Beyond Obsession (4 page)

In her separate interviews Karin told the police just about the same things, sometimes even using the same words and phrases.

The police may have had their suspicions at this point, but that was all. They had nothing but suspicion to go on. For one thing, they weren't even sure where Joyce Aparo had been murdered. The best guess was that she must have been killed in Glastonbury, strangled in her own bed sometime during the night; the fact that she was wearing only a nightgown when her body was discovered would point to that. But then, again, it was possible that she had been abducted, driven to Bernardston and killed there. If so, the question that loomed was why.

What seemed certain, though, was that at least two people, and two cars, had to be directly involved, certainly if Joyce had been murdered in Glastonbury. Her car had been driven north to the Massachusetts-Vermont-New Hampshire border, where her body had been dragged to its resting place beneath the Fall River bridge, and the car dumped down the slope into the stream a mile and a half away. Unless the killer was from Bernardston itself (but, if so, how had he gotten to Connecticut?), he had somehow had to make his way back south in the middle of the night, and the only way that would have been possible was if there had been somebody else along in a second car to drive him. Karin had a solid alibi. The Markovs could attest to her presence at their home in Rowayton. Dennis seemed to have one, too; it was a long trip from Glastonbury to Bernardston and back, and unless there indeed had been someone else in another car, someone else involved in the murder, there was just no way he could have made that round trip and been at work by seven the next morning.

Anyway, who could suspect these two teenagers, or either one of them, of committing a murder, and a terrible one at that, not a sudden killing in the momentary heat of passion, but a murder by strangulation, a murder that must have taken long, agonizing minutes, during which the victim had to have fought desperately and violently for her life? These two were the kids next door, children of the upwardly mobile middle class, wanting for little.

Tall, slim, red-haired, freckle-faced Dennis Coleman, son of an old Glastonbury family, was the kind of boy, Connecticut State's Attorney John Bailey said later, that you'd want your daughter to bring home. He was good-looking and personable, a smart boy, with an IQ of 137, a boy who could get by in school without cracking a book, a young man talented in music, something of a prodigy with computers, in love with the outdoors, a skier, a sailor, an expert woodsman who spent long hours carving trails and campsites in forests. He was a child of affluence, his father, Dennis senior, being head of his own prosperous computer consulting firm, where young Dennis worked part-time during the school year and on vacations until after a dispute with his father he had left and found the job at the country club. Though the junior Dennis Coleman had not gone on to college after graduating from high school the year before, had instead initially gone to work as a computer programmer for one of Hartford's ubiquitous insurance companies, he was now planning to go on with his education. In August he was to start at Central Connecticut State University in nearby New Britain. He already had his books and his student ID card. For him, the future seemed limited only by what he would make of it.

And what about Karin Aparo? Except for a little more than a year when she was twelve, she had lived in Glastonbury since the age of five. She was small, only a little over five feet. At the time, beset by the hormonal changes that afflict so many teenagers as they turn from children into adolescents and then into adults, their bodies developing in spurts at no predictable rate, she was a little plump and a little buxom and very concerned about her weight, unaware and unconvinced that before long the baby fat would vanish. She had short dark hair, deep brown eyes, often concealed, or magnified, behind large glasses, and though there was a sharpness about her features, she was, most people agreed, an attractive teenager. And she was bright, brighter than most, people who knew her said; her mind was, at least intellectually, on a par with Dennis's, her IQ 131. If she was a little standoffish, that was perhaps understandable, too, for she was talented, her mother having predicted for years that one day she would make her mark as a concert violinist, and driving her toward that goal. After hearing her play, especially after hearing tapes Joyce said that Karin made, many people agreed. Besides, Karin was hardly more than a child, just entering her junior year at Glastonbury High School. But there was something about her, a sexual aura, that affected men of all ages who came into her orbit. One of the cops who interviewed her that first day and later says, “You spent a couple of hours with that girl and you wanted to jump her bones.” Still, she was little more than a child, and she may have been unaware of the effect she had on men.

Perhaps, then, it was all as innocent as they said. It would be incomprehensible to suspect these two not just of murder but of premeditated murder.

At one-thirty in the morning, Joyce Aparo then dead for some twenty-four hours, the questioning of nineteen-year-old Dennis Coleman and sixteen-year-old Karin Aparo, the daughter of the murdered woman, ended. A cop drove them back to the Coleman house. They went to bed together in Dennis's room. Karin later said it was the first time they had slept together in that bed in that house through the night. Over the past year they had made love eighty times. That night they only shared the same bed.

2

Murder didn't happen in Glastonbury. Somewhere else, maybe, in some inner city, some congested urban pressure cooker. But not in Glastonbury. There were crimes, certainly, just as there were everywhere. Indeed, at this very moment in the summer of 1987 the cat burglar Beverly Warga was concerned about was on the loose, preying on unguarded homes in the night. And there was “Benji the Pillow Case Bandit” on his own burglary spree. Both, especially the cat burglar, were the major concerns of the town's police force; extra cars were on patrol every night, cruising the quiet dark streets, stopping and questioning any pedestrian out too late, checking any strange car parked in a residential area. There was, too, as in every city and town across the nation, a drug problem, especially among the young, and there had been a couple of drug busts in recent months, but in Glastonbury most adults were sure drugs were less prevalent than in many another suburb. They were wrong, and the police and the school authorities were aware of it and were dealing directly with the issue with a variety of programs.

But crimes of violence? Murder? Not in Glastonbury, or if in Glastonbury, the crime must have been committed by some outsider who had invaded this safe suburban enclave. Never by a native and certainly not by the protected children of the town.

For Glastonbury was the quintessential, the idealized New England suburb, the dream town of both residents and real estate brokers showing their white clients, those willing and able to pay from $150,000 to $1 million and more for a house, a place to live and bring up their children untouched by the afflictions that beset much of the nation: pervasive drugs, violent crime, racial unrest and so much more. Though Glastonbury was less than a half hour's drive from the center of Hartford, the state capital that, in recent years, had become one of the most poverty-stricken and crime-ridden cities in the Northeast, it was as though the town somehow existed on another planet or in another time.

Its roots were far in the past, its old streets laid out in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Its oldest homes dated from before the Revolution. Glastonbury had been settled in 1638, only two years after the Reverend Thomas Hooker and 110 members of his congregation had left the Massachusetts Bay Colony, traveled south and established the first permanent settlements on the Connecticut River in what became Hartford, Windsor and Wethersfield. Some of the Wethersfield pioneers, resenting the strict rules of the Hooker congregation and seeing fertile land on the eastern side of the river, broke away and formed their own community on thirty-four parcels they bought from the local Indians. The colonists called their new town Glastonbury, after the place in England where many had been born.

The town prospered, as both an agricultural center and the site of some small industries—a cotton mill, a paper mill, a soap mill, a tannery, a silver firm and, most important in those early days, the Stocking Gunpowder Factory, a major supplier of gunpowder to George Washington's revolutionary army. But industry gradually vanished as the Industrial Revolution took root and factories moved closer to urban centers and the railroads. Glastonbury lapsed into a sleepy agricultural backwater, a place where residents of Hartford, East Hartford and surrounding communities went during the summer to buy local corn, tomatoes, berries and other fresh produce, and cider made from locally grown apples, often crossing the river on the Glastonbury Ferry, which made its first passage in 1655 and continues to run to this day, at least in good weather, and is now the oldest ferry service in continuous operation in the United States.

By the end of the 1950s there were only about eight thousand people in the town, and it had changed little from early days; in 1959, for instance, it was still governed, as it had been since 1692, by the town meeting. But radical change was at hand. Suddenly new highways were laid down, and bridges built across the Connecticut River, bringing Hartford with its insurance companies and other growing communities with their factories within an easy commute. As Glastonbury turned from an agricultural enclave into a bedroom community, home to the growing middle and upper middle classes, the town meeting vanished, replaced by a nonpartisan town manager, appointed by an elected nine-member town council (more often than not with a six to three Republican majority, though registered voters have over the years been about evenly balanced among Republicans, Democrats and independents). Over the next quarter century the population tripled, soaring to more than twenty-four thousand by the mid-1980s, and townspeople predicted that by the turn of the decade they would be joined by another thirty-five hundred people.

But that growth has hardly reflected the demographic image of America at large. Glastonbury is lily white—in the mid-1980s, 97 percent white, in fact, with a mere 107 blacks, most of them servants, and 365 “others,” the others representing an influx of increasingly prosperous Asians. Of the fourteen religious congregations, one is Jewish, two are Catholic, though the Catholic population has grown steadily, and the other eleven are various Protestant denominations.

The median family income in the early 1980s was more than thirty-one thousand dollars; by 1990, according to estimates, it was close to forty thousand dollars. And there is a car not just for every family but for almost every citizen—more than twenty-one thousand cars registered in the mid-1980s.

The town is hardly overbuilt, and if town planners have their way, it never will be; 70 percent of the 468 square miles of land remains undeveloped, much of it heavily wooded parks and state forests where building is forbidden or strictly limited. Multiple dwellings—a scattering of apartments and condominiums, all in the moderately high to high price range—account for a mere 2 percent of the housing, though, in a bow to contemporary pressures, there are now plans for a few residences for senior citizens. The rest are single-family houses, built according to strict zoning regulations that divide the town into three distinct areas: In the most densely populated areas, the rules call for no more than 3.2 families per acre, a second area mandates one house per acre, and the third requires that houses must be built on lots of two acres or more. Where any industry is permitted, it is strictly light, and it is contained in industrial parks on the outskirts.

Glastonbury has from its earliest days prided itself on educational excellence (Noah Webster, creator of Webster's dictionary, began his teaching career in the town, and during the Revolutionary War Yale University relocated its junior and senior classes to Glastonbury). Today the town's budget for schools is one of the highest in the state. The result: About 75 percent of the high school graduates go on to college.

And so for those who settled in this town with all its privileges and all its protective veneer, the idea of murder, deliberate and cold-blooded, was unthinkable.

But it had happened. What was worse, according to rumors that spread quickly in the first days, the murderer was not an outsider but one of those children of affluence.

Early on Thursday morning, the day after the murder, Detective Cavanaugh drove up to the morgue in Springfield, Massachusetts, where Joyce Aparo's body had been moved during the night. He was there to observe the autopsy. It was a thing he had done perhaps eighty times over the years. It was not something in which he took any particular pleasure; it was a job. Besides, most of the other state cops who had moved in on the case during the previous day had been up most of the night while Cavanaugh, the man in charge, had made the assignments and then gone home to bed. He was fresh, the others were not, so he had gone up to the autopsy.

As he stood to one side, watching, the body bag used to move Joyce Aparo was unzipped. He took a photograph. For the next three hours, as the Massachusetts medical examiner, Dr. Peter Adams, painstakingly went over the body, Cavanaugh took more photographs and gathered bits of evidence, including the ragged yellow paper towel that had been stuffed into Joyce Aparo's mouth, and the single gray work glove, now coated with grime and debris, that had been found beneath her body. Then he drove back to Glastonbury, to the command post that had been set up at the Naubuc Elementary School to coordinate the joint investigation by the state and local police, to take charge.

The cops returned to search the Aparo condominium, more thoroughly and carefully this time. Things they had passed over during the previous visits now took on a special meaning. For example, they looked at the rumpled bed shoved away from the wall, with three pillows and a blanket on the floor beside it, another pillow on the bed. The killer must have shoved the bed away from the wall during the struggle, had perhaps used the pillows to smother and stifle his victim's cries. Flung haphazardly across a chair in the bedroom was a nightgown sash that matched the gown Joyce Aparo was wearing when she was found.