Beyond Obsession

by Hammer, Richard;

  “Let’s spend this good year together, O.K.?” she told him in that letter. “Then, next year, we’ll worry about court.” Unless forced to, she would not testify against him. But if the worst happened, he could depend on her to do what she could to make his life bearable. She would visit him as often as possible and write to him; she would bake him cookies, cakes and breads, would send him books and a lot more. And when he got out, they would make a good life together and do all the things they had planned and dreamed of. They would go to London, and they would see Venice in the year 2013. Above all, she didn’t want him to miss New Year’s Eve in 1999; they would party like crazy that night, to celebrate the changing of the millennium. Their children would be part of that new age; they wouldn’t know anything about what had happened, and she and Dennis would be special for those children, just as they were special for each other now. “I love you, Denny. So damn much it hurts,” she wrote.

  She was feeling very lonely. She might have his voice on tape, but that wasn’t enough. She might have a lot of people around her, helping her, but she didn’t have the one person she wanted, him. He should always stay close to her and never leave her. If she had to testify against him, she would, but only because she didn’t want his lawyer to tear her apart when she got on the witness stand, and above all, she didn’t want to go to prison. She wanted to thank him for making her the tape and for taking care of the ferret, Meegan, whom she adored. She promised that before September I she would give him a gold chain, with all her love and apologies, to wear around his neck. What lay ahead for them now was his going to court and her going back to school, and during recesses they would somehow manage to have lunch together at a Chinese restaurant.

  “God, I love you, Den. You’re my sweetie. My endless love,” she wrote. She was sorry that words couldn’t say precisely what she meant, and she was sorry that she had lied to him about Alex Markov. But he should ignore what she had told him and think only about what he felt. “God will be with you, Dennis. If not we’ll be together in hell. Forever.”

  She loved him and missed him, wanted and needed him and thanked him for things he had sent her. She signed it, “Humbly, Karin.”

  And then she added a postscript: “You can send the Victoria’s Secret clothes back!”

  26

  Christopher Wheatley was not just a smart young man. He had a powerful father who got him a good lawyer. So, in a corner, the evidence of his involvement in the murder of Joyce Aparo overwhelming, facing a long term in prison as an accessory, he looked for a way out. He made a deal. And the state of Connecticut made a blunder.

  On August 24 Wheatley and his sixteen-year-old girl friend Kira Lintner and their attorneys showed up at the office of State’s Attorney John Bailey and Assistant State’s Attorney James Thomas, who had been handed the prosecution of the Aparo cases. Wheatley and Kira Lintner would tell everything they knew, everything they had done, would tell the truth, would appear as witnesses, if necessary, in exchange for a deal. The deal was that neither he nor she would ever be charged as accessories to murder, that nothing they said could ever be used against them, that the only charges that could ever be laid against them were those of hindering prosecution and perjury and that if hindering prosecution charges were brought, the state would not object to his receiving a suspended sentence or probation or to her being tried as a juvenile offender, with the proceedings closed and the verdict sealed.

  It was not an unusual bargain to gain the cooperation of essential and potentially convicting witnesses. There was just one thing that was left out. It happened to be crucial. In their haste to strike this deal, the prosecutors forgot to include the stipulation that any agreement would be null and void if either of them lied to the authorities and that if they did, they could then be charged and tried as accessories.

  The papers signed, Wheatley and Lintner began their song. Only, as far as the authorities were concerned, that song had more than a few false notes in it, was more than a trifle off key.

  For instance, Wheatley never mentioned that the first time Dennis Coleman asked for his help, he wanted to know what financial arrangements Dennis was prepared to make in exchange for that help, an omission Detective Cavanaugh, who conducted the interview, characterized in his report as “definite, calculated.” Among other “calculated” omissions from Wheatley’s statement were his failure to mention the substance of his conversations with Dennis Coleman the evening of the murder and his failure to mention what happened in his car just before Dennis left to “do the deed.” Further, Cavanaugh was of the opinion that Wheatley deliberately lied when he said, “I did not know that Dennis was going to kill Mrs. Aparo that night.”

  He had his doubts, too, about Kira Lintner’s claim that she knew nothing about what was going to happen, that all she knew was that “Chris asked me if I wanted to go for a ride. Chris said we were going to New York City. When I asked why, Chris said don’t worry about it, he just had something to do, and Chris said, ‘Just go with me.’” As far as Cavanaugh was concerned, it was far more believable that Wheatley had told her all about it before and that she had heard a lot more about it while Dennis was in the car preparing to go off to the Aparo condo.

  In fact, little in either statement went beyond, in general outline, what Cavanaugh and the other investigators already knew or surmised. About the only thing either one said that was new came from Kira Lintner. She said that Karin told her that when Dennis told her the precise time of Joyce’s death, the time he read on the digital clock at her bedside, Karin was struck by a coincidence; she had been in the middle of sex with Alex Markov at the moment.

  Lintner had something else to relate. She said that in the days after the murder in a discussion with Karin Aparo, which dealt in large measure with the murder, Karin said that she was going to ask, or maybe had already asked, Alex Markov to kill Dennis. (When the police asked Markov about that, he denied that any such thing had ever been proposed to him or that he would ever have considered it had it been.)

  When Wheatley and Lintner were finished, Cavanaugh was enraged. The state had gotten nothing for its bargain, he felt, except deliberate and calculated omissions and some outright lies. As far as he was concerned, that was grounds to throw the plea bargain out, indict both of them for accessory to murder and proceed to prosecution. He would have liked nothing better. Wheatley, particularly, with his superior and flippant manner, had gotten to him from the first day they met up at Lake George. The more he learned about Wheatley and his role, the more convinced he became that the law ought to move against him. “Of all the kids involved in this thing,” Cavanaugh says, “he was the worst. He had no excuse. He could have stopped the whole thing by just saying no. He didn’t. He went along. And the only reason he did was for money.”

  Just about everybody who knew anything about the murder agreed. But they could only bridle with frustration. For the state had neglected to put into the plea bargain the little item saying that if Wheatley did not tell the truth and the whole truth, the bargain was void and he could be prosecuted as an accessory to murder. A bargain, even when one side has blundered in the making, is still a bargain.

  Soon after signing those deal papers and making their statements, however incomplete, misleading and fudged, Wheatley and Lintner checked themselves into private psychiatric hospitals. During their stays their attorneys pressed State’s Attorney Bailey to live up to the agreement, despite what misgivings he might have, and Cavanaugh and other law enforcement officials pressed just as hard to have Bailey throw it out. Reluctantly Bailey decided that he had no choice. At stake, he said, was the reputation of the state as a responsible and principled entity. “When you enter an agreement with us, it will be honored,” he said. Otherwise, it would be a “breach of our promise of immunity.”

  Wheatley and Lintner were off the hook. In February 1988 all the murder-related charges against both were dropped. Kira Lintner was granted youthful offender status, and her case, on the charge of hindering
prosecution and making false statements, was transferred to juvenile court. Behind closed doors a hearing was held, though the record was sealed. She could have been sent away for three years. She was not. She was freed on probation.

  As for Wheatley, in the late summer of 1988 he was in court on that same relatively minor charge. He could have been sentenced to up to five years in prison. His lawyer told the court he was a responsible young man and the state would not be served by locking him up. What Wheatley should receive was what in Connecticut is called accelerated rehabilitation, meaning that in the year since the murder of Joyce Aparo, he had become a good citizen and was totally rehabilitated. Without objection from the state, which said it had no right to object, Wheatley was rehabilitated instantaneously and put on probation for two years, at the end of which his criminal record was to be erased.

  There was a public outcry. The Hartford Courant spoke for many. In an editorial, entitled “Getting Away with Murder?” it wrote:

  Judge Quinn did not even order Mr. Wheatley to perform community service. He said the charge against the 20-year-old Glastonbury man was “not of a serious nature.” That may be true, but only because the judge never got to consider Mr. Wheatley’s participation in planning and executing a murder.…

  A terrible crime was committed. Investigators believe Mr. Wheatley played-a part in it. But there will be no determination of his guilt or innocence, nor will there be any record of his involvement if he completes his probationary period satisfactorily. That’s not justice—for Mrs. Aparo or for Mr. Wheatley.

  But nothing could change the court’s decision. It stood. In September 1990 Christopher Wheatley, having done nothing wrong, having gone back to his studies after initially being expelled from his college, was a totally free man, his record wiped clean.

  27

  M. Hatcher Norris was faced with a very big problem. It was not just that he had taken on a client who had committed a particularly brutal murder. He had done that plenty of times over the previous decade, since going into private practice as a criminal lawyer. If the case went to trial, he almost always won; if the evidence was insurmountable, he was usually able to plea-bargain a sentence that was something less than onerous. But this client didn’t seem to want to do anything to help himself or help Norris defend him, even though if the state wanted to get full measure, it could send him to prison for the next eighty years.

  Dennis told him, yes, he had done the deed. Dennis related the details of the deed. Dennis told him about Chris Wheatley and Kira Lintner. “I wasn’t going to protect Chris,” he said later. “He was already talking, and I was going to let him hang in the wind. I figured he could take care of himself.” But beyond that he would not go.

  Anything else Norris was finding out from Detective Cavanaugh and other investigators, whom he cultivated and who talked freely to him, though he would not let them talk to Dennis. From them he learned about all those letters from Karin to Dennis and from Dennis to Karin, he learned about Karin’s diary for July 1987 and what it contained, he learned that suspicion had fallen on her.

  He tried to talk to Dennis about this, but Dennis did not want to listen. And though the police were forbidden to talk to Dennis about the crime, about anything surrounding it, they made some hints. Dennis remembers an afternoon when he and Detective Revoir were sitting on the lawn in front of his house, waiting for the arrival of a search warrant, which Revoir had forgotten to bring with him. They were talking about baseball, about a few other things. “Then Revoir looked at me,” Dennis says, “and he got a little serious, and he said, ‘You know, kid, there’s a big difference between love and obsession. Think about it.’”

  “Initially,” Norris says, “he didn’t want to hear the truth about Karin. Yet to allow him to take the rap and protect her—I just couldn’t do that. That’s not doing much lawyering for your client, at least not in my book. We have obligations to give our clients the best defense and the best representation, and if you believe the client has deluded himself, you’ve got to bring him back to reality and say, ‘This is the fact.’ I got him out on bond, and as you can imagine, I told him, as any lawyer would, to stay away from her. But he calls her, and they make love that very night. So much for the control of a lawyer. It makes you feel rather insignificant. Obviously my words and my advice were not enough to overpower her influence and the way he felt about her.”

  So Norris had a meeting with Cavanaugh. If Cavanaugh would come to his office and bring along that diary, Norris would have Dennis there and let him read it for the first time. Once he had read it, maybe he would see some light, and maybe he would finally tell not just what had happened but why things had happened, why he had done what he had. And Norris would have no objections to Dennis’s making a statement.

  On September 3 Dennis showed up at Norris’s office, in a small house set a little way back from New London Turnpike in Glastonbury. Norris and Cavanaugh were waiting. The diary was handed to Dennis. Norris and Cavanaugh waited while he read it slowly. “This wasn’t someone else sullying the reputation of Karin Aparo,” Norris says. “This wasn’t someone saying bad things about Karin. I don’t think Dennis would have listened to anyone. It had to be in Karin’s own hand. It had to be Karin who burst the bubble herself. As he read it, the tears just flowed down his face. Until that moment it had been inconceivable to him that Karin would ever do anything to harm him, that she would ever have set him up and that he might have been a victim of her.”

  When he finished reading, when he discovered at last that Karin had lied to him about the number of times she had slept with Alex Markov, that she had lied to him about her feelings for Alex Markov, that she had lied to him about her concern for him, that she had used him and taken advantage of him and then written about that in her diary, that all she had promised him was a fiction, that if the diary was what she really felt and believed, the murder itself had been without meaning, he was stricken, in shock. He looked at Norris, a plea in his eyes. The lawyer nodded encouragement. Dennis began to talk. He went back to the time he and Karin had met, talked about the summer of 1986, talked about the last weeks of July and beginning of August 1987 as he had lived them. When he stopped talking some days later, he had put Karin Aparo at the center of a conspiracy to murder, had made her its core and its reason. He gave Cavanaugh, and John Bailey, what they wanted in detail, enough detail so that when added to what Shannon Dubois had already told them and what Chris Wheatley and Kira Lintner had given them, they could charge her with conspiracy to murder and accessory to murder.

  What he also did was give his attorney something to bargain with. Not much, but something. Dennis was going to go to prison for a long time. No one doubted that; no one argued with that. The question was, How long? Would it be for the rest of his life, or would he someday, with some life still ahead of him, be free? Norris began to deal. If Dennis testified against Karin, and he would be the major witness, what was the state willing to give? The state, Bailey replied, would not ask for the maximum, would not ask that he be sent away for eighty years; that would mean, if Connecticut precedents were followed, he would have to serve at least forty before he was released. Rather, the state would recommend a prison term of forty-two years, meaning he could get out in about twenty.

  Norris tentatively accepted. He kept some options open, though, by entering a not guilty plea at a preliminary hearing at the end of September. Had he entered a guilty plea, Dennis could have been sentenced immediately, or as soon as a probation report was compiled, and sent to the state penitentiary without delay. This way no one worried that free on the $150,00 bond, he was likely to run; he would have a little time before the steel doors slammed behind him and the long years of his youth vanished in the limbo of a cell and bars. “There was no rush,” Norris said. “He was going away, no doubt about it. But I figured I’d try to keep him out as long as I could.”

  It was also to the advantage of the state at that moment, though it would never admit it, to have Denn
is enter a not guilty plea, be still free, remain not convicted. As a witness against Karin, he might appear as a self-confessed killer, but he would not appear as a convicted one, which would cast ever more doubt on his credibility.

  As he was doing his bargaining, as he was meeting often with Dennis, Reese Norris was a troubled man, and not only because of the impossibility of his client’s situation.

  There was something wrong, and it was not just that Dennis had committed a murder. It went beyond that. Norris sensed it the first time he sat down with Dennis over the dining-room table in the Coleman home and listened to his confession of murder. Dennis was calm; Dennis was forthcoming; Dennis was articulate. Yet something was missing; something just wasn’t there. Norris didn’t know what. But he was enough disturbed and confused by it to call Gerald Faris, a man with a Ph.D. in clinical psychiatry, an expert in the study of schizophrenic children, whose specialty was diagnosing, evaluating and treating personality disorders over the long term.

  He asked Faris to see Dennis, but not necessarily to search out and discover some mental disease or defect that he might use as a defense. It was not his intention then to use an insanity defense when and if Dennis came to trial. For one thing, he had been in practice long enough to know that insanity defenses rarely work, that juries seem to have a built-in bias and skepticism when they are told that a defendant is not guilty because he didn’t know what he was doing, that he didn’t know right from wrong, that he couldn’t help himself because of something in his psychological makeup. For another, there was the nature of the crime itself. It was horrifying, not a shooting or a stabbing in which the victim died in an instant, but a strangulation that took perhaps twenty minutes, minutes in which the victim struggled and suffered intolerably. Thus, even if a jury bought the diminished capacity idea, the details of the murder, when spelled out, would undoubtedly work against any leniency.