The Strange, Charmed Life of Karla Homolka
Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo met in 1987, when he was 23 and she was
17. They married in 1991, six months after they raped and killed
Karla’s little sister, and two weeks after abducting, raping and
killing 14- year-old Leslie Mahaffy. The following year in April of
1992, 15-year-old Kristen French was the next young lady unlucky enough
to cross paths with the Bernardos, and her fate would be the same as
that of Tammy Homolka and Ms. Mahaffy.
Three
months after Paul and Karla met in 1987, a series of brutal rapes began
in Scarborough, Toronto, a large suburban area where Paul Bernardo
lived. The last assault attributed to the Scarborough Rapist occurred
in 1990.
Mention “The Ken and Barbie Killers” to a true crime
buff, and you’ll probably hear about two things which make this case
significant: one is that Paul and Karla videotaped themselves sexually
assaulting Ms. Mahaffy and Ms. French, and Karla’s sister, Tammy. The
other is the part those tapes would play—and wouldn’t play—in their
prosecution.
Paul Bernardo admitted he was responsible for every
sexual assault attributed to him, but he steadfastly maintained Homolka
had been the killer; Homolka, of course, pointed the finger at
Bernardo, and it isn’t likely we will ever know the truth of the
matter. However, to this day Paul Bernardo insists he never killed
anyone, and it is worth noting that while they are hardly better off,
the 19 victims of the Scarborough Rapist are still alive: not one girl
died until Karla Homolka, literally, was in the picture.
Bernardo
was never the most stable character in the best of times, and after the
death of Kristen French he began to psychologically “disassemble”. In
late December, 1992, he beat his wife so badly the ER doctor reported
in his 15 years it was the worst case of domestic abuse he’d seen.
On
February 1, 1993, The Toronto police got three positive DNA matches to
Bernardo for the Scarborough rapes, and Karla was only too happy to
lend them her views of her now estranged husband. Everything unraveled
after that, and soon both Paul and Karla would find themselves facing
the legal consequences of their actions.
After a two year
investigation beginning with the death of Leslie Mahaffy, and the
addition of a large and costly task force, Inspector Vince Bevan, the
man whose job it was to apprehend the perpetrators of the
French/Mahaffy murders, had clues he could not decipher and little
else. An officer of Bevan’s rank should know that eyewitness accounts
are notoriously unreliable; nevertheless, based on the statements of a
few eyewitnesses who reported seeing two men in a cream-colored Camaro
near the site of Kristen French’s abduction, the Inspector threw all
his efforts into a futile search for a just such a car.
Ideally,
neighboring law enforcement jurisdictions work together in a spirit of
cooperation to move toward a common goal. In reality, to say the
atmosphere was tense between Inspector Bevan’s task force and the
Toronto Metro police would be an understatement. When the Toronto
detectives interviewed Karla Homolka regarding her husband’s
proclivities, Inspector Bevan was not invited to take part in the
discussion; he was allowed to give the Toronto detectives a list of items they
could ask Karla if she had seen, and that list included a watch which
was missing from Kristen French’s body. As it turns out, this interview
would prove more informative to Karla than to anyone; it told her the
police had made a connection between the Scarborough Rapist and the
murdered girls, which, in fact, officially, they had not. The following
day, Karla saw her lawyer, and after confessing the bizarre
circumstances of her marriage, she asked him to seek full immunity from
prosecution on her behalf. As she states in her diary, until the
interview with the Toronto detectives when Bevan’s question tipped her
hand, Karla’s plan for the future was “to get my stuff back” from the
home she shared with Bernardo, and “go out and have some fun.”
On
February 11, 1993, the RCMP met with the FBI to hear the profiler’s
theories about men like domestic terrorist Paul Bernardo—and supposed
reasons why women like Homolka find them suitable romantic partners.
The FBI obliged their Canadian equivalent with a then unpublished paper
entitled, “Compliant Victims of the Sexual Sadist”. This paper surveyed
seven women who were incarcerated for crimes they committed with their
spouses or lovers; generally, it explained their criminal behavior as
aberrant, a consequence of their partner’s brutal treatment, or put
more simply—they were beaten into being bad. It was in this meeting
that the decision was made, the compliant victim/sexual sadist model
best fit the dynamics of the relationship between Bernardo and Homolka.
Keep
in mind that Ron Mackay, the RCMP officer who introduced the
unpublished “Compliant Victims” paper at this meeting was a protégé of
Roy Hazelwood, the FBI agent who co-authored it. Agent Hazelwood must
have been proud that day, and I say “must have” because neither I nor
Roy Hazelwood were there. In fact, Roy Hazelwood would not meet or
speak with Karla Homolka about sexual sadists or anything else, until
1996, a year after Paul Bernardo’s trial had ended—and long after Mr.
Hazelwood’s theory transformed Karla from a full-status 1st degree
murder accomplice into something closer to the girls whose deaths she
was responsible for.
And keep in mind that when they made this
decision, none of these men—including the RCMP’s Ron Mackay and the
intrepid Inspector Bevan—had ever laid eyes on either Paul Bernardo or
Karla Homolka. “Compliant Victims of the Sexual Sadist” was a stroke of
luck for the Inspector, as it became the basis for a renewed search
warrant and allowed him to take back control of his own investigation.
After
almost two years and the addition of his much heralded task force,
Bevan did not have a single shred of evidence against Paul Bernardo, in
spite of having run his name through suspect data banks 17 times—he
actually cleared Bernardo a year before as a suspect in the murders. As
late as February 6, 1993, the Inspector was quoted by the press stating
his belief there was no link between the murders of Kristen French and
Leslie Mahaffy; two days later the Toronto Metro detectives conducted
their interview with Karla. And even though the detectives note she
turned white as a sheet and stammered after the question about the
watch, they underestimated Karla when they chalked that up to the
stress of being interviewed by the police for the first time.
Instead
of functioning as an effectively conjoined unit, the
multi-jurisdictional teams of law enforcement—Toronto Metro with the
Scarborough rape investigation and Bevan with Niagara Regional and the
French/Mahaffy murders—were squaring off for what would become the
golden Bernardo collar. And Bevan must have seen his career flashing
before his eyes, because Toronto Metro, with three DNA matches and more
on the way, was winning.
Regardless of the truth of the matter,
that Karla was a woman beaten into complying with the twisted desires
of her husband was an assumption that would stick because it served, if
not a greater purpose, at least a larger one. And when the astute men
of the FBI and RCMP made their decision that the compliant
victim/sexual sadist dynamic best fit the picture, the picture they
were looking at was of Karla Homolka, taken at the hospital on the
night Bernardo beat her.
It's doubtful even the aforementioned
true crime buff has taken the time for a truly penetrating look at this
case. Most of what is written will proclaim as heroes the men
responsible for the investigation and arrest of Paul Bernardo, and the
men who prosecuted him as earnest souls simply doing their sworn duty
to protect the good citizens of Canada. But behind this veil of honor,
what is now commonly believed to be the basis for everything done in
the name of capturing “Ken and Barbie”, has, in fact, little to do with
the videotapes or the images they contain—and nothing to do with
whether or not Bernardo was in fact a “sexual sadist” and Homolka his
“compliant victim”.
In an effort to save his expensive and
failing investigation, on the night of February 13, 1993, Inspector Bevan sent his officers to the home of
Karla’s defense attorney, after hours and with an urgent message in
hand; the police do not habitually rendezvous late at night at the home
of defense attorneys, so if you’re any good at poker, you know that
when they do it says a great deal about the hand they’re holding.
***
In the latter part of 1990, when fiance Paul Bernardo took an
“interest” in her 15-year-old sister, rather than end the relationship,
or at least call off the wedding, Karla Homolka’s solution was to
procure Halothane, an animal anesthetic, and sedatives from the vet
clinic where she worked as a surgical assistant; the thinking, if you
can call it that, was to knock her baby sister out and “give her” to
Paul Bernardo as a one of a kind Christmas present, and on Christmas
Eve, 1990, the plan was put into action.
It was unfortunate
for Tammy Homolka, however, that her sister carried out this demented
act; as a veterinary assistant, Karla was well aware that if the
“patient” has had any food or drink in the previous 24-hour period,
using anesthetic is “contraindicated”. And she certainly knew that
Halothane was intended to be used with a calibrated vaporizer, not
doused liberally on a rag and held over the mouth and nose. But this is
something we can be certain Karla did, not only because the happy
couple videotaped themselves attacking Karla’s sister, but also because
of a particularly disturbing morgue photo of Tammy Lyn Homolka, with a
large raspberry red burn covering her cheek and extending to the
hairline on the right side of her face.
In spite (or
perhaps because) of Karla’s efforts, Paul Bernardo began expressing
doubts about the upcoming nuptials. No proof is good enough for some
people, but whatever else she was, Karla wasn’t a quitter. Reaching
into her bag of tricks again, she lured a young friend of hers (known
in court as Jane Doe) to the couple’s home; she then called Bernardo on
his cell phone to tell her soon-to-be hubby she had a “wedding gift”
waiting for him.
Keep in mind that since Paul Bernardo did not
even know Jane Doe, it’s impossible for Karla’s testimony, that he made
her summon the teenager to their home, to be anything but perjury,
which in and of itself was grounds for revoking the plea-bargain deal.
And keep in mind Karla, all on her own, drugged and anesthetized her
friend not once but twice, in exactly the same manner she obviously
knew had killed her sister just a scant six months before.
Keep
all that in mind, because no investigation of Karla Homolka would come
out of it, and no additional charges would be brought against her.
Even
with six and a half hours of videotape in which she is either directing
the on-camera activity, as someone put it, “with all the blasé of a
photographer taking baby pictures at Sears”, or actively sexually
assaulting Tammy Homolka, Jane Doe, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen
French—in spite of that, Karla Homolka would never be charged with a
single sex crime, which made both her present and her future
circumstances infinitely better than those her partner in crime was
facing, and would face.
Paul Bernardo was the real danger,
according to the Crown, and Karla Homolka’s testimony against her now
ex-husband was deemed so necessary she received two concurrent 10-year
sentences for manslaughter on the Mahaffy/French murder charges, with
obligatory “Two for Tammy” years, also to be served concurrently,
tacked on.
In the photograph of Karla taken after Paul
Bernardo beat her in December of 1992, there are long, dark bruises
under her eyes; the injury is called a contra-coup, sometimes referred
to as “raccoon-eyes”, and it’s caused by a violent blow to the back of
the head, hard enough to send the brain slamming forward to the front
the skull. The circumstances under which this injury occurred are as
disturbing as the image itself; it takes some digging to find it now,
but the reason for the raccoon-eyed injury is in the court transcript
from Homolka’s cross-examination. You have to wonder what took Paul
Bernardo so long to ask his wife why at each Christmas reminder of
Tammy’s demise she was not reduced to the sniveling wreck he was, but
when he finally did confront her with this query, looking at the
black-eyed photograph of Homolka, it’s obvious the answer was
unsatisfactory.
In the story as it’s most often told, when Paul
and Karla made their home movie of her sister’s Christmas Eve rape,
suddenly Tammy “turned blue” and vomited; supposedly, a noxious
combination of alcohol, food, sedatives, and Halothane, caused the
vomit to be acidic or caustic. The acidity of the vomit coming in
contact with skin is often cited as the most likely source of the burn.
But if you look closely at the morgue photo you see very fine facial
hair on Tammy’s face, even in the areas the burn covers. Something
caustic enough to leave a burn that raspberry red certainly would’ve
taken babyfine facial hair with it.
Since it did no damage to
the eyebrows or eyelashes, the burn does not appear to be the result of
anything flammable or the result of a splash with corrosive material,
and the demarcated edges of the burn stand above the top layer of skin,
as in relief. In other words, the burn does not appear to be topical
and a 2001 article in the Canadian journal Elm Street cites medical
examiner Dr. Vincent Di Mao, as saying that the anesthetic “pools”
below the skin.
Keep in mind, it only “pools” in this instance,
because it’s supposed to be used with a vaporizer and the Halothane has
steadily decreasing amounts of oxygen to mix with. And keep in mind
it’s “pooling” because someone’s still applying it to Tammy’s nose and
mouth. According to a police report which was never made public, at the
time her sister began “to look funny”, as Karla puts it, Paul Bernardo
was in another room asleep, and was awakened by her 45 minutes to an
hour after the videotape shows the sexual assault on Tammy stopped.
Coordinating the events of that night with the starting and stopping
point of the videotape, and the time the call was made to Emergency
Services—it appears that only Karla Homolka was with her sister when
she died.
In the Canadian criminal justice system it is standard
procedure to release inmates at their earliest possible parole date,
after serving one-third of their sentence. Since Karla's two ten year
sentences for the French/Mahaffy murders ran concurrently with the two
year sentence she received for Tammy's death, the strange accounting
process by which someone arrived at the "Two for Tammy" years was for
all intents and purposes, meaningless; even if this weren't standard
procedure, written into the plea-bargain agreement was a clause
stating, in effect, parole was only four short years away.
***
Technically
speaking, Paul and Karla were equally guilty of first-degree murder,
but unless Karla slipped up on the stand the “deal with the devil” was
untouchable. Only Bernardo was facing the full weight of all the
charges, and the best result that could be realistically hoped for was
a guilty verdict on second-degree murder, instead of first. It wasn’t
much, but understandably, no one wanted to give Paul Bernardo much;
with second-degree murder convictions he might have the chance at a
life outside of prison. Someday. Everything came down to whether a jury
could be persuaded, it was Karla and not Paul who had the intent to
kill.
Homolka states she was present when Bernardo strangled the
abducted girls with an electrical cord; Bernardo’s story is, it was
always his intention to let the girls go. In both instances, with
Leslie and with Kristen, Paul Bernardo states he left the house to get
take-out food and to rent movies, and each time when he returned, the
girls were dead. People who are of the opinion Bernardo is a murderer
say that after using Leslie and Kristen as objects for his sexual
gratification he didn’t need them anymore and simply killed them. But
looking at everything else he’s done, and the manner in which he’s done
it, I have to disagree.
In his testimony Bernardo stated that
both weekend nights while he was zigging here for take-out and zagging
there for movies, he also stopped at a gas station. The thinking, if
you can call it that, was to make sure to fill the tank because he
planned to drive the girls home the next day, and didn’t want to come
to a sputtering stop somewhere with a missing girl in tow. As ludicrous
as that might sound, ex-accountant and pack rat Paul Bernardo kept
almost every receipt ever given to him so there is a record of all that
zig-zagging here and there. It’s possible of course, this was all an
elaborate bit of staging to give himself an alibi—but that’s a lot of
work in support of a weak story.
It’s risky business abducting
girls in broad daylight, even with a helpmate, and being the prince of
a fellow that he is, Bernardo has chosen to “reward” his victims with
dinner and a movie, and made three different stops to do it. So—once
he’s brought home the bacon, and the videos, and he’s king of his
castle again with a pretty, little compliant wife and a young plaything
to boot—for the man who desires that and does all this to get it—for
the narcissistic, former accountant who never threw anything away, it
makes no sense that his next step is to wrap an electrical cord around
his harem girl’s neck and strangle her to death.
As much as they
are objects on which to vent his rage, in the calm after the storm
Bernardo needs the girls like a junkie needs a drug; his need for them
is such he aims to make them need him in return. The Scarborough Rape
attacks lasted almost two hours in some cases; Bernardo practically
showered Jane Doe with gifts, as Karla states, “trying to buy her
love.” Twisted as it as, Paul Bernardo is a “collector”, and these
incidents are mini-“relationships” to him; he needs all of them, and to
pack rat Paul Bernardo killing Leslie or Kristen would
be the equivalent of an addict tossing away his drugs—by sheer
self-interest, it would be unthinkable. It defies our basic structure
to destroy what we still need.
Karla, on the other hand, has her
own peculiar and mercenary reasoning. Unlike her mercurial partner, she
is steadier and more careful. But as attentive as she is, her
perception’s somewhat skewed, like one of nature’s mothers stealing
eggs from other nests to make her own nest count come out right.
There’s something else worth noting about that black-eyed photograph of
Homolka: Paul Bernardo beat his wife severely all along her body, and
to document how savage a beating she received, the hospital took
pictures, head-to-toe. In one of those pictures you can see Karla’s
wearing a watch. It’s not a gift, and it’s not a watch she bought—but
it’s nothing fancy, just an ordinary Mickey Mouse watch.
A watch
just like a million other watches on the wrists of a million other
girls, who also never quite outgrew the well-known Disney icon. Nothing
distinguishes this item on the surface, but like the girl who wears it
in the hospital photographs, what sets this watch apart is hiding in
the light.
Unlike a million other watches, this one has a
primitive and terrible significance, like jewelry sculpted from the
bones of vanquished enemies, worn as both adornment and a warning, …I’m
capable of this…if you are not, I’ll wear your bones as well…
But
since there was no omen or thunderbolt of warning—and since most
everything in life seemed good, and right and fine, as a normal
15-year-old schoolgirl in modern-day Ontario, such primitive and
predatory thinking would never have occurred to Kristen French.
In
the only tape in which we see the two of them alone, Karla regales
Bernardo with future tales of all the things life has in store for
them; the room is dark, and the soon-to-be bride and groom lie before a
roaring fire in the fireplace. Cozy. Intimate. All in all it seems
quite the romantic setting.
But in her future tales, Karla isn’t
talking about the car or the house they’ll have some day, or of all the
things they’d buy if they were rich beyond their wildest dreams; she is
counting though—there could be 10, 20—even 50—together they could have
as many as 50, she exclaims. And what she’s counting off in multiples
of 10 for the one she hopes to marry is the number of young girls that
as man-and-wife and side by side, they can enslave.
When she’s
asked on cross-examination about the time Kristen French spent in her
home, Homolka expresses some regrets, and Bernardo’s defense attorney
pounces on a particular phrase she uses; according to Karla, she and
Kristen interacted more like girlfriends than abductor and abducted,
and she seems a little wistful when she says, “It’s hard…because you
get to know these people…”
...You get to know these people...
It’s
hard because you get to know these people and then the weekend’s
almost over...and Karla must be thinking, too, how absurd it is…Paul,
driving them home...Leslie...or Kristen...but even Paul and Karla have
unspoken agreements…and silent rules, like all couples do—that’s your
job, this is mine, and most of it’s understood...and generally men know
the silent rules exist and operate accordingly...but
sometimes...sometimes men forget the silent rules...a woman’s work is
never done…
it’s hard, because you get to know these people—
Keep
in mind, in that romantic fireside setting, those future tales are
woven a mere two weeks after putting Karla’s sister in the ground. And
that as she’s counting off young girls in decimation style, when she
reaches “50” Karla tells Bernardo, “They can be our children.”
…how
hard must it have been for Leslie, or for Kristen,… thinking she’s the
only way they might get out of this… hoping she might save them …and
finding out she won’t…it’s hard when you get to know these people…
Keep
all that in mind, and think about how hard it must have been four years
ago this Spring, when these people heard that Karla Leanne Homolka
walked away from prison without a single parole restriction placed upon
her by the Crown. Think how hard it must have been two years later
when they heard the news that day: Karla Leanne Homolka has a
child.
***
After Tammy Homolka died Bernardo saved as many items of hers as he could, even keeping an empty
cereal box simply because he knew she’d eaten from it. Such histrionic
behavior seems typical of Bernardo; far more troubling is how
unaffected Karla, and others, appear to have been. The death of Karla’s
sister was strangely under-investigated, and in Paul and Karla lore,
Tammy Lyn’s significance in general is often overlooked. According to
Paul Bernardo, he beat his wife that late December night after she
admitted that while Tammy's death was sad, it was not the emotionally
devastating event for her that it was for him. And if that’s true, it
presents us with another dark aspect to the Bernardo-Homolka tale.
In the past year I have asked many
Canadians what they think of the disparity in the sentences Paul and
Karla received, and some say her sentence was appropriate. They
ask if I’ve seen that picture of Karla taken after the beating her
husband gave her; I say I have, and they say Paul Bernardo got what he
deserved.
They may be right. I do not know.
I only know
that looking at Karla Homolka is like looking through a prism—what you
see depends upon the light. Hold the picture one way and there's a
victim who's been very badly beaten; turn it, and there's a woman
sculpting jewelry from your bones.
Keep
in mind the Crown maintains that without Homolka's "help", the case against
Bernardo for murder was in doubt; keep in mind, without that raccoon-eyed
photograph of Karla, the compliant victim theory might have been a tougher sell. Keep all that in mind and ask yourself the question that
no one asks out loud: when Paul Bernardo beat his wife so badly he sent
her brain slamming forward in her skull, were his actions more akin to
justice for Tammy Lyn Homolka, than those of the men of justice with their "Two for Tammy"
years.