Beyond Obsession (8 page)

From the funeral home the procession wound its way to the cemetery. There, as he had in the chapel, Archbishop Whealon conducted the service. When he finished, the prayers for the dead said, the services over at the graveside, just as people were getting ready to leave, Karin rose and went to the funeral director. She told him to start filling in the grave immediately. He was stunned. It shouldn't be done, he said, until after everyone was gone. Karin wanted it done then. She wanted no delays. He finally agreed. But except for a shovelful, to show that he was complying, the grave was not filled until the cemetery cleared.

The mourners filed from the cemetery toward the waiting cars. Karin, with Alex Markov at her side, moved toward the limousine that had been rented for her. As she was about to get into it, Lori DeLucca, who had known Karin since fourth grade and had once been a close friend, remembers distinctly, for it was something she could not forget, Karin's turning to the crowd and saying, “Will everyone clap as I make my grand exit?”

The mourners gathered at the Duboises' that afternoon. There was nowhere else to gather. Though Joyce's mother, sister and brother appeared for the funeral, gathered around Karin and offered her their support, support that increased in the time ahead, they had been estranged from Joyce for years, and Karin had little fondness for them. She would not hear of their receiving those attending the funeral. The proper place was where she was, and that was at the home of the Dubois family.

Soon after she reached the house, Karin went into the kitchen. Lori DeLucca happened to be in the room. Karin picked up the phone and dialed. “I need to talk to you,” she said into the mouthpiece. “I'm okay. But, oh, boy.” She hung up, turned to Lori and said, “Dennis will be stopping over pretty soon.”

Dennis had not seen Karin since the moment he left his home for work the morning after Joyce's murder. Later that day she had settled in with the Duboises. They had spoken briefly on the phone once or twice, including the call in which she had given him the names of Reese Norris and Hubert Santos as criminal lawyers who might be able to help him, but that was all.

It was not long before Dennis Coleman arrived. He had not been at the funeral services. He and Karin greeted each other. Lori DeLucca and several others saw them standing in a hallway, then walk away and disappear into a bathroom.

Out in the living room Jeff Sands looked around and saw that Karin was missing. Somebody said she was in the bathroom with Dennis. He walked that way and spotted them through the open door. It was the first time he had ever seen Dennis Coleman, though over the week since the murder he had heard his name often and had become increasingly suspicious of him, increasingly convinced that Dennis was the murderer of Joyce Aparo. “They seemed to be a little agitated,” he remembers. “I stuck my head in and said, ‘Is everything all right, Karin?' She said, ‘Yeah, no problem.'” Sands walked on.

The door closed. How long they were in that bathroom behind the closed door is a matter of dispute; a few years later it became of critical importance.

Soon after they entered, Alex Markov approached the door, knocked on it, said, in his thick Russian accent, “Karin, I'd like to talk to you.”

From behind the door Karin said, “Not right now, Alex.”

Markov continued to stand by the door, knocked a couple of times more, repeated the request and was met with the same reply.

What happened in that bathroom, as what happened on other occasions and what was said, depends on who is doing the telling.

Says Dennis Coleman: “She started asking me questions about the murder. They were the same questions she had asked over the phone from the police station. I couldn't understand why she was asking those questions when she already knew all the answers. We were in there about five minutes, that's all.”

His estimate of the time, at least, is supported by Lori DeLucca and a few others who saw them enter and then saw them depart.

Says Karin Aparo: “I wanted to tell him what I had seen on my mother, and I wanted to him to explain it all to me. He did. This was the first time Dennis told me the details of how he had murdered my mother, and it took him more than fifteen minutes to do it.”

Jeff Sands agrees with Karin's estimate of the time. He saw her disappear into the bathroom, and then he strolled back to the living room. He says that he next saw her emerging from the area around the bathroom fifteen or twenty minutes later.

However long they were in that bathroom, eventually the door opened and Karin and Dennis emerged. Alex Markov was standing right beside the door. The three of them walked into the living room. There Karin turned to Dennis and said, “Does Denny need a hug?”

Dennis looked at her and said, “From you?”

She nodded and said, “I guess so.” Then she put her arms around him and held him close. They moved to the couch and sat next to each other. Karin, says someone who was watching, seemed very warm toward Dennis.

From across the room Jeff Sands was watching carefully. “Karin looked a little funny,” Sands says, “and I walked by, and she stands up very casually and says, ‘Oh, Jeff, I think I need a breath of fresh air. Would you walk outside with me?'”

Out in the backyard Karin turned to Sands and said, “Jeff, I know something, and I need help.”

Sands said, “Anything to do with the murder?”

“Yes.”

“Karin,” he said, “do you want a criminal attorney?”

“No.”

“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“Dennis just confessed to me. What should I do?”

Sands said, “You've got to go to the police and tell them. If you don't, you're committing a crime, and the police can charge you with being an accessory or obstructing justice or something. So you have to tell them.”

She offered no argument. They went back into the house to tell Al and Susan Dubois they were leaving, though not why and to find Mike Zaccaro, who was due at a local bank to sign some credit papers on a nursing home Athena was about to open; Sands had promised to drive him to that appointment. Sands took Zaccaro aside and told him that Karin was going with them and that he would explain in the car.

As they were starting out, Shannon Dubois saw them. She went up to Karin and said, “Where are you going?”

Karin said, “I'm going to the police.”

And then, Sands remembers, “Shannon made some reference to loyalty and friendship. It stuck in my mind, like, what in the world is she talking about?”

On the way to the bank in Glastonbury Zaccaro learned where Karin was going, and why. “She told us,” Zaccaro says, “that Dennis did it because Joyce was preventing them from spending the rest of their lives together. She knew about it afterwards because Dennis told her, but she had nothing to do with it. The way she told it, it was a very plausible story.”

Sands dropped Zaccaro off at the bank. Then he and Karin drove around for a few minutes before heading for the command post at the Naubuc school. It was only a few blocks from the bank, and Zaccaro intended to walk there, go in and talk to the police before Karin appeared.

As they drove toward the school, Sands said to Karin, “I'll go in there with you as a friend. But I'm not representing you because I'm not a criminal attorney. Are you at all worried about the statement you're going to make? Is there any way it can incriminate you? Any problem at all? Because if there is, we'll just put you on hold and get somebody in here to represent you.”

She shook her head. “No, “she said, “there's no problem. I'll go in and tell the police that Dennis has just confessed this thing to me, and I can't live with this.”

Zaccaro reached the command post just as Sands and Karin were driving up. They waited while he went in to prepare the way. Cavanaugh and Revoir were there. “I told them,” says Zaccaro, “that Karin was coming in to see them, that she had something she wanted to say. But I said that Jeff and I were concerned that they might use something she might say against her. If that were the case, if they had reason to believe that Karin might have had a significant involvement, then she should have a criminal attorney with her and it could wait until we got one. Cavanaugh said no, if what she said was the truth, they wouldn't use it against her. It wasn't that they didn't have any suspicions, but they would not use anything she said against her, if it was the truth.”

So Zaccaro went out and brought Karin and Sands in to meet with Cavanaugh and Revoir. They were led into an empty classroom. Revoir took out paper and pencils and began to set down whatever statement Karin was prepared to make.

The first thing Karin asked was if she was going to have to testify in court. Cavanaugh said she would. She accepted that. Then she gave them what they wanted. She told them that Dennis Coleman had confessed to her that afternoon in the Duboises' bathroom that he had murdered her mother. She told them he had laid it out for her in explicit and excruciating detail, and she repeated those details for the state cops. Among other things, she said, Dennis told her it had happened at one fifty-six in the morning. He told her about the yellow paper towel stuffed in Joyce's mouth. He told her other things that had not been released to the press, that were not common knowledge, that only the murderer and the investigators could have known. She was with Cavanaugh and Revoir for more than three hours; it took her that long to give her statement in a preliminary form, then have Revoir write it down in longhand for her to sign; it ran to fifteen pages. In it she gave the police the missing pieces from the puzzle or at least enough of them so they now had probable cause to move against Dennis Coleman.

“Afterwards,” Sands says, “Cavanaugh got up and kissed Karin and said, ‘You gave us the murderer, you've given him to us, thank you, this is great.' Cavanaugh was very supportive and talked to Karin about a victim support group and the programs they had to help, because this was going to be a tough time for her.”

“I didn't suspect her then,” Cavanaugh says. “I didn't want to suspect her then.”

Still, there were a few troublesome factors, some of which were immediately apparent, others not quite so evident until sometime later. As they looked back, both Cavanaugh and Revoir were struck by the way Karin was able to recite the details of her mother's murder, details that were horrifying, yet show almost no emotion as she did so. That was one thing. Another was how much she knew; she said that the first time she had ever heard the particulars, all the minutiae of her mother's murder, down to the last detail, even to the precise time, one fifty-six in the morning, that her mother had stopped breathing, was that afternoon in the bathroom.

As the two cops read and reread Karin's statement, both of them realized that she and Dennis must have spent at least fifteen minutes, and probably more, alone behind the closed doors of the bathroom for him to have told that much and for her to have absorbed it so thoroughly. That was how long she said they were alone together. But later not merely Dennis Coleman but several others said that he and Karin had been in that bathroom behind the closed doors for no more than five minutes, hardly time enough for him to have said all she claimed.

Just as Karin and Sands were getting ready to leave, Cavanaugh called Sands to the phone. There was a call from Al Dubois. Dennis, he told Sands, was still at the house. He was just hanging around, and they couldn't get rid of him. He was waiting for Karin, and he seemed to be growing more and more agitated all the time.

One thing was certain then. Nobody was going to let Karin Aparo return to the Dubois house that night, not with Dennis Coleman waiting for her, not after what she'd just done, what she'd just said about him.

“Being the nice guy that I am,” Jeff Sands says, “I offered to take Karin home to our house and let her stay overnight. Now my wife was suspicious of Karin from the first moment she heard about Joyce being murdered, especially when she heard about that phone call from the police station to Dennis. So I take Karin home, and my wife, Patty, takes one look, and you can see the reaction in her face. ‘Hi, Karin. What are you doing here, guys?'

“I explain the whole situation quickly, which doesn't make Patty feel any better, because now she's worried about Karin. And then she's worried about this Dennis, this killer looking for Karin, and God knows if he'll figure out she's at our house. I say to Patty, ‘Dennis wouldn't kill anyone else.' I don't know whether she believed me or not.

“So we get Karin settled, and we order a pizza, and then my wife says, ‘Gee, Jeff, I'm having trouble getting the comforter down from the spare bedroom closet. Can you come up here a minute with me?'

“We get upstairs. Now Patty is very demure, and she's very straitlaced and never uses foul language. But we get up to the room, and under her breath she says, ‘What the fuck are you doing? How could you bring her here? She's a murderer.'

“I say, ‘Patty …'

“She says, ‘All right, she's associated with a murderer. Dennis could be looking for her. Anything could happen.'

“I say, ‘It'll be okay. She can sleep in the spare bedroom. It's separated from the rest of the house.'

“She says, ‘It won't be okay. You're staying up all night. You're not sleeping. You're going to protect us. It's your responsibility.'

“Our house is a colonial, with a guest room on the right on the top of the stairs and our room and the baby's room off to the left. I sat on the bottom of those steps all night while Karin slept in the spare bedroom, even though I never thought our family was in danger from either Dennis or Karin.”

5

At two the next afternoon, August 13, the sun bright, the day warm, too hot, some thought, as Dennis Coleman was leaving his job at the concession stand at the Tallwoods Country Club, the state police arrived. Some golfers were just coming off the eighteenth hole; a few others were strolling from the clubhouse toward their cars in the parking lot. Dennis was on his way toward his car when the cops approached. He knew what was about to happen. He waited. They reached him. They told him he was under arrest for the murder of Joyce Aparo and for conspiracy to murder her, they read him his rights and then they hustled him into a police car. There handcuffs were put on him for the first time. In the months and years ahead they were to become as familiar to his wrists as the other clothes he wore.