Beyond Obsession (21 page)

Karin was fifteen, and inside, she was assailed by conflicting emotions: She hated her mother because of what her mother had done to her, yet she loved her because she was her mother and she had been taught that one loves one's mother without question, no matter what. As a result, when questioned by people in authority, often she denied her mother had done anything out of the ordinary and said they got along well.

Karin craved acceptance by her contemporaries, but she had been drilled to believe that she did not need them, that she was better, that she was special, and they were not worthy of her. She believed it, and she did not believe it.

She wanted to be like her friend Shannon, have a family like Shannon's, but she had been taught, and so believed and disbelieved, that her mother was best for her, her family life the one suited to her.

She wanted love, but with frozen emotions she could not really feel it. She wanted men to come to her aid, to protect and defend her, the role her mother had instructed her was theirs, but men always failed her, always let her down, always abandoned her, as her mother said they would in the end.

She was becoming more like her mother all the time, a thing she wanted and a thing she hated. She had become adept, even better than her mother, at manipulating people to her own use. She was confused, her mind a hornet's nest of forbidden thoughts and desires she wanted to act out and feared.

She needed help, and she knew she needed it, but there was no way she could get it. One time she went to the school nurse, Maria Bonaiuto, and asked if there was any place she could go to get away from home, any way she could get somebody to take custody of her. All that Bonaiuto could suggest was that she go to Youth Services and ask for help with her problems. Karin said that was impossible because that required parental approval, and Joyce would never give her approval. Indeed, when Bonaiuto approached Joyce about the possibility of counseling for Karin, Joyce flatly rejected the idea. Nobody could counsel Karin, she said, because nobody except Joyce understood Karin.

Karin's soul was being murdered, and there seemed no escape from the murderer, no hope. Then she met Dennis Coleman.

*
Leonard Shengold, M.D.,
Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation
(New Haven: Yale University Press. 1989).

PART THREE

HOW THE DEED WAS DONE

14

In the summer of 1986, in one of the scores of letters Dennis Coleman placed in Karin's secret mailbox, the slot in her bedroom window between the screen and the glass, he sent along a tape he had compiled of seventeen rock songs, “in an attempt to express my appreciation of your love. You may not appreciate modern music as much as other forms, but these songs
are
me. They are my essence.
Listen to the lyrics
and you'll hear my soul, my heart.”

On that tape were songs by Julian Lennon, Steve Perry, Dennis De Young, and the rock groups Journey, Led Zeppelin, Chicago, Giuffria, and Styx. The beat was mainly hard, but all the songs were love songs. In another time, with a beat for a different age, they would have been called love ballads, and even in this age that theme filled them: “Want Your Body,” “Patiently,” “Open Arms,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Faithfully,” “Running Alone,” “Foolish Heart,” “It's Only Love,” “You're the Inspiration,” “Hard Habit to Break,” “I'll Be There,” “Desert Moon,” “Call to the Heart,” “Babe, Don't Let it End,” “Come Sail Away,” “Lights.”

A month or so later he slipped another note into that mailbox. “I'm listening to the first song on your tape, ‘Want Your Body,' for the 21st time in a row. I've been listening while writing. I'm lying on the floor … crying. I don't know if it's good or bad. Quite literally,
you
are the only thing I've got left.”

The soft rock music and the lyrics, by Julian Lennon, had become special to both of them and, particularly to Dennis, the most special of all the songs on that tape he had made. As he wrote, Dennis played it over and over, day after day. It was the song that led the tape, the first among the equals.

They had known each other then for not quite a year, had met, exchanged words for the first time on a mild evening in May 1986. Joyce and Karin Aparo were returning to their Butternut Drive home from a concert at a local school where Karin had played her violin. Joyce pulled into the parking lot, turned off the engine of her Volkswagen and started to roll up the window on the driver's side. Something was wrong with the handle; it was jammed, the window frozen wide open. She was exasperated. She glanced across the parking lot and spotted a tall, red-haired young man working on his car. She turned to her fifteen-year-old daughter, Karin, and said, “Go and ask that person over there if he'll come here and fix the handle on this window.”

Still in the dress she had worn for her performance, appearing older, more grown-up, a young lady, not a fifteen-year-old adolescent, Karin Aparo walked across the lot and approached Dennis Coleman for the first time. He looked up from the open hood of his MGB sports car, listened to the request, closed the hood, picked up some tools and followed her across the parking lot. Joyce Aparo, standing beside her Volkswagen, showed him the window, demonstrated her problem. He examined the stuck window critically.

“Do you think you can fix it?” she asked.

“Sure. No trouble.”

The idea of leaving a car overnight with its window open, even in a safe suburb like Glastonbury, even in a neighborhood of culs-de-sac, had not been an appealing one. Who knew what could happen to an unprotected car late at night when everyone was asleep? The assurance by Dennis that he could fix the car was what she needed to hear. Relieved, she thanked him, then turned and started for her house. Karin stayed behind and watched as Dennis took out some tools, did a few things and quickly had the window rolling up and down. While he put away his tools, he and Karin began to talk, and for the next fifteen or twenty minutes they stood together in the parking lot by the car. Neither was able later to remember what they talked about. “This and that,” Karin said, “nothing major.”

So eighteen-year-old Dennis Coleman, within a few weeks of graduating from Glastonbury High School, took notice of fifteen-year-old Karin Aparo, just finishing ninth grade, her freshman year at that school—or, as some later had it, Karin Aparo, fifteen going on thirty, decided at that moment that Dennis Coleman, eighteen going on twelve, was the boy for her.

They had been neighbors on Butternut Drive for about two and a half years, Karin and Joyce at number 3, Dennis, his younger brother, Matt, and his mother, Carol Louise Coleman, at number 8, directly across the parking lot. Dennis's father and stepmother, coincidentally also named Carol Louise, with whom he spent most weekends, lived a few miles away, in South Glastonbury, in an old house, near the river and surrounded by woods, that had been his grandparents'.

Karin later said that she had noticed Dennis at least a year before, his red hair and his sports car impossible to miss or ignore. But she was sure he had never noticed her; there were those three years between them and she was certain Dennis was very popular with the girls his own age. Besides, it was about then that she had begun to be filled with idealized romantic fantasies about Alasdair Neal.

Dennis said later that he, too, had first noticed Karin a year before, when she was only in the eighth grade. “There was just something about her, I guess.” But he never approached her. She was, after all, just a kid, the only distinguishing marks that someone older might note being the violin case always clutched in her hand and the large glasses that seemed to cover half her face. Besides, there were all the other girls, the Michelles and the Brendas and the Denises and half a dozen more, all more mature, who had moved through and filled that part of his life, one after the other, since he had reached the age when becoming involved with girls turns into a preoccupation.

At first it seemed only a momentary, inconsequential thing, an idle passing on a spring night. Dennis later said, “I fell for her immediately. I found myself somehow willing to give more than. I had ever given in my life.” But he did nothing to show it during those first days.

Nor did Karin. In the days after that first meeting, she later wrote in her diary, she used to see Dennis often out by his car in the parking lot. She watched his car speed out of the lot and then, sometimes, race back in a few minutes later. She began to look for him at school, in the halls, with people they both knew, coming and going to classes, in a lot of different places. She nodded, they exchanged a few words, but “it was no major thing.”

Until, that is, one afternoon shortly before the start of summer vacation, when she was waiting for the school bus to take her home. In her diary Karin wrote that Dennis was standing nearby, alongside his car, talking with a friend. He happened to glance up, saw her and asked if she'd like a ride. She said yes. They started off, Karin in the front seat with Dennis, the friend in the back. It began to rain in torrents. For some reason she didn't understand, Karin started to laugh and couldn't stop laughing the whole way home. Dennis dropped his friend off, then put the MG's cover over her head to protect her; over his own head he wrapped a blue towel that blew out behind him, making him look, she thought, like an Arab. “Everything appeared so funny,” she wrote. “Now, as I look back, that was the first day in a line of many where or in which I would spend most of my time with Dennis laughing.” It was, she said, the high point of the year, her first in high school, and “I entitled it, ‘the ultimate life experience.'”

It was the start. Within days he was writing her notes and she was writing notes back to him. They established a routine, complete with their private mailbox for delivering and receiving those notes, some just a few lines, some running to page after page. A friend, Dennis noted, “told me Karin liked me, and that gave me the confidence to ‘pursue my heart's desire.'”

The last week of school, though as a graduating senior he had no classes in the morning, he drove her to school in the morning, picked her up and drove her home in the afternoon.

In the way of any romance, though, stood Joyce Aparo. She would have to be won, would have to see something in Dennis that made him suitable for Karin if the relationship were to progress beyond casual greetings. Almost unwittingly he won her over.” In my ongoing attempt to have parents (not mine) like me,” he wrote in his own diary (which, unlike Karin, who rarely missed a day in recording the ongoing events of her life, he kept only sporadically), “I gave her mother a ride to Waterbury, and thank god I did. I guess she likes me now and I think she's a neat person.”

The significance of that gesture was not lost on Karin. That particular day Joyce had trouble with her car and took it to a Volkswagen dealer near the high school. Driving by with Karin on the way to her morning classes, Dennis noticed Joyce standing in the dealer's parking lot. He asked if Karin thought Joyce might need a lift. Initially Karin said no, then changed her mind. So, once he had dropped Karin off, he returned, picked up Joyce and drove her to her job in Waterbury. That afternoon he reported to Karin what he had done. She was amazed and stunned, wanted to know everything they had talked about and everything they had done on that trip.

That ride and the conversation during it thawed Joyce. She was taken with Dennis and began to talk about him to Karin. Until then, Karin said, she had not really examined her own feelings. Now “I knew there was something there, though. It was different and it was special.”

“I'd like to say,” Dennis wrote in his own diary, “how glad I am that Karin came into my life just as graduation did. Sitting in the bleachers waiting to get my diploma, I constantly thought of her. Quite honestly, she was
all
I could think of. Anyway, I'm happy she was there for me to think of.”

And Karin wrote in her diary that on the last day of school Dennis gave her one long-stemmed rose together with a note expressing his growing fondness for her. Now he began to see more and more of her.

So it grew, for the most part unplanned, just sudden whims, sudden chance that threw them together when they were free, no formal dates set days or weeks in advance. They might see each other in the condo parking lot, somewhere in the neighborhood, anywhere, come together and then go off somewhere, anywhere.

There were those three years between them, of course, teen years that to those who have grown old enough to forget seem a nearly unbridgeable chasm. Between Dennis and Karin, it was a gap as easily crossed as if it had not existed. It was more than certain shared interests or a physical attraction that drew them together. Each had a need, a desperate one, an emptiness that the other filled, so each became indispensable to the other.

15

“I think I'd like to tell you about me. As much as is remembered,” Dennis Coleman wrote to Karin Aparo in August 1986, a long autobiography that is a mixture of fact and fancy, braggadocio and understatement, insight and naiveté. “Born Feb. 23, 1968, 8:32
A.M.
Mom sort of woke up and there I were. At six months I helped move from East Hartford—a trailer park my first home and a tenement the second one. Imagine being conceived in a mobile home? TACKY.”

It wasn't quite that bad. Dennis's grandparents were an old, established and financially comfortable Glastonbury family. Both of Dennis's parents, Dennis senior and Carol Louise, grew up in Glastonbury. They met in high school when the elder Dennis was a senior and Carol a freshman. They fell in love. And as in most high school romances they fell out of love. After a time Carol still at Glastonbury High School, Dennis in college, Carol announced that they ought to end it, that she didn't want to see him anymore. He became distraught, made an abortive suicide attempt. When he recovered, Carol took him back. They married when she finished high school, Dennis senior dropping out of college, to the displeasure of his parents. “I only found out about [them] during all that happened [to me],” Dennis junior said much later. “It was a very similar situation to Karin and me. The parallels are creepy.”