Joyce was the only one of us who was smiling. And then she sent Karin into the family room to practice the scales.”

Joyce's battle to conquer the school system intensified as she discovered that Karin had begun playing hooky. At six Karin was a latchkey kid. Joyce went to work early and came home late, and Karin was expected to wait alone in the morning at the school bus stop, then take the bus home at the end of the day, let herself into the house and wait alone until Joyce appeared. But neighbors noticed that all too often Karin started out in the morning, then, before reaching the school bus stop, turned and went back home, let herself in and did not reappear all day. The reason, Joyce maintained, must be both boredom and hatred of teachers who neither understood nor appreciated her. The solution was to put Karin in second grade immediately. She called Stachelek and asked for her support. If Stachelek spent a day observing Karin at home, Joyce said, she would see the truth of Joyce's claims.

Stachelek, indeed, learned a lot that day, but not necessarily what Joyce expected. She learned, for instance, that every morning before she left for work, Joyce posted on the refrigerator door a list of chores Karin was required to do when she got home from school and before Joyce returned about six, including feeding the cats, vacuuming the living room, general cleaning around the house and setting the table for dinner. If they weren't done to Joyce's rigid standards or if they weren't finished, she made Karin do them again. What Karin didn't tell Stachelek then, though later she did tell friends, was that if Joyce wasn't satisfied, she hit her across the face, backhand, then forehand, before that second round of housework could start.

Stachelek learned that if the phone rang while Karin was home alone, she was not to answer it unless it was Joyce giving a special signal: two rings and a hang-up, then one ring and a hang-up, followed immediately by another ring. On weekends and vacations Karin was again left home alone while Joyce went to work; she was not permitted to go outside or play with friends or answer the phone; she was to stay in the house and do what was required of her.

That day Stachelek followed Karin about as she did her chores, watched a little television and made her own lunch. But there was something particularly chilling. Karin spent much time in the closet in her room. She had turned that closet into a fort and filled it with her stuffed animals. It was there that she found comfort and protection. Being alone in the house after dark frightened her, so she went into the closet, into her fort with her stuffed animals; it was the one place where she felt safe.

“I tried to talk to Karin about all this, about why she didn't go to school and all the rest. She said she didn't want to go to school because she wasn't allowed to play with any of the children. Her mother had told her that she couldn't make any friends because she didn't want Karin associating with children who were not on her intellectual level. That was the real reason Karin was skipping school.”

Joyce didn't believe it. Joyce couldn't be wrong. Joyce was determined to battle the school to get her way, threatening lawsuits, threatening publicity, threatening more. Joyce won the battle. Karin was moved to the second grade.

The victory was short-lived. From the very start it was apparent to the second-grade teacher, Sharon Rickard, that the idea had been a dreadful mistake. “Karin was a sweet, shy kid,” she remembers, “but she didn't interact socially with the other children. How could she? She was very much a six-year-old, and the others were seven and eight, and at that age there's a big difference.”

There was the day when she came out of the classroom at the end of school and found Karin leaning against the wall, crying. She asked why.

“I missed my bus,” Karin said.

“That's okay. It happens. I'll call your mommy, and she'll come and get you.”

Panic filled Karin's face, and she begged Rickard not to make that call. She seemed so terrified that Rickard complied and said instead she would give Karin a ride home herself.

“Mommy's not home,” Karin said.

Then she'd drop her off with a neighbor, Rickard said.

“You can't do that,” Karin said. She had to go straight home, and then she would let herself in. She had a key.

That was something Rickard didn't like. A six-year-old kid with a key going into an empty house just didn't seem right. “If something happened,” she asked, “what would you do?”

Karin said she'd call a neighbor. Rickard wasn't quite so sure she would. Nevertheless, she drove Karin home and watched as she unlocked the door and let herself in. The incident left a bad taste.

About the only time Rickard saw Karin animated and excited was the day she arrived at school and told the teacher she was about to have her first communion. “Uncle John,” she said, “is going to do it for me. He's my godfather, you know.” Who was “Uncle John”? He was, Karin explained, Archbishop John Whealon.

After a couple of months Rickard and others at the school knew that they had to move Karin back into the first grade. The situation was impossible for her. Pamela Merwin, another first-grade teacher, went to the principal. “Listen, no one is thinking of Karin. I want that child in my classroom,” she said.

Karin was moved. “I'll never forget the first day. The guidance counselor brought her into my class. She had big brown eyes with dark circles under them. She was perfectly dressed. The first thing she said to me was ‘My name is Karin, with an
i
.'”

As the days passed, Merwin became increasingly concerned about her new charge. “She was always somber, always very depressed, always dressed perfectly. It was almost as if all the outward appearances were of a perfect child and of a perfect family. The way I run my classroom, I try to have a very trusting and open atmosphere so that the children could come and talk to me. They knew I was there for them. There were days when Karin was definitely upset, and you could tell she had been crying even before coming to school. One day I said, ‘Karin, what's the matter?' She said ‘Mrs. Merwin, I was so excited about going to see my daddy, and I told my mother, and she flushed my tropical fish down the toilet.'

“This little girl was terribly abused emotionally. I really watched for signs of actual physical abuse, but I never saw any although Karin shared with me specific instances where she was terribly punished and slapped. There was a distinct pattern. On weekends when she went to see her father, she did not come back to school until maybe Wednesday. I suspected it was because Mrs. Aparo kept her home so that the signs of abuse did not show.”

Perhaps. Or perhaps some of that physical abuse had more to do with the fact that neither Karin nor the school was living up to Joyce's expectations. “Karin's mother came to me in a parent conference with a wealth of papers that we do in first grade,” Merwin says. “Part of my program is to use positive reinforcement. Even if there was a mistake, I would say, ‘Good, keep trying.' She came to me with all these papers and threw them at me and was questioning my ability as a teacher. What was wrong with me? How could I accept that kind of work? She would make Karin correct them. One example I'll never forget. It was for initial consonants. And the picture was of a camel, and Karin had put the
c
for the beginning sound and the
l
for the ending sound. Mrs. Aparo shoved that paper in my face and said something about the number of humps it had and it was supposed to be a dromedary. This was the kind of expectation she had for Karin.

“I was worried about Karin taking her own life at some time, if she continued under this pressure.”

That extreme dissatisfaction with what the school was teaching and Karin was learning, expressed to both school and child, never let up. Later, when Karin was learning cursive handwriting, she showed her work to Joyce. Joyce looked at it, raged that the handwriting was awful, made her practice the cursive lettering again and again for hours and threatened to go to the school and force it to send Karin back a grade unless she improved.

It was not just Merwin and others at school who were taking notice that all was not well in the Aparo house. Concerned neighbors had been watching Joyce and Karin for some time and wondering what to do. One neighbor remembers when Karin broke the rules and brought her daughter into the house to play dress-up. The two children played until Joyce suddenly and unexpectedly arrived home. Terrified, Karin hustled the other child down to the basement and hid her until when Joyce was otherwise occupied, she could sneak her out the cellar door.

Another neighbor decided to take some action on her own and called the Department of Child and Youth Services to report that Karin was being left alone after school and into the evening. But she made that call anonymously and was told that because she wouldn't give her name, the DCYS could do nothing.

Finally, in early June 1978, when Karin was seven, an event occurred that was so blatant it could no longer be ignored. One morning a neighbor, watching her own child heading for school, saw Karin turn away from the school bus stop and return home, unlock the door and disappear into the house. She did not reappear all day. That night the woman told her husband, Richard LaCroix, a Hartford insurance company executive, when he got home. He walked across the street and rang the Aparos' bell. Joyce, who had just returned from work, opened the door. He told her what his wife had seen. Joyce was furious, railed at him, told him Karin would never do such a thing and slammed the door.

About a half hour later his doorbell rang. Joyce was standing on the stoop, gripping Karin's arm tightly. “I owe you an apology,” she said.

“I'm not concerned about apologies,” he said, “What I'm concerned about is Karin being left alone. She's just a little kid.”

“I can assure you it won't happen again,” Joyce said. She turned on Karin and hit her in the side of the face with a closed fist, then dragged her down the steps and across the street, punching her all the way home.

LaCroix followed across the street. “I couldn't take what was happening,” he said. He rang the bell. Joyce answered. “I told her that what she was doing was totally inappropriate, and it was no way to treat a child.”

Joyce glared at him. “I'll show you what this kid did to me today,” she snapped, and then smashed Karin in the face with her closed fist again, knocking her to the floor. Then she slammed the door in LaCroix's face.

As it happened, LaCroix once had been both a member of the DCYS board and its chairman. When he got back home, he picked up the phone, made a call and filed a formal complaint of child abuse against Joyce Aparo.

So began a three-month investigation by the DCYS. The initial report of the department reads:

On 6/3/78, a referral was received via the Care Line. Caller reported that Karin was left alone, unsupervised, between 3:00
P.M.
and 7:00
P.M.
Caller was not sure if this happened everyday [
sic
]. A neighbor witnessed mother punch Karin in the face with her fist because she did not go to school. Another neighbor said Karin was hit in the mouth and it was bleeding. Caller alleged that mother practices witchcraft.

Contacted Joyce Aparo at her place of employment. Immediately upon [my] telling her of the referral, Mrs. Aparo became very defensive. It took a considerable amount of talking to persuade Mrs. Aparo to discuss the allegations. She initially referred me to her lawyer but did open up and converse more freely later on. She confirmed that Karin had missed school one day. Apparently Karin had decided she did not feel like going to school and stayed home that day. No one had called in to say that Karin was absent and the school did not contact the mother to find out what was wrong. This upset Mrs. Aparo very much. When she returned home, a neighbor informed Mrs. Aparo that Karin had stayed home. In the neighbor's presence, Mrs. Aparo spanked Karin quite hard which resulted in leaving a bruised area. She denied ever hitting Karin in the face with her fist. She raised a valid point in saying that the school social worker or teacher would have noticed some marks on the child's face if she was punched. She said Karin was not bleeding at all. She accused the caller of being an outright liar. Mother also thought the accusation of her practicing witchcraft was ridiculous.