Beyond Obsession (26 page)

But Joyce did not die from the pills. She took one bite of the sandwich and made a face. “The damn relish has gone bad,” she said. “Throw it out, and the two of you go to the store and buy some fresh relish.”

Karin and Dennis did as ordered. In the car an anguished Dennis talked about what he had witnessed. Karin told him that since he wouldn't do it, she'd had to make the attempt herself. She should never have put it to him anyway.

Dennis spent a sleepless night. “I was distraught. I was a wreck,” he says. Until that moment in the living room he had thought that it was just talk, that Karin couldn't possibly be serious about killing her mother. He had tried to head her off whenever she came too close to the idea. It hadn't worked. Now he knew she meant it. The next morning he got up, got into his car and sped out of the parking lot without glancing in the direction of her window, without making any gesture toward it, as he normally did on his way to work. He just had to get out of there, get away, fast.

Sometime during the day his brother showed up at the office. Karin had come across the lot late in the morning and handed Matt a letter for Dennis. Since Matt was driving into Hartford, he decided to drop off the letter and not let Dennis wait until he got home to read it.

In the stillness of her room that morning, after he had sped away without a backward glance toward her, she wrote him that long letter about abandonment. “Where are you?” she began. “Have you stopped talking to me?” If, indeed, he had, she wrote, she understood. She had asked him to do something that never should have been asked of anyone, certainly not of someone she loved as she loved him. Now she wanted him to know she didn't really want him to do it. She didn't want him to have to live with the memory of committing such an act, murder. He had suffered enough as it was, and she didn't want to add to the suffering. Joyce, after all, was her mother, and she would deal with Joyce herself. But what really hurt her was that he had driven away that morning without even saying a word to her. She related then the story of the seventh birthday that never was and of her father's abandonment in that time of crucial need. She ended, “You both left when I needed you most … and you didn't even say goodbye.”

If she wrote that letter to make him feel guilty, to turn him back into more than just an ally, into someone to help her do what she believed had to be done, she succeeded. Reading it, Dennis felt himself torn apart. “I felt I was dealing with a horror,” he says. “She was playing on me, making me see it from her point of view. That's the way it came across when I got that letter. It was an emotional appeal.” He could not abandon her as everyone had in the past. He would be there for her from then on, would do whatever she asked without question.

He read the letter several times. He dialed her number, and they talked. He was sobbing into the phone. She seemed cold and distant. When he hung up, he felt he had to answer her letter. During breaks through the day he wrote a reply he titled “Love and Death”:

I read every note you gave me and remembered us in a simpler time. Our first kiss, our first meeting, and most special to me, the first time I ventured forth beyond limit of restraint and held your hand. The feelings that shot through me at that second. Today those same feelings have flourished to the point that I cry at the thought of you—every night. My heart feels like it's going to burst from the fullness in and around it. My innocent attraction has taken me like a tide and I lie happy and helpless in its wake. A love I have never felt, or even dreamed of. A girl I scarcely know yet I dream of. Karin Aparo—before you I felt love and life slipping to loneliness. My life was becoming void and my heart unable to love. Already had I lost the capability of trust. Consider it one of your greatest achievements to have me trust once again.

I love you. I want you. I need you. What more can I say? Any sacrifice I will make. My life is yours. Forever from now, my only goal is to make you happy in any way I must. Don't be afraid to ask. If you don't, how will I know you still need me. Soon—for you—I will give my soul to something black. Please, all I ask in return is that you keep my heart in the light. My soul I can do without. You I cannot. Today you almost took both our lives. Don't scare me like that again. When I saw that bottle empty, you can't imagine how incredibly terrified I became. I can honestly say, I've
never
been that scared. Please … promise me. I love you Karin. I'm here for you. Always. You know I would kill for you. You could ask nothing more, yet I could give nothing less.

I had a talk with my mom about things for you. Any time you need to you can stay here for as long as you like—she said so. There could even be the possibility (she kind of offered) to have you come live with us, permanently. If
anything
starts to look bad over at your house, don't wait. Come right over, whether I'm home or not. My mom said so. We can work things out dear.

When he arrived home, he put that letter in their secret mailbox. When Karin reached home later that afternoon, Dennis's letter was waiting for her. But she was not the only one who read that introspective struggle with love and death, that offer to die for her.

Joyce was furious. She summoned Karin into the living room and for an hour berated her. “She told me if I had anything more to do with Dennis, she would cancel me,” Karin says. “She said she was not going to let me ruin my life over Dennis. Then she asked me to call Dennis and get him over.”

While she waited for Dennis to appear, Karin picked up some odd pieces of stationery she was using as a diary until she bought a new book, and she scribbled some rambling reflections. Joyce had found the note in the window, so Karin was in permanent trouble. She wondered if the trouble came out of teenage rebellion. Her eyesight was changing, and she had to see an ophthalmologist. She had been so upset at Dennis that morning when he raced out of the parking lot without a word to her, so hurt and angry that she had written him the note about her seventh birthday and given it to Matt to pass on. Dennis had called, had been in tears, but she had refused to cry. She and Joyce were going to visit Archbishop Whealon, who was ill in the hospital. She weighed 116 pounds, which was too much, yet she craved ice cream. “Am in love with Denny,” she concluded, “very much so. Miss Alasdair!”

When Dennis arrived, he says, there appeared to him to be nothing out of the ordinary. Joyce acted toward him as she always had. It was just their usual evening together. But, then, Joyce rarely, if ever, spoke severely to Dennis. “She never expressed anything to me but that she liked me and had a good opinion of me,” he says. “All I ever knew about her thinking anything different was what Karin told me she said.” Of course, Joyce rarely criticized or became angry at outsiders unless she thought they posed a threat, a danger to her of one kind or another. Because Dennis was hardly more than a boy, she considered him no threat; he was someone she could handle. She saved her rages for those close to her, like Karin, or for those such as neighbors who publicly criticized and thereby humiliated her.

Karin says, however, that Joyce sat both of them down on the couch in the living room and then told Dennis that Karin had better things to do with her life than sleep with him. She ordered them to stop. Karin says that they agreed, that they would just see each other socially but there would be no more sex. Joyce seemed satisfied with that, she says. They, of course, had no intention of keeping that promise.

Whatever happened that evening in the Aparo living room, whether Joyce spoke only to Karin or to both of them, gave her orders only to Karin or to both of them, the determination that Joyce had to go, and go without delay, became even more entrenched, although Karin later said that all they were ever talking about, that all they were ever planning, that the only determination was about her running away. Murder, she claimed, was not on her mind.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. For within days Karin and Dennis had devised a new plan. This time it would not be Karin acting on her own. This time they would work in concert. It was now the second week of August 1986.

It would go this way: Of an evening Karin would lure Joyce into the kitchen of the condo. Initially it was decided that Dennis would be lurking in a nearby closet, ready to come to her aid. Before it was over, Joyce would be dead, Karin doing the killing and Dennis supporting her in a claim of self-defense. Then that scheme was dismissed, and a new plan emerged, though with essentially the same elements. In this one Dennis would be watching from his window across the way. At the appropriate moment, when Joyce was distracted, Karin would take a kitchen knife and kill her. She would then flick the lights in the kitchen on and off to summon Dennis, and he would come running. The police would be called. Dennis would tell them that he had heard loud noises and come rushing across the parking lot. As he arrived, Joyce was viciously attacking Karin. In self-defense Karin had grabbed a knife and acted to protect herself.

When they finally agreed on this method, Karin wrote another note to Dennis, telling him, “I will do whatever is necessary. It is a decided thing and I will do it even if you won't help me. It is just another thing to do on my ‘priority list' & right now it has a very high billing.” As for the lights, she would take care of them, unless, that is, he wanted to help.

Out of nowhere, a non sequitur, she added that she had his socks, that school began on September 3 and she had her school schedule, was going to be taking chemistry even though she hadn't finished algebra.

Then, on a line by itself, she wrote, “My God, do you realize what we're thinking?”

Now Karin announced that she couldn't carry out the plan herself. Joyce was her mother, she said, and much as she hated her and wanted to escape from her, she couldn't kill her. Dennis said, “Okay. I understand. I could do it.”

So the plan was revised once more. Joyce and Karin were going out for a day. When they got home, Karin would get Joyce into the kitchen. Karin would flick the lights on and off. Dennis would be watching from his window. When he saw the signal, he would come across the parking lot, enter the condo, take a knife and stab Joyce to death. The police would be summoned. Karin would tell them that Joyce had been attacking her. She had screamed. Hearing the screams, Dennis had raced across the lot to her aid. Joyce was strangling her. He had tried to help Karin, but Joyce was raving and could not be stopped. The only way he could stop her and save Karin was to grab the nearest implement at hand and go at Joyce. Unfortunately that implement happened to be a kitchen knife, and he had killed Joyce. He hadn't wanted to, hadn't meant to, but it was the only way to stop Joyce and save Karin.

Dennis agreed. Anything to placate Karin, anything to help her. “But I was a wreck. I didn't know what to do,” he says. “I wanted to talk to someone, so I called Denise and I made a date to see her that night.”

Then he waited and watched. It grew later. Dusk settled and then darkness. He heard Joyce's car pull into the parking lot. She and Karin had spent the evening at dinner with Archbishop Whealon, who was home from the hospital. These had been long and, for Karin, excruciating hours, filled with apprehension. She was sure she knew what would happen when they reached home. Dennis had said, “If I promise you something, I'll do it, no matter what.”

Dennis says: “I was watching from the window right across the lot, and then I saw the lights go on and off. I thought,
Oh, god
. I went over to the phone and called Denise and said, ‘I've got to talk to you.' I left right away, and we went to a bar, and I told her everything that was going on. She couldn't deal with it. You can't deal with something like that. I was freaked out.”

He also talked to his friend Christopher Wheatley and told him what Karin wanted done. Unlike Denise, Wheatley didn't seem to be bothered by the idea. He listened, did not try to talk Dennis into walking away from the whole thing, merely listened and made no comment.

The lights in the Aparo condo had been flicked on and off by accident. Entering the condo's kitchen, Joyce had switched them on and immediately switched them off again. “I got scared,” Karin says. “I thought Dennis would come over and do it then. So I went over and locked the glass doors and drew the curtains so he couldn't come in. And then later he told me he didn't even try.”

Late that night, sitting at the desk in her room, Karin wrote to Dennis. What had she learned from the events of the day? she asked. She had learned that if she ever ran away from home and moved in somewhere else, Joyce would take revenge and would make sure, at the very least, that she didn't get info a good college. She would, for instance, go down to Yale and talk to the deans, talk to Alasdair Neal, and relate in detail the stories of Karin's delinquencies so that they would never want to speak to her again. Even now they probably wanted to have nothing to do with her because the word was spreading that she had a bad reputation; even as far away as California they must know that she had done things no girl her age should have done.

She had had a miserable evening, sitting with Archbishop Whealon and eating ice cream and wanting to talk to him, but she had been unable to do so.

What was left for her now? she asked. “Just more shattered dreams, eh? Remind me never to get my hopes up again about anything.” She'd listened to too many promises only to see them broken. Promises were like water, a flood one day, a drought the next. People shouldn't make promises unless they intend to keep them, she told him. Maybe Dennis could not have done anything but what he did—which was nothing. “I told you that you wouldn't be able to. But you denied me.… I didn't ask you this time. You offered.”

One thing was certain, she wrote: Any possibility that she could ever get away was gone now. Joyce wouldn't let her break free. If she tried, Joyce would have her committed to juvenile hall as a delinquent. Yes, she wanted to leave because she was terrified of her mother, but she knew there was no way she could.