The chief got into his car and headed for the river. When he reached it, there was nothing to be seen. Wrong bridge. He drove another half mile, to a second bridge over the river. This was the right bridge.
On the riverbank under it, covered with some leaves and brush, was the body of a dark-haired woman in her mid-forties. She had on only a nightgown, one shoulder strap dangling low on her arm. There were bruises all over her body, some apparently from a struggle before she died. There were abrasions and a layer of dirt coating her arms, legs and body, obviously from her having been dragged across rough ground to this spot. Her face was bloated as well as badly bruised, nearly unrecognizable. She had been strangled, and the panty hose used to garrote her were still wrapped tightly around her neck. Stuffed in her mouth was a yellow paper towel. Later, when they moved the body, the investigators found a gray work glove.
Murder was something far outside Peter Brulotte’s experience. No one could remember the village’s last killing. Indeed, there were few crimes of any kind that took place in Bernardston, perhaps a burglary now and then, or some kids smoking marijuana, or someone going too fast or driving while drunk or parking too long. That was about it.
Bernardston was a middle- and upper-middle class community of private houses, the residents sleeping there at night, going off during the day to well-paying jobs in Greenfield, Amherst, perhaps even as far as Northampton. They enjoyed the good and secure life in a rural countryside near the Fall and Connecticut rivers, far from the dangers of urban society.
Still, Brulotte knew what was expected of him. He called the medical examiner. He put police tape around the crime scene, sealing it off. He examined the area carefully and thoroughly. The only things he found were the sneaker prints of the eleven-year-old who had come upon the body and the scuffling marks of the boy’s dog because the early-morning rain had washed away whatever other marks there might have been.
Returning to his office, Brulotte called the investigative branch of the Massachusetts State Police. And then he made the connection. He had an abandoned car leased to a Connecticut woman in her forties named Joyce Aparo. He had found the body of a woman in her forties who had been murdered about a mile and a half from the abandoned car. He had his dispatcher call the Glastonbury police to tell them the latest news.
That was the end of Brulotte’s connection with the case. Investigators from the Massachusetts State Police arrived on the scene soon after his message reached them. He gave them what information he had, and then they took charge. They had experience with this kind of thing and he didn’t, and he was just as glad to have them in command. He went back to his normal duties of keeping the peace in his small town.
As the small boy and his dog were stumbling on a body under the Fall River bridge in Bernardston, about seventy miles to the south the Glastonbury police were beginning to take some action of their own. What they knew for certain was that a woman of the town was missing and her car had been found in a brook in another state. Lieutenant Thomas McKee called the Markov house in Rowayton and spoke to Karin Aparo. He told her it would help in the investigation of her missing mother if she would return to Glastonbury as soon as possible, come directly to police headquarters on Main Street and not go to the condo. She said she’d be there as soon as she could find a ride.
An hour later it was no longer a missing person’s case. Now there was a body, and if the growing conviction of authorities in both Massachusetts and Connecticut was confirmed, that body was Joyce Aparo and the case was murder. The Glastonbury police were certainly more experienced in dealing with crime, even an occasional violent crime, than Brulotte. The department was considered one of the best trained, best financed and best staffed in the state. Its commanders knew precisely what to do. They sent cops out to the Aparo condo to make sure all the doors and windows were locked, that the premises were sealed, that the area was ringed with yellow police tape marking it a crime scene. Then three cops stationed themselves around the condo, keeping guard, making sure nobody entered, while other officers began to canvass the neighborhood to see if anybody had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary, anything suspicious during the previous night.
Still, murder was not an everyday occurrence in Glastonbury, and there was an immediate understanding that more experienced help would be needed. The place to turn was the Connecticut State Police and its major crimes squad.
Detective James Cavanaugh, a large, burly twenty-one-year veteran of the State Police, seventeen years of which had been spent investigating murder and other major felonies, and his partner, Detective Charles Revoir, were enjoying their day off. They were playing golf, were just putting out on the fifth hole when Cavanaugh’s beeper went off.
They holed out and then made for the clubhouse. Cavanaugh called in. A woman had been murdered and her body found in Massachusetts, he was told, and although positive identification had not yet been made, it was assumed that she was the Connecticut woman who had been reported missing earlier that day. From this moment on the Aparo murder was Cavanaugh’s case. Over the next days he would be in Massachusetts for the autopsy, would be traveling around the Northeast, tracking down leads and interviewing the possible witnesses and suspects, while Charlie Revoir would hold down the command post in Glastonbury.
About five-thirty in the afternoon Trooper Dave Kenney of the Massachusetts State Police called Michael Zaccaro. “They wanted a description of Joyce, what she looked like and that kind of thing,” he remembers. “I gave it to them. Then they told me they’d found a body that matched the description, and was there any family that could come up and identify the body? I didn’t even know then that Joyce had other family in Connecticut. I said the only family that I know of is her daughter, Karin, and she’s sixteen. They said that wouldn’t do, and they told me I’d have to come up myself and identify the body.”
With his partner Ed Giamelli and Phil Murray, the husband of another Athena partner, Ann Marie Murray, Zaccaro set out for Greenfield, where the body had been taken. “We were driving along, and we were in Northampton, about a half hour south of Greenfield. It had been raining, but up ahead it was clear, and the sun had dropped down below the clouds. Now I know this sounds kind of hokey and made up, but honest to God, it really happened. We had a bright sun ahead of us and rain between us and the sun, and all of a sudden there was this huge, beautiful rainbow in the sky. By this time we were positive Joyce was dead. The description I had given matched the body they had perfectly. So we looked at each other, the three of us, and we looked at the rainbow and we said, ‘This is for Joyce.’”
The three men reached the hospital in Greenfield a little after eight that night. Zaccaro was led back to the morgue. “It was unpleasant,” he says, “which is an understatement, not so much because I didn’t recognize her as because she was bloated, disfigured, very beat up. They showed us the body exactly as they found it. Not where it was, of course. It was lying on a slab, but the stocking was still around her neck, her face was bloated, a paper towel was stuck in her mouth with pieces hanging out and she was bloody, black and blue, she was dirty. You could see everything that had happened to Joyce that night.”
Zaccaro made the identification.
Karin Aparo got her ride. Albert Markov drove her up from Rowayton. Though McKee had told her not to stop at the condo, she ignored the request and had Markov drive her there. They arrived about five in the afternoon. There were three cops standing on the lawn outside the condo, and the area was surrounded by yellow tape. Karin and Markov started out of the car, but the cops stopped them. Karin introduced herself and Markov explained that he was her violin teacher. They had stopped, Karin told them, to pick up her ulcer medicine and to see about her cats. The cops said that they couldn’t go into the condo, that they were to go directly to police headquarters. One of the cats appeared from somewhere, ran up to Karin, and she picked it up and hugged it. The cops sympathized but said there was nothing they could do. They had to obey orders, and she should, t
oo. Though she later said that one of the main reasons she had driven to the condo was that she thought that there she might hear some news about her mother, she did not ask what the three cops were doing around her home, did not ask if anybody had heard about her mother, and the cops volunteered nothing.
They returned to the car, and Albert Markov drove to police headquarters, where they arrived at about six. He stayed for a few minutes and then drove back to Rowayton, leaving Karin alone.
The initial interview with the Glastonbury cops was a tentative one. Though they were pretty sure the body in Massachusetts was that of Joyce Aparo, nobody had any desire to tell the victim’s daughter that her mother had been murdered. They decided to wait for more positive identification. What Caron, who talked to Karin while a civilian secretary, a blond, heavyset woman in her thirties, Beverly Warga, took notes (she was present as well because of the department’s policy that no woman is ever questioned by a male officer without another woman being present), seemed most interested in at that moment was information about Joyce’s movements since the last time Karin had heard from her, the night before, and a detailed description of Joyce. Karin filled him in, though, when it came to a description, she later said, “I lied to them about her weight. I thought my mother would be pretty upset if she ever read my statement and saw that I’d told them how much she weighed.” When she finished her statement, Karin asked if she could go to the condo. Her ulcers were acting up, she said, and she needed her medication. Lieutenant McKee, who was then the head of the department’s detective division, vetoed the request. He didn’t want anybody going there, but if she would tell him what kind of medication she needed, he would have a local pharmacy send over the prescription. She told him.
The initial interview over, Caron left the office. One of the things he was going to do was call up to Massachusetts and relay the description Karin had given. Alone with Warga, Karin asked if she could use the phone. Warga motioned to one on a desk three or four feet away and went on typing some notes. Karin made two calls. The first was to her father, Michael Aparo. He and Joyce Aparo had been divorced for more than ten years; he was remarried, living in nearby Hartford and working for the city’s Catholic Charities. Karin had not seen much of him over recent years, had, in fact, not even seen him at all since the previous summer; the divorce had not been amicable, and Aparo’s second wife, with her own children to raise, was not overly fond of the child of her husband’s first, failed marriage. Nevertheless, Michael Aparo was Karin’s closest relative and the one she should naturally have turned to in this crisis.
When Karin told him what had happened, he said he would drive over to Glastonbury to be with her. He arrived at headquarters at about six-thirty.
Karin then phoned Dennis Coleman. It was a short call merely to let him know that she was in town. She told him she was still at the police station, that the police had sealed her apartment, she had no place to stay that night. Could she stay with him, and would he come down to the station to pick her up? He said he would. She said she would let him know when she was finished. “I didn’t feel comfortable with my dad,” Karin later explained, “and I felt comfortable with Dennis.”
Everything changed within minutes of Michael Aparo’s arrival at police headquarters. Word reached the Glastonbury police that all the descriptions that had been relayed matched the body; there was no doubt that the victim was Joyce Aparo; the positive identification would be only a necessary formality.
It was then time to tell Karin that her mother was dead, murdered. It could not be delayed any longer. McKee and another officer took Karin aside. It was their job, they realized, to break the news. “I didn’t know how a person reacts to this news,” McKee recalls, “so we prepared ourselves for any type of reaction.” But the one they got they were unprepared for. “Karin’s only response,” he says, “was one tear. Nothing else.”
McKee turned to Michael Aparo, who was standing alone at some distance. He told him his first wife was dead. Aparo’s reaction was shock. Still, he made no move toward his daughter. She did not approach him, and he did not approach her, and they neither embraced nor sought any comfort from the other. Evidently even tragedy could not bridge the gulf that separated them. When Karin asked McKee if she could leave for her friend’s house, Michael Aparo told McKee it was okay with him. The Colemans—Dennis, his father, Dennis senior, his brother, Matthew, and his stepmother—were good people and good family friends, he said, though McKee had a feeling that in reality, Aparo barely knew them if he knew them at all. But, McKee says, “it was not my place to question it,” so he said sure.
On the way out Karin stopped once more in the office, a small room with a couple of desks and chairs and a bench, where Beverly Warga was working. She asked if she could make another phone call, to her friend Dennis. Though there was a public phone nearby, she ignored it. Warga nodded. Karin picked up the phone, dialed the number. Warga, only a few feet away, was transcribing some notes on the hunt for a cat burglar who had been preying on homes in the town over the past several weeks.
“I’m at the police station,” Karin began, and then her voice lowered, dropped to a near whisper. That was enough to make Warga pause, strain a little to catch the next words. Warga’s manner, the expressions on her face say that over the years she has seen and heard enough that there is little left that shocks her. But over the next few minutes she was deeply shocked. What she began to pick up in that hushed conversation, at least Karin’s side of it, compelled Warga, who attempted to keep her face blank, uninterested, to take out a pad and write down what she heard, as much as she could as fast as she could.
For Karin Aparo said to Dennis Coleman, from the phone in the Glastonbury police station, with a police witness sitting only a few feet away, listening and taking down her words: “Where did you do it?… Did you hurt your head?… That’s okay, you were over at the house the night before we left.… Don’t worry about it.… The police said the house was neat, the bed hadn’t been slept in. Did you clean up? Did you make the bed? Do you know if Chris did it? The police don’t think it was a cat burglar.… Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you a psychiatrist. Don’t forget, I’m going to be a psychiatrist.… Think about something else. I’ll be there soon to take care of you.”
According to Warga’s notes, the phrases “Don’t worry about it … I’ll be there soon … I’ll take care of you” were repeated several times.
Finally the call was over. Karin turned away, went to her father, and together they left police headquarters.
Hardly were they out the door before Beverly Warga accosted Lieutenants McKee and Caron and told them what she had overheard. McKee decided that maybe they ought to have another little talk with Karin Aparo and with this boyfriend, Dennis Coleman. Without waiting for orders, Caron was on his way out the door, only a few minutes behind Michael Aparo and his daughter. By the time he reached the Coleman house, Aparo had already departed. Michael Aparo, showing little concern that his daughter, her mother just murdered, was planning to spend the night at the home of her boyfriend, had simply dropped Karin off and then driven back to Hartford.
Inside the Coleman house Karin and Dennis were off to the side of the living room in intense, hushed conversation when Caron entered. He approached. There were, he said, some questions that had come up as a result of the phone conversation that had been overheard by Beverly Warga. Would Karin and Dennis be willing to return to police headquarters to clear up what might be just a misunderstanding? They agreed.
Over the next four hours the police alternately and separately questioned Karin and Dennis and for much of the time simply left them alone together in the office with Beverly Warga. The two sat together, Karin holding Dennis’s hand, as though somehow comforting or consoling him, Warga thought, and they talked, sometimes in whispers, sometimes in more normal voices, sometimes to each other and at times including Warga. Some of what they said was inconsequential, about movies, about Dennis’s playing bass in a rock ban
d with some friends, about cars, about other things. “This,” Warga remembers, “was just small talk.”
But there was more that to Warga was anything but small talk. It seemed so filled with implications, as potentially incriminating and portentous as the phone conversation, that Warga once more took out her pad and surreptitiously noted down words and phrases, some that to her seemed to have particularly crucial meaning, some that were merely enigmatic.
Several times Karin repeated the questions and the phrases she had used during the phone conversation. And there was more.
Dennis was rubbing the back of his head. Karin asked if it was all right. “You banged it on the table at my house when you went in to feed the cats, isn’t that right?”
“No,” Dennis responded, “I banged it on the stove at work.”
When Karin asked the question again, she seemed to have picked up on his explanation.
Karin kept looking at Dennis’s hand. “I hope your hand is going to be all right,” she said.
“It’ll be okay,” Dennis said. Then he explained to Warga that one of Karin’s cats had bitten it when he had been putting out food over the weekend, though when the subject came up again, he said the cat had scratched it, and yet another time he said he caught his hand in a door.
Karin mentioned something about Dennis’s not being able to ski. Warga noted how shocked Dennis seemed, that he turned to her and said that he had been skiing since he was seven.
At one point Karin turned to Warga and said, “I hope the Markovs don’t call while we’re here. Dennis is very jealous of Alex, you know.” Dennis made no comment.
Periodically the police—Caron, McKee, other Glastonbury officers and the first state cops to arrive—took Karin and Dennis off for some separate private conversations.
Beyond Obsession Page 2
