Beyond Obsession: The Shocking True Story of a Teenage Love Affair Turned Deadly

291 Pages·2017·3.75 MB·English

by  Richard Hammer

Beyond Obsession
Richard Hammer
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
—W. B. YEATS
“No Second Troy”
My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Romeo and Juliet
Author’s Note
This is a work of nonfiction. The reader will find in it events that defy logic,
actions that would not be credible in fiction, people whose motives seem often
irrational and not easily explained, sometimes beyond simple explanation or
even any explanation at all. But life does not follow formulas, and neither people
nor events behave as we would wish them to or as we believe and expect they
should. Yet this story is a true one, the events did happen and these people are
real.
The story is a mystery, its solution still debated. There are a number of
events about which the major participants told conflicting versions, sometimes
vastly and critically different. In most instances I have presented both versions,
to give the reader the opportunity to make up his or her own mind on which
seems most reasonable, on which seems most clearly to arise from what went
before and from the personalities of the antagonists. I have, though, tried to set
down guideposts, which the reader should take merely as my view. If there are
solutions to the unanswered questions that hover over the outcome, they lie in
the story itself and how the reader interprets it. As will become clear, different
people have read the evidence in different ways.
Some mention must be made about the section dealing with the trials of
Dennis Coleman and especially of Karin Aparo. A trial, contrary to television
and fictional presentation, is a study in tedium. It is long stretches of legal
argument and repetitious and befuddling questions and responses, broken now
and then, but not often, by an illuminating colloquy. There are few surprises, for
any good lawyer should know the answer to a question before he or she asks it,
and there are almost never one of those dramatic climaxes so dear to fiction.
These trials were different only to the extent that witnesses gave widely
conflicting testimony.
In setting down what seemed to me the high points and critical moments in
direct examination and cross-examination in these trials, I have tried to edit out