Trying to put the nightmare behind him.

Byline: Dianne Williamson

COLUMN: DIANNE WILLIAMSON

William Kotoski Jr. was working at his Gardner furniture store in the fall of 2004 when a state trooper walked in, asked if he could speak with him in private, and dropped a bombshell so shocking that Mr. Kotoski first considered it a joke.

"He said he was putting me into protective custody, and he said, `Would you believe that your wife this very minute is soliciting someone to have you killed?'" Mr. Kotoski remembered.

The information was so inconceivable that Mr. Kotoski assumed that his college buddies were playing a prank. When he saw the trooper's gun and realized he was serious, Mr. Kotoski went into the bathroom and threw up.

"Of all the things that could have happened to me that day, this wasn't even on the radar screen," he noted dryly.

On Friday, three years after Caroline Kotoski paid an undercover state trooper to have him killed, William Kotoski sat alone in the second row of Room 203 in Worcester Superior Court and listened as his ex-wife publicly admitted her role in the plot.

"Did you, in fact, commit the acts?" Judge Francis R. Fecteau asked.

"Yes," the 43-year-old defendant replied calmly.

Ms. Kotoski never looked at her ex-husband while pleading guilty to a single count of solicitation, a plea that will allow a woman who paid someone to kill her husband to serve just 18 months of a 2-1/2 year sentence. Under state law, hiring a hit man to murder someone is only a misdemeanor as long as the crime isn't carried out. In this case, the only reason William Kotoski isn't dead is because the "hit man" was actually an undercover state trooper who had been tipped off that Ms. Kotoski was looking for someone to kill her husband.

The couple was in the middle of a bitter divorce when the mother of two met with Trooper Peter LeDuc Sept. 9, 2004, in a parking lot on Gold Star Boulevard and paid him $7,500 to kill Mr. Kotoski, with the promise of another $7,500 once the crime was committed. The one-time Teacher of the Year at Notre Dame Academy in Fitchburg told the trooper that she didn't want her children present during the killing, and she didn't want it to look like a suicide because she'd be banned from collecting some $1.2 million in life insurance.

While Ms. Kotoski was meeting with the trooper in Worcester, a second trooper was breaking the news to her intended target at his furniture store, R. Smith in Gardner.

"The trooper said, `For the next hour and a half, I'm going to be the best friend you ever had,'" the Princeton man remembered. "My heart was racing. It was sort of surreal. We sat there until his cell phone rang, and he said, `We got her.'"

In his first public comments since his ex-wife's arrest, Mr. Kotoski said he's refused interview requests from national media because he didn't want to jeopardize the case and wanted to protect his children, now 9 and 6, who know only that "Mommy made some bad choices and got into trouble."

"They haven't seen their mother in three years," said the 45-year-old businessman. "I've had to be mother and father to them. My kids are thriving. We have each other, and that's what's important. My main responsibility now is to be there for my kids."

He said he had met his wife after his sister began working for her father, a banker in southwestern Massachusetts. They married two years later, in 1992. Cultured and refined, his bride spoke fluent French and Spanish and had even attended the Sorbonne in Paris.

"She was beautiful, sophisticated, kind and caring," he said softly. "I fell head over heels in love with her back then."

The marriage soon deteriorated and the divorce was described as "contentious." Had the case gone to trial, a defense psychologist would have testified that Ms. Kotoski suffered from depression with psychotic features and a "major mental illness," so that she lacked criminal responsibility for her actions.

Mr. Kotoski said he wished his wife received a harsher penalty, but understood that her lawyer planned to raise an insanity defense. He declined to say whether he believed her to be mentally ill, saying he's not a psychologist. The prosecution claimed that she wanted her husband dead to inherit the life insurance, homes in Princeton and Cape Cod, and his furniture store.

"She's a dangerous person, and I don't know what she's capable of," he said. "They got the best sentence I could have hoped for. I'm realistic."

He said he feels no malice toward his wife - only sadness. But he's fearful of what she could do and tends to look over his shoulder. He hasn't had a good night's sleep in three years, he said.

"To sit in court and watch the person you were once in love with, the person who bore your children, admit her intent to have you murdered is chilling," he said. "The person she used to be, I don't know that person anymore."

Contact Dianne Williamson by e-mail at [e-mail].