Nobody, of course, did anything, then or later. Joyce’s explanations were accepted. And the accusations that she practiced witchcraft were just as easily dismissed when she contemptuously denied them. Yet, neighbors say, she openly told them when she first moved into the house on Wesleyan Street that she was a witch, though she gave no details. Perhaps it was just a way of keeping at a distance neighbors she wanted nothing to do with because she considered them as much beneath her as she thought their children were beneath her daughter.
But the boast was there, and some gave it credence; if they were not adults, then at least other children believed it. Lori DeLucca, a friend of Karin’s until the fourth grade and an acquaintance thereafter, remembers that when they were friends, Karin told her and Shannon Dubois about her closet, about sitting there and meditating for hours, told them that if they sat outside in the dark and stared at the moon, they would be able to leave their bodies. Lori went home and told her mother, who said, “Stay away from that girl. There’s something not right about her.” Lori obeyed, and the friendship died.
8
In any person’s life there are seminal events, essential in the formation of later attitudes and actions. On the surface they may seem trivial, of little lasting significance at least to the outsider. But in the psyche they are unforgettable and take on a crucial aspect. For Karin Aparo her seventh birthday, on February 12, 1978, was such an event.
Years later she wrote about it to Dennis Coleman, during a critical phase in their relationship. It was in early August 1986, and she had watched from her window as he walked out of his house and got into his car. She had turned away to put on some clothes, meaning to go out and speak to him. But by the time she got dressed, he had driven away without looking in her direction or speaking to her.
As she watched him leave, she suddenly remembered her father’s doing precisely the same thing on that seventh birthday. It was to have been a special day. She had never before had a birthday party for friends, and now Joyce was about to give her one. A rum cake had been ordered, made specially for her, and Joyce had purchased candy and other treats, party favors, napkins and plates and all the rest to make this a gala occasion.
Karin was just returning with her father from a weekend together. Those weekends were special, for they were the only times she saw him, and during those days he treated her like a princess. As they drove up to the house, he suddenly proposed that she go upstairs, change, and then he would take her to visit her grandmother—his mother—and other relatives, who all had presents for her, and they would spend her birthday together.
She was ecstatic. She raced into the house. Joyce was busy cleaning and getting everything ready. As she tore up the stairs, Karin announced her plans. Joyce was furious. She picked up the phone and began calling the kids who had been invited; there would be no party. Michael Aparo appeared. He and Joyce had a bitter argument. Karin, upstairs, frantically trying to change her clothes, heard them. Then she heard the front door close. “My dad left. He got into his little yellow Volkswagen bug & sped away in the opposite direction. He didn’t even say goodbye.”
A few minutes later Karin descended the stairs. She asked where her father was. Joyce told her he had run out on them as usual. Karin began to cry. Joyce told her to stop because she had brought the situation on herself. Through her tears Karin asked if they could call her friends and tell them that the party was really on and that the first call had been a mistake. Joyce refused. She ordered Karin to throw out all the party favors, the plates, napkins and the rest, to put the candy away and leave the rum cake in the refrigerator. Then she ordered Karin to go back upstairs, unpack her weekend suitcase, return and finish all the housework.
Karin got no presents that birthday. The party that never was, as she later called it, was supposed to be the present from Joyce. From her father, she thinks she got a card, though she can’t remember it. The cake remained untouched in the refrigerator, bringing tears until Joyce eventually threw it out.
“Well,” she wrote to Dennis, “instead of ‘little yellow Volkswagen bug’ put in ‘little yellow Triumph Spitfire’ then maybe you’ll get the idea of how hurt I was.” The one difference was that this time she didn’t cry. But, she wrote, she had begun to wonder if perhaps she should never get dressed again. When she did, something bad inevitably happened. Her father had once been, and now Dennis was, her only escape from her mother. They both gave Karin time away from Joyce. They both endeared themselves to her, gave her nice things, made her forget her troubles and problems. But they both deserted her in a time of desperate need, and they both “didn’t even say goodbye.”
Michael Aparo barely remembers that event. But it convinced Karin that she could never depend on him in time of need. He became a figure of increasingly less importance or influence in her life. Though she continued to see him now and then, the meetings became fewer and fewer as time passed, and the distance between them grew ever wider.
Her father had disappointed her, but she could escape him. Her mother, who did worse than disappoint her, she could never escape. And the agony of living at home with her grew worse as the years passed. There would be the times, many of them, repeated often, she says, when Joyce “made me stand in the middle of the floor while she was in bed, and then she would go over me critically from head to toe, making remarks. ‘Look at your hair. It’s always in your eyes. You look like a dog. Hold your face up or you’ll get a double chin. You’re getting fat. I don’t know why you don’t listen to me. You’re an intelligent girl.’”
And there was the day “I was standing with my mother and she was ironing and she was yelling about something I had done and she held up the iron and said, ‘Come here. I want to burn your face.’” Fortunately Karin didn’t move, and the cord wasn’t long enough to reach her, though Joyce kept stretching it and screaming at Karin to come to her and get burned. Suddenly the washing machine in the other room started making noises, spinning out of balance. Joyce glared in that direction, then at Karin and ordered her to go and fix it.
But there were things to fill the emptiness, to blunt the terror. There was the violin. Karin and Joyce, in reality and fantasy, shared it, and in the sharing they forged whatever bond existed between them. Among the earliest memories of neighbors and friends is the picture of a small, sad-faced child with big dark eyes, soon concealed behind large glasses like those her mother wore, and dark hair, always with a violin case in her hand. Among other memories are those of a grown woman talking constantly, pridefully of her daughter and her daughter’s future with that violin.
Karin picked up the violin for the first time just before her sixth birthday, in January 1977, and it remained in her hands, central and crucial to her existence and to her relationship with her mother, for the next ten and a half years. Karin later told a psychiatrist that the violin was the only thing in her life that belonged to her alone. Her mother might tell her how much she loved music, might share that love with Karin but the violin was “my thing,” the one thing that took her away from her mother, the thing that became the focus of her identity.
Joyce brought her to Constance Sattler, a teacher at the Julius Hartt School of Music, a practitioner of the Suzuki violin method, based on the idea of constant cooperation and interplay among teacher, student and parent, in which the parent attends the lessons, an individual one and a group one with other children every week, observes, gets some instruction herself and then, at home, is able to help the child during practice sessions.
Sattler remembers clearly that first meeting. Mother and daughter arrived. She looked at Joyce, and her immediate thought was that she must have gone through some terrible tragedy; her hair was snow white. “Then I saw her a couple of weeks later, and her hair was a different color, and over the next several years, it changed color again and again.”
Karin took lessons with Sattler at Hartt for the next four years. At first Joyce was always there, sitting off in a corner, observing and embroidering somethi
ng in satin with ornate gold and silver thread. When Sattler casually asked what she was doing, Joyce told her she was making a headdress for an archbishop.
“Her moods,” Sattler recalls, “were very changeable and unpredictable. She could overflow with love and approval one minute or one time and the next be icy with disapproval, all for no apparent reason.” No matter what Joyce’s moods were, Karin never seemed to react.
There were other things about Joyce that Sattler noticed. As Karin got older, Joyce, at the teacher’s urging, showed up less often. Michael Aparo sometimes, or a variety of other men, for Joyce invariably had men around her, dropped Karin off for her lessons and then picked her up when the lessons were over. Once, when Sattler expressed concern for Karin to Aparo over the way she was being treated by her mother, Aparo had no comment, acted, the teacher thought, as though he were helpless to do anything.
Through the years Sattler heard a variety of stories from Joyce about her plans. “She talked about marriage all the time. She would come in and say, ‘I’m getting married next week.’ It never happened.” And once Joyce told her that she was about to leave on a long business trip to Australia, perhaps the one she had told several friends she was making to hunt for semiprecious stones and buy into an opal mine, and that Karin would be flying out a few days later to join her. But Karin missed only a couple of lessons, and when she was back at the music school, she explained that her mother had returned sooner than expected, so she hadn’t made the trip. As it happened, Joyce hadn’t made the trip either.
Joyce’s expectations for Karin as a violinist were outsize and far beyond the child’s ability or talent, as were her expectations about everything. “Karin,” Sattler says, “was not as good as I first thought she would be. There was something blocking her talent and development. She was an average student, and she should have been a very good one. She started off with a bang and then dropped off.”
But Joyce had convinced herself that Karin was the best, and she demanded perfection. Once when seven-year-old Karin was playing in a music school recital as part of a group of twelve children, her bowing suddenly went out of sync with the others. In front of an audience of about seventy-five people, Joyce leaped from her seat, rushed onto the stage, dragged Karin off into the wings and began to scream at her.
A year later Karin was slated to play a solo at another recital, but Sattler wasn’t satisfied that she was quite ready to perform this difficult piece and gave it to another child. After the performance, in the midst of the crowd of parents and friends, Joyce grabbed hold of Karin, and shouted, “Listen, everybody. Karin can play that solo as well as anybody. Listen while she plays the piece.” She forced Karin to play, to Karin’s mortification and the embarrassment of everybody else. When Karin finished, Joyce looked around with obvious satisfaction and pride and proclaimed, “There, didn’t she do it better than the other one?” It didn’t end there. Joyce advanced on the other child, snarled at him, “See, Karin could have played it better than you.” Then she began to curse at him and his parents.
“I never saw anything like it before or after,” Sattler says.
Joyce was a woman with an obsession, a woman driven to achieve all her dreams through her daughter. Karin would be Joyce’s star. Karin would be famous and rich and celebrated. Karin would be all that Joyce had ever wanted to be. Joyce preached that idea constantly. She filled Karin with stories about her own father, the musical genius, the conductor of enormous promise who had been derided at home and driven to suicide, and stories about herself as a musical prodigy on the piano who had been blocked by that same family opposition. Karin had obviously inherited their talent and would do what they had been stopped from doing.
Karin had talent, yes, but, as her teacher said, not as great as Joyce assumed, or dreamed or fantasized, and demanded.
But Joyce was convinced that the talent was there and that Karin towered over all her contemporaries. Joyce also used the violin as a weapon to maintain control, to keep Karin subjugated. She bought better and more expensive violins and then threatened to take them away if Karin didn’t maintain the standards Joyce set. She made Karin practice in front of her for at least an hour every day, and no matter how well Karin played, Joyce never seemed satisfied. On the way to lessons, she forced Karin to play for her what she was going to play in class, and if she didn’t do it to Joyce’s satisfaction, Joyce turned the car around and drove back home, refused to let Karin go to her lesson. There were times, too, when dissatisfied with the way Karin was playing, she would grab the violin out of her hands and beat her across the back with it. After recitals she never let Karin share in refreshments that had been laid out. Instead she dragged her away and told her that Karin had embarrassed her mother by playing some wrong notes. “I felt like standing up in the middle of your piece and walking out and letting you find your own way home,” she said more than once. But that was merely talk, that was merely the attempt to force perfection. The dream did not die. Later she enrolled Karin at the Manhattan School of Music and for several years drove her down to New York every week for lessons.
She might say to Karin that she was a disappointment, was not fulfilling her promise, but when Karin wasn’t around, Joyce constantly boasted of Karin’s great progress, of her growing expertise, and related fantasies as though they were true, as though they had really happened.
To one friend she told a story of how she and Karin had gone on vacation to Bermuda. “Joyce said that Karin took her violin with her because she didn’t want to miss any practice time. And somebody heard her playing and asked her to play in the restaurant and she did, and everybody gave her money.” The only thing was, Joyce and Karin never went to Bermuda.
To other friends she told how Karin had been invited to the Soviet Union over a Thanksgiving vacation to play a concert. Only Karin and Joyce did not go to Russia; Karin was never invited to play there.
There were stories that Joyce told about Karin’s playing with the New York Philharmonic, about Karin’s going to Scotland to play a concert there. They were inventions.
Jeff Sands remembers Joyce’s telling him that Karin was going to England to play a concert. “Joyce brought in a tape that she told everybody was Karin’s rehearsal with the New York Philharmonic. I asked Joyce if I could listen to it. I put it in the tape deck of my car and listened to it on the way to work one morning. It was a stunning tape. The pieces were beautifully played, and the violin was the featured instrument. Then I gave it back to Joyce, and she was so excited about this and the trip and everything. Later on I mentioned it to Karin, and she said it wasn’t her; she said it was a tape of Alex Markov playing with the New York Philharmonic.”
“That woman was insane, she was a dangerous personality,” Constance Sattler says, “and I thought so from the time I first met her.” Years later, when Sattler heard on the radio that Joyce had been murdered, she says her first reaction was “If anyone ever deserved it, she did.”
9
And there was Archbishop John Whealon, for more than two decades head of the Hartford Roman Catholic archdiocese, the twelfth-largest in the United States. He became and remained perhaps the most important figure in the fantasies and realities of both mother and daughter.
For Karin, he was a father figure, supplanting Michael Aparo even before Aparo had faded from her life. For Joyce, who had nothing to do with her religion, who was contemptuous of it and its practitioners, who later did not permit Karin to be confirmed or even to attend church, Whealon inhabited a very special place in her mind, her fantasies, her delusions.
From the time Karin was small, barely able to remember, she visited him at St. Mary’s Home, where he maintained his apartments, and for years she made his bed, cleaned his room, tended his garden and did other chores for him. She wrote him letters, first in a childish scrawl corrected and recopied by her mother, later in a more accomplished manner. They were filled with the events of her life and of her dreams, the kinds of letters one writes not to a st
ranger but to someone close, someone in whom it is possible to confide. They were filled not only with her thoughts and feelings but with those of her mother as well, for, she says, when she was young, her mother used to write many of those letters as though they were from Karin, some of them by hand, some on a typewriter, and then have Karin sign them. To most he responded in an affectionate, caring manner, not the kinds of letters one would expect from a priest to just an ordinary member of his congregation.
Kept in a filing cabinet in the basement of the condo on Butternut Drive, the correspondence fills thick file folders, letters from Whealon to Joyce Aparo dating from 1967 until shortly before her death and from Whealon to Karin from 1974 until mid-1990, along with copies of some of the letters they wrote to him.
“We saw your picture in the paper,” begins one dated March 17, 1979, just after Karin’s eighth birthday, a letter that Karin later said was actually written by Joyce although Karin signed it. She had cut out that picture and added it to a growing collection she had of him in her room, so many that Joyce kept coming across ones she hadn’t seen before.
Beyond Obsession Page 11
