Beyond Obsession (44 page)

On the sidewalk outside the courtroom later the jury foreman and several of his younger male colleagues gathered before microphones to talk about what they had done. The foreman said he had decided that Karin was not guilty even before the state had finished its case. Dennis Coleman, he said, “was a very self-centered individual. This boy was already twisted. To turn around and say he felt no animosity toward her, that is to me a direct lie.” He was convinced, he said, that Dennis Coleman was a liar who had tried to implicate Karin Aparo in order to get his own sentence reduced. The case, he added, should never have been brought to trial in the first place, and the state should not even consider retrying her on the charges on which the jury hung because any reasonable jury would acquit her on those as well. The other jurors nodded their agreement.

Somebody asked if the jurors thought Shannon Dubois was lying. No, they just believed she was confused, so much so that she mixed up what Dennis told her and thought it had come from Karin.

And then suddenly Karin Aparo appeared in their midst. The foreman saw her coming. He grinned at her. “Did you catch my wink?” he asked.

She nodded and smiled back. “Thank you so much.” She gestured toward the other jurors. “I just owe them my life,” she said.

The foreman put his arms around her and hugged her, stroked her hair and her shoulders. One of the other jurors grinned and said, “We read your diary.”

“I'm so embarrassed,” she said.

The whole thing was a spectacle no one, not even the oldest and most jaded courtroom veteran, could remember having witnessed before. An acquitted defendant might nod and smile at his jurors in the courtroom. But a gathering on the street outside? A physical embrace?

That night, Karin and several friends went to a popular Hartford restaurant to celebrate. The festivities were on the house.

By that night, too, public outrage was reaching a crescendo. Callers were flooding the switchboards of the local television and radio stations, of the newspapers and of State's Attorney Bailey's office. Those calls were nearly unanimous in condemning the verdict as a miscarriage of justice and demanding that she be retried on the conspiracy counts. The majority of those calls came from women. No one in the area could remember such a public reaction to a trial and a verdict before. “We've had people let us know what they thought on cases before, but never anything like this,” said an attorney in Bailey's office. “It was absolutely amazing. We've gotten so many calls, a hundred in one day alone. What really stands out is the anger. They don't want this to be dropped.”

The Glastonbury police chief was “shell-shocked. I never would have believed it.”

A former neighbor of the Aparos on Butternut Drive shook her head. “I can't believe she could have got off. We're all so upset.”

While some who had testified in Karin's behalf were relieved and pleased for her, they had mixed emotions. “It's about time the abuse of Karin Aparo stopped and this evil woman is put to rest where she can't hurt anyone,” Sandra Yerks said. “Joyce Aparo was an evil, vicious lady who hurt a lot of people. The only thing I feel badly about is the young boy, Dennis Coleman.”

Dennis Coleman. Some reporters rushed to the Hartford Correctional Center the day after the verdict to find out what he thought. “My reaction was shock,” he said. Karin, he said, had learned from her mother “how to manipulate people. She did that with me. In a very subtle way, she did that to the jury, too. There's a very strong urge in me to let people know what happened. I'm not some kind of monster. She was just as guilty as I was. If there was any justice, she should have been found guilty.”

Over the next weeks the public outcry over the verdict did not let up. It grew. The pressure on John Bailey to retry Karin on the conspiracy count was unrelenting. After hesitating, he announced that indeed, the state was going to do just that.

Hubert Santos was indignant. His client had been subjected to enough. She should be free to pick up her life and go on. To retry her would be double jeopardy.

Into court went Bailey and Santos. Santos demanded that the charge be thrown out. He lost. He demanded that if she were tried, it should be as a youthful offender, behind closed doors, the record sealed, because she had been fifteen when the alleged conspiracy began. Again he lost. Just before Christmas 1990 the court ruled that because of the seriousness of the charges, Karin Aparo's peers would judge her once more, as an adult, on the charge that she conspired to murder her mother. Santos, though, brought forth more appeals on more grounds, to more and higher courts. He was not sanguine about the possibility of blocking another prosecution. Nevertheless, he was determined to take every legal step on Karin's behalf.

But at some point, no one is quite sure when, Karin Aparo will go on trial again, to hear once more the stories of how she conspired with Dennis Coleman to have her mother killed. Once more a jury will decide her fate. In the meantime, she will spend her time going to school during the day and working at the bank in the evening, trying to live some kind of life with her future still in doubt. While she waits in this limbo, there is at least the comfort of knowing there are some who believe in her and upon whom she can lean. There are new friends, from the bank and from school. There is a new boyfriend, a young man who appeared with her during the final days of her trial and whom she sees often. There is Hubert Santos who, after his initial doubts and uncertainties, came to believe implicitly in her and her innocence and, going far beyond what one would normally expect of an attorney, has sought every possible means in his efforts to protect and defend her. He has become, in many ways, something of a surrogate father, a role he has accepted willingly.

But she can no longer look to Archbishop John Whealon for the advice and counsel he gave all her life, who was at the center of her life from childhood, and at the center of Joyce Aparo's fantasies. At the beginning of August 1991, the intestinal cancer that had afflicted him for decade, leading to numerous hospitalizations and surgery, sent him once again to the hospital. He died during another operation.

One day in the fall of 1990 I was sitting with Dennis Coleman in a private conference room at the Hartford Correctional Center. He was still there. The state had not yet found a place to move him. He could not go back to the state penitentiary at Somers. He had been told, and the state knew, that a posse was waiting for him. Because he had testified for the state, the other convicts had sentenced him to death. If he appeared there again, the sentence would be carried out. So he remained for a while in this limbo. He had begun to study, to take college courses leading to a degree. He wanted to be moved to a more permanent place where he could use what he knew. He had ideas, he said, about revamping the state's computer system, and if he got a chance, he would like to put them into practice. He had other plans as well. Before Thanksgiving he was to marry. Margaret, the young woman who had become his constant companion in his final months of freedom, who had sat with his family at his sentencing hearing, who had appeared again when he was called to testify against Karin, would become his bride, would wait for him on the outside while he spent however many years the state of Connecticut decided were essential to serve the ends of justice, fitting punishment for the crime he had committed. There would be conjugal visits, but there would be no hope of a real life for them until he reached middle age.

The conversation came around to Karin and all that had happened. He had put her behind him now, he was sure. She had been his past, and she had been his ruin. Margaret was his present and his future, whatever that held for him. But he could never truly escape Karin Aparo no matter how long he lived. She would cast her shadow across his life.

Did he really mean, he was asked, what he had said in court, that what he felt for her now was only apathy?

He thought about that for a time, then slowly shook his head. “Not really,” he said.

What did he feel?

He took his time. “I feel sorry for her,” he said at last. “I feel pity for her. And I'm the last person who should ever feel pity for anyone.”

Afterword: A Note on “Fair Use”

Throughout this book, and especially in Part Three, the reader came upon mention of various letters and diary entries written by Karin Aparo and Dennis Coleman. During their trials many were offered as exhibits and read in open court to spectators and jurors, most often by the defense. They became part of the court record, printed in the transcripts available to the public, and many were also printed in full in various newspapers and other publications in Connecticut.

It was my desire, and it had been my intention, to quote extensively from those letters and diaries. More eloquently than I could, they express the emotions, hopes and aspirations of both Karin Aparo and Dennis Coleman and the pressures they were under during these years. Their own words, I believed, were essential if the reader was to gain insight into them and what lay behind their actions. In the past this would have presented few problems. Such extracts, especially from court documents, were covered by what was known as the fair use doctrine applied to unpublished materials, though such materials are protected by a so-called statutory copyright. Despite popular belief, exhibits and other evidence offered in a court of law, though published in court transcripts and available to anyone who seeks to read them, are considered unpublished works.

Times have changed, however, and what was once standard practice for writers of nonfiction, both scholarly and popular, became impossible following several federal court decisions, one by the United States Supreme Court and two by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Those decisions, which overturned lower federal court rulings upholding a broad concept of fair use, were rendered by the Supreme Court in
Harper & Row
v.
Nation Enterprises
in 1985 and by the court of appeals in
Salinger
v.
Random House
in 1987 and in
New Era Publishing Company
v.
Henry Holt & Company
in 1989. The Supreme Court refused to hear appeals from those lower-court decisions; as a result, they were allowed to stand. The impact was to strike down the age-old doctrine of fair use.

In
Harper & Row
the Supreme Court ruled that the
Nation
magazine's publication of long excerpts from an autobiography by former President Gerald Ford before the book's publication by Harper & Row had violated and infringed upon Ford's copyright. “Under ordinary circumstances,” the Court said, “the author's right to control the first public appearance of his undisseminated expression will outweigh a claim of fair use.”

The court of appeals extended this doctrine far beyond merely protecting the contents of books about to be published or in the process of being written from being excerpted at length, which conceivably could damage the financial and other interests of the author. It ruled that without the express permission of the person who wrote them, or his or her estate or heirs, nothing anyone had written at any time, no matter how distant in the past, including letters, diaries and other private papers, could be quoted or excerpted in books or in any other media.

The reclusive novelist and short story writer J. D. Salinger had brought suit against the author Ian Hamilton and his publisher, Random House, seeking to block their use of quotations from a number of Salinger's unpublished letters in a biography scheduled for publication. It mattered not that those letters were on deposit in the Harvard University library and available for public examination. The appellate court held that since the words in all unpublished works, as in published ones, remain the property of the writer, not of the recipient, without Salinger's permission nothing in those letters could be quoted. It granted an injunction against publication of the biography until all quotations from Salinger's letters were removed.

A similar ruling was forthcoming from the court of appeals when suit was brought against the publisher Henry Holt and the author Russell Miller to bar the use of quotations in a critical biography from unpublished letters of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. The court said Miller had relied too heavily on these unpublished materials, though it gave no definition of what it meant by “too heavily.” The book, as it happened, was published anyway because of a legal technicality: New Era, which controlled rights to the Hubbard letters, had waited too long to file its suit; the statute of limitations had lapsed. But the chilling impact of that and the other decisions remained in force.

The potential result was a serious, some thought even fatal wound inflicted on the writing of history and biography, of all nonfiction, scholarly and popular, as we have come to know it, perhaps even on the dissemination of news in any medium no matter how vital to the public interest. Copyright lawyers insisted that unless and until Congress and/or the courts acted to redefine “fair use” broadly, authors of works of nonfiction could not quote more than a few words from unpublished diaries, letters and other documents, even if they were part of court records and widely available, even if they were written in the distant past, even if they had previously been published in newspapers, magazines or other periodicals, without the express permission of the writer of those letters, diaries and other works or, if the writer was dead, of his or her estate or direct heirs.

Yet such permissions are not always easily obtained. The direct heirs to a deceased letter writer or diarist may have disappeared, may not be easily found, or, if found, may, for one reason or another, refuse to grant the requested permission. The letter writer or diarist may decide to dictate what may be said about him or her either by refusing to grant permission or by selectively giving permission—that is, this may be quoted and that may not. Or the letter writer or diarist may demand payment in exchange for permission.