Beyond Obsession

by Hammer, Richard;

  Most important, she ended, they should put this whole thing behind them and start over, be happy and in love the way they had been. Joyce, she assured Dennis, still loved him, and “I still love you Dennis Coleman.”

  So the plot to murder Joyce Aparo and gain Karin Aparo her freedom in August 1986 came to an end.

  19

  Early in September 1986 Dennis received a letter from his friend Chris Wheatley. Wheatley had gone off to Syracuse University as a premed student, telling friends he dreamed of the day when he could help people as a doctor in a hospital emergency room. The letter from college was a rambling one, filled with news, the embarking on a new adventure. The main reason for the letter, he wrote, was that he was broke. He’d already borrowed more than he should have from his father and couldn’t ask him for any more, especially since, he said, he’d lost the money gambling. Could Dennis send him a couple of hundred? Dennis did, and later sent him more when Wheatley asked again. “I found out later,” Dennis says, “that he hadn’t lost money betting; he’d gotten a girl in trouble, and he needed it to pay for an abortion.”

  In the course of that letter Wheatley wrote, “So, Dude, how’s your woman? Is her mother still alive?”

  Joyce Aparo was, indeed, still alive and, as autumn approached, in no immediate danger. She either had been unaware of or had blinded herself to the plot that nearly took her life during those first weeks of August. She probably would not have taken it seriously in any case. The plotters, after all, were mere children; she was an adult, she was trained in social work and psychology and she had always totally dominated and controlled one of the conspirators. Besides, her life was full; she had little time for anything beyond her immediate conscious concerns. The demands of her job at Athena Health Care were exhausting. Her jewelry designing business was booming; she was becoming a nuisance around the Glastonbury post office with her demands. One employee in the post office remembers how everyone groaned when Joyce Aparo walked in the door. It always meant trouble.

  And there was still trouble at home. There was always trouble at home. Joyce’s nagging at Karin continued unabated. Nothing Karin did was the way Joyce wanted it done.

  “Whatever your mom says, or does,” Dennis wrote near the end of August, the plot now put aside, “can’t be helped. Just remember that it will end soon. She can say what she likes, but it won’t affect our lives together. Not in the long run. When she gets angry, just know in your mind that it’ll all blow over quickly and that I’m here waiting for you … forever. Because it means so much. Think of the long run. Please trust in us, and hope for us.”

  A little later he wrote, “I wish you could cope with your mom without getting upset.”

  Later still: “Right now I really feel bad about your state of affairs. Karin, do whatever you do only for you. Appease your mother for just a while longer. But know in your mind that what she says, or what she does, doesn’t, shouldn’t and won’t ruin your life. You keep your dreams and ambitions alive—if you lose everything else: your violin, me (never), or anything else, never lose your dreams. Devote your life to them.”

  Again: “Your mother is too unstable, self-centered and ignorant to be an obstacle to us. She may call me what she likes, and I don’t care, because any opinion she has about me, or much of anything else is warped. Why she feels as if the whole world is out to get her is beyond me. Why should it or anyone care about her? I couldn’t imagine being so closed and self-centered. She considers me to be ‘that kind of company.’ I consider her to be no kind of company.”

  Another time he wrote: “These ‘bad times’ with your mother go in cycles. There was Nantucket and now there’s now. I understand. They will pass and you’ll live. At this rate, I figure there are about one of these every 1½ months. Or about 8 a year—tops. Don’t worry, you’ll make it and I’m always and forever here for you.”

  Letter after letter from Dennis, advising, cautioning, entreating, understanding, agreeing, followed complaint after complaint from Karin. It became something of a ritual. Karin would relate to Dennis another of Joyce’s foibles, follies, impossible demands. Dennis would try to calm her with one of his letters.

  Karin was back in school, a high school sophomore now, her days filled with all the usual chores, the violin demanding more time, and now school work, too, and babysitting for the Hudners a couple of evenings a week. It was hard to find the time for Dennis. She made the time.

  “During school are we gonna have midnight visits or what?” Dennis wrote. “It’ll be hard during autumn with leaves on the ground, and during winter with the snow. Feet make tracks in snow, you know.”

  The midnight visits, trekking across the parking lot, were not to be. In September Dennis’s mother met a man and thought she was in love. The man was from Michigan. In order to be with him, she sold the condo on Butternut Drive, packed up her belongings and moved west. Her younger son, Matt, went with her, though he returned before too long. Dennis packed up his clothes, the intricate model house he had been building for years, carving shingles the size of eraser heads and painting each individually, fitting every piece meticulously, never finishing, and all the rest of his personal effects and moved in with his father and stepmother in the house that had been his grandparents’ in South Glastonbury.

  That first night in what was now his permanent home, he wrote a sad letter to Karin:

  I miss you already. We all had a very nice dinner and I told my mom I loved her. I don’t think Matt will stay out there. To tell you the truth, I don’t think my mom will either. She’s already decided that if she doesn’t like it, she’s gonna come back. What hurt the most was looking out my window for the last time, out at your window, and I backed out of my spot for the last time. It made me miss you. We’ll still be together just as much as always. Please stay with me now and forever. In many ways, you’re all I’ve got to hold on to. I’m supposed to be pulling away from my family. That’s what happens at my age. And it still really hurts to have lost all my friends. I feel I’m moving through one chapter in my life and starting another. Besides you, I’m all alone in my life.

  To the end of that letter, he appended one of his love poems:

  I had a dream

  And it would seem

  I only dreamed of you

  Forever I could always dream

  And only dream of you

  Try as I might to get in the dream

  The dream would only have you

  I don’t know what this obsession with

  You has got to do with my dreams

  But if I were you I’d know what

  I’d do … I’d go to you with my life

  And to you I would give

  My promises, my hopes, and my dreams

  To make life what it seems.

  We’ll travel together, on the road of life

  While stopping along the way

  So I won’t take for granted my own wife

  And we’ll love now, day by day.

  I love you.

  It was a drive of several miles to see Karin from then on, to pick up the notes she left for him in their mailbox, to leave notes for her. It was not easy. Still, they found ways. There were notes waiting for Dennis in that mail slot often; “Wanna fuck?” she scribbled in the course of one, to which he appended, “Hi Kar—Now that you put it that way, YEA!!!!!—Love, Den.” Or another, in which she told him to think of the two of them when he was in bed that night, adding a postscript, “Thanx for the fuck.”

  The quality of their sex was changing, though. “I know what you’re saying,” Dennis wrote that fall. “You’re saying, ‘But I’m too embarrassed to ask about kinky sex.… I’m afraid of what he’d do.’ I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d give more than all the kinky sex you could take in a week. I’m here for anything … forever.”

  They tied each other to the bed with nylon hose. Dennis bought handcuffs, drilled holes in the posts of his bed, and they locked each other to the posts with those cuffs. Karin asked
for and Dennis bought a metal dildo. Karin wrote an illustrated letter, detailing their sexual activities. “It wasn’t one of us taking the lead,” he says. “It was mutual.”

  They had their arguments, of course. Dennis was filled with an almost unreasoning jealousy if Karin talked to somebody else, looked at somebody else. He was even jealous when she paid attention to his brother:

  Call me insecure maybe, or call me anything you like, but it is the way I feel. I love you so much. Something like this shouldn’t and won’t come between us, but please just try to put yourself in my place. Reverse the roles, so that every time your sister came over I turned around and ran to her to talk to, or do things for her. To be more excited around her than you. It just really hurts, and really tears me up. You’re not trying to do it on purpose, I know, but please understand.… You say that you like him because there’s so much of me. That means I’m not enough, or possibly you prefer the package it comes in with him.… You’re upset because you’re afraid that I don’t trust enough in us to be secure about this. I understand that, and I do believe in us … forever. I do, I do, I do. Do you even want to know what I’m afraid of? I’m afraid that you have the room in your heart to like someone else right now, or ever. I’m afraid that you have the capability to put me in the background be it only for a few minutes.… I’m not mad, I’m scared, literally, to tears. I only ask as much as I give to you.… I’m very sorry and very much in love with you. Karin, I need you so much. I’m out of words. Stay with me forever.

  Karin could be jealous, too, but in her jealousy she was stone, not tears. One day early in the fall, she says, she was in Dennis’s room, cleaning it for him, when she found a note he was writing to Chris Wheatley. In what was an attempt to show Wheatley that he was still his own man or in a fit of braggadocio, he wrote that he was going to spend a weekend with one of his former girls and, if possible, have sex with her. Dennis was in tears when Karin faced him with that note, begged forgiveness, swore that it wasn’t true, that he would never betray her in any way. The discovery of the note gave her another hold over him.

  The most serious argument and the closest they came to an irreconcilable difference, though, arose in November, over one of Dennis’s closest friends and a member with him of the rock group. His name is Mike, and he was close not merely to Dennis but to Karin as well. “I used to sit with her for hours outside school,” he says, “and she would just talk and talk and talk and talk about her relationship with Den. I used to talk to her practically every day, buddy-buddy, take walks outside, talk about this, talk about that. It was like she couldn’t talk to me enough, like I was her best friend.”

  There was one thing about Mike beyond school and the rock group. “Back then,” he says, “I used to smoke a lot of pot, and when I was really on, I was selling it. It was a really stupid thing to do. And one day out of nowhere the police showed up at my door and arrested me for dealing. Which was pretty much to be expected. But I never knew how they found out. So I thought I must have been pretty stupid about the whole thing. Then, after it all happened, Dennis told me that Karin told him she had gone to a pay phone and made an anonymous phone call about me and told the police that I had so much of this at such and such a place and told them everything, and fifteen minutes later they drove up to my house and I was arrested.”

  Karin was sure, she told Dennis, she had done the right thing. Mike was selling drugs. That was a crime. Who knew to whom he was selling the pot? The temptation was there for anyone who wanted to experiment, and Mike’s stash made it easy to give in to that temptation. She had even thought about it herself, and that scared her. So she had an obligation, to herself and everyone else, to turn him in, even if anonymously.

  Dennis was furious. Mike was his friend, one of his closest friends. Mike played with him in the rock group. And Karin had turned him in. He wrote her:

  … Where I come from a friend is the most important thing in the world and not something to abuse. Ask just about anyone our age or order and they’ll say you are wrong. And if you’re not wrong, why are you afraid of it getting around? If you had to do something you could’ve told a school administrator to look into it more carefully and if they found pot let them call the police. I understand your side of it and I know you tried to help—in your way, but you acted very rashly. Why not try to help Mike in his way, not your way. We won’t talk about it no more. I’ll love you forever.

  Like most of their other disputes, this faded, too, for angry as he might become at something she did, he could never hold that anger, he forgave her anything, the anger giving way to increasing espousals of love and devotion and a torrent of more and more expensive gifts.

  There was little doubt now who was the dominant force in their relationship. If Dennis had thought himself in the preeminent position when they met and began in the spring, if he had thought they had come into balance by mid-July, even he no longer had any doubts over who powered the engine. “I was hooked,” he says. “I lost all my friends. There was work, and there was Karin, and that was it; there wasn’t any time for anything else.” He wrote to her constantly, even thought he was seeing her most days. He was fantasizing about the future, sketching plans for a large, lavish house on a hill that he would build for her and where they would live in paradise forever. Under unrelenting pressure from Karin and even from Joyce, he was reconsidering his decision to forgo college. Karin was at him all the time about it. He capitulated and wrote away for applications. Considering his far from outstanding scholastic record in high schools he knew there was no chance for the Ivy League, no chance probably at any of the better colleges. The thing to do, Karin said and he agreed, was go to a college nearby, make a good record there and then aim higher. The choice was Central Connecticut University, in New Britain, not far away; it would have the advantage, too, of keeping him close to Karin. He began to fill out those applications.

  “It was like religious worshiping,” says a close friend of Dennis. “He alienated almost all his friends. You’d never see him out anymore. The only time you’d see him out was with Karin.”

  It was a heady thing for Karin. All her life she had been the slave to Joyce’s master, a reluctant, unwilling, resentful inmate to her warden, forced to do her mother’s bidding, forced to abnegate herself, to have no will of her own. Now, for the first time, she was the master with a slave of her own, not a reluctant slave but a willing one. All she had to do was ask and he gave. There was nothing he would not do for her or give to her. And she was not slow to ask. Did she want flowers? Dennis bought them. Did she want jewelry? Dennis got it for her. Did she want expensive dinners out? Dennis took her. It was not Joyce who drove her down to Rowayton, a round trip of more than 130 miles, and then to Manhattan, another round trip of nearly 230 miles, for her violin lessons. Most times it was Dennis. “I’d drive her to Markov’s in Rowayton on Friday night after work and after she finished school, and she’d have a lesson for an hour or an hour and a half, and I’d hang around, and then I’d drive her home,” he says. “And then at six-thirty on Saturday morning I’d pick her up and drive her down to New York for her lesson at the school there.”

  He turned his room in his father’s house in South Glastonbury into what he called “my Karin Shrine.” “You walked into his room,” remembers a friend, “and there were photos of Karin all over the walls and memorabilia she had given him everywhere. There were dead flowers; there was packaging from gifts he had given her, lots of photos, everything you could think of. Three of the four walls were papered from floor to ceiling, from the cracks in the corners, with pictures, all sizes, all different kinds, class photos, photos of her in a car, in this and that, snapshots, eight-by-tens. They were everywhere.”

  20

  All through the winter and into the spring Dennis was there for Karin whenever she needed him, whenever she wanted him. He wanted only her protestations of total love and commitment to him to the exclusion of anyone else.

  That winter there were episode
s of jealousy. In the Aparo living room in January Dennis listened as Joyce carried on about Michael Zaccaro: He was only twenty-nine and such a success, president of Athena and that was just the start; he owned his own home, ate his meals off Lenox china and sterling silver, drove a beautiful car, dressed in the latest fashions. And, she told Dennis and Karin, Zaccaro had expressed to her deep feelings toward Karin, had said he was going to wait for her to grow up and then marry her. Dennis sat and inwardly was racked with anguish, until Karin assured him in private that Zaccaro really didn’t feel that way about her; besides, she loved Dennis.

  He was jealous of any mention of Alasdair Neal, grew frantic with jealousy when Neal reappeared briefly at the beginning of January. In her diary Karin wrote that wearing a yellow sweater over a white shirt with red stripes, gray tweed slacks, gray socks and black shoes, Neal had arrived that day to conduct the orchestra in which she played. “He looked wonderful! My heart still can’t believe it.” But there was a downside. She had to leave the rehearsal early because of a violin lesson, and she was on the verge of tears when she left. Still, Alasdair Neal “is so perfect in every way! Absolutely wonderful! I am so much more in love with him than I could ever be with the rest of the world! Ooohhh heavens.”

  What she wrote in that diary she reported to Dennis, including her renewed love for Alasdair Neal. Dennis felt lost, abandoned, in deep depression. He pleaded with her:

  I love you. You know a lot has happened between us lately, and so far we’ve come through it o.k. Not great, but o.k. Karin, I know that in some ways you do love me, but in others you don’t. And it’s usually easier for anyone (me in particular) to look at the bad half of things. I ask you to please understand that there’s a lot in me. A lot of dreams, hopes and desires. They drive me and what I do. You also have your own, and part of that is how or with who you’ll be happy with in the long run. There are a hundred things we could do to make each other happy—in the short run. But they all include some sort of compromise. We can’t just keep giving up this and that forever. It won’t work. I will compromise my dreams to be with, and stay with you. But understand, please, that I have sacrificed much of my self-esteem, and pride as well. I did not sacrifice my dignity—that you have, in effect, taken from me. As long as you still love Alasdair as much, if not much more than me, how can I have anything? How? Why must I live as an afterthought, or a second choice? How can I do those things and retain any dignity or self-worth, when, what you’re asking me to do is give up those things to “better myself?” I’m sorry. All my life people have been asking me to compromise and to change. They have promised to help me and to stay behind me. And all those people (me included) they have let me down and cast me out, leaving me with the remnants of what I was. Leaving me, and making me put the pieces back together and each time, each person took more and more. Bit by bit until I became so bitter that I all but dropped out of school and decided to ruin my life as best I could and live in the bitterness. Survive despite the extravagance of my loss and the consequence of my choice. Become part of the terrible hate in me which fed upon itself. Not just give up and die. That was not the answer, that was too easy. No, I had to stay alive to punish myself for having given of myself too much. For having compromised my very moral fiber. I had to give in and give up. I had compromised too much.