Beyond Obsession (9 page)

If convicted, he faced up to sixty years in prison on the first charge and twenty years on the second, and those terms would have to be served consecutively, not concurrently. This meant that Dennis Coleman faced the bleak prospect of spending the next eighty years in state prison.

As he was booked, there was about him a deadness, a sense of something missing, something empty inside. It was not just a lack of emotion; there was not even that wash of relief that the waiting was over, that the inevitable had finally occurred. It was as though somehow he were removed, as though none of this were really touching him.

He got a hint of what the future held immediately. He spent that weekend in jail, though a local one, not the dreaded state penitentiary in Somers, until his father managed to raise, in property and other assets, the $150,000 bond that was set.

But it was not over with the arrest of Dennis Coleman. There were still too many unanswered questions, and he was answering none of them. There was the nagging and basic one: how he had managed to get Joyce Aparo and her car from Glastonbury to Bernardston, dump both of them there and get back home in time to be at work at his regular time.

Once Dennis was charged, Reese Norris had no more grounds to object to a search warrant of the Coleman house or Dennis's car. Had it been served a few days before, absolute convicting evidence would have been discovered both in Dennis's closet and in the trunk of his sports car. But the previous Friday that evidence had disappeared into the compactor at the town's garbage dump. The police, though, did find enough in Dennis's room to give them pause and force them to take a new and different look at Karin Aparo.

Entering his bedroom, they were brought up short. Three walls were covered from floor to ceiling with photographs and memorabilia of Karin Aparo. There were portraits; there were snapshots, some enlarged, some small; there were casual pictures and formal posed ones. “There wasn't a pinup among them,” Cavanaugh says, “not even one of her in a bathing suit. The most revealing picture was one where she had her shirt knotted so you could see a bit of her stomach. When we walked in there, it was like we had walked into a shrine dedicated to Karin Aparo.” Indeed, Dennis called it his Karin Wall.

And there was more. In Dennis's desk, in drawers, the cops discovered stacks of letters, a hundred and more; there were letters from at least six different girls to Dennis, but the bulk of that correspondence was from Karin to Dennis and, to the puzzlement of the searchers, from Dennis to Karin.

The content of many of those letters was enough to turn Karin Aparo from bereaved daughter of a murder victim and willing witness and ally for the police into not merely a major subject, but an active and willing participant in murder. Some suggested she might even be the motivating force behind a plot that had begun long before. Perhaps there was an innocent explanation for what was written, but the authorities couldn't see one. Neither could Dennis Coleman's attorney, Reese Norris.

When confronted with the letters, Dennis still would not help them, would not even help his own lawyer. Norris, of course, knew that Dennis was the murderer. He, like the police, knew Dennis could not have done the murder alone. And he, like the police, suspected that Karin Aparo had played a role. But his client refused to confirm Norris's suspicions, in fact insisted to Norris that he had done it all by himself, that Karin had played no role in his deed and knew nothing about it. Nothing Norris said could make Dennis open up; nothing could thaw the ice that Norris sensed encased the very essence of his client.

Among all those letters found in Dennis's room not only were the ones to and from Karin fascinating to Cavanaugh, Revoir and others, but there was another letter that seemed to point not merely to a long-standing plot between Dennis and Karin but to knowledge of that plot by someone else, someone else whom Cavanaugh already suspected. It was from Christopher Wheatley to Dennis Coleman, and it indicated that Wheatley had been aware of a plot to kill Joyce Aparo for a very long time. “So, Dude,” a paragraph in that letter read, “how's your woman? Is her mother still alive?”

Ever since Chris Wheatley's name had first come up, Cavanaugh had been determined to talk with nineteen-year-old Wheatley, a premed student at Syracuse University, and to his girl friend, sixteen-year-old Kira Lintner, about to enter her junior year at Glastonbury High School, the friends, along with Frank Manganaro, with whom Dennis Coleman had said he had spent the evening of August 4, just before the murder. He was convinced that Wheatley and Lintner were crucial figures in the case. They both were interviewed briefly during the first days by the Glastonbury police and a couple of detectives from the state police major crimes unit, but those interviews had led nowhere.

Now, after the discoveries during the search of Dennis Coleman's room, Cavanaugh was determined to have a little interview with Wheatley. For he had something else that linked Wheatley to the crime.

The night of the murder the Glastonbury police had been out in force, cruising the town's streets for the cat burglar on the loose. When Cavanaugh went over the reports of the town's officers for that night, one stopped him. At about one-thirty in the morning a 1984 white Renault Encore had been spotted parked within a block of the Aparo condo. Within the next fifteen minutes cops saw that Renault drive past the condo twice, and other cops saw it several more times in the area. The license plates of the Renault were noted and checked. The car was registered to a Frank Bollard of Glastonbury. Frank Bollard was Christopher Wheatley's stepfather.

Cavanaugh went looking for Wheatley and his girl friend. But in the days after the murder it seemed that they had disappeared. Cavanaugh tracked them to a vacation retreat Kira Lintner's mother owned at Lake George in northern New York. He made the trip up there on August 12, the day of Joyce Aparo's funeral, and met with them in the late morning. Cavanaugh's initial impression of Wheatley was that he was a smart, arrogant kid, too smart and too arrogant. When the Connecticut detective told him that he had some questions he wanted answered, Wheatley said, affecting an air of boredom, “Is all this really necessary?”

“You could have heard my roar all the way to Canada,” Cavanaugh says. What Wheatley and Kira Lintner had to say was a repeat of what they already said, and what the cops had already heard. They had spent the evening together at Kira's house with Manganaro and Dennis and had watched a couple of movies; Dennis left to go home, and Wheatley, Kira and Manganaro went over to Manganaro's house for a while. Then he and Kira drove back to the Lintner house, where he and Kira spent the rest of the night together.

“Have you ever been inside the Aparo residence?” Cavanaugh asked. He did not mention that he knew Wheatley's car had been parked less than a block away on the crucial night.

“Never,” Wheatley replied.

“Have you ever been in or around Mrs. Aparo's Volkswagen Jetta?”

“Never,” Wheatley answered.

Cavanaugh heard that, and he didn't believe it. He went back to Glastonbury, where he arrived in time to hear Karin Aparo's revelation that Dennis Coleman had confessed. But he was not about to give up his intuition that Wheatley and Lintner were involved, deeply involved. By Saturday, August 15, three days later, he knew of the “So, Dude,” letter Wheatley had written Dennis Coleman a year before; it seemed to confirm his suspicions. He took those suspicions to the state's attorney and the court and got a search and seizure warrant against Wheatley personally, his residence and his car. Handed the warrant, Wheatley was no longer quite so arrogant or quite so sure of himself. He told Cavanaugh that while he was still insisting that he had never been in the Aparo condo or anywhere near the Volkswagen Jetta, he did have some information that he was willing to share. But first he wanted to talk to an attorney his father was going to get for him. Cavanaugh had little choice but to wait.

On Monday, August 17, Cavanaugh got what he needed to prove that Wheatley had been lying to the Glastonbury police, to the state police and to him since the moment of his first interview. The latent fingerprints lifted from both the outside and the inside of the abandoned Volkswagen Jetta had now been identified and matched. They belonged to Christopher Wheatley.

The next day both Wheatley and Lintner were arrested and charged with accessory to murder and conspiracy to murder Joyce Aparo. Like Dennis Coleman, they were facing up to eighty years in prison if convicted. Wheatley had been the driver of the second car on the way to Bernardston, had obviously helped Dennis dump it into the brook at the bottom of the slope next to Chief Brulotte's house and then had driven Dennis back home; Kira Lintner had evidently been with them the whole way.

There was still one more to go. After the search of the Coleman house and the discovery of Dennis's Karin Wall and all that correspondence between Dennis and Karin, correspondence dating back more than a year, the state police obtained another search and seizure warrant, this one on the condo, for letters between Karin and Dennis. Search they did, but they found little, except some letters, which Revoir seized, and the three diaries he had already read; he took one, the most recent, dealing with events of the month of July 1987, leaving the other two behind, though he did take some loose pages that on first glance seemed to be more letters but that turned out to be pages from the diaries dating from the year before.

On August 27 Shannon Dubois, accompanied by her parents and a lawyer, went to see Cavanaugh and Revoir. Her conscience, her sense of morality finally had won out over loyalty to her friend. She could no longer keep secret the things that Karin Aparo had told her. In the weeks since the murder she had been interviewed by the police several times. “I didn't say anything because Karin was at my house and I still couldn't believe the whole thing.”

Then Karin was gone for a day. “I was all by myself for the first time, and it all came out.” Shannon went to her parents and told them what she knew. “They couldn't believe I knew all that, and they called a lawyer for advice.”

They did something else, too. Al and Susan Dubois told Karin Aparo that she was no longer welcome in their home, that she would have to find someplace else to live. Karin immediately called Archbishop Whealon, who arranged for her to stay first with some nuns and then with a Catholic family in Glastonbury. By then Karin also was aware that even greater trouble was looming. But she was prepared. She had already put herself, and her future, in the hands of criminal defense attorney Hubert Santos.

The lawyer the Duboises went to, Richard Brown, called John Bailey, and told the state's attorney for Hartford that his client Shannon Dubois had very important information about the murder of Joyce Aparo and would tell the authorities what she knew if she were granted immunity from prosecution. She was not directly involved, he said; it was just that she had known these things and had not revealed them, so could be charged with hindering prosecution.

If that was all it was, Bailey said, he would have no hesitation in granting immunity.

On August 27 Shannon Dubois met Charlie Revoir and recited to him all the confidences that Karin Aparo had told her that Wednesday morning three weeks before and all that she had imparted in the days and weeks since.

The next day, August 28, an arrest warrant was secured against Karin Aparo, charging that she had played a role in the murder of her mother.

Late that afternoon Charlie Revoir arrived at the home in Glastonbury where Karin was then staying, told her why he had come, recited her rights under the Constitution and then drove her to the police station. The word of her arrest was already out, and a crowd of reporters and the curious had gathered outside. The car pulled up; the door opened. Karin Aparo stepped out and was led inside. If the spectators expected a teenager of remarkable beauty and magnetism or a frightened child distraught by what had befallen her, that was not what they got. What they got was a slightly overweight, buxom sixteen-year-old with sharp features, large glasses and short dark hair, wearing too-tight jeans and an open leather jacket beneath which was a tight shirt that emphasized her bust. But the thing that was most noted, most commented upon and, for many, most disturbing was the arrogant expression on her face and the way she held herself; arrogance seemed to exude from every pore in her body. That moment—that look—would be remembered by all who saw it. It took nearly three years for it to be even partially replaced by another, softer, more guileless image.

Before that first day was out, she was on her way to the women's prison in Niantic. There she spent a night behind bars before a hundred-thousand-dollar bond could be arranged. When she emerged, she was to tell friends that she would never spend another night in a cell, that she would kill herself before that happened.

The possibility that she might, indeed, have to spend another night and more in a cell was about to grow stronger, though. Since his arrest Dennis Coleman had adamantly refused to implicate Karin in the murder, and so long as he continued in that refusal and continued to take all the blame himself, while the state's case against him might be overwhelming, its case against her was on very tenuous grounds.

In early September, however, Reese Norris met with Jimmy Cavanaugh. Norris was searching desperately for a way to defend his client. At that moment, despite his own deep suspicions and intuitions, he had nothing, not even a chip with which to bargain with the state for a sentence of less than eighty years. Cavanaugh, by now convinced of Karin's involvement, was sure that the only way she could be gotten was with Dennis's cooperation. Perhaps he and Norris together could find a solution to their dilemmas.

They found one. Cavanaugh showed Norris the letters between Karin and Dennis that had been found in Dennis's room, showed him Karin's diary that had been found in her room and told him just how suspicion had first fallen on Dennis and how the police had learned that he was the murderer. For the first time Norris saw hope for Dennis, not to keep him out of prison but at least to reduce the portion of his life he'd spend there. He and Cavanaugh met with Dennis.