Paul Bernardo and Karla HomolkaIn 1987, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka met for the first time. Their subsequent relationship would prove to be one of the most terrifying cases of serial murder in the history Canadian true crime. Already a rapist when they met, Paul Bernardo would involve his wife in his many crimes, to which she was an enthusiastic participant, and included the murder rape and death of her own sister, and the heinous murders of two schoolgirls. Known as the Ken and Barbie killers, the story of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka is a curious case of sex, murder and justice.
On December 23, 1990, Paul Bernardo went to the home of his fiancé, Karla Homolka, where a Christmas party was being held at the Homolka household. After family, which included Karla’s parents, and her sisters Lori and 15-year-old Tammy. Paul brought along his new camcorder, which he used to record the family, and their Christmas decorations.
After the family had food and drink, most retired to bed, leaving Karla, Paul and Tammy downstairs. Unbeknown to Tammy Homolka, Paul Bernardo had developed an interest with the teenager that bordered on an obsession. He planned that night, in full agreement with Karla, to take Tammy’s virginity, without her consent.
The young girl was offered , laced with anaesthetic agent halothane, an animal tranquilizer, that her sister had previously stolen from the St. Catharines veterinarian clinic where she worked. Paul administered the drug to Tammy’s rum-and-eggnog cocktail, which took effect swiftly and she was soon unconscious.
The coupled undressed the young girl, and as Karla applied a halothane-soaked cloth to her sister’s nose and mouth, she looked at Bernardo lovingly. According to her later testimony, she had wanted to “give Tammy’s virginity to Bernardo for Christmas,” after he grew disappointed that he was not Karla’s first sexual partner.
Paul had rationalized the situation by telling Karla that, therefore, from his point of view, it was her responsibility to make it possible for Paul to take the virginity of Karla’s pretty younger sister Tammy without her knowledge or consent. For some unfathomable reason, Karla accepted this logic. She had even agreed to videotaping the act, after Paul explained that it would be a way to remember important events.
She held the camcorder as her fiancé raped her younger sister. Once Bernardo had finished, he ordered Karla to make sexual advances on her sister. As she was about to comply, Tammy Homolka began to convulse as she started to vomit the food she had eaten. Karla immediately did what she had been taught in the veterinary clinic, and held her sister upside down to try to clear her throat. At some point, Tammy Homolka choked to death on her own vomit.
All attempts to revive her failed, and they grew increasingly panicked. However, before they decided to call an ambulance, they hid any evidence of what had transpired, dressed the young girl and did the laundry. This all occurred while Mr and Mrs Homolka slept, their only knowledge that something had happened was when the ambulance pulled up to the front of the house.
Tammy Homolka was taken to St. Catharines General Hospital, where she was pronounced dead without having regained consciousness. It all seemed like a tragic accident. The only mystery, was the chemical burn on her face. As far as everybody knew, the whole affair had been a tragic accident, with Tammy accidentally choking on her own vomit.
Karla Homolka did not disclose what actually happened, and Bernardo told police he had unsuccessfully tried to revive the young girl, and her death was ruled an accident. What the Homolka family, or the police knew, was that Paul Bernardo was a sexual predator, and in Karla Homolka, he had a willing accomplice in his crimes.
It was in October 1987 when Paul Bernardo, met the girl of his dreams — pretty, blond Karla Homolka. In Bernardo, Karla found everything she had been looking for in a man. He was a handsome, sophisticated professional accountant with money. He was well-liked by her family, and he appeared courteous and charming.
Almost immediately, they became sexually obsessed with one another. Homolka had found the Ken to her Barbie, and unlike Bernardo’s previous girlfriends, Karla Homolka became a willing participant in his sexual fantasies, many of which were perverse and extreme, sometimes involving violence and forced sexual acts.
By the time Paul went to college at the University of Toronto, his sexual fantasies had developed a dark side. Forceful anal sex was his preferred means of pleasure. Submissive women were what he sought. He had a terrible temper and enjoyed humiliating women publicly. He began beating up the women he dated.
By the time he met Karla Homolka, Bernardo’s girlfriends, fed up of being tied up and beaten, were ready to dump him. In Karla, he found a sexual partner who encouraged his sadistic sexual behavior. According to Stephen Williams, “Karla, handcuffed, on her knees and begging for him, was scratching an itch. Paul asked her what she would think if he was a rapist. She would think it was cool. Their love deepened. He started raping women in earnest.”
Unbeknown to Karla, her boyfriend had already started raping women the previous year, and by late 1987, a series of rapes were carried out in the Toronto suburb in which he lived. This serial sex offender, dubbed by police as the “Scarborough Rapist,” had a regular pattern in which he would wait for his victim to get off a bus, before grabbing her from behind.
Pulled to the ground, he forced anal sex and fellatio on her, all the while talking before letting her go. Over the course of two years, Paul Bernardo had committed as many as eleven sexual assaults as the Scarborough Rapist, as well as an unknown number prior to this. A seven month hiatus occurred, before several more rapes happened in 1988.
During the subsequent police investigation, physical evidence was collected from victims, along with witness statements that helped develop a composite sketch of the suspect. Although it was decided to share that drawing with other police forces in the region, it was not shown to the public for a long time — a decision that became controversial.
All the while Paul Bernardo was carrying out his sexual crimes, his girlfriend Karl Homolka knew exactly what he was doing, and even actively encouraged him. One victim spoken to by police recalled seeing a woman with the rapist with what appeared to be a video camera in her hand. The police discounted this memory, chalking it up to hysteria on the part of the woman who was raped.
The investigation into the rapes carried out by the Scarborough Rapist were undertaken by detectives and officer of Toronto’s Metropolitan Police. One of those who was deeply involved in the hunt for the perpetrator was Detective Constable Steve Irwin, who looked through all the witness statements, and came to the conclusion they were looking for a single suspect.
Stephen Williams, points out in his book that serial rapists are fairly rare in the annals of true crime. “They are invariably acting out some kind of strange, private fantasy, so the details of their crimes are distinctive… In the earlier assaults, the women had all just left buses, they were accosted from behind, the guy had been rough but he did not really ‘rape’ them.”
“He had fondled them sexually, penetrating the last one with his fingers… the descriptions of a well-groomed young man who had good teeth and did not smell bad. The rapist talked all the time he was assaulting his victims, and he wanted to hear certain, specific things.”
All of the attacks had occurred within a short radius of Scarborough’s Guildwood Village, and just before Christmas, 1987, one of the victims of the rapist gave a very specific description of her attacker. She said he was around 6ft tall, good looking, clean-shaven and had no visible tattoos.
This description helped developed an uncanny likeness of Paul Bernardo, however, the sketch was not published by police. One of Bernardo’s previous girlfriends, Jennifer, had complained to police several times about Paul and the degrading and brutal rape, physical abuse and threats to do her further harm.
After speaking with his ex-partner, it became apparent to some detectives that there were certain coincidences that connected Bernardo to the rapes. The rapist reportedly drove a white Capri, as did Paul Bernardo. He also lived in close proximity to where the rapes took place. Although a report was filed, no further action was taken.
On May 27, 1990, years after the rapes first began, police decided to release the composite sketch of the “Scarborough Rapist” to the public. The victim had all agreed to the likeness was as close to what their attacker looked like. Couple with the sketch, was a reward of $150,000, which initiated a flurry of tips.
By this time, Bernardo had quit his position as a junior accountant at Price Waterhouse and was living entirely on income he made from smuggling cigarettes with his friends across the US.-Canadian border. However, when his former colleagues at the accounting firm saw the newspaper sketch, they were astonished at how much it resembled Paul Bernardo.
An employee of Paul’s bank contacted police and reported that Bernardo shared many facial similarities with the sketch. However, at this point in time, the police were inundated with similar calls, and so this tip, along with many others, was not follow up on. It would prove a devastating misstep by the investigation.
Meanwhile, all of the physical evidence gathered from the rape victims was centralized by Detective Steve Irwin under one individual, Kim Johnston, in the forensic laboratory. From the available semen samples, Johnston was able to determine that the rapist was a non-secretor and his blood type factors, which put him in 12.8 percent of the male population.
After a number of Bernardo’s acquaintances contacted police to report him as a possible suspect in the case, Det. Irwin paid Bernardo a visit. According to Irwin, Paul Bernardo did not appear as the kind of person who would carry out a campaign of serial rape. Despite this, he took samples of a blood, saliva and hair from Paul anyway.
Those samples, along with others from 230 additional suspects, were handed to Kim Johnston, who determined after tests that only five of the 230 samples fit the blood factors of the rapist. Among those five was Paul Bernardo. His sample was resubmitted for additional testing in April of 1992.
However, by this time, the Scarborough Rapist had inexplicably ended his attacks, which resulted in the case no longer having the urgency and priorities that it had two years earlier when the attacks were in happening. The samples of the Scarborough Rapist, including those of Paul Bernardo, went back into storage.
By 1990, Paul Bernardo was spending an increasing amount of time with the Homolka family, having quit his position and focusing solely on smuggling cigarettes. He was well-liked by the Homolka’s, who were unaware of his criminal activities, and he was welcome with open arms when he and Karla became engaged.
It was around this time that Bernardo grew increasingly obsessed with Karla’s younger sister Tammy. He often showed her special attention, and even demanded that Karla pretend to be Tammy during sex. He took to peering into her window and entering her room while she slept to masturbate.
Karla seemingly accepted this fixation with her younger sibling, and even went so far as to break the window in Tammy’s bedroom, allowing her fiancé easier access. In September 1990, Karla agreed to allow Paul to rape Tammy, after his displeasure with his fiancé for having previous sex partners. Paul wanted to deflower the young Tammy, and Karla acquiesced.
She procured a bottle of Halothane from the veterinary clinic where she worked, which would later be used to sedate Tammy while the two raped her. Bernardo would later testify at trial that Karla used the drug to lace spaghetti sauce with crushed valium she had stolen from her employer at an animal clinic.
She then served this to her sister, who soon lost consciousness once the drug took effect. Bernardo then raped Tammy while Karla watched. After one minute had passed, Tammy suddenly regained consciousness. Paul Bernardo demanded Karla help him sedate Tammy for longer next time, so he could enjoy more time with the teenager.
Six months before their 1991 wedding, Karla stole the anesthetic agent halothane from the clinic. “She had really thought this thing with Tammy through,” said Stephen Williams, who wrote the book Unknown Darkness about the couples crimes. “After all, she did not want to kill her own sister; she just wanted to knock her out and give her to Paul for Christmas.”
“They sedated animals before they put them to sleep for surgery, so it should be all right to do it to her sister. There was some risk without the proper equipment — she would have to put the halothane on a cloth and hold it over Tammy’s face — but she would make sure Tammy had plenty of air and check her breathing regularly.”
On December 23, 1990, Karla and Bernardo administered sleeping pills to 15-year-old Tammy, who lost consciousness. The couple soon lost control of the situation as Tammy Homolka began to choke on her own vomit, leading to her death. Despite the loss of a family member, Paul Bernardo told Karla that with Tammy gone, he needed a replacement.
Shortly after Tammy Homolka’s funeral, her parents left town and her sister Lori visited grandparents in Mississauga, leaving the family home empty. According to author Stephen Williams, Bernardo abducted a girl during the weekend of January 12, 1991, and took her to the Homolka house. There he raped her while Karla watched, and dropped her off on a deserted road near Lake Gibson. Bernardo and Homolka referred to this rape victims as “January girl”.
On April 6, 1991, at around 5:30am, Bernardo encountered a 14-year-old girl off the street. The girl, who was training to be a coxswain for a local rowing team, remembered being distracted by a blonde woman who waved at her from her car, enabling Bernardo to drag her into the shrubbery near the rowing club.
This allowed Bernardo to come behind the girl and drag her into the shrubbery near the rowing club. She was subjected to a brutal sexual assault, during which Bernardo forced her to remove her clothes. Afterwards, he made her wait five minutes for him to escape the scene. Unbeknown to police, the Scarborough rapist had struck again.
Meanwhile, Karla Homolka had become obsessed with keeping her soon-to-be-husband happy, and she was willing to go to any lengths to ensure it. Her greatest fear was that he would look elsewhere, and so whenever he became bored or distracted, she would either do something wild to excite him, or find someone who could entertain him.
Paul continually berated Karla that Tammy was no longer available to him for his sexual pleasure and blamed her for causing her death. In desperation, Karla searched for a replacement for Tammy — someone young and with her virginity intact. There was a person who Karla thought perfect as a gift for her fiancé.
A young girl Karla met some two years previously at a pet store, and who remained un-named due to her age, but has referred to as “Jane” in literature about the case, looked very similar to Karla’s dead sister, Tammy. Jane would be Karla’s wedding gift to Paul. Jane was in awe of Karla, who she idolized as a beautiful, sophisticated role model.
When invited to their new rented home at 57 Bayview, she gratefully accepted the opportunity. The first evening, June 7, 1991, Karla took Jane to dinner and spent hours talking to her and plying her with sweet alcoholic drinks, that had been secretly laced with Halcion tablets. Eventually, Jane passed out and Karla called Paul over to receive his surprise gift.
When he saw Jane sleeping, Bernardo was delighted how much she resembled Tammy Homolka. However, he showed concern that Karla had used to same drug that killed Tammy. Karla assured him that this time she would be in control of the situation. Together they undressed Jane, and Paul videotaped Karla as she made sexual overtures to the sleeping girl.
The Paul took over, taking the sleeping girls virginity, all of which was captured of videotape. Then, he moved on to his favorite sexual activity, brutal anal sex. Fortunately for his victim, she was so heavily drugged that she did not wake up during the depraved and degrading ordeal.
Once he had finished, Paul left Karla to clean the blood off their 15-year-old victim, and Jane was put up to bed for the night. The next morning, feeling unwell and wondering why she was so sore, Jane met Paul, for what she thought was the first time. She had no idea that she had been a sex toy given to Bernardo by his wife.
Despite his gratitude towards Karla for arranging Jane as a gift, and despite the fact that he was continually amazed at the lengths to which she was prepared to go to please him, he was having second thoughts about marrying her. In his mind, Karla was getting old, having already passed her 21st birthday, and she was long past the virgin for which he lusted.
Despite these concerns, Paul went through with the wedding and they got married in a huge, lavish wedding. “Their wedding was going to be perfect,” said Stephen Williams. “The historic church in Niagara-on-the-Lake with the white horses and the carriage, champagne, a sit-down dinner for one hundred and fifty guests with veal-stuffed pheasant at Queen’s Landing, no expense spared.”
Karla was allowed little influence in the planning of her wedding to Paul, with him carefully controlling every minute detail, from Karla’s hairstyle to the $2,000 wedding dress, to the menu and the inclusion of “love, honor and obey” in her wedding vow. He would not allow the minister to pronounce them “husband and wife,” insisting it had to be “man and wife.”
“If it was to be a grand wedding, then people could be expected to donate money and gifts on a similarly grand scale,” said Scott Burnside & Alan Cairns in their book Deadly Innocence. “Paul viewed the entire process as a great business opportunity. ‘If I spend fifty dollars a plate, I expect to get a hundred dollars a person,’ the junior accountant proclaimed. He told them he’d set a goal of realizing $50,000 from the wedding.”
The newly married couple honeymooned in Hawaii in the summer of 1991. A newspaper clipping, found years later during a search of Bernardo’s house described a rape that occurred in Hawaii during there stay. The modus operandi of the rapist fit with Bernardo’s, and he is strongly suspected of perpetrating the crime, however he was never prosecuted.
Shortly after their wedding, Paul and Karla moved into their home on Bayview in St. Catharines. Bernardo was still smuggling cigarettes, and would often go out late at night to steal license plates to disguise his frequent visits across the American-Canadian line. It was one such nocturnal venture that brought him into contact with his first murder victim.
Early in the morning of June 15, 1991, Bernardo was driving through Burlington in search of licence plates, when he came across 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy. The teenager had been encountered Bernardo as he left his car, telling her he wanted to break into a neighbor’s house. Bernardo later said Mahaffy seemed unfazed by his admission, and asked if he had any cigarettes.
Bernardo led her to his car, pulled out a knife and threatened her to stay quiet. Blindfolded, she was forced into his car and driven to Port Dalhousie. It was a series of unfortunate events that led to Leslie Mahaffy ending up in the clutches of Paul Bernardo. A troubled youngster, Mahaffy was head-strong and independent, which often led to her ignoring her curfews.
She would engage in promiscuous sex, often skipped school and even began shoplifting. Her parents responded by getting tough on Leslie when she broke the rules. On Friday, June 14, 1991, Leslie went out with friends for the evening and stayed out well past her curfew. At around 2:00am, she found herself locked out of the family home.
She called a girlfriend to ask if she could stay the night there, but the girlfriend didn’t think her mother would allow it at such a late hour. Leslie said that she was going back home to wake up her parents. When she arrived home, she attempted to get inside the house without waking anyone up. In what was the worst possible luck imaginable, she encountered Paul Bernardo.
When they arrived at Bernardo’s house, Mahaffy, still blindfolded, was stripped naked and while Karla slept, he began to videotape the fourteen-year-old. When Karla woke, she was angry that Paul had used their best champagne glasses to entertain his new toy. She soon came around to the idea, and started to behave as the submissive and obedient wife he demanded.
Paul gave her elaborate instructions on how to make love to Leslie. On the camcorder footage later found by detectives and shown at the trial, Bernardo could be heard giving Karla instructions, almost as though he was directing an important film. Every detail had to be perfect for the videotape he was making.
Once Karla had finished the prelude, Paul began enacting his own particular type of sex play. He liked it rough, and while his wife held the camera, he performed brute form anal penetration which caused Leslie Mahaffy to scream in pain. While they carried out this torture, songs by David Bowie and Bob Marley played in the background.
At one point Bernardo said, “You’re doing a good job, Leslie, a damned good job”, adding: “The next two hours are going to determine what I do to you. Right now, you’re scoring perfect.” On another segment of tape played at Bernardo’s trial, the assault escalated. Mahaffy cried out in pain, and begged Bernardo to stop.
At one point, Mahaffy told Bernardo that her blindfold appeared to be slipping. She knew that if she saw her attackers faces, that they might not let her go alive if she could identify them. The next day, according to Bernardo, Karla administered a lethal dose of Halcion. In her own testimony, Karla claimed Bernardo strangled Mahaffy.
The body was placed in their basement the day before Homolka’s family had dinner at the house. Once the dinner party ended, and their guest went home, Bernardo and Homolka decided to dismember Mahaffy’s body and encase the remains in concrete. Bernardo purchased a dozen bags of cement at a hardware store the following day.
The receipts kept would prove damning evidence at his later trial. After Bernardo cut apart the body using his grandfather’s circular saw, the couple made a number of trips to Lake Gibson, where they dumped the cement blocks in Lake Gibson. One of the blocks weighed as much as 200 pounds, and proved impossible to sink.
It lay near the shore, where it was found on June 29, 1991, coincidentally on Bernardo and Homolka’s wedding day. Mahaffy’s orthodontic appliance was instrumental in identifying her. On the evening June 29, 1991, one of the concrete blocks was discovered by a man and his wife were canoeing on Lake Gibson. When they inspected the object, they saw what they thought were pieces of animals flesh encased within.
When the man later went back to the spot and, with the help of a fisherman, pulled out the concrete block and looked at it closely, they realized it was the calf and foot of a young woman. When police arrived on the scene, a further five concrete blocks were found to have been dumped there in the shallow water, and all contained human remains.
Police theorized that whoever was responsible for dumping the body parts in Lake Gibson was likely not familiar with the area, or they would have disposed of the concrete blocks over the bridge where the deep water may have kept them from being discovered. Not long afterwards, the torso of a young woman was found in the water.
The medical examiner believed the body parts that had been found in the concrete block had been cut from the victims torso with a power saw. It did not take long for police to identify the body, after Leslie’s distinctive braces provided the clues to her identification.
The murder of Leslie Mahaffy had set in motion an obsessive need in Paul Bernardo, a desire for the perfect sex slave, a young girl, who would submit to him twisted sexual fantasies. While Karla continued to search for a suitable replacement for the dead Tammy and Leslie, Bernardo began stalking a fresh victim.
On July 28, 1991, he followed 21-year-old Sydney Kershen, after he saw her while driving home from work. After several days he resumed his stalking, however this time she noticed she was being followed. Kershen stopped at her boyfriend’s house just prior to his arrival, and after spotting Bernardo, the boyfriend gave chase.
Following him, Kershen’s boyfriend came across Bernardo’s gold Nissan, and took note of the licence plate. The couple reported the incident to the Niagara Regional Police (NRP), which discovered that the car belonged to Paul Bernardo. An NRP officer paid a visit Bernardo’s house, and saw the car parked in the driveway, but did not pursue the matter. Neither was an official police report submitted.
Despondent at his lack of entertainment, Paul became prone to fits of depressive rage. Karla, ever the dutiful wife, requested Jane visit them. However, Jane would not prove a sufficiently subservient slave for Bernardo. She upset the couple when she refused to allow Paul to have sex with her, believing herself to still be a virgin.
She made it clear that oral sex was as far as she was prepared to go. Then she confided in her riding instructor about Paul and his demands, and in-turn, the instructor told Jane’s mother. This meant there would be even less opportunity for Paul and Karla to enjoy their depraved time with Jane.
However, one night in August 1991 things got out of hand again with the halothane and Jane vomited and stopped breathing for awhile. The couple panicked, and Homolka called 9-1-1, however when they managed to resuscitate the young girl, the ambulance was recalled. This latest close-call caused Paul to become annoyed with his wife.
He questioned whether she was competent enough to use the halothane. In turn, Karla grew despondent, and was desperate to reclaim the romance in their marriage. She managed to coax another girl into their depraved sex acts, but when she moved back to Youngstown, Ohio, the Paul Bernardo was once again without the entertainment he craved. This always created tensions in their marriage, and Karla found it unbearable that she could not please her husband.
On November 30, 1991, Terri Anderson disappeared. Described as a pretty and vivacious 14-year-old, Anderson’s body was found six months later in the water at Port Dalhousie. It was reported that the medical examiner found no signs of foul play. In turn, the coroner ruled that her death was by drowning, probably as a result of drinking beer and taking LSD.
Considering the circumstances of Leslie Mahaffy’s death, with her body found in water, the coroner’s ruling was controversial. Despite the similarities, it has never been determined if Terri Anderson was another victim of the Bernardo’s. Paul continued to stalk young women, and in early 1992, the came across a new victim.
On April 16, 1992, Paul spotted an attractive teenager named Kristen French in a church parking lot. Karla was instructed to lure the pretty girl over to their car on the pretense of asking directions, and when the girl stood by the car looking at a map Karla was holding, Paul came up behind and forced her at knifepoint into the backseat.
There were seemingly no witnesses to the abduction, and French was taken back to their home. However, this time their victim was not blindfolded. She had clearly seem them, knew where they lived and had even seen their dog. From the beginning, Bernardo and Homolka knew that she would have to die.
They decided to keep their intentions from Kristen, in particular because she was bigger than Karla was and fairly strong despite her youth. Kristen was a smart girl, and so when she did figure out what they were planning, she did everything she could to cooperate with their depraved, outrageous and humiliating demands.
Believing that cooperation was her best chance for survival, however the ordeal became worse and worse. The more she cooperated, the more sadistic Paul became towards her. In his book, Stephen Williams recounts some of the interactions between Paul and Kristen from the videotapes the couple recorded of her ordeal.
“‘I’m going to piss on you, okay? Then I’m going to shit on you.’ Paul said in a whisper… Kristen did not move, even when he slapped her face with his semi-erect penis. “‘Don’t make me mad. Don’t make me hurt you,’ he said, urging her to smile when he rubbed his groin into her face. “‘Don’t worry, I won’t piss in your face.’
“Finally, he stood over her and urinated. Then he moved. Turning his buttocks into her face, he squatted over her face and tried to defecate on her without success. “‘You’re a fucking piece of shit. But I like you,’ he told her. ‘You look good covered in piss.'” Kristen French endured this torture for the next day or two.
Everything they did to their victim was all meticulously captured on video for the future enjoyment of Paul Bernardo and his obedient wife. The following day, Bernardo and Homolka murdered French before going to Easter dinner at the Homolka’s family home. During their later trial, neither would claim responsibility for the death.
Homolka would testify that Bernardo strangled French for seven minutes while she watched. In contrast, Bernardo claimed Homolka beat French with a rubber mallet because she tried to escape, and French was strangled with a noose around her neck which was secured to a hope chest. After this, Homolka went to fix her hair for the Easter dinner.
On April 30, 1992, Kristen’s naked body was found in a ditch in Burlington, about forty-five minutes from St. Catharines. It was determined that she had been washed after death and her hair was cut off. Although it was thought that the hair was removed as a trophy, Homolka later testified that it was cut to obstruct identification.
Because Kristen French’s remains had not been dismembered like Leslie Mahaffy, investigators came to the erroneous conclusion that the murders of the two teenagers were not connected. This change in modus operandi of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka led the investigation in the wrong direction.
During the course of the Scarborough Rapist investigation, Paul Bernardo had been questioned by police on several occasions. He was and Karla were also interviewed about Tammy Homolka’s death and Bernardo’s stalking of other women before the abduction of Kristen French. On May 12, 1992, Bernardo was briefly interviewed by an NRP sergeant and constable after his name surfaced once again from one of the many tips that police received.
However, these officers decided Paul Bernardo, who appeared very calm and polite during the interview, was an unlikely suspect despite his admission that he had previously been questioned in connection to the Scarborough Rapist. He claimed this was because of his facial similarities to the composite picture.
In the subsequent police report it was noted that Bernardo was very clean-cut and good looking, that he was intelligent and seemed very cooperative with their inquiry. They observed that his home was very clean and orderly, and also noted that he drove a Nissan, which looked nothing like a Camaro that was reportedly driven by the rapist.
Nevertheless, the two policemen attempted to contact Detective Steve Irwin in Toronto to enquire about the results of the inquiry into the Scarborough Rapist. It was eight days later when Irwin responded to the message, explaining that final testing of Bernardo’s blood and saliva samples had not been done.
Because of this, Bernardo was, technically, still considered a suspect. Irwin sent the task force some information on the case, but neglected to send results of the interviews with friends and acquaintances of Paul who had tipped off the police about him. These included a report from a woman stalked by Bernardo, and the police reports filed by his former girlfriend, Jennifer. As a result, Bernardo was not pursued as a suspect.
Three days after Bernardo was interviewed at his home, the Green Ribbon Task Force was created to investigate the murders of Mahaffy and French. Fearing capture, Bernardo and Homolka had applied to have their names legally changed to Teale, a name which Bernardo had taken from the serial killer in the 1988 film Criminal Law.
At the end of May 1992, John Motile, an acquaintance of Smirnis and Bernardo, reported Bernardo as a possible suspect in the murders. Now that Paul and Karla were living and committing their crimes in St. Catharines, the police investigation was centered in the Niagara Falls area.
When the body of Leslie Mahaffy as found, Superintendent Vince Bevan was placed in charge. After the death of Kristen French, and the formation of the Green Ribbon Task Force by the Ontario government, hotlines and a base of operations were set up just outside St. Catharines, and forensic experts from the FBI were brought in to advise the task force.
An important witness came forward who recalled seeing a struggle going on in a car at the scene of the Kristen French abduction. While she was not familiar with various makes of cars, the witness thought it was a Camaro. Vince Bevan focused on tracking the ownership of all the Camaros in the region.
By February 1993, several years after the blood samples had been taken from Paul Bernardo, the forensic laboratory in Toronto finally got around to analyzing his blood. The results from the tests proved conclusively that Bernardo had raped the three women victims from whom they had semen samples. Detective Irwin immediately put Bernardo under surveillance.
Before the samples had been tested and proved Paul Bernardo to be the Scarborough rapist, he had already sealed his fate when he started using Karla as a punching bag in the summer of 1992. Despite all the perverse and insane crimes Karla had committed with Paul, and now being given two blacks eyes and serious bruises on December 27, 1992, she still did not leave him.
In early January 1993, after she returned to work and claimed she had been in an automobile accident. Her co-workers became worried and in-turn alerted her to the domestic abuse. They persuaded Karla to take refuge at the home of one of her sister Lori’s friends, whose husband was a Toronto cop.
The Homolka’s contacted the Niagara police, who intervened and physically removed Karla from their home and took her to the hospital. At one point, Homolka went back in to frantically search for something. Taken to St. Catharines General Hospital, Karla gave a statement to the NRP that she was a battered spouse and promptly filed charges against Bernardo.
He was arrested, and later released on his own recognizance. All of this occurred before the Toronto police had the forensic evidence to convict Paul as the Scarborough Rapist. In early February, when the police investigation of the Scarborough rapist intensified, both the Toronto police and the Ontario Green Ribbon Task Force wanted to interview Karla Homolka.
They also stated their intention to take her fingerprints and question her about a Mickey Mouse watch that was very similar to Kristen French’s watch. The initial interview with several Toronto detectives lasted for almost five hours. When she was asked certain questions, Karla understood that the police had connected the Scarborough rapes with the murders in St. Catharines.
Worried that she would be arrested as an accomplice, a nervous Karla confided in her uncle that her husband was the serial rapist and that he killed Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. A friend who found Bernardo’s suicide note intervened, and Homolka moved in with relatives in Brampton.
During her time working as a veterinary assistant, Karla had taken special care with the cancer-stricken Dalmation of lawyer George Walker, who agreed to represent her. During a series of meetings, Walker came to the realization that she was not necessarily an innocent victim of Paul Bernardo that she claimed.
However, he did not fully understand what her exact role had been in the crimes. This presented Walker with a problem. He knew his client required some kind of immunity, but did not know what could be negotiated on her behalf in exchange for complete cooperation. What he did know was that Karl Homolka was prepared to tell what she knew about her husbands crimes.
An arrest warrant was issued for Paul Bernardo on February 17, 1993. A police warrant was executed to days later at Paul and Karla’s house, and detectives found a wealth of evidence. Paul had kept a written description of every one of the Scarborough rapes, as well as an extensive library of books and videos on sexual deviants, pornography and serial killers.
The warrant was limited, allowing officers to remove only evidence that was documented, and any and all videotapes that were found could only be viewed within the property. They were forbidden from tearing down walls to look for further evidence, and the only videotape they did find was a brief segment.
However, the film indicated there had been more than one perverse individual in the Bernardo household, namely footage that showed Karla as an enthusiastic lesbian in sexual acts with two other women, one of whom was “Jane,” it became apparent that the Karla had more questions to answer than police initially understood.
During a call from jail to his lawyer Ken Murray, Bernardo revealed that the rape videotapes were hidden at his home in a ceiling light fixture in the upstairs bathroom. Murray went to the property and found the tapes. He subsequently hid them from investigators, but alter resigned as Bernardo’s lawyer. His new attorney, John Rosen, turned the tapes over to police.
On May 5, 1993, George Walker and Murray Segal, a plea-bargain specialist for the attorney general, discussed a deal for Karla, which would involve twelve years’ imprisonment for each of the two victims, sentences she would be served concurrently, which she had accepted. She would be eligible for parole in a little over three years with good behavior.
If she had declined this plea bargain, the government were looking charge Homolka with two counts of first-degree murder, one count of second-degree murder and other crimes. On May 14, 1993, with her plea bargain finalized, and she began giving statements to police investigators, revealing how Bernardo had boasted to her that he had raped as many as thirty women, twice as many as investigators knew about.
The prosecutors believed that Karla’s testimony against her husband would ensure he was convicted of the many crimes he had committed, both as the Scarborough rapist, and the killer of Mahaffy and French. She subsequently agreed to tell the whole truth about her involvement in the crimes.
In turn, Segal would do what he could to arrange for Karla to serve out her sentence in a psychiatric hospital instead of prison. The trial would be very brief and she would waive her right to a preliminary hearing. In early March 1993, Karla was checked into a psychiatric hospital for assessment, and given heavy doses of drugs.
She even insisted on being given even larger doses. With guilt weighing heavily on her mind, Karla knew that she would have to tell the truth about everything, even if that meant divulging a dark secret she had been keeping from her parents. She eventually plucked up the courage to write an important letter to her parents and sister:
Dear Mom, Dad and Lori,
This is the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write and you’ll probably all hate me once you read it. I’ve kept this inside myself for so long and I just can’t lie to you any more. Both Paul and I are responsible for Tammy’s death. Paul was “in love” with her and wanted to have sex with her. He wanted me to help him. He wanted me to get sleeping pills from work to drug her with. He threatened me and physically and emotionally abused me when I refused. No words I can say can make you understand what he put me through. So stupidly I agreed to do as he said. But something maybe the combination of drugs and the food she ate that night caused her to vomit. I tried so hard to save her. I am so sorry. But no words I can say can bring her back I would gladly give my life for hers. I don’t expect you to ever forgive me, for I will never forgive myself.
Karla — XOXO
A publication ban was imposed after it was argued for Bernardo’s right to a fair trial. The Crown had applied for the ban, which was imposed on July 5, 1993. Homolka supported the ban, however Bernardo’s lawyers argued that he would be prejudged by the ban, since Homolka was being portrayed as another of his victims.
The trial of Karla Homolka began on June 28, 1993. She was described by Burnside and Cairns in Deadly Innocence, “Karla sat impassively, wearing a green jacket over a one piece green dress that seemed oversized and somehow too broad for her slender shoulders. On her feet were black shoes with a slight heel.”
“Unlike her court appearance a month earlier, when she wore a schoolgirl’s tartan kilt and blazer, Karla now looked somewhat matronly. Yet her clothes were out of place with the false eyelashes, deep-red lipstick, and heavily caked foundation on her face. If she was matronly, then she was a matronly Lolita.”
With her psychiatric report helping to set the stage for the plea-bargain deal, Dr. Malcolm, the psychologist, testified his conclusion that Karla “knew what was happening but she felt totally helpless and unable to act in her own defense or in anyone else’s defense. She was in my opinion paralyzed with fear and in that state became obedient and self-serving.”
With the court allowing only very few details of Karla’s trial, so that a future jury pool selected for Paul’s future trial would not be tainted by information they heard or read before the trial, little was known about the case at that stage. The most significant detail known as Karla’s plea bargain.
Expecting a public outcry over the deal, Murray Segal chose to make a statement: “Why not a greater penalty in light of the horrendous facts? Without her, the true state of affairs might never be known. A guilty plea is the traditional hallmark of remorse. Her age, her lack of criminal record, the abuse and the influence of her husband, and her somewhat secondary role were factors. She’s unlikely to re-offend.”
With Karla’s trial over, and given the agreed upon sentence, she prepared herself for what was to be a far greater ordeal, the trial of her husband, Paul Bernardo. The trial was delayed for years after his arrest, primarily because Bernardo had placed his first lawyer, Ken Murray, in a very difficult ethical situation.
Bernardo had told Murray the location of the videotapes that he and Karla had made of their many crimes, believing that by doing so, they would never get into the hands of prosecutors. However, Karla had already told police and prosecutors about the existence of the videotapes, and conversations had been wiretapped between Murray and Bernardo.
Under significant pressure, Murray was forced to do something about the videotapes in his possession, which were eventually turned over to the prosecutors, resulting in Murray withdrawing from the case. Veteran defense lawyer John Rosen took his place as Bernardo’s lawyer, all of which caused a delay of one year in the start of the trial.
Paul Bernardo’s trial began in May of 1995, in the courtroom of Judge Patrick LeSage. He was facing two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of aggravated sexual assault, two counts of forcible confinement, two counts of kidnapping, and one count of performing an indignity on a human body.
For two years, information about the case had been sealed with the publication ban, although sordid details had leaked out in the American press, copies of which were smuggled into Canada. The good-looking, suburban couple were being referred to by the media as the Ken and Barbie killers.
Crown Prosecutor Ray Houlahan opened the trial with a full-day monologue of Karla’s life as a victim. He recounted how she had been as much a victim of the dominating sadist, and presented her as a brain-washed, frightened accomplice to the most degrading criminal acts. One of the most critical pieces of evidence presented in court was the videotapes, a damning record of the heinous crimes.
Houlahan began with a segment showing Karla naked, masturbating, with the camera focused on her vagina. In the book Lethal Marriage, Nick Pron describes the effect the video had on the courtroom: “Gasps of surprise and disgust, perhaps even shock, along with plenty of embarrassed giggles, could be heard throughout the courtroom as the camera lingered on Homolka’s exposed body for several minutes as she stimulated herself…”
“For the previous two years, ever since her arrest, Homolka’s face had been almost as well known as the prime minister’s. She had been seen on television in footage taken at her wedding, with her friends, and at her trial. But few people in the courtroom that day were expecting to see a triple X-rated tape, a close study of the country’s most infamous woman in a variety of sexually explicit positions.”
The intention of the prosecution in showing such an explicit videotape was to prove that Homolka had been used by her husband, with the dialog in the videos entirely scripted by Bernardo. It was proved a successful example in showing how he forced his will on his subservient wife.
When more tapes were shown, such as those of Jane, Leslie and Kristen, the jury were provided with indisputable and shocking evidence of Paul Bernardo’s sexual depravity. In an effort to further the prosecution’s case, Karla was called on to testify and elaborate on what the jurors had just bore witness to.
She went on to describe a relationship with an escalating theme of sexual degradation similar to what Paul had previously orchestrated with other girlfriends before he met Karla. With Karla, Paul found he could enact all his wildest and most perverse fantasies. He made her wear a dog’s “choke” collar and inserted objects such as a wine bottle into her vagina.
On one occasion he almost strangled her to death with a wire cord to satisfy his sadistic fantasies. He told Karla that his choke fantasy was “important to him and it wouldn’t hurt anybody.” He made it clear to her that she was nothing without him and he would call her degrading names during their sexual acts, like slut, bitch, and cunt. It was reiterated that Paul had committed the crimes in his pursuit of the perfect sex slave.
When it came time for the defense to present their argument before the court, John Rose began by attacking Karla’s credibility. He attempted to prove that far from being a victim as she portrayed her herself to be, she was in fact a willing participant in the couple’s rape and murder spree.
His attempt was somewhat successful in painting Karla as a morally repugnant woman with little to no remorse for her part in the crimes of her husband. One particular case in point was the murder of Kristen French, which was committed at a time when Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka were about to spend Easter dinner with Karla’s parents.
In the immediate aftermath of the murder, when Kristen was strangled to death, Karla went to blow dry her hair for their visit. If it was not immediately clear at the trial, it became clear shortly after, that Karla had orchestrated a clever manipulation of the circumstances of her involvement.
She had managed, through cooperation with the government, to engineer one of the most morally abhorrent deals that the Canadian government had ever made with a criminal witness. Regardless of the degree of her involvement, the crimes carried out by the couple outraged the press, the public and eventually the jury.
On September 1, 1995, Paul Bernardo was convicted on all the charges against him regarding the kidnappings, rapes and murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. After Karla’s revelation about her sister Tammy’s death, he also faced trial for her murder, along with the serial rapes in Scarborough.
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