Beyond Obsession (20 page)

Karin was just starting ninth grade, was not yet fifteen when she met Neal. He was in residence at Yale and was conducting the symphony group in Hartford in which Karin played. “When I showed up for rehearsals the first day, he was the conductor,” she says. Joyce was with her, and after the rehearsals Joyce went to Neal, talked to him, beckoned Karin to join her.

From that moment on Joyce talked about Neal constantly, and Karin, seeing him three times a week at rehearsals, felt herself increasingly drawn to him. She introduced Shannon to him and later told Shannon she thought he was “handsome and cute and a terrific person. I had a crush on him, and my mother said she had a crush on him, too,” Karin said.

Indeed, so highly did Joyce approve of Neal that she did everything she could to bring Karin and him together, and so highly did she approve that her attitude toward Karin altered radically. No longer did she complain constantly; no longer did she find fault relentlessly. At last they got along. They drove to New Haven several times to hear concerts Neal was conducting, saw him as often as possible. Joyce appeared ecstatic whenever he was around, whenever his name was mentioned.

New fantasies emerged. Joyce began to tell Zaccaro and others how close Karin and Neal were, how deep was their feeling for each other. Then, early in 1986, she announced that she was leaving for Scotland with Karin and Neal; he was going to conduct an orchestra there, and Karin was going to play solo. Further, while they were in Scotland, they all were going to stay with Neal's parents, Lord and Lady Neal.

For a week or more Karin was out of school. Nobody saw her. The phone at the Aparo home went unanswered. They had, everyone believed, gone to Scotland on that concert tour. Indeed, Joyce was in Scotland—but not accompanying her daughter and Alasdair Neal on a concert tour. She was on one of her rock-hunting expeditions. Karin remained home, under strict orders not to answer the phone, not to leave the condo, not to be seen. Everyone was to think they were in Scotland.

It all had gone beautifully, Joyce proclaimed when she returned. The concerts had been well received, they had stayed with Lord and Lady Neal and the noble couple just loved Karin.

Karin listened in silence as Joyce rhapsodized to Michael Zaccaro and others. She did not tell them that she had not been to Scotland, that she had not played the violin with an orchestra conducted by Alasdair Neal, that she had never met Neal's parents, who were not, anyway, a lord and lady. “I just sat there and didn't correct her because I was fifteen and I knew I couldn't correct my mother.”

Then Alasdair Neal was gone. By the spring of 1986 he had other commitments, so it was time to leave Yale, time to leave Connecticut. He had looked with perhaps amusement or tolerance on the adolescent infatuation lavished upon him by one of his violinists and on the adulation of her mother. For him, it had not been a serious thing; it could not be; the girl, after all, was only a child. He never realized, nor could he, how important, how crucial he had been to Karin, to Joyce and to both of them together at that moment, nor could he have had any sense of how devastating his departure would be to them. Over the next months Karin's diary entries were filled with plaintive “Oh Alasdair, please come back and make things better!” … “Miss Alasdair” … “Miss Alasdair
terribly
.”

For when Alasdair Neal left, the era of good feelings between Karin and Joyce vanished.

With what she saw somehow as Neal's abandonment, Karin looked elsewhere, anywhere for solace. She experimented with sex for the first time, with a boy her age named Jeff. It was not especially satisfying, did nothing to ease the sense of loss. Worse, somehow, perhaps through reading the diaries Karin kept in her bedside drawer, Joyce learned of it or sensed it, and the condo was filled with recriminations and threats. Karin would do what Joyce wanted, or Joyce would spread far and wide the tale of Karin's delinquency, would destroy Karin's reputation.

So Karin, in the late spring of 1986, retreated into herself more and more, her mind churning to discover some way out of what had become once more an intolerable situation.

13

All her life Karin Aparo had been a victim, brutalized physically until she was twelve, and worse, tortured emotionally without end. She was on the verge of being murdered, not physically but emotionally. What had been, what was being done to her was what psychiatrists have come to call soul murder. In his study
Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation,
*
the analyst and clinical professor of psychiatry at New York University Dr. Leonard Shengold defines soul murder as “my dramatic designation for a certain category of traumatic experiences: instances of repetitive and chronic overstimulation, alternating with emotional deprivation, that are deliberately brought about by another individual.” He writes:

The capacity to destroy a soul, hinges entirely on having another human being in one's power, and this confrontation of the powerful and the helplessly dependent is inherent in childhood.… What happens to the child subjected to soul murder is so terrible, so overwhelming, and usually so recurrent that the child must not feel it and cannot register it, and resorts to massive isolation of feeling, which is manifested by brainwashing (a mixture of confusion, denial, and identifying with the aggressor).… In individuals, psychic murder is founded on the relations between hostile, cruel, indifferent, psychotic, or psychopathic parents and the child prisoner in their charge.

Karin Aparo was that prisoner, and Joyce Aparo was the parent in charge, hostile, cruel, indifferent, psychotic, psychopathic. The home in which Karin was kept was nothing so much as a concentration camp. She was a prisoner, at the utter mercy of a mother whose capricious and often wanton cruelty, ladled out with a shovel and interspersed by occasional drops of kindness, made her a combination commandant and guard. Karin was trapped, unable to find any escape, knowing that even if she managed to flee, her mother would find her no matter what it took, return her to captivity and there subject her to even worse. She was only fifteen, and there were three years lying between her and possible escape to freedom, years that seemed like forever.

Joyce Aparo was a very sick woman. This moment, in 1986, should have been for her a time of celebration, a time of fulfillment. She had achieved in her career much that she had sought. As Michael Zaccaro foresaw, those block grants to the states to aid social programs had come to an end, and the health council on which Joyce sat had been phased out. Zaccaro had left NewMediCo and, with a group of colleagues, started Athena Health Care Associates, to develop and operate nursing homes and convalescent facilities. Joyce Aparo was just what he needed. He made his pitch. She accepted and now was heading Athena's social services division, earning about fifty thousand dollars a year. The drive to Waterbury, where Athena made its headquarters, was longer than the one to Hartford, but there were plenty of compensations. The work was what she knew and what she enjoyed. She was being paid well for that work, was associating with people she respected. She was doing good for many.

But it satisfied none of what was eating away inside her mind. Nothing could. She was a classic compendium of neuroses and psychoses. The symptoms were there, had been spotted long before by many who came into her orbit. They were growing worse, consuming her and those closest to her.

Her obsession with Archbishop John Whealon, the stories she invented and repeated about her relationship with him, say psychiatrists who have examined her history, have all the earmarks of what is called erotomania. DSM-III-R, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(
Third Edition Revised
), compiled by the American Psychiatric Association, defines it as “an erotic delusion … that one is loved by another [and] the person about whom this conviction is held is usually of a higher status, such as a famous person.” The sickness, though, was not isolated in Joyce alone. While Whealon might dominate her inner life, she attempted, as well, to infect her daughter with the virus, trying to convince Karin that she was loved and desired by Mike Zaccaro, Alasdair Neal, and other men of success and promise.

Erotomania was only one, and perhaps one of the least, of the psychiatric ills that afflicted Joyce Aparo. It would be nearly impossible to look at the relationship of Joyce the mother with her daughter, of Joyce the wife with her husbands, and not see a pervasive pattern of cruel, demeaning, and aggressive behavior—symptoms of what many psychiatrists call a sadistic personality disorder.

From the time she was a child demanding undivided attention from her parents and siblings, through her teen years, when she was flashing a ring and claiming it was a gift from the queen of England, on to her tales of foreign travels and adventures, to having her nose fixed to enhance her beauty, to her constant berating of Karin, with whom she so closely identified, as too fat or otherwise physically unattractive, Joyce Aparo was forever demanding, in the words of the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual, “reassurance, approval, or praise; [was] inappropriately seductive in appearance or behavior; [was] overly concerned with physical attractiveness; [was] uncomfortable in situations in which she [was] not the center of attention; [displayed] rapidly shifting and shallow expressions of emotions; [was] self-centered; [had] no tolerance for frustration or delayed gratification; [attempted] to control the opposite sex or enter into a dependent relationship. Flights into romantic fantasy [were] common.… Interpersonal relationships [were] usually stormy and ungratifying.” It all added up to an aberration called histrionic personality disorder.

That was not all. Joyce Aparo neatly fitted the descriptions of at least two other major psychiatric disorders. Her unreasonable demands for perfection in everything, both from herself and from Karin, demands that could not possibly be met and that therefore too often meant that things could never be completed satisfactorily, and her preoccupation with compiling detailed rules, lists, schedules, and more, combined with her insistence that they be followed precisely with no deviation, are clear demonstrations of what the manual calls obsessive compulsive personality disorder.

Her reaction to criticism—the rage, shame, even humiliation she felt when either she or Karin was criticized—together with her constant exaggerations of her own and Karin's achievements and talents, and her conviction that she and Karin were unique and that only very special people could possibly understand them are manifestations of the manual's narcissistic personality disorder. People with this disturbance, the manual says, are “preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love; [and] lack of empathy: inability to recognize and experience how others feel.” This was Joyce Aparo indeed.

These illnesses, and more, these disturbances did not exist in isolation, wreaking their havoc on Joyce Aparo alone. They were infectious. Her daughter was as much a victim as she, and the effect was devastating. As Karin grew, Joyce passed along the viruses.

Some years later Dr. John Cigalis, a psychologist specializing in personality disorders, and Dr. Walter Borden, a general and forensic psychiatrist, were asked by Karin's lawyer, Hubert Santos, to examine her and offer their opinions on her mental and emotional state and stability. Cigalis saw her three times in 1988 and once in 1990. Borden saw her about a dozen times between the fall of 1987 and the winter of 1988. Both have testified often in criminal cases, almost always for the defense, so their views perhaps, may be colored, may be biased considering the general purpose of their examinations. But other psychiatrists who have looked at Karin's past, as re-created by her and others, though they did not personally see her, tend to agree at least in part with Cigalis and Borden.

Karin, all agree, suffered from a multitude of personality disorders. It would have been nearly impossible had she not. She was a battered and abused child, both physically and emotionally, from her earliest memories. The result was what has come to be called post-traumatic stress syndrome, a condition that is given popular currency by the delayed reactions of prisoners of war and especially by Vietnam War veterans after they returned to civilian life and that is common among battered children when they reach adolescence. The trauma is devastating, an event or series of events over which the victim has no control and no ability to change: the captivity and brutal punishment of prisoners, the horrors of a senseless war and the constant battering of the small child. The episodes may appear to have no immediate effect and may be borne stoically during their course. Later, though, the impact hits, and when it does, it can be crushing. The victim is beset by recurring memories, waking and sleeping, of the event or events; as much as he or she tries to avoid them, they cannot be shaken off, there is no escape and it is as though the times were being relived. With that come a marked loss of interest in ordinary things, a feeling of isolation and detachment and estrangement from the world, an inability to feel ordinary emotions like love, a sense that the future holds little or nothing, not career or marriage or children or success.

There were frequent episodes, increasing as Karin grew into adolescence, of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, the starvation and the vomiting after eating, induced by Joyce's constant haranguing that Karin was too fat, that she ate too much, and then filling the refrigerator with éclairs and other sweets and insisting that she eat them and then vomit.

Karin had all that, and more. There was an induced psychotic disorder, which psychiatrists describe as a delusional system that develops in one person because of that individual's intimate relationship with someone who has a psychotic disorder with his or her own delusions. Eventually the two people will at least partly share these delusions. Nowhere was this more clearly evident than in the dreams Joyce maintained, and fed to Karin, about her future on the concert stage. A key element here is that the shared delusion is usually within the realm of possibility. It doesn't matter if one of this pair is healthy, sane, at the beginning of the relationship. If the dominant partner is the one with the delusions, and the relationship is not one that can be easily escaped, then the sane one's fall is almost inevitable.