Free Beyond Obsession by Richard; Hammer Page B

them from spending the rest of their lives together. She knew about it afterwards because Dennis told her, but she had nothing to do with it. The way she told it, it was a very plausible story.”
    Sands dropped Zaccaro off at the bank. Then he and Karin drove around for a few minutes before heading for the command post at the Naubuc school. It was only a few blocks from the bank, and Zaccaro intended to walk there, go in and talk to the police before Karin appeared.
    As they drove toward the school, Sands said to Karin, “I’ll go in there with you as a friend. But I’m not representing you because I’m not a criminal attorney. Are you at all worried about the statement you’re going to make? Is there any way it can incriminate you? Any problem at all? Because if there is, we’ll just put you on hold and get somebody in here to represent you.”
    She shook her head. “No, “she said, “there’s no problem. I’ll go in and tell the police that Dennis has just confessed this thing to me, and I can’t live with this.”
    Zaccaro reached the command post just as Sands and Karin were driving up. They waited while he went in to prepare the way. Cavanaugh and Revoir were there. “I told them,” says Zaccaro, “that Karin was coming in to see them, that she had something she wanted to say. But I said that Jeff and I were concerned that they might use something she might say against her. If that were the case, if they had reason to believe that Karin might have had a significant involvement, then she should have a criminal attorney with her and it could wait until we got one. Cavanaugh said no, if what she said was the truth, they wouldn’t use it against her. It wasn’t that they didn’t have any suspicions, but they would not use anything she said against her, if it was the truth.”
    So Zaccaro went out and brought Karin and Sands in to meet with Cavanaugh and Revoir. They were led into an empty classroom. Revoir took out paper and pencils and began to set down whatever statement Karin was prepared to make.
    The first thing Karin asked was if she was going to have to testify in court. Cavanaugh said she would. She accepted that. Then she gave them what they wanted. She told them that Dennis Coleman had confessed to her that afternoon in the Duboises’ bathroom that he had murdered her mother. She told them he had laid it out for her in explicit and excruciating detail, and she repeated those details for the state cops. Among other things, she said, Dennis told her it had happened at one fifty-six in the morning. He told her about the yellow paper towel stuffed in Joyce’s mouth. He told her other things that had not been released to the press, that were not common knowledge, that only the murderer and the investigators could have known. She was with Cavanaugh and Revoir for more than three hours; it took her that long to give her statement in a preliminary form, then have Revoir write it down in longhand for her to sign; it ran to fifteen pages. In it she gave the police the missing pieces from the puzzle or at least enough of them so they now had probable cause to move against Dennis Coleman.
    â€œAfterwards,” Sands says, “Cavanaugh got up and kissed Karin and said, ‘You gave us the murderer, you’ve given him to us, thank you, this is great.’ Cavanaugh was very supportive and talked to Karin about a victim support group and the programs they had to help, because this was going to be a tough time for her.”
    â€œI didn’t suspect her then,” Cavanaugh says. “I didn’t want to suspect her then.”
    Still, there were a few troublesome factors, some of which were immediately apparent, others not quite so evident until sometime later. As they looked back, both Cavanaugh and Revoir were struck by the way Karin was able to recite the details of her mother’s murder, details that were