Then he started forward. He could not stop. “It was like a time that didn’t exist in my life,” he said. “It was as if it wasn’t really me in the room, as if I was standing outside my body. It was surreal.” A psychiatrist later said, “If there had been a cop in the room at that moment and he had ordered Dennis to stop, he would not have stopped. The only thing that would have stopped him and prevented the murder was shooting him.”
As he neared the bed, Joyce suddenly woke and sat up. She shrank back in terror. “Please don’t hurt me,” she gasped. “I have no money. Please don’t hurt me.” Dennis doesn’t think she recognized him. It was too dark in that room.
He pounced on her, wrapped the parity hose around her neck, twisted tighter and tighter, bracing himself with his knee on the bed. She began making gasping noises. “I was going shh, shh, shh. I was trying to quiet her. I didn’t want a lot of noise.” He grabbed a pillow and put it over her face to deaden the sound. He kept losing his grip on the panty hose, regained it, twisting and strangling. His finger pained him; he was developing a blister on it from the pressure. “I thought about stopping, but it was past the point of no return. I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t.”
At last she was dead. He looked at the digital clock beside her bed. It was one fifty-six. She might have been dead for several minutes by then. He had no way of knowing. All he knew was that it was 1:56, that the deed was done, and it had taken twenty-five minutes, far longer than he had estimated.
He was in a hurry now. He had to get the body off the bed, out of the condo and into the car. Chris would be waiting outside. They had a long drive ahead. He tugged her body off the bed, across the floor to the entrance to the kitchen. He went for the box of plastic bags, opened it, took out a bag and tried to slide her body into it. Her body slid right through. The bag was not strong enough to hold it. He gave up, went into the living room, took two afghans she had made and covered her with them.
He moved to the sliding glass windows facing onto Griswold Street and looked out, expecting to see Wheatley’s car. It was not there. What he did see threw him into a panic. A police car was cruising slowly along the street. A moment later another police car appeared and moved past. The first police car reappeared, returning and passing. “I was flipping out. Chris wasn’t there, and there were just those police cars. I didn’t know what to do.” He had no way of knowing that police were all over the area, cruising back and forth along the streets, up and down the culs-de-sac. The cops were out in force to catch the cat burglar.
He grabbed Joyce’s purse, pawed frantically through it until he found her car keys. He took them, went out the front door, relocked it behind him and raced into the parking lot and climbed behind the wheel of her car. For the next fifteen or twenty minutes he drove around the neighborhood, frantically searching for Wheatley. But Wheatley was nowhere to be found. Finally he drove back to the condo, parked the car on the street just outside and let himself back into the house.
In the living room, Joyce’s body lying nearby, covered by the afghans, he reached for the telephone and called Kira Lintner’s house. He figured Wheatley would be there. He wasn’t. What happened? he asked. Why wasn’t Chris outside the Aparo condo waiting for him, as he had promised?
There’d been some trouble, Kira said. While they were parked on Terry Brook Drive, a cop had pulled up beside them. He had written a ticket for Chris for littering; Chris had thrown something out the window. Then the cop had told them to get out of there. Chris had started the car, and the cop followed them as they drove around Glastonbury. Finally Chris gave up and dropped her off at her house and just went home to his.
“Get Chris and have him call me here, at the Aparos’,” Dennis practically screamed. He sat by the phone and waited. While he sat there, he could see through the window more police cars cruising back and forth. “I was falling apart,” he says.
Five or ten minutes later Wheatley called. Dennis answered on the first ring. All Dennis was sure of at this point was that the original plan was no longer possible. It was too late to drive to New York and be back in time for work. He didn’t know what to do. Wheatley took charge, tried to calm him down, told him to get the body into the car and drive to a parking lot across from a 7-Eleven store on Main Street in East Hartford, just off the exit ramp from Route 2. Wheatley would meet him there, and they would decide what to do then.
Now Dennis had to get the body out of the house and into the car. He dragged the body across the floor to the sliding glass windows and left it there. He turned and grabbed some of the plastic garbage bags, raced out of the house to the car and spread them across the seats. He started back toward the house to get Joyce. He froze just as he reached the middle of the yard. Another police car was coming down the road, its headlights sweeping across the area. He sought frantically for cover. There wasn’t any. He was out in the open, too far from any place to run to and hide. He dropped flat on the ground. The cruiser went slowly by. It did not stop. He jumped up and sped back into the house. As he approached Joyce’s body, he could hear sounds coming from it, gurgling noises. They were the sounds a dead body makes as the air leaves the lungs for the last time. He was terrified. He didn’t know what to do. He went into the kitchen, grabbed a yellow paper towel off the roll under the sink, the last sheet on that roll, and stuffed it into her mouth to silence her. He covered her again with one of the afghans and began dragging her body through the doors, closing them behind him, and then across the lawn to the car. He had a lot of trouble moving her. He couldn’t believe how heavy she was. The sweat was pouring off him in rivers, nearly blinding him, soaking his clothes. His eyes were straining up and down the road. He was praying he would reach the car before another police cruiser appeared.
He made it. He heaved her body onto the backseat, covered it with the afghan and some plastic bags and shut the door. For a second he remembered that he had left some things behind in the condo: the garbage bag box, garbage bags, perhaps other things. He didn’t go back. He didn’t care. Karin would be home in the morning and would clean everything.
It took him another ten or fifteen minutes to reach the parking lot in East Hartford. He sat in the car and waited. About five minutes later Wheatley arrived. Kira Lintner was with him. Dennis didn’t care any longer. Wheatley got out of his car and walked over to the Jetta. They both knew there was no way they could drive south now. “I wasn’t concerned about the insurance or anything anymore,” Dennis says. “The only thing I was concerned about was getting rid of the body, and I didn’t care if it was discovered or not.” Wheatley suggested that they get on Interstate 91 and head north along the edge of the Connecticut River. At some point they’d stop and dump the body in the river.
So they started out, moving north, looking for a spot, Wheatley leading, Dennis following. Alone in the car he was filled with dread, with an unnatural fear. On the backseat, under the afghan and plastic bags, Joyce’s body was emitting sounds Every time they went over a bump, there was another noise. “I was afraid she wasn’t dead, that she was going to leap over the seat and strangle me,” he says. He was afraid to look around, afraid of what he might see. He turned on the radio to drown out the sounds. It didn’t help.
They drove steadily north for about an hour and a half. “I’d been up and down ninety-one many, many times, but I wasn’t paying attention, and I had no idea where we were.” They lost the river, and still they went on. Finally Dennis just couldn’t go any farther. He flashed his lights at Wheatley and pulled over to the side of the road. Wheatley pulled over, got out and walked back to Dennis.
“We have to get rid of the car, get rid of her now,” Dennis said. “If I’m going to get to work in the morning, we have to do it now. We can’t keep on going.”
Wheatley told him to follow and they would find a place. At the next exit Wheatley led him off the highway. They drove for a few minutes, searching for the river so they could dump the body into it. They couldn’t find the river. They stopped and talked
again, decided to dump the body wherever they found some out-of-the-way place. They came to a bridge. Both cars pulled off the road. Wheatley and Kira Lintner got out of the lead car. Dennis got out of the Jetta and walked toward them. He told them to drive away for a little while and he would take care of the body. They should return in five or ten minutes. They agreed, returned to Wheatley’s car and drove off.
Dennis went back to the Jetta. He dragged Joyce’s body from the backseat, down the embankment beside the bridge and then under the bridge. He scraped up some leaves and brush and covered her. He turned away and climbed back up the embankment to the car.
Wheatley’s car returned. Dennis went to it. Wheatley said that as he and Kira had been driving around, they’d found the perfect place to ditch the car, down a slope on a dead-end dirt road. Dennis got back into the Jetta and followed Wheatley to the spot. He drove the car off the road, down the hill and into a small stream. Wheatley clambered down the hill and pulled the plates off the Jetta. Together they went through Joyce’s car and cleaned everything out of it, put it all into a trash bag and carried it back to Wheatley’s car. Dennis got into the backseat, and Wheatley started driving back to Glastonbury.
In the backseat Dennis opened the duffel and changed his clothes. He searched through Joyce’s purse, which he had taken from the condo, found seventy-five dollars and several credit cards. He gave them to Wheatley, as the down payment on the promised thousand dollars that would come from Joyce’s insurance.
For a long time Dennis sat in the backseat sobbing. “He was crying,” Kira Lintner says, “and he was telling us what he had done, and he kept saying, ‘Karin made me do it. I had to do it. I didn’t want to do it. I had to do it.’ He was totally distraught.”
After a time he stopped crying. Drained, nothing left in him, he fell asleep.
They reached Glastonbury about six in the morning. Wheatley made an unexpected detour. He stopped at Frank Manganaro’s house, and Kira Lintner got out, went inside and after a few minutes reappeared. Dennis didn’t know why they stopped. Later Wheatley told him it was because Kira wanted to tell Frank all about it. Wheatley drove her home and then dropped Dennis off at his house in South Glastonbury.
Dennis ran inside, ran upstairs. He carried the duffel and the plastic garbage bag. He shoved them into his closet. He went into the bathroom, brushed his teeth and washed his hands and face. He ran downstairs, got into his car and sped off to Hebron. He arrived at the Tallwoods Country Club at seven. He was right on time.
PART FOUR
WHAT THE DEED COST
25
All the conspiring, all the planning, all the scheming had come to nothing. Early the morning of August 5 Joyce Aparo’s Volkswagen Jetta was found, not in the Bronx but down a hill beside the home of the police chief in Bernardston, Massachusetts. By afternoon her body had been discovered a little distance away. Karin never got home that morning to clean the condo. That night Glastonbury police stenographer Beverly Warga overheard the incriminating telephone conversation between Karin Aparo and Dennis Coleman and overheard another as they sat talking in the police station near her desk a few hours later. Within a few days Karin had turned over to the state police the “I will ‘do the deed,’” note, and on August 12, the day of her mother’s funeral, she had gone to them with what she said was Dennis’s confession to her, down to the smallest detail, given only an hour before in the bathroom at the home of her closest friend Shannon Dubois, that he had murdered Joyce Aparo. Dennis never got to start classes at Central Connecticut State University. The day he was to begin, Friday, August 7, he drove instead to the Glastonbury incinerator and dumped the clothes he had worn two days before and everything else he took from Joyce Aparo’s car. Less than a week later he was arrested and charged with her murder.
He was in jail over the weekend, until his $150,000 bond could be posted. On Monday, August 17, he was released and sent home, to wait for what would come. As soon as he was back home, he went to the phone and called the Duboises’ number and asked to speak to Karin. “I was very upset, and I wanted to talk to her. I asked if I could see her that night.”
During that call she told him everybody was putting pressure on her not to see or talk to him again. Still, she wanted to see him and talk with him, and they arranged to meet at the Gallery restaurant. Karin arrived first, with Shannon and a few others. Dennis drove up a little later. She saw him as he entered, got up and went to meet him. They walked out together to his car, got in and drove away.
They drove into South Glastonbury, by his house. He was sure they were being followed. They kept driving around until they lost whoever was behind them, then turned onto a field near the Connecticut River and parked out in a deserted area behind a barn in the woods. They stayed there for about two hours.
She asked him what jail was like. It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad, he said. They talked about what lay in store for him. “If I went to jail,” he says, “would she be around when I got out. Writing and things like that. She told me that she had found out from one of the police officers that the victim’s next of kin had a lot to do with the person’s final sentence if they were convicted and that when it came down to it, when she went to court, she would make sure that I stayed out of jail, she would try to keep me out of jail as long as possible.” They talked about all that had happened in the past ten days. She talked about turning the note over to the police, told him they had found it and taken it from her when she sat on the bed and they heard the sound of paper crinkling. She told him about going to the police with his confession and so turning him in.
“It didn’t upset me very much,” he says. “I knew she had done that, and I told her not to worry. Whatever happened, I wouldn’t ever say anything about her part. I told her I didn’t want to see her go to jail and I would take all the blame. I had already told her before that if the police started to ask her any questions or started to consider her as a suspect, she should give a statement and lay the blame totally on me.”
She agrees that he did not seem disturbed by what she had done. “He really seemed like the same old Dennis,” she says. “I had very mixed feelings about him. He was all I had left, and I didn’t want to lose him. But he had killed my mother. I didn’t know how to deal with those two things.”
And then they made love. “We hadn’t had sex in a while,” she says, “and so we did.” One of the reasons she had sex with him that night, she later said, was that she was afraid of him, afraid of what he might do to her if she didn’t.
“She asked me to make her pregnant,” he says.
She says she never asked him to do that.
After a while they drove back to the restaurant, parked in the post office parking lot nearby, and Dennis took her inside to her friends and then left.
With Dennis gone, Shannon wanted to know what had happened, why Karin had even gone with him, what they had talked about all that time. “She said he accused her of turning him in. She said she told him she had to because the police made her. She said she was afraid because he was angry with her; she was afraid he would do something to her because of that and because they were all alone away off by the river.”
They did not see each other again until Saturday. Then Dennis called her. He was going down to Mystic to spend the day on his father’s boat. She agreed to go along. They spent the day and the evening together. They made love again. Then he drove her back to Glastonbury and dropped her off.
It was months before he saw her again. Alex Markov had long since departed on his concert tour. She would not see him again. She had put the violin away, along with all those fantasies that her mother had conjured and they had shared. She had been arrested by then. He had talked to the police by then, had finally told them about her. Both were out on bond with the stipulation that they not see each other, speak to each other or communicate in any way.
They had one brief telephone conversation. Shannon called and said that Karin wanted to speak to him. He got on the phon
e. “It was maybe thirty seconds long,” he says. “I said hello, and she told me to write to her. I didn’t.”
But she wrote to him. Soon after their last meeting, during a time when he was still determined to protect her, before he decided to talk to the police, he received a note. It was inside a formal card whose cover contained the printed message “To thank you for your kindness and sympathy at a time when it was deeply appreciated.”
He opened the card. Inside, she had written him a short note, addressed to “my Denny.” She was sorry about all that had happened. She would try to keep him busy for the next quarter of a century. She was sure things would work out. She begged him not to believe all he heard about her because half of it just wasn’t true. She still loved him and forgave him for loving her.
There was one more letter. It was a long one. She wrote it on August 20. He received it a few days later.
She began by calling him “dearest.” She asked how her love was making out and hoped he was well. It was nearly ten-thirty in the evening as she was writing, and she was listening to a song on the radio whose lyrics went: “I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you.” Those lyrics, she said, were true. She was sitting there remembering the time when the romance between the two of them was just beginning, when he was eighteen, young and sweet, and she was just falling in love with him. She was remembering all the things they had done together, ordering clothes for her from Victoria’s Secret, going to Cape Cod and Nantucket and Boston. They had had so much fun, and he shouldn’t worry, because they would still have fun together. “I really believe,” she wrote, “that we’ll turn out O.K. Even if we both have to spend 25 years in jail.” But she didn’t think that would happen. She had always been sure she would have a good life. The psychics had predicted it, and she was certain that they were right.
Beyond Obsession Page 26
