Beyond Obsession (17 page)

“The next morning, when Joyce and Ed arrived back at the house, the woman walked in and took one look at Karin. It was May, and she had on a pair of slacks and a shirt. Joyce insisted that she go and change immediately because she was not appropriately dressed.”

For Karin, then, little had changed. The dress code, always to look like a lady, now in clothes that were often identical to those that Joyce wore, if in smaller sizes, was rigidly enforced. So was the rule that other children were not her equals, that all contact with them was to be avoided. So was the rule that a multitude of household chores was to be done as soon as school was over, that there was to be no dallying on the way home. The other kids in school in Darien, seeing her for the first time, made fun of her. It was childish cruelty but affecting enough that Karin often called Sandra Yerks and asked her to take her home from school because she was not feeling good, had a stomachache, had a headache, had some other ailment. Yet when she got home, she was constantly tormented by the Murphy sons. There was nowhere to flee.

Yerks remembers that one day Karin arrived at her office carrying a book of raffle tickets for a school charity. “What do I do with these?” she asked.

Yerks told her, “Honey, I'll tell you. It's not a problem. Walk up Brookside Road. Ring the doorbells, and ask the people if they'd like to buy a raffle ticket for the school. Then cross the street and go down the other side. I'll bet you can sell something.”

Karin, Yerks says, grew excited by the idea. She went out, went up and down the street, rang the bells and within a half hour had sold all the tickets. She went back to Yerks and told her.

“As she was explaining to me what she did,” Yerks says, “Joyce walked into my office and asked what was going on. We said, ‘Look, Joyce, look what happened,' and we told her. Well, she chastised that child to the point of humiliation. She asked Karin to leave the room, and then she laced into me because I was making her daughter common by having her go out and sell raffle tickets.”

Still, in Karin's isolation there was always music to fill the empty hours, music into which to escape, music she could play knowing this was something that won her mother's approval. Ed Murphy watched with dismay. He couldn't understand it. “There were the violin lessons and the piano lessons and the bloody French horn lessons and the tennis lessons,” he complained. “Finally, I said, ‘Knock it off. She can play the violin if she chooses. But everything else stops.'”

Joyce paid no more attention to that order than she did to anything else Murphy said. Above all, though, it was the violin that was the thing, that was essential. She found Karin a new teacher, one she was sure would be the right one to train her for a career on the concert stage. His name was Albert Markov. He lived in nearby Rowayton, an enclave in Norwalk on Long Island Sound, with his wife, Marina, and his son, Alexander. All three had left the Soviet Union in 1976 and emigrated to the United States. All three were violinists of considerable note. Marina played with the New York City Opera Orchestra. Alex had captured a number of prizes in violin competitions beginning at the age of nine, when he began performing publicly in Russia. In 1982, when he was nineteen, he won the Gold Medal at the Paganini International Violin Competition in Genoa, Italy, an award that carried with it a European concert tour, including a performance on Paganini's own violin in Genoa. A year later he made his New York debut at Carnegie Hall, playing unaccompanied solo violin as well as violin trios with his mother and father;
The New York Times
critic John Rockwell said of Alex that his playing was “inspired” and that “a talent he most surely is.”

Albert also played frequent concerts around the country, as he had done in his native Russia, to considerable acclaim. Albert Markov was not only a concert soloist but a teacher with a growing reputation. He had taught his son, had been, in fact, Alex's only teacher, and since arriving in the United States, he had been teaching others at the Manhattan School of Music, where he was attempting to propagate his own methods. In contrast with the traditional teaching that stressed hand positions and fingering, he was concerned with giving his students a more direct sense of where on the strings the tone lies.

Now Karin Aparo joined the ranks of Albert Markov's students, journeying to New York with Joyce to take lessons at the Manhattan School and making the shorter trip from Darien to the Markov home in Rowayton for private lessons there.

Before long the formal relationship of teacher to student and teacher to student's mother had turned into one of friendship. Joyce discovered that Albert Markov shared her passion for long hikes on rocky slopes searching for rare and semiprecious stones, and soon they began to go off for a day now and again on rock climbing and hunting expeditions.

Until Joyce's death, Albert Markov remained not only Karin's teacher but also another father, a man she could look up to, admire and respect, a man who was not slow with his advice to her.

All was not well with the newly wedded Murphys. Hardly had the marriage been consummated before trouble erupted. It was as though Joyce, once she had won, once she had captured Murphy, had abandoned all her feminine poses and turned once more into a virago. “I knew on the second day,” Murphy says, “that I was in trouble.”

He had no idea how much trouble. Murphy, who liked to lift a glass with friends, overimbibed on occasion, perhaps on too many occasions for his new wife. Indeed, once was one time too many for Joyce. More than once was intolerable. He found himself under attack, assailed as an incorrigible alcoholic.

Joyce soon added another charge. Says Yerks, it was not long after the wedding before Joyce began to charge Murphy with being not merely a drunk but a homosexual as well, a charge she repeated again and again, in front of Karin, in front of Murphy, in front of everyone. Murphy just sat there and took it, without response. She had, Joyce claimed, walked in on Murphy having sex with another man on their living-room sofa.

Yerks remembers vividly a night when she received a panicky call from Joyce at the Murphy house. Joyce was in an uncontrollable rage. Yerks sped to the home, was greeted by a terrified Karin. She put her arms around the girl to comfort her. Joyce raced out of the living room and attempted to drag Karin away, screaming that Murphy had come home drunk and was in the bedroom at that moment. She was going to force Karin into that bedroom and “uncover Murphy and let Karin see what was going on.” Yerks stopped her.

About nine o'clock on a Sunday evening some months later Yerks and her husband had just settled in to watch a movie on television when the phone rang. A soft, calm voice said, “Sandy, this is Joyce.”

Yerks said, “Hi, Joyce. How are you?”

“I thought I would call to tell you that I am going to run the Mercedes off a bridge.” With that the line went dead.

Yerks was frantic. She knew that Murphy had just flown off to Texas, that Joyce was home with Karin and Murphy's adopted sons. She knew, too, that there had been considerable and mounting friction in the house between Joyce and Karin on one side and the boys on the other. This time that antagonism must have boiled over. She ran to her husband and shouted, “We'd better get to the Murphys'.”

It took them only minutes to drive to the house, but during those minutes Joyce had called the police, and they had arrived. There were several patrol cars parked outside and cops in the living room. They had taken one of the Murphy sons into custody on Joyce's complaint, were holding him and trying to calm Joyce down and restore the peace. The Yerkses rushed into the house. Karin ran up to Sandy Yerks and put her arms around her. Joyce glared at Karin and ordered her away. Karin walked over to the corner and stood there.

One of the cops approached Sandy Yerks. “Can you help us calm this lady down?” he asked. “If you can, we'll release this kid in your custody and you can take him home.”

Yerks tried. “But,” she says, “Joyce was off the wall; she was just out of her skull.” She ran into the bedroom, and Yerks and Karin followed. Joyce was yelling, screaming and threatening everyone. She picked up the phone and started to dial. Yerks said something calming. Joyce turned and threw the phone at her. She kept screaming, “They tried to kill me.”

Then she turned on Karin, ordered her to go pack her belongings, pack Joyce's things, too, and load them in the car. “We're leaving this minute,” she shouted.

Karin obeyed, packed and loaded the car. When the car was ready, Joyce ordered her to unpack it, she'd changed her mind. Karin did as she was told. Once the car was unloaded and the luggage back in the house, Joyce demanded that Karin pack it again. “Five times that night,” Yerks says, “from ten-thirty at night until five-thirty in the morning, she made Karin pack and take the bags out to the car and load it and then unload it, then reload it and unload it again and again.”

Joyce and Karin did not leave that night.

By the summer of 1983 the Murphy household was a bomb, fuse lit and burning inexorably, ready to explode. Joyce and Ed Murphy had been married little more than a year, and Murphy was regretting every moment more and more. The woman he had courted was not the woman who was his wife. The woman he had courted had been all smiles and warmth, understanding and helpful, sharing his profession and his interests; the woman to whom he was married was scowls and ice, scathing and demeaning, bitter and in a constant rage, demanding subservience, sharing nothing. Joyce hated her stepsons, who returned that hatred. They vented their wrath not only on Joyce but on Karin, tormenting her, brutalizing her. Murphy had come to adore his stepdaughter, but there was little he could do to help her; she was cowed and dominated by her mother, fearful of doing anything that would incur her mother's fury; when Joyce was around, he says, “it was like shutting off the TV, blank.” And she was terrified of the adopted sons.

Joyce's rage mounted, at everything and everyone. She was gone often on business, commuting frequently to her office in Hartford with the health planning agency, going around the state checking on new nursing homes. Her days were long; the pressures on her to oversee a burgeoning industry, to make sure that it hewed to the regulations, to ensure that only the best developers got into the field, to visit every new home as it opened and to make repeated visits to existing homes to check on them, were demanding. She was on the edge, teetering, trying to do her job, trying to do what she thought best to raise her daughter, trying to manage a house distant from her job, a house that contained youths she despised and a man for whom she had contempt. It was an impossible situation. By the time she got back to Darien at the end of the day, she was exhausted, and that exhaustion only seemed to magnify any failing, real or imagined, of others, served only to send her off into paroxysms, send her lashing out in word and deed at Murphy, at his sons, at Karin, at the world. Finally she decided she needed a place of her own, so that she would not have to make that trip every night. With three thousand dollars advanced by Murphy to help with the down payment, she bought a condo on Butternut Drive in Glastonbury, where she spent several nights a week.

But when she was in Darien, any peace that existed in the Murphy house during her absence, though there wasn't much of that for Karin, with the Murphy boys always there, always at her, vanished. Her orders and demands to Karin became sterner, and the punishments harsher. Her tongue lashed Murphy, and sometimes her fists as well, and she began to talk divorce.

Then the bomb exploded. It was inevitable.

11

Late in the afternoon of August 10, 1983, the phone in Sandra Yerks's office rang. Ed Murphy was on the line. “Sandy,” he said, “would you get up to Norwalk Hospital right away? Karin tried to commit suicide.”

There were those, Jeff Sands and Michael Zaccaro among them, who, when they heard about the suicide attempt, were sure the reason was the Murphy boys. “Everybody,” Sands says, “who knew the situation assumed it was just because of the unbelievable torture she was getting from those kids. I had just constantly heard these stories about Ed and the drinking and the kids and one of Ed's sons threatening Karin with a knife. It was just an awful, awful situation that was going on.”

Zaccaro agrees. “Being aware of that situation and knowing what was going on, I'd be willing to bet anything that the attempted suicide was not because of abuse by Joyce as much as that Karin hated, absolutely hated what was happening to her down there, with those kids of Ed's.”

They, and the others who thought that way, were wrong.

Earlier on that Wednesday afternoon Karin, alone in the house, had canceled a dentist appointment. Joyce called a little later to find out what the dentist had said and done. When Karin told her she hadn't gone, Joyce railed at her, screamed over the phone, threatened dire punishment when she got home. Terrified, Karin went into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, took out a bottle of Tranxene, an antidepressant Joyce sometimes took for anxiety attacks, and swallowed four tablets. If it was not enough to kill her, it was certainly a cry for help, perhaps the first she had uttered in her life.

A few minutes after taking the pills, she called a friend who lived nearby and told her what she had done. The friend's mother called Poison Control and then got in touch with Ed Murphy to tell him. An emergency medical service ambulance sped to the Murphy home and rushed Karin to the Norwalk Hospital emergency room, where she was treated with ipecac. It was not long before Karin had been calmed, her system cleared. The hospital proceeded to call Murphy, Joyce and Michael Aparo.

Sandy Yerks arrived a few minutes later, while Karin was still in the emergency room. Karin was, naturally, pale and shaken. Yerks went to her and held her. Karin held on tightly, kept saying over and over, “Please don't leave me, please don't leave me. Mom's on her way. If she comes, please don't leave me.” She was, Yerks says, “scared to death.”