Beyond Obsession (6 page)

Then Karin went to the phone and called Dennis. “She was consoling him and telling him not to worry,” Shannon remembers.

3

Joyce Aparo had been dead for two days before Karin went home for the first time. A little after ten in the morning Friday, August 7, Susan Dubois dropped her off outside the condo, watched as Karin went up the walk, unlocked the door and went inside. Then she drove away. For fifteen or twenty minutes Karin was alone.

About ten-thirty Jeff Sands arrived, and a few minutes later, Mike Zaccaro and Roland Butler showed up. Over the next half hour they roamed through the apartment and went down to the basement to search the file cabinet Joyce kept there, a cabinet containing mainly a mass of personal letters. It was a filing cabinet the police were never aware existed; they were not told of it, and they did not then or later ever investigate the basement. Back upstairs Karin led Sands, Zaccaro and Butler to a closet in Joyce's bedroom and pointed to a small valise filled with papers—insurance policies, will, title for the condominium, mortgage papers and more. In a dresser drawer in that room, they came upon an American Express card and a number of bills, including an American Express bill that contained a notation about payments for American Express life insurance. Sands and Zaccaro took all those papers, sat on the bed and began to go through them. “Up to that moment,” Sands said, “we thought that what with the debts there wouldn't be much of an estate.” Now they discovered that there was indeed an estate, and it was not small. There was a group insurance policy on Joyce's life taken out by Athena and valued at about $50,000 and the American Express life insurance worth another $55,000, and both were increased by indemnity clauses in case of accidental death. Perhaps most important of all, among the papers they found a credit life insurance policy that paid off the mortgage on the condo, leaving the title free and clear. Mike Zaccaro did some figuring. Joyce Aparo's estate, he estimated, was worth between $350,000 and $375,000, and even after deduction of the outstanding debts, which came to about $46,000, Karin, as the main beneficiary under the will would net something over $300,000. Sands and Zaccaro explained all this to Karin. “She seemed quite happy about it,” Sands says.

At some point during all this paper work Karin walked out of her mother's bedroom and into her own room. The doorbell rang. Sands went to answer it. Revoir and Beth Libby, a female officer, were outside. He let them in, and they all went into the living room. Karin came out of her room. In one hand she was holding two pieces of paper, folded twice. Revoir, who had not seen Karin before, asked her to take a tour of the apartment with him. They wandered about. Karin looked around. She said that her mother's purse and wallet, with some cash and credit cards, were missing. In her own room she pointed to a pair of sunglasses on her desk and told Revoir she had never seen them before. Revoir put them in an evidence bag. She opened the drawer in her bedside table, Revoir standing by her. In the drawer were three diaries. “I asked him if he wanted them,” Karin says, “and he said no, he had already read them and he had no interest in them.”

Back in the living room, Karin sat on the sofa, the folded papers still visible in her hand. Revoir sat on the sofa near her. Zaccaro and Butler sat nearby. Sands was in a chair directly across from her. Over the next hour or so Revoir and Libby questioned Karin about her mother's background. “I was just kind of listening,” Sands says, “and I thought,
Gee, they asked that question a couple of minutes ago
. Karin hadn't caught on to that, and the answers she was giving weren't quite the same answers she gave the last time. Close, but not quite. All of a sudden, I'm thinking,
Aha, this is an interrogation
. Why would you ask the same question three different ways unless you wanted to see if there's some kind of inconsistency in the answer? So I said to the officer, ‘Wait a second here. Look, is this any kind of interrogation? I want you to tell me right now, is Karin is a suspect?'

“He said, ‘Well, no, she's not.'

“I said, ‘Fine. To the extent that your questions have to do with mundane matters like who had the key, who gave it to whom, things like that, I'll let it go on. But I want to tell you, I'm not a criminal attorney, but if this thing gets out of hand, it's going to stop there.' It pretty much stopped then.”

But Sands had noticed something that everyone else was overlooking. The papers in Karin's hand. Revoir asked no questions about them, did not seem to be aware of them. Sands watched and waited. About halfway through the interview Revoir and Libby took a break, got up and walked out of the room. Karin unfolded the papers and read them. She refolded them, crumpled them in her hand, paused, got up, walked over to an open green Hefty garbage bag and threw them inside. Revoir and Libby were just returning to the room. Karin was in full view of everybody. Nobody commented. Mike Zaccaro noticed but, he says, “I didn't think it was anything unusual.” Jeff Sands watched but said and did nothing. Nobody else seemed to pay any attention.

The questioning resumed, went on for a little time more, and then Revoir and Libby left. As soon as they were out the door, Sands looked at Karin. “Karin,” he said, “I saw you take those pieces of paper and throw them away. If they have anything to do with your mother's death, we have to talk about it.”

Karin rose from the sofa and went to the garbage bag, reached in, retrieved the papers and handed them to Sands. He read the first page, looked up at her, then read the second page. “Who wrote this?” he asked.

“Dennis,” she said.

“Where did you find it?”

“Between the sheets of my bed,” she said.

Sands reread the note. The first page said:

To My Dreamgirl

I will “do the deed.” I PROMISE YOU!!

The second page read:

Monday. 4:15
P
.
M
.

Karin,

Hi dear. How was your trip?
O.K
. I hope. I missed you horribly. Come back soon. Listen, I've got a plan for this week. Almost all the details are set. We must seriously talk. It could work. I hate those pictures on your dresser. (Sorry, I wasn't trying to be nosey.) Had a bizarre dream. Your mother was in it. If your mom goes to work tomorrow either call me at work, or I'll pass by on my way home. I can't wait to talk to you. Do you still love me? (I hope). I love you more than ever. Please don't ever leave me. I see good times for us in the near future. We'll have fun. Well, the Dud's [the cat] been fed, we played for a while. Ring me tonight
any
time if you can. See you soon? Can't wait. We'll soon be havin' a party, you and me. I promise. I'm so in love with you my dear. I will ask you to marry me someday—the right way.
The
most romantic and loving way I can. I PROMISE. See you soon.

Love,

Den

P.S. I've been eating more lately,

and haven't felt sick—good?

Sands looked up at her. “Why did you throw this away?”

Karin said, “I was scared.”

Sands turned to Zaccaro and Butler and asked them to leave the condo for a while because he had to talk to Karin privately. They left.

When they were alone, Sands told her she had to turn the note over to the police immediately. The police had been in and out of the condo since Joyce's murder. They had searched it thoroughly. They must have found that note and then put it back between the sheets to see whether she would try to destroy it or give it to them. If she didn't turn it over, a lot of suspicion would fall on her. At the very least, she might be charged with hindering prosecution, a potentially serious crime. If she had anything to worry about, he said, he would get her a criminal lawyer.

Karin offered little resistance. She said that she didn't need a criminal lawyer, that she had nothing to hide, that she was just upset because the note was from Dennis. Until then Sands had never heard of Dennis Coleman.

Sands held the note and started for the door. Karin followed. He drove her to the command post at the Naubuc Elementary School. When they arrived, Revoir was outside in the parking lot. Sands walked up to him and said that Karin had found a note in the apartment from her friend Dennis Coleman, and they thought Revoir ought to have it. Revoir led them inside, took the note and read it, with interest and a little surprise. Sands had been wrong in his surmise. As it happened, the police had not come upon the note. During their searches of the apartment they had barely looked in Karin's room.

Where had she found it? Revoir asked.

Between the sheets of her bed.

What did it mean, the deed and the plan?

Dennis had been having problems with his stomach, she said. They thought perhaps he had an ulcer. She had one, and maybe he did, too. The plan, she explained, was that he was finally going to see a doctor. There was just one thing, she said. She didn't want Dennis angry at her and thinking she was trying to make trouble for him if somebody happened to read the note the wrong way. So, if they asked him about it, would they tell him that they had been in her bedroom with her, that when she sat down on her bed, they all heard paper crinkling and wanted to know what the sound was, so she was forced to reach between the sheets, take out the note and give it to them?

Revoir agreed to pass on that explanation when he talked to Dennis Coleman. He decided not to press her at that moment on whether the note might really have another, more sinister meaning, though he was pretty sure the one she had given was made of whole cloth. Revoir was pretty sure he knew what the note was really about, and the fact that it had been left in Karin's bed indicated to him that she might know a lot more than she was letting on.

Revoir knew the law and knew the limits it placed on him. If he pushed too hard, alarm bells would go off, Jeff Sands would call a criminal lawyer and the possibility of any further cooperation from Karin would come to a sudden end.

Revoir also suspected that Karin might have more to say. The way the note had been found, her open display of it, and her lack of resistance to the idea of turning it in led him to wonder if perhaps she was setting Dennis Coleman up to take a fall.

The thing to do, then, was bring Dennis in, show him the note, tell him Karin's tale of how it had been found, see what he had to say and look for inconsistencies.

Dennis Coleman was a little late getting home from the Tallwoods Country Club that afternoon. He had stopped on the way to take care of an errand that he knew should have been done before, at least a day, if not two days, earlier. The stop had been at the Glastonbury town dump. The errand had been to toss a couple of bulging plastic garbage bags into the compactor.

Soon after he reached his father's house in South Glastonbury, the state cops showed up and asked him if he would accompany them to the command post to answer a few more questions. For three hours that afternoon and on into the evening, they went over the story he had told them two days before. And they found the inconsistencies.

He had an explanation for the note, of course. The “deed” he was writing about meant that he was finally going to get a doctor's appointment to see about his stomach troubles.

As for the “plan,” he and Karin were always making plans for what they would do, how they would manage to be together. That's what the note was all about. The plan “was our plan for the future,” he said. The thing about marrying the right way meant “She was romantic. She wanted a formal proposal, a formal ring, horse-drawn carriage, down on my knees, that kind of thing. Because the first time I proposed to her, I gave her a paper ring.”

He had left the note between the sheets of her bed because it was something he did all the time. They were always writing notes and letters to each other, sometimes three or four in one day, and leaving them in the other's room. This was just another of those notes. He had left this one between the sheets of her bed, which was where he often left notes, either on Sunday, August 2, or Monday, August 3, he couldn't remember which because he was in and out of the apartment, feeding the cats and doing the other things Joyce and Karin had asked him to do while they were away. She had told him she would be home on Tuesday, and he was sure she would find it then.

They let all that hang for the moment. They turned to the night of the murder. He had told them when first questioned that he was with his friend Frank Manganaro. But they had talked to Manganaro, and he had told them that yes, he had seen Dennis that night, but it had been at the home of another friend, Kira Lintner, and Kira's boyfriend and their mutual friend Chris Wheatley had been with them, too. Manganaro said they had spent the evening drinking some beer and watching three horror movies; he remembered one,
Friday the 13th
, but he couldn't remember others. He and Kira had left about midnight, to go out and buy a Garfield mug. Dennis and Chris had remained behind.

That was right, Dennis admitted. He had been so upset about Joyce that he'd gotten things mixed up. Actually Frank was right. What he said was exactly what they had done. The one thing he wasn't certain about, he said, was the chronology. He was sure he'd left Kira's about eleven-thirty and had gone straight home to bed because he had to be up early to be at work at seven in the morning.

It was early evening before the police finished with him. By then Dennis Coleman knew he had become the prime suspect in the murder of Joyce Aparo. Indeed, the cops had asked him directly if he had killed her. He had denied it, but he was sure they didn't believe him. He was badly shaken, and it showed in his face when he walked through the door. His father took one look at him and asked, “Dennis, do you need legal help?”

“Yes.”

Dennis Coleman, Sr., asked his son just one more question. “Did you do it?”