The pleading and the pressure were too much, and at last he agreed. He turned from the window, got into his car and drove away, went to an auto supply store and bought wire cutters. He drove back to the Aparo condo, into the parking lot and sat in his car, staring at Joyce’s Volkswagen. “I couldn’t do it. Every now and then people would be coming by, but that wasn’t it. I just couldn’t do it. So I gave up and went back over to Karin’s window and it was dark and I tapped a few times, but she didn’t move or come to the window. I gave up and went home.”
The next day, Wednesday, he says he spoke to her briefly, told her that he hadn’t been able to carry out the plan, that he had gone to her window and tapped, intending to tell her, but she didn’t appear. Her response was anger.
Thursday night, at nine o’clock, he was back outside the window. “She was packing, and I was watching her pack, and she was pleading with me. ‘This is it,’ she kept saying, ‘it has to be tonight.’ They were leaving for Binghamton in the morning, and she told me she didn’t want to go and she couldn’t go, but her mother was making her. I was in tears outside the window, telling her I couldn’t do it, and she was in tears inside the house on the other side of the window, begging me to do it, and her mother kept coming in and out asking for help or something, and she kept going off to talk to her mother, and then she’d come back and it would start over.”
As they talked, plans, details, contingencies began to emerge and be spelled out. A week earlier, when Karin had first begun to press him on the necessity for murdering Joyce, a method had come up about creating a poison gas by mixing ammonia and bleach. “I can’t remember who brought it up first,” he says, “but I didn’t really know that much about the ammonia-bleach thing. I may even have brought it up first because I thought of it, but she helped me with the ratios and exactly what was going to happen. It was three to one, but I can’t remember whether it was three parts ammonia and one of bleach or the other way around.”
So they worked it out. Before they went to bed, Karin would leave the door unlocked, and after everyone was asleep, Dennis would enter the condo, soak a rag in the mixture of ammonia and bleach, go into Joyce’s bedroom, put the rag over her face and kill her. There was an alternative plan. If the ammonia-bleach combination didn’t asphyxiate Joyce, Dennis would strangle her. When Joyce was dead, Karin “would stay in the house and clean up, get rid of the fingerprints, vacuum, wash the sheets, dust, make sure there were no traces of me left in the house.”
Dennis’s job at that point would be to get rid of Joyce’s body. He would have to take it away somewhere and dump it. There had to be a body found, Karin said, because of the insurance; she couldn’t collect without proof of death. And while he was disposing of Joyce’s body, she told him, she wanted him to take the rings off Joyce’s fingers: They were valuable, and she wanted them for herself.
Finally the plotting ended. “I left not sure of myself. I was not sure whether I was going to go through with it or not, and she was not sure whether I was going to or not either. She was assuming that I was going to show up that night. I never did. I went home and went to bed. I couldn’t do it.”
So the murder did not come off, and the next morning Joyce and Karin left for Greenwich and then went on to Binghamton.
Karin called from Greenwich. “At first she was upset. She asked me why I didn’t show up and do it. I told her I couldn’t. She said, ‘I just don’t understand,’ And then it was kind of weird. She asked me to go into the house and take care of the cats while they were gone, and that she’d be home on Tuesday morning.”
He went into the condo, using his key, the next day to feed the cats and do other chores. While there, he walked into her bedroom. “I saw the picture of her and Alex on her dresser. I didn’t like it at all, and I walked out of there.”
He returned to the condo on Monday afternoon. He fed the cats again, went back into her bedroom. “That’s when I picked up her diary. I held on to it, and then I put it back without opening it. It was her private property, and it wasn’t right for me to look inside. I should have. If I had read that diary, I wouldn’t have killed anybody, not Joyce, not Karin, not anybody. Because she was telling me, on the one hand, that her mother was making her do all those things, and on the other hand, if I had read the diary, I would have seen there was nothing in it about her mother making her do anything; she was doing all these things—going to Rowayton, sleeping with Alex—because she wanted to. And there was the stuff she wrote about me. If I had read the diary, there wouldn’t have been any reason for me to kill Joyce or anybody.”
Later the question of whether or not he read the diary was raised again and again, debated and argued endlessly. Those who insist that he must have read it say that what he found there so shattered him that it spurred him on to take revenge and so to kill Joyce Aparo. They also maintain that since there is nothing in the diary about Karin’s feeling a desperate need to escape her mother’s domination, nothing about plots and plans to kill her mother, it is patent that she did not feel that need and did not beg or plead with Dennis to murder Joyce Aparo.
But there are people who find Dennis’s story believable. As he said, what was there in the diary that would have driven him to murder the mother? There was nothing about Joyce’s forcing Karin to spend time in Rowayton, nothing about Joyce’s fostering an affair between Karin and Alex Markov, little even about disputes between Karin and Joyce, nothing certainly about wanting her mother dead. If what was written there was reason for murder, it was not for the murder of Joyce Aparo but rather for the murder of Karin Aparo or Alex Markov. And Dennis Coleman did not murder Alex Markov and would never have considered murdering Karin Aparo.
Yet another question hovers over the diary. Why was it left so openly in that bedside drawer, where anyone who entered the room might find and read it? Karin was certainly not blind to the fact that her mother often entered her room, was not hesitant about opening her drawers, searching through them and reading whatever she found. Realizing that at any time Joyce might come upon and read the diary, would Karin have written in it anything about her anger, about her bitterness, even about her disenchantment with the violin or about a desperate desire to be free and have Joyce out of the way? Among all the mundane events that fill those pages, the major subject is the affair with Alex Markov, an affair of which Joyce Aparo fully and enthusiastically approved.
Karin also understood Dennis well enough by then, had enough experience with him, to know that he indeed respected her privacy, that she could leave things in the open and he would not look at them without her approval. She had been witness to it often over the previous year.
So Dennis says he didn’t read that diary. Instead, he sat down on Karin’s bed and wrote her a note beginning, “I will ‘do the deed.’” He had been thinking about it, had been thinking about little else since she left, and was now determined that he would do it. “The whole thing wasn’t real,” he says. “It was surreal, fantasyland. I was in a nightmare, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s happening, and you’re not in control of it. Just watching it happen and nothing you can do to stop it. My back was against the wall, and there was nowhere to run. The only option I thought she gave me was to kill myself or do that. All this time later I don’t know if she thought I would really do it, but she kept pushing me to see how far she could push me.” In his mind, variations on the plot had jelled. She and Joyce would not be home before Tuesday, so nothing could be done before they arrived. Once both were home, he and Karin would have time to talk more about his revised plan.
He wrote it down in detail, a schedule of just how everything should go and how much time it ought to take. It went like this: He would go into the condo about one-thirty on Wednesday morning, after Joyce was asleep, and then with Karin’s help, kill Joyce, either with the ammonia-bleach combination or by strangling her. It should take about ten minutes to kill her. Then he and Karin would carry Joyce’s body out to the Volkswagen. Karin would return
to the condo and clean up, wait twenty-four to thirty-six hours, then call the police to report her mother missing.
Dennis would drive away in the Volkswagen, Joyce’s body in the back. At a prearranged rendezvous point he would meet up with a friend whom he would enlist to help him. They would drive in two separate cars to a remote section of the Bronx or perhaps Harlem, he wasn’t sure which, clean all the evidence out of the car and then abandon it. Considering the normal pattern with abandoned cars in such areas of New York, it would be days, perhaps even weeks, before the body was discovered and identified; the car would probably be stripped before anyone thought to look inside and see what was in the back, and even if someone did while looting the car, it was doubtful if that person would call the police. Thus, by the time the body was discovered, it would be impossible to pinpoint with any degree of accuracy the date or time of death, so there would be nothing to implicate him, Karin or anyone in particular.
According to Dennis’s timetable, the trip to New York, the ditching and cleaning the car of any evidence and the trip back ought to take something less than five hours, bringing him back to Glastonbury by seven in the morning, in time to go to work as though nothing had happened.
There was, of course, the necessity of recruiting someone to drive that second car. On Sunday he approached his friend Chris Wheatley, home for the summer from his premed studies. “He owed me one,” Dennis says, “because of what I’d done for him when he needed help with money.” He laid out for Wheatley the plan to kill Joyce as it was developing in his mind.
“What’s in it for me?” Wheatley asked.
Dennis offered him a thousand dollars from Joyce’s insurance, though he’d have to wait for it until the insurance companies paid up, and Wheatley could have whatever loose money might be lying around in Joyce’s purse.
Wheatley didn’t say yes, and he didn’t say no. He told Dennis he would think about it and give an answer in a day or two.
On Tuesday, August 4, Dennis arrived home from work at the country club at midafternoon, expecting that Karin would be home and he would be hearing from her momentarily so they could discuss how they would implement the plan, which he now set for that night, and to fill her in on the final details as he had formulated them. When she called, at three thirty-six, it was not from home but from Rowayton. She was still there; she was going to be there another day. In the background he could hear Alex Markov moving around, talking. Dennis had a funny feeling, he said, that Alex was overhearing all their plans. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t know what to do about it.
Once again, during the conversation, which lasted about ten minutes, Karin told him that Joyce would have to go; there was no other way. But, she said, it would have to wait until Wednesday night. Joyce would not be getting to Glastonbury until very late that Tuesday, and Karin would still be in Rowayton and unable to help. He told her he had left a note for her between the sheets of her bed, telling her that he had come up with a nearly complete plan. If she wasn’t going to be home, he was afraid Joyce might find it. She told him not to worry, Joyce would never look there.
At six-oh-six that evening Karin called again. Once more Dennis heard Alex Markov talking in the background. He wondered how Karin could be so open in her talk with Alex around. She had been thinking about what they were going to do, she told him, and she realized that she just couldn’t be in the house when he killed her mother. She just couldn’t be there. Since she was coming home the next morning, the murder would have to take place that night, Tuesday. He should do it and not worry about leaving anything behind; when she got home, she would clean the condo thoroughly so that when she did report Joyce missing a day later, if the police decided to search, there would be nothing for them to find. He should remember to take clothes to dress Joyce in. She shouldn’t be found in her nightgown. That would tell everybody that she had been killed at home and then moved. If she was dressed, there would be no way of knowing where she was killed; it would be just as possible the cops would think that she had never reached home that night, that she had been waylaid someplace, killed and left. At the beginning of that conversation she was breathing heavily, and he heard Alex Markov in the background. He didn’t think much of it at the time. Later he became convinced that they must have just finished making love when she called him.
It was essential now that he win Chris Wheatley’s agreement to help. Otherwise there was simply no way he would be able to drive away with Joyce’s body once he had killed her, leave it and her car far away and be back in time for work. He went looking for Wheatley and found him at Kira Lintner’s house. He asked Wheatley to go for a ride. They got into Dennis’s car and drove around Glastonbury. Dennis told him the murder was now definitely set for that night. He would need Wheatley. He wanted a commitment. Wheatley said he hadn’t completely made up his mind. He would think about it and let Dennis know later that evening.
Dennis dropped Wheatley off at Kira Lintner’s and drove back home. At seven-thirty he called Karin at the Markovs’. He told her he had talked to Chris Wheatley, but Chris hadn’t made up his mind if he would help. It was vital, she said, that the plan be carried out as they had agreed; a body had to be found if she was going to collect the insurance. She said, “If you can’t get Chris, then get your brother, get Matt to help.” He would try to get Wheatley, he said, and call her back later and let her know.
“I was determined to find somebody,” Dennis says, “anybody but Matt. But if I couldn’t, if Chris hadn’t agreed, I would have asked Matt. I wish I had. Because he wouldn’t have. But I was desperate. I thought this was the only way I could save myself. If everyone had said no, this never would have happened. But everyone didn’t say no.”
He went out to find Wheatley once more, to press him to make a decision. He found him, they went for another ride and this time Wheatley agreed. They drove around, looking for a place to buy some beer, couldn’t find an open store and drove to the Coleman house in South Glastonbury to grab some beer from the refrigerator. They took a few cans; Wheatley carried them out to the car while Dennis called Karin. It was nine-oh-three.
It was on for that night, he told her. Wheatley had agreed to help, to drive the second car. All he needed to know now was when Joyce would be home.
She was already home, Karin said. They had talked an hour earlier, and Joyce had told her she was tired and was going to bed early.
Dennis went out to the car. He and Wheatley drove back to Kira Lintner’s. She and another friend, Frank Manganaro, were there. Over the next few hours they sat around, drank beer, watched a couple of horror movies, including Friday the 13th.
About eleven-thirty, the movies over, the beer gone, Kira and Manganaro went off to try to buy a Garfield mug. Dennis and Wheatley discussed what would happen over the next hours. They agreed that Wheatley would pick Dennis up at the Coleman house about one in the morning.
Dennis left then. On his way home he stopped at a Wa-Wa convenience store and bought a pair of L’eggs panty hose, a black wig, work gloves, a box of plastic garbage bags and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. He did not smoke. He began to smoke that night.
Once he was home, he burned the schedule he had written out. He changed into black pants, black shirt, black socks and shoes. He grabbed a black ski mask, a black hat, a pair of goggles and the box of plastic bags and put them in a duffel bag along with a change of clothes for later, for after. He wore all black, he later said, so that he would blend into the night darkness as he crossed lawns and entered the Aparo condo. The ski mask, the gloves, the goggles, the plastic bags all were a precaution against leaving any evidence behind in the condo, in case Karin didn’t get around to cleaning as well as she should, and in Joyce’s car. “I knew something about forensics,” he later explained. “It was a question of hair falling out, things like that, leaving traces of myself around. You can never be too careful.” He had learned about forensics, he said, when he read a book about the Atlanta child murders. “They eventually caught
the guy who turned out to be the guilty party through forensics.” He put his duplicate key to the Aparo condo and the unwrapped panty hose in his pocket. He would now “do the deed.” There was no turning back. “That’s the way it had to be. I thought it had to be done. She had put a tremendous amount of pressure on me. There was nothing, literally nothing I wouldn’t have done for her. If I did the deed, there would be the insurance money, there would be the condo and I would be getting Karin.”
Then he waited. A little after one in the morning Wheatley drove up. In the car with him was Kira Lintner. “I was very upset when I saw her. Chris said he had told her what was going to happen. I don’t know why, but she insisted on coming along.”
He got into the backseat of the car. Wheatley drove to Terry Brook Drive, a block from the condo, and parked. Dennis opened the duffel and removed the things he would need. As he did, they went over the final plans. He would be in the house about twenty minutes, he figured. It would take him that time to murder Joyce and then put her body in the backseat of her Volkswagen Jetta. Wheatley agreed to be outside the house about then, and they would start the trip down to the Bronx.
About one-twenty Dennis opened the car door and started away, toward Butternut Drive and the Aparo condo, dressed all in black, the ski mask over his head, the gloves covering his hands. He had decided against the hat and goggles and left them behind. Five minutes later he was at the front door. He put the duplicate key in the lock. There was some trouble with it. It was making what to him seemed like a terrible racket as he tried to turn it, and he was afraid the noise would wake Joyce.
At last the door swung open, and he entered the dark condo. He went into the living room and laid the box of garbage bags on the coffee table. He took off the ski mask; it was too hot, and he was sweating beneath it, the sweat dripping into his eyes and blinding him. He took the panty hose from his pocket and started into the bedroom. Joyce was lying on her back. He paused. “I was afraid she was awake and waiting, because people don’t usually sleep on their backs. I was afraid she had heard me.”
Beyond Obsession Page 25
