Beyond Obsession (10 page)

For the first time Dennis was told that it was Karin who had turned over to the police the “I will ‘do the deed'” note, that it was Karin who had gone to the police and recited his confession with all its details. Then he was handed Karin's diary. He read it slowly. When he finished, he stared at Norris and Cavanaugh and began to talk.

In the town of Glastonbury there was shock and horror and disbelief. The worst fears, the nightmares of the residents had come true. “This just doesn't happen to people like us,” said one native, words, conviction, that echoed up and down Main Street and along all the small streets of the town. But it had happened.

A friend of Dennis Coleman and Karin Aparo, of Christopher Wheatley and Kira Lintner remembers those days. “I couldn't really believe it,” he says. “Dennis is the last one I would have thought would have done something like that. Karin, yeah. But not Dennis. Never.”

It was a sentiment shared by the vast majority of the people in the town. For reasons only vaguely understood, the town, and soon much of central Connecticut, came to view Dennis Coleman not as a cold-blooded murderer but as a victim, came to view Karin Aparo as evil incarnate, a girl who had wanted her mother dead and had used and manipulated a love-obsessed young man to accomplish that end.

“If this was a couple of hundred years ago and a hundred miles north of here,” one resident said, “they would have burned her with all the rest of the witches in Salem.”

It was glib, but it reflected the sense of the town, reflected, perhaps, a sense that if one believed it, the whole thing could be explained away. It could not, at least not that easily. If the question of who, of the several whos, seemed to have been answered, the answer was just superficial, and it truly satisfied no one. For there remained a bedeviling group of questions: How had the murder come about? When did they begin planning for it? How could it possibly have remained a secret for so long? How had it been committed? How did these children expect to get away with it? And, finally, what did they hope to gain from it?

And there was the deeper and ultimately more disturbing question of why these teenagers, with everything open to them, would plan and commit murder? There were no easy answers; they lay, perhaps, in some dark places, somewhere in the lives not just of those who had been drawn to do the deed but in the life of the victim herself.

PART TWO

WHY THE DEED WAS DONE

6

The facts were stark, frightening and on the front page. Joyce Aparo was dead. Four teenagers—her daughter, her daughter's boyfriend and two close friends—were under arrest, charged with her murder. The evidence against them appeared overwhelming. The question that bedeviled everyone was why. The answer, many believed, had to lie as much in the victim as in the children.

Joyce Aparo. Those who knew her, who came in contact with her over the years, those who worked with her, who thought of themselves as her friends—though there were few of these, for she was a woman who kept most people at a distance and did not let them look into her private interior world—those who were her neighbors all saw a different woman. She wore a mask, a dozen masks, maybe more, and no one ever completely stripped the disguises from her; perhaps she herself never looked beneath them.

To those who worked with her, in her chosen field of social work and the care of the elderly in nursing homes, she was a brilliant woman, an extraordinary administrator, incorruptible, imaginative, a perfectionist, intolerant of anything less than total dedication from those around her, caring and concerned about those who depended on her. When she opened a door to her personal life, what was revealed was her daughter and her pride in that daughter's gifts.

To friends, the very few who thought themselves close to her, she was also a brilliant woman, lively, fun to be with, knowledgeable about just about everything, perhaps opinionated, expert at anything she put her hand to, a perfectionist who insisted on only the best for herself, a good listener and sounding board for friends' problems though rarely revealing her own inner feelings or deepest concerns, except her pride in her daughter.

To neighbors, she was cold and forbidding, a woman who erected an unbreachable wall around her home and kept the world at a distance, who considered herself and her daughter superior to the common herd, those inferiors not worth associating with. In the glimpses they caught of her, she was cruel and abusive, to them, to everyone and especially to her daughter. They likened her to the Wicked Witch of the West and, indeed, said that she had told them she was a witch, and many believed it.

To her husbands and the men in her life, she was bright and domineering, taking orders from no one, giving orders to everyone, manipulating them and the world to her whims and desires, abusive and scathing in word and deed, rigid, impossible to live with.

To her daughter, she was the mother who taught her to sew and crochet and knit, to cook and bake, to make strawberry jam. She was the mother who shared her dreams and fantasies. She was the mother who put in her hands the violin, the instrument that became the center of her life, and who sacrificed so that she could learn to play. But she was also the mother who rarely, if ever, showed affection, let alone love, the mother who abused her physically and emotionally from the time she was a baby, the mother who manipulated her without end to her bidding. At home as much as at the office, Joyce was a mother who was intolerant of any mistakes, real or imagined, a mother who filled her daughter with tales that left her uncertain about herself, left her in terror. Joyce isolated Karin from much of the world, trapped her in a home and a life that was unendurable and from which there seemed no escape.

And there was something else, something many did not fully realize until after her death. She was an inveterate liar. Her second husband, Michael Aparo, later called her pathological, a woman who invented so many stories it was often impossible to ferret out the truth, and perhaps it came to a point where she herself did not know where the truth lay.

She was born Joyce Cantone in 1939, the youngest child of a lower-middle-class Italian family, several years between her and her brothers and sisters, some adults by the time she was born. She grew up in a cramped second-floor tenement apartment in the Italian south end of Hartford. It was not a happy home. Her father, she told a college friend, was a day laborer and a heavy drinker, a man who more often than not arrived home drunk and, when drunk, vented his fury and frustration on everyone, beating her mother and then turning on her brothers, sisters and herself. The situation was intolerable and did not change for the better as the years passed. She kept trying to persuade her mother to leave her father, she said, but they were practicing and deeply devout Catholics, and that was something that just wasn't done.

Then her mother met a man. They fell in love, and he promised to marry her if somehow she could free herself from her husband. “Joyce said her mother went to see a priest,” her friend Carol Parkola remembers, “and then the priest came over to the apartment with an altar boy and spread incense all around and explained that he was going to cleanse the apartment, and all this would get rid of the evil spirits and all the evil that was involved with leaving her husband. Well, Joyce said she got so mad she opened the door and she took the priest's hat and she threw it down the stairs and told him to go chase it. She just didn't take to the church telling her what to do or how to do things.” Her father, she said, later died as a result of his alcoholism.

That was one story. There were others. Her father, Joyce later was to tell other acquaintances, as well as repeat often to her daughter, had been a brilliant and sensitive man, a man with outstanding musical talent, a superb pianist who should have been destined for the concert stage. His dream had been to become a conductor, and as a young man he had shown considerable promise with the baton. But her mother would have none of his dreams. In front of the children she constantly derided him, sneered at him, berated him for spending his time and money on useless things while she was forced to struggle just to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Her wrath, though, was not limited to words and gestures; on a number of occasions she turned on him with her fists, with frying pans, with whatever was available. He never struck back. Finally, Joyce said, thoroughly beaten, all his hope and dreams gone, he committed suicide.

There is nothing in the local newspapers to support Joyce's tale, but, then, a poor man's suicide was rarely noted or reported, and suicides in Catholic families were often hidden, the death attributed to other more natural causes.

Her brothers and sisters, she later told a friend, were older so that she had little to do with them. She rarely saw any of them after they left, saw them not at all during the last decade of her life.

To another friend she confided that her brothers and sisters had made her life miserable. Just like her mother. They picked on her constantly, ridiculed her because she was too smart, because she was stubborn and had a mind of her own, because she was a rebel in a home where conformity and traditional values were not merely the norm and expected but demanded and because she was attractive, never without beaux flocking to her. She prided herself on her intelligence, her talents and her ambitions. But she was not quite so confident about her beauty. Her large dark eyes were all right, one of her best features, and her dark hair was thick and soft. But she hated her nose, thought it too large, too Italian. A long time later, in the early 1980s, she finally did something about it. She had it bobbed. A friend remembers meeting her in the Gallery restaurant in Glastonbury shortly afterward. “Joyce came in, and she was grinning. She always had this big grin whenever I saw her. And she was just preening. She said, ‘How do you like my new nose? I finally had something done to it.' You know, I didn't even notice it at first. I guess they did a good job because it fitted her face.”

Very early she announced that she had no intention of following the accepted path laid out for the youngest daughter in a poor Italian family. She would not find a husband as soon as possible, marry without finishing school and then spend the rest of her life cooking, cleaning and raising a large family, modeling herself after her mother and sisters. She was going to finish school, go on to college and then carve out her own career in the professional world. She would make her mark. If a husband came along at some time, all well and good, but she was not going to go out looking for one and holding her breath until she found him. Her pronouncement, she said, served only to exacerbate an already oppressive situation.

That's not the way her sister Ina saw it. Joyce, she said, was the pampered youngest child, catered to by everyone in the family, including her sisters and brothers, given things that were denied them. While they were made to toe the mark, follow all the rules and do what was expected of them, and woe if they didn't, Joyce was allowed to do pretty much what she wanted and, even when she broke the rules, was rarely punished severely. “Joyce,” she said, “was showered with a lot of attention as she was growing up since she had the advantage of older sisters and older brothers and a myriad of cousins. She was also fortunate in that economic times were better and my parents were able to give her dancing lessons, art lessons and a college education. Joyce was a very intelligent girl but also a very manipulative person.”

She was also a lonely child. Even her mother, Rose Cantone, who now lives with daughter Ina, says that Joyce “grew up more or less alone.” Because, people who knew her say, she acted as though she were better than and superior to everyone else, she had few friends and no real confidantes. Alone and friendless, then, thrown on her own resources, she retreated often into a world of fantasy, of make-believe, and expressed those fantasies as though they were real. Someone who knew her when she was a teenager remembers a day when they ran into each other on the sidewalk and Joyce held out her hand. “See my new ring,” she said. “The queen gave it to me when we were in England.” The Cantones made no trips abroad. Others remember that she always had a story, about trips, about meeting and becoming close to famous people, and that she always told them with such absolute conviction that many believed what she said.

That she was very intelligent is indisputable. She invariably scored high marks all the way through school and graduated near the top of her high school class. She had, a friend says, a photographic memory. “I was a little intimidated by her. She knew Latin, Italian, French—three or four languages. I had to work like crazy, study all the time just to get by, and she could pick up a book and just glance at a page, her eyes just darting over it, and that was it. She knew it all.”

Her education did not end with high school. When she was graduated, she enrolled as a business major at Hillyer College in Hartford, now the University of Hartford. According to what Joyce told friends, her decision to go on to college, rather than being supported by her family, was bitterly opposed. She fought constantly with her mother. They agreed about nothing. Finally, she said in one version, her mother threw her out when she was sixteen, and from that day on she made her own way. Like so many other things she said, then and throughout her life, that just didn't happen to be true. All through college she lived at home with her mother and commuted to school, though a bed and a roof were about all the support she got. She paid for her college education with scholarships and by holding a job as an assistant to an insurance agent named Gino Dinatto at the Aetna Life and Casualty Insurance Company from her freshman year right through graduation in 1961.

With a degree in her hands, she had a kind of real independence she had never possessed before; she had credentials; she had education. One thing she knew for certain was that now she could cut all but the most casual ties with the home where she had felt trapped, where she was sure nobody had understood or sympathized with her and her ambitions. The opportunity to do just that was there for the taking: Robert I. White. Over the years of college their friendship turned into a kind of romance. When he proposed, she accepted, and within days of graduation they were married. It was a small ceremony, attended by only a few friends and some family, so small and casual, in fact, that one person who was there cannot remember who else attended, cannot even remember if it was a religious ceremony. When it was over, Joyce had cut the ties; rarely after that did she see her mother, brothers or sisters.