Beyond Obsession (32 page)

Outside the window Dennis was crying uncontrollably, begging her not to go, pleading with her to stay home and be with him.

“I lied to him,” Karin says. “I did want to go. I was looking forward to the concert and the reception afterwards and being with Alex. But Dennis was so jealous, and I didn't want him to think I wanted to be with Alex. I was afraid of what he might do.”

She sent Dennis away, assuring him passionately that she loved him and would be with him always once she returned.

On Friday, July 31, she and Joyce drove to Greenwich and that evening went to the nursing home party. She called Dennis from one of the offices during that party, without Joyce's knowledge. The reason she called him, she says, was that she was worried about her two cats, Godfrey and Winston. “Mom had said I wasn't to worry about the cats because they could take care of themselves. But the weather was very hot, and I was afraid they would run out of water. So I called Dennis and asked him to please go into the house and feed Godfrey and Winston; otherwise they might not make it through the weekend. He had his own key. He had made a copy before of mine. He said okay, he would take care of them.”

The only other thing they talked about, she says, was when she was coming home. “I told him we'd be home on Tuesday, which was August 4.”

On Saturday, August I, she, Joyce and Albert and Alex Markov drove to Binghamton. They stayed in a hotel for three days. “Alex had a rehearsal and then a concert and then a reception party afterwards. I had a very good time. Alex was the soloist, and the reception was held in a big hall, and everybody, got all dressed up. It was wonderful.”

Early in the morning of Tuesday, August 4, they left Binghamton for Rowayton, Karin and Alex in one car, Joyce and Albert Markov in another. They reached the Markov house about four in the morning and went to bed. “My feelings toward my mother were very good then,” she says. “We had a good weekend together.”

About nine-thirty that morning Joyce woke her, told her she was leaving for Saybrook, where she had a business appointment, and then would be driving home. Karin, she said, should stay on in Rowayton for another day. Joyce would drive down in the Volkswagen Jetta that Athena was leasing for her and pick her up on Wednesday (Karin's car had gone to the scrap heap).

About three o'clock that afternoon Karin called Dennis to tell him they were back, but not in Glastonbury. They had reached the Markovs' very early in the morning, she told him, and she was going to stay on until Wednesday. There was no need for him to go back to the Aparos' condo to see to the cats, she said, because Joyce would be home and would take care of them herself.

“Why are you staying?” Dennis demanded. “You're supposed to be back here. You told me you were coming back today.”

“There isn't anything I can do about it,” she said. “Mom is making me stay over.” That wasn't true, but she says, “I didn't want Dennis to be mad.”

As they were talking, Dennis mentioned that he had left a note for her when he had been in the condo over the weekend. “I hope,” he said, “she doesn't find it.”

“Where did you leave it?” Karin asked.

“Between the sheets of your bed.”

She told him not to worry. Joyce wouldn't find it because she never looked there.

Later that afternoon Joyce called Rowayton to tell Karin that she was home and that she was making out a list of things for Karin to do. The whole house was filthy, she said, and she wanted Karin to clean it when she got home on Wednesday. The best thing would be if Alex would drive her up to Glastonbury in the morning; otherwise Joyce would drive down late in the afternoon and get her.

Soon after that call from Joyce, Karin phoned Dennis again. She told him Joyce was home, was complaining that the house was dirty and demanding that Karin clean it. Joyce intended to pick her up on Wednesday afternoon. Dennis was very unhappy about the delay in her return. He complained that she should already have been home. He sounded upset.

At midevening Karin called Joyce, who told her that Shannon had called, they had spoken for about a half hour, and Shannon wanted to see Karin when she got back to Glastonbury. Joyce said that was all right with her, but before they got together, Karin had to do the laundry. “Then my mom said she was very tired and she was going to bed early.”

About nine that evening Dennis called. “He said he didn't understand why I wasn't there. He said, ‘If she's making you stay there, she's coming between us. I think I should kill her. When you come back, you'll never have to go to Rowayton again.'”

According to Karin, all these calls were made from and received in the Markovs' living room, and Alex was in and out all the time.

After the last call from Dennis she stayed up for a while, then, very tired, went to bed.

About eleven the next morning the phone rang. It was for her. The caller was Michael Zaccaro. He told her that Joyce's car had been found abandoned in Massachusetts.

24

July 28–August 5, 1987: Dennis Coleman's Story

There is a different version of what happened that week. On July 28, after their traumatic ride, Dennis returned to the Aparo condo and stood outside Karin's window. “She began pressuring me,” he says. “She began telling me that she couldn't live with her mother any longer. She was crying and saying she couldn't take it any longer, and she was begging me to kill her mother. And I was standing outside, and I was crying, too, I was so upset about what had happened and what was happening and what she wanted me to do and that she was so upset.”

He stood outside the window for fifteen or twenty minutes, Karin inside crying and pleading with him, Dennis crying and trying to discourage her, to find some way to turn this thing, the idea of murder, aside. Then, he says, Karin came up with a plan. The way to kill Joyce, she proposed, was to cut the brake lines on her car; that way she wouldn't be able to stop, would have an accident at some speed, for she was a fast driver, and would be killed. “She was pleading with me to do it, and I was telling her I was not sure it was a good idea and I was afraid I was going to get caught. She assured me I wouldn't.”

The pleading and the pressure were too much, and at last he agreed. He turned from the window, got into his car and drove away, went to an auto supply store and bought wire cutters. He drove back to the Aparo condo, into the parking lot and sat in his car, staring at Joyce's Volkswagen. “I couldn't do it. Every now and then people would be coming by, but that wasn't it. I just couldn't do it. So I gave up and went back over to Karin's window and it was dark and I tapped a few times, but she didn't move or come to the window. I gave up and went home.”

The next day, Wednesday, he says he spoke to her briefly, told her that he hadn't been able to carry out the plan, that he had gone to her window and tapped, intending to tell her, but she didn't appear. Her response was anger.

Thursday night, at nine o'clock, he was back outside the window. “She was packing, and I was watching her pack, and she was pleading with me. ‘This is it,' she kept saying, ‘it has to be tonight.' They were leaving for Binghamton in the morning, and she told me she didn't want to go and she couldn't go, but her mother was making her. I was in tears outside the window, telling her I couldn't do it, and she was in tears inside the house on the other side of the window, begging me to do it, and her mother kept coming in and out asking for help or something, and she kept going off to talk to her mother, and then she'd come back and it would start over.”

As they talked, plans, details, contingencies began to emerge and be spelled out. A week earlier, when Karin had first begun to press him on the necessity for murdering Joyce, a method had come up about creating a poison gas by mixing ammonia and bleach. “I can't remember who brought it up first,” he says, “but I didn't really know that much about the ammonia-bleach thing. I may even have brought it up first because I thought of it, but she helped me with the ratios and exactly what was going to happen. It was three to one, but I can't remember whether it was three parts ammonia and one of bleach or the other way around.”

So they worked it out. Before they went to bed, Karin would leave the door unlocked, and after everyone was asleep, Dennis would enter the condo, soak a rag in the mixture of ammonia and bleach, go into Joyce's bedroom, put the rag over her face and kill her. There was an alternative plan. If the ammonia-bleach combination didn't asphyxiate Joyce, Dennis would strangle her. When Joyce was dead, Karin “would stay in the house and clean up, get rid of the fingerprints, vacuum, wash the sheets, dust, make sure there were no traces of me left in the house.”

Dennis's job at that point would be to get rid of Joyce's body. He would have to take it away somewhere and dump it. There had to be a body found, Karin said, because of the insurance; she couldn't collect without proof of death. And while he was disposing of Joyce's body, she told him, she wanted him to take the rings off Joyce's fingers: They were valuable, and she wanted them for herself.

Finally the plotting ended. “I left not sure of myself. I was not sure whether I was going to go through with it or not, and she was not sure whether I was going to or not either. She was assuming that I was going to show up that night. I never did. I went home and went to bed. I couldn't do it.”

So the murder did not come off, and the next morning Joyce and Karin left for Greenwich and then went on to Binghamton.

Karin called from Greenwich. “At first she was upset. She asked me why I didn't show up and do it. I told her I couldn't. She said, ‘I just don't understand,' And then it was kind of weird. She asked me to go into the house and take care of the cats while they were gone, and that she'd be home on Tuesday morning.”

He went into the condo, using his key, the next day to feed the cats and do other chores. While there, he walked into her bedroom. “I saw the picture of her and Alex on her dresser. I didn't like it at all, and I walked out of there.”

He returned to the condo on Monday afternoon. He fed the cats again, went back into her bedroom. “That's when I picked up her diary. I held on to it, and then I put it back without opening it. It was her private property, and it wasn't right for me to look inside. I should have. If I had read that diary, I wouldn't have killed anybody, not Joyce, not Karin, not anybody. Because she was telling me, on the one hand, that her mother was making her do all those things, and on the other hand, if I had read the diary, I would have seen there was nothing in it about her mother making her do anything; she was doing all these things—going to Rowayton, sleeping with Alex—because she wanted to. And there was the stuff she wrote about me. If I had read the diary, there wouldn't have been any reason for me to kill Joyce or anybody.”

Later the question of whether or not he read the diary was raised again and again, debated and argued endlessly. Those who insist that he must have read it say that what he found there so shattered him that it spurred him on to take revenge and so to kill Joyce Aparo. They also maintain that since there is nothing in the diary about Karin's feeling a desperate need to escape her mother's domination, nothing about plots and plans to kill her mother, it is patent that she did not feel that need and did not beg or plead with Dennis to murder Joyce Aparo.

But there are people who find Dennis's story believable. As he said, what was there in the diary that would have driven him to murder the mother? There was nothing about Joyce's forcing Karin to spend time in Rowayton, nothing about Joyce's fostering an affair between Karin and Alex Markov, little even about disputes between Karin and Joyce, nothing certainly about wanting her mother dead. If what was written there was reason for murder, it was not for the murder of Joyce Aparo but rather for the murder of Karin Aparo or Alex Markov. And Dennis Coleman did not murder Alex Markov and would never have considered murdering Karin Aparo.

Yet another question hovers over the diary. Why was it left so openly in that bedside drawer, where anyone who entered the room might find and read it? Karin was certainly not blind to the fact that her mother often entered her room, was not hesitant about opening her drawers, searching through them and reading whatever she found. Realizing that at any time Joyce might come upon and read the diary, would Karin have written in it anything about her anger, about her bitterness, even about her disenchantment with the violin or about a desperate desire to be free and have Joyce out of the way? Among all the mundane events that fill those pages, the major subject is the affair with Alex Markov, an affair of which Joyce Aparo fully and enthusiastically approved.

Karin also understood Dennis well enough by then, had enough experience with him, to know that he indeed respected her privacy, that she could leave things in the open and he would not look at them without her approval. She had been witness to it often over the previous year.

So Dennis says he didn't read that diary. Instead, he sat down on Karin's bed and wrote her a note beginning, “I will ‘do the deed.'” He had been thinking about it, had been thinking about little else since she left, and was now determined that he would do it. “The whole thing wasn't real,” he says. “It was surreal, fantasyland. I was in a nightmare, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's happening, and you're not in control of it. Just watching it happen and nothing you can do to stop it. My back was against the wall, and there was nowhere to run. The only option I thought she gave me was to kill myself or do that. All this time later I don't know if she thought I would really do it, but she kept pushing me to see how far she could push me.” In his mind, variations on the plot had jelled. She and Joyce would not be home before Tuesday, so nothing could be done before they arrived. Once both were home, he and Karin would have time to talk more about his revised plan.