Beyond Obsession (7 page)

Dennis Coleman, Jr., nodded his head yes.

His father turned and went to the phone.

The lawyer Dennis Coleman, Sr., called that night was Maurice Hatcher Norris. In his late thirties, balding, of medium height, Reese Norris is a man with a zest for battle, with a dramatic courtroom style, a man who has realized his childhood dream. “I always wanted to be not just a lawyer,” he says, “but a courtroom lawyer, and a criminal lawyer at that.” That was what he had become.

This was a dream he worked hard to achieve. A native of New Jersey, graduate of Rutgers, he had gone on to the University of Connecticut Law School. As a student he went to work as an intern in the federal public defender's office, for free when it turned out that the public defender had no funds for interns. By the time he was graduated, Norris had handled briefs and assisted on enough cases to begin creating a reputation. At that point he turned to the other side and became an assistant United States attorney in Connecticut, a job he held until, in 1978, he struck out on his own. In the years since, he has become one of the most successful, and expensive, criminal lawyers in southern New England, a lawyer who has lost only about a half dozen of the hundred or more cases he has handled that have gone to trial, many of his victories coming in cases that seemed at first unwinnable. The result has been that he is able to afford the expensive custom-made Porsche sports car he loves, whose license plate reads “NT-GLTY,” and other cars, the large sprawling house on several acres in Glastonbury where he lives with his wife and two children and the good clothes he wears, just about all he wants.

Norris met with Dennis for the first time the following morning. It is not, of course, a defense attorney's job to do the police's work for them or to see that legal justice is served. It doesn't matter whether the client is guilty or innocent, for under the law every person has the right to the best counsel he or she can get. The attorney's job is to defend the client as best as he or she can. Norris listened to his new client, who told the lawyer he had done the deed but told him little else, identified no one else as having been involved in any way.

While they were sitting at the Colemans' dining-room table during this initial conference, the telephone rang. It was for Dennis. He took it, listened, said into the phone, “Mr. Norris is here with me now.” When he returned to the table, he told Norris that the caller had been his girl friend, Karin Aparo. She knew he was in trouble, he said, and so she had asked Aldor Dubois, at whose house she was staying, if he knew the names of any criminal lawyers. Dubois had mentioned two, Reese Norris and Hubert Santos, a man in his forties with whom Norris had worked when he was a volunteer intern and Santos was a senior attorney in the federal public defender's office; Santos, now in private practice, is considered one of the state's most prominent and inventive criminal lawyers. Karin was calling to pass on those recommendations. Later, when she needed a lawyer of her own, she turned to Santos.

When the conference was over, Norris began making some preliminary inquiries of his own. As far as he could see, the police might have their suspicions, but they had no solid evidence to back them up. The best strategy at that moment, he decided, was to stonewall.

So on Monday, when the police arrived at the Coleman house, Norris was ready for them. The police wanted to interview Dennis again. Norris said no way. They could sit there as long as they wanted and talk about the weather or the baseball scores or anything they wanted, but not about Joyce Aparo or anything to do with her. They wanted to search Dennis's room. Norris said to go try to get a search warrant, and if they did, he would go to court and argue that they had no probable cause for the issuance of such a warrant.

For the moment the police were stymied. They had a suspect, Dennis Coleman. But that was all. As for putting together a solid, convicting case, all they had was a lot of talk from a lot of people, an overheard phone call and a note that might mean nothing or everything. It was not enough.

4

Karin, Sands, and Zaccaro devoted the early part of Saturday, August 8, to the grim task of making the necessary arrangements for Joyce Aparo's funeral. They had no choice; no one else could do it. Their first stop was a funeral home, to see about shipping Joyce's body from Springfield and to set a time and place for the service and burial, which they did in consultation with Archbishop John Whealon. Then they proceeded into the home's showroom to select a coffin from among the dozen or more on display, standing open both to reveal the texture of the interior and, according to those who know, to calm the fears of the mourners that the boxes they are viewing are not empty. What happened then caused both to begin to suspect that Karin was not as innocent as she proclaimed, that she was somehow involved in the murder of her mother. For they were stunned by her actions, by her lack of emotion.

“She was so cold,” Zaccaro remembers, “that it was almost unbelievable. When the undertaker took us around to show us the coffins, she didn't look at the boxes; she looked at the price tags and chose the cheapest one. We finally persuaded her to upgrade at least a little.”

Sands was still at this point finding rationalization for Karin's behavior. “She was,” he said, “concerned about the cost of the funeral and how she was going to pay for it, and she seemed upset by that.”

The undertaker asked about the notice in the paper, whether she wanted one in the Hartford
Courant
and what it should say. Did Joyce have any relatives and, if so, who should be included? Neither Sands nor Zaccaro knew much about Joyce's personal history; she rarely discussed it. They knew that within recent years she had been married to and soon divorced from a man named Ed Murphy, for both knew Murphy and had been involved with Joyce and him during the courtship, marriage and breakup. Now they discovered that not only did she have another former husband, Michael Aparo, about whom they were aware, but that both her mother, Rose Cantone, and her sister, Ina Camblor, lived in nearby South Windsor, and that there was a brother, Thomas Cantone, a construction executive in White Plains, New York. But Karin wanted no mention of any of them in the obituary. “She was so hysterical about it,” Sands says, “that we told the funeral director in front of Karin, don't include them. After we'd made all the arrangements, I went back in and said, ‘Look, do me a favor. We don't know who these people are. Could you please track down their addresses and phone numbers, because we're going to need them anyhow, and prepare the notices for the
Courant
and the other papers, and include those names? I don't think it's right not to have those people in there. I think they'd be very offended.'”

They were. The funeral home managed to track down Joyce's sister, Ina Camblor, in South Windsor. “They called her,” Sands says, “and told her that Karin didn't want her included in the obituary. The next day I'm out mowing the lawn and I get a call and I come to the phone and it's Ina Camblor, and who I don't know from Adam. And the phone call starts, ‘You no good son of a bitch …' She was livid. She was screaming and yelling about the idea that she wouldn't be included in the death notice. I calmed her down, and I told her, ‘Look, the situation was that Karin was hysterical at the time, and you can understand that. She wasn't thinking straight. The reason you got called at all was because we wanted to make sure you got into the death notice.' After about ten minutes she calmed down, and then she gave me her brother's name and her mother's and everything.

“To me, it was absolutely amazing because Karin had indicated to us that there had been a real estrangement between her mother and her family. Ina Camblor readily admitted that there had been a real freeze between Joyce and her family, for whatever reason, she didn't go into it, but that Karin was her blood, her family, and whenever there was a crisis, her family came together. They would be there for Karin, money, shelter, whatever she needed.”

From the funeral home Karin, Sands and Zaccaro went back to the condominium, to choose the clothes in which Joyce would be buried. “We went into her closet,” Zaccaro says, “and we went through a lot of things. Then Karin picked out this sleazy green pants outfit. It was about the cheapest thing there. Jeff and I picked out a very nice dress. Karin said no. She said she wanted that dress for herself. Eventually Jeff and I persuaded her to choose at least a dress for Joyce to be buried in.”

The undertaker took one look at that dress when they returned and was incensed. It wouldn't do at all, he told Karin. It was just too garish. He demanded that she go back home and pick something more appropriate. She did, but the experience was distressing enough to him that in the time that followed he related it to many of his friends.

Susan and Shannon Dubois took Karin shopping for an appropriate dress for her to wear the next day. On the way back to the house Karin was alone in the rear seat of the Duboises' car. The sky was dark, rain pouring down. Karin began to cry. She had not shed many tears until then. These were the first that either Shannon or Susan Dubois had witnessed. Shannon reached over the seat and held her hand, tried to say comforting things to console her. She turned to her mother and said she was sure Karin was crying because suddenly she was struck by the thought of Joyce lying out in the rain under the bridge in Bernardston before her body was found.

Joyce's funeral was scheduled for Wednesday, August 12, exactly a week after she was murdered. A few days before the funeral the Markovs appeared at the Dubois house. To everyone's astonishment, Karin announced that she was leaving with them. Alex was giving a concert in Philadelphia, and she intended to be there. She would be back in time for the service. It might not be seemly, but she didn't seem to care. She did ask Jeff Sands what he thought, and Sands told her it was not a bad idea for her to get away for a few days. She went.

As she had said, she was back in Glastonbury in time for the funeral. In the morning Alex Markov rode with Karin in the lead limousine to the funeral chapel and then with her behind the hearse to the cemetery. At the funeral chapel Joyce's closed coffin was in a private room. Karin went into that room with Archbishop Whealon and a few others. To the shock of some who were there, she went to the funeral director and demanded that the coffin be opened and left open. He was reluctant. She insisted. He opened the casket. Karin stood over it, staring down at her mother's body, walked around and looked at the body from every angle. It was the first time she had seen her mother since that morning in Rowayton when Joyce set out on her final errands. “I was in shock,” Karin said later, “I didn't know what to do.” She saw a dark mark around the neck, where the panty hose had been wrapped and tightened to strangle, saw purple bruises all the way down the chest, saw bruises and blotches on the arms between the wrists and elbows, noted the ring still on her mother's finger and that “her face was distorted, it looked out of shape.”

To Jeff Sands, she looked emotionally shaken, leaning against Archbishop Whealon as if for comfort. But others saw something else in that scene. One later said, “Karin acted like she wanted to make sure Joyce was really in there.”

There were services first in the funeral chapel. It was packed, all the seats filled, people standing at the back and along the sides. The open coffin rested in front of the altar. Karin and Alex Markov sat in the first row. Ina Camblor, her brother, Thomas Cantone, and their mother, Rose Cantone, sat across the aisle.

One of those people standing was Carol Parkola. She arrived just before the services were to begin. There were no seats, so she stood at the rear of the chapel. She was perhaps Joyce Aparo's oldest continuing friend. They had met while college freshmen and had maintained their friendship through the years. Carol lived in Florida now, but she returned to Connecticut for a two-week visit every August, and during those weeks she and Joyce talked often on the phone, had lunch and dinner together, spent time at each other's homes. This August Carol was making her annual pilgrimage north. “I got in, and I was going to call Joyce,” she remembers, “but my sister and I spent the Tuesday on a boat down at the shore and it was late when we got home. So I said, ‘Well, I'll call her tomorrow night,' because I couldn't call her during the day because she was at work, ‘and we'll get together for dinner.' But something came up, and I didn't call, and then my father and I were listening to the news with half an ear, because the national news was over and I wasn't that interested in the local news. And we both said, ‘What did he say? Did he say Aparo? He couldn't have.' Then the newspaper came the next morning, and I just, well, I couldn't believe it. For a long time I felt so guilty, and I kept saying to myself, ‘What if I had only called her, would I have had her on the phone and then the person who did it couldn't have and she'd still be alive?'”

All she could do was go to the funeral. At the funeral chapel “I found Michael [Aparo], who was the only one I really knew, and I spoke to him, and he said, ‘Have you spoken to Karin?' I said no, so he took me down to Karin. He wasn't even sitting with her. There was a boy sitting next to her; I found out later it was Alex Markov. I was so upset and I was trying to compose myself and talk to her without breaking up and it was all I could do to tell her how sorry I was, and this kid Karin was sitting there and she was not the least bit broken up or upset. She just kept talking to this guy.

“When the service was over, I was standing at the back of the funeral home while they were taking the coffin out the other way, and she came out past me, and she couldn't have been more than a few feet from me and she was laughing and talking with this guy and she wasn't broken up at all. I said to my mother later, ‘I can't understand it, she wasn't upset at all.' Then somebody pointed out the sister to me, and I went over and spoke to her, and she was all, like ‘Oh, my poor sister,' she was just all broken up and crying so hard she couldn't speak to me, and her brother was holding her up and helping her out. That day you would have thought they were this close, extremely close; only I knew they hadn't even had anything to do with each other for years and years.”