Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered

by Karen Kilgariff

  By this point, Asher had moved in with my dad to a somewhat larger divorcé apartment because the tension between my brother and mother had gotten so volatile as he went through puberty that there were holes kicked in walls (him) and threats of taking a hammer to his precious pre-internet computer (her).

  When I saw my brother later that week, Asher got serious with me, which isn’t something he’s prone to do. Normally, we didn’t discuss either of our bad behavior, allowing the other the room to fuck up without judgment. It was a nice unspoken understanding we had come to. While our parents and teachers and school and society and therapists constantly scrutinized our behavior, I could count on my brother not making me hate myself even more than I already did by bringing up all my shortcomings, and vice versa. There were no lectures, no shaming, and no analyzing.

  So when he let out a deep, world-weary sigh and couldn’t make eye contact with me, I knew something was up.

  “Georgia, the night you disappeared, I heard Dad in his room, through the door,” he told me. “He was sobbing and praying. He thought you were dead.”

  I’ve never felt like such a monster in my life. I could handle anger and yelling from my mom. Hell, I’d been handling it ever since my dad left home. But aside from a clenched-teethed “Move away from me now,” my dad had never shown anger or disappointment. He’d only ever been patient and supportive. This is someone who has never ended a phone call with me without telling me how proud he is of me, even through some bad shit when there was no reason for anyone to be proud of me. So knowing I made him sob hurt my heart in a way I wasn’t ready for. And it made me think about what would have happened if I actually hadn’t, or couldn’t, come home the next morning.

  I’ve lived my life since then with the image of my dad in the back of my mind and how he’d react if some dumb decision or blasé attitude toward life led to me dying or being killed. Being his clear favorite child (sorry, Asher and Leah, but you KNOW this is true! I mean, how could it not be? I’m kind of the awesomest), I’m pretty sure it would not be something he’d ever be able to recover from. And OK, fine, also if his two less favorite children met the same fate. So I’m a little extra careful, a little less of a risk taker, a little less of a forest-goer because of that.

  So be adventurous and take risks and go into the forest (metaphorically speaking), but please keep an eye on your surroundings. ’Cause you never know when there will be a hitchhiking rapist, a questionable stop sign, or a hiking trail that leads to death. The people who care about you won’t be the same without you.5

  Karen’s Lessons from Listeners and Canadian Aldermen

  When I was growing up, there was a weekly column in the newspaper called “Hints from Heloise.” This was long before the internet, back when they would print out a pile of information every day and an unattended nine-year-old boy on a bicycle would throw it at your house before dawn. People would write to Heloise with a household problem and she’d tell them how to fix it using everyday items. Gum in your kid’s hair? Put peanut butter on it! Wine stain on a white shirt? Put salt on it! (Those were both off the top of my head. The wine/salt one is real, but now that I think about the peanut butter one, it might have been a prank my sister pulled on me once when I got gum in my hair.)

  As a child, I read Heloise’s hints with wonder. Why aren’t they teaching this in schools? I’d think. Putting fresh peaches in a brown paper bag to speed up the ripening process should be part of the third-grade curriculum for all of North America. I mean, if I didn’t know that combining vinegar and baking soda created a powerful yet organic cleanser for the kitchen sink, then how could anyone else in my class? It also made me obsess on what other great fixes I was missing out on. It seemed like no matter what the problem was, Heloise had an encyclopedic knowledge of simple solutions that were easy, convenient, and often involved butter. At the time, she also had long gray hair, so I was drawn to the whole “eye of newt, wing of bat” thing she had going on. It felt like she was sharing ancient women’s knowledge that had been banned by the church, but her family had secreted away the forbidden books. I don’t know, I just really liked it.

  In the early days of the podcast, when Georgia and I would read the details of horrible crimes to each other, I think we felt the need to pull a useful lesson out of the senseless tragedy. I know I did. I’d think, What can we do to make sure this never happens again? How do we identify the warning signs that the victim missed? We thought if we identified the “big mistake” and then pointed it out, a preventative measure could be taken. In my mind, it became us giving advice, Hints from Heloise–style. The stain was always the same: being murdered. And the solutions were practical, organic, and most importantly, effective: use the buddy system, get a large dog, generally mistrust all strangers, stay out of the forest. If we just had enough tricks to share, we could help each other outsmart these predators.

  And look (listen), they were good pieces of advice, but the truth is, the kind of violence we’re talking about isn’t some small, immaterial stain waiting to be removed with salt. And even if it were, we’re no Heloise. (She’s truly awesome, by the way. Aside from having a syndicated newspaper column since 1980, she’s written fourteen books, and she won the National Mental Health Association’s first-ever award for outstanding contribution to mental health education. And she’s the one who taught me the trick of using lemon juice to fade freckles that I mentioned in an earlier chapter. Her accomplishments know no bounds.)

  We’ve said this many times, but I’m going to repeat it here for anyone who might find it unclear: none of the advice we give in this book or have given on our podcast is qualified. We’re only experts in our own experiences. We don’t have college educations or training of any kind, and if either of us has ever outsmarted a serial killer, we don’t know about it. What we definitely have are big old-fashioned blind spots. Which is why we’ve learned to be grateful when our listeners point out our mistakes and allow us to adjust. I truly hate nothing more than finding out I have no idea how much I don’t know. I find it shameful to have been ignorant in the first place, and that shame makes me resistant to learning. But too bad for me and anyone like me. The only way we can evolve and grow is by accepting our flaws and doing our best to grow out of them. This podcast has been a lot like life in that way: one big, semi-involuntary learning experience.

  So when multiple people pointed out that some of our safety advice could be taken as victim blaming, I was shocked and, honestly, slightly offended. I thought, Don’t you know us? We’re the noblest of all creatures! We’re women trying to help women stay out of trouble! We only strive to create a sisterhood of security, freedom, and confidence. Of course we’re on the victim’s side! Of course we don’t think anyone deserves it! We’re just streetwise city girls trying to lend a helping hand! Eye of newt! There’s really nothing like the self-righteousness of the partially informed.

  When we were asked to listen to our own advice from the point of view of an assault survivor, we suddenly saw how our offhanded “fixes,” like “Never get into a car with someone you just met,” were tinged with the invisible final clause “but since you did, you’re to blame for whatever happens.”

  We’d never thought of it that way. And the idea that anyone thought we did really sucked.

  It reminds me of something I read while I was researching Paul Bernardo and his wife, Karla Homolka, the horrifying yet Canadian husband-and-wife serial-killing team some called the Ken and Barbie Killers.

  That story actually starts in May 1987, when a man began attacking and raping young women in the Scarborough area of Toronto. He attacked at night around bus stops where the women had just gotten off the bus alone. The longer he eluded police, the more vicious and violent the attacks became. Over the span of one year, the Scarborough Rapist attacked seven girls. And I’m calling them girls because the majority of them were teenagers, some as young as fifteen years old.

  When the police finally held a press conference, the message
the local constable had for the women of Toronto was surprisingly callous. He actually said, out loud and for the record:

  “Don’t expect people to watch out for you if you happen to come back at 1:00 A.M. in the morning off the bus. It would be nice to think that you can go anywhere you like nowadays, but don’t put yourself in a vulnerable position.”

  Riiiiight.

  OK, first of all, just a general note to the constable: if you say, “1:00 A.M.,” you don’t also need to say, “in the morning.” It’s redundant and it makes you sound like a cartoon rooster with a Southern accent. Second of all, what’s with that tone? The disdain and condescension coming from him here is palpable. Plus, I looked it up, and it turns out that in Canada, a constable is what we Americans call a police chief. Ergo, it was LITERALLY HIS JOB to watch out for women getting off the bus at 1:00 A.M. in the morning.

  Now, as any good true-crime aficionado knows, this constable was most likely under an immense amount of pressure to catch this serial rapist. Someone was terrorizing his city in one very specific neighborhood with the exact same MO each time, and yet he and his men could not figure out how to apprehend him. The constable was probably getting yelled at by whatever a Canadian mayor is called, angry neighborhood groups were probably demanding answers at town hall meetings, reporters were probably hounding him day and night.

  I’m sure that every time this man heard about a new attack, it hurt him personally. I’m sure it weighed on him and kept him awake at night. He knew every detail of every case. Every broken bone and soul and what school they went to. And no matter what he tried, it just kept happening. Chances are, he was frustrated and humiliated that he was failing so publicly at being constable. He couldn’t tell the rapist to stop, so he did the only thing he could think to do: blame the victims. He chastised the women of Scarborough for assuming they had the right to move around their city in safety. It was probably much easier for him to talk about what women needed to be doing than to address the fact that he couldn’t catch one extremely fucked-up guy. He was familiar with men like this rapist, more animal than human. So the constable did the only thing his panicking brain could think of: talk directly to the people this was happening to and tell them to stop “allowing” it to happen. There. That’ll solve it.

  Very few people understand how best to deal with this kind of violent crime and the emotional impact it has on everyone. It’s a horror movie come to life. Week after week, the people of Toronto had to read about a monster in their midst that the police couldn’t catch. Suddenly, everyone is vulnerable, and that creates a culture of fear. Even in police officers themselves. For them, it was probably much easier to imagine that all the young women in Toronto who were taking the bus at night were simply caricatures of the sloppy drunk girl who can’t walk in her own heels and will not listen to reason. I bet it was a relief for some people to hear authorities come to this conclusion. The issue is no longer that there’s a predatory psychopath in their city who’s outsmarting the cops. Now the issue is young women’s failings as critical thinkers.

  I like to think that some mouthy broad somewhere along the line pointed out to this constable that if women in Toronto were still taking the bus late at night knowing full well that a serial rapist was on the loose, they weren’t doing it for fun. The odds are very low that they were laughing in the face of danger for the adrenaline rush or the need to rebel with indignant carelessness. These were women who had no choice but to take the bus at night. Single mothers with two jobs and no car. Women who couldn’t afford to drive. Women with DUIs. Women who were legally blind, deaf, had been in terrible car accidents and were afraid to drive. There are so many reasons why people chose to roll the personal safety dice in this situation, but the overarching theme with most of them was probably desperation and definitely need. No, the women who continued to ride the bus at night alone in Scarborough in the late ’80s were most likely doing what they had to do to survive—in spite of the danger. And more importantly, they were not putting themselves in a vulnerable position. The serial rapist was making a normal position vulnerable by being a serial rapist.

  Don’t worry, it gets worse. Later that month, an alderman proposed an especially backward solution: a curfew for women. A CURFEW FOR WOMEN. This civic leader’s best idea to prevent more rape was to require the half of the population, who were definitely not the perpetrators of said rapes, to remain indoors at night.

  I mean, seriously. Wouldn’t the logical solution be a curfew for tall, blond males between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five matching the description of the rapist? Or a curfew for convicted sex offenders? Or a curfew for constables and aldermen with bad ideas?

  His statement might as well have been, “What do women have to do at night that’s so important they need to be taking the bus across town? They should just stay home with their aprons and their curlers and stop making problems for us, the busy and important men of this city.” Again, I like to think there was a reporter who looked like Ruth Bader Ginsburg sitting in on that meeting who gave that guy the what for. Or maybe everyone just rolled their eyes and waited for him to stop talking like they always did. No curfew was ever enforced, as far as my paltry research tells me, so someone said something.

  All of this makes me think of the story my friend Paul told me about his mom who lived in that neighborhood when the Scarborough Rapist was at large. She was in her sixties and she liked to swim laps in the rooftop pool of her apartment building for exercise. So one morning, she went up to swim some laps alone. When she got there, she had the pool all to herself. As she swam, a young man came out onto the roof deck and began to watch her. She was immediately uncomfortable. Why would this good-looking young man silently stand and stare at a woman her age that way? But she went on swimming. The young man began walking along the side of the pool with her as she swam. Now she had no doubt there was something wrong with him. Her discomfort turned into fear. She had nowhere to go. She wasn’t going to get out and confront him. Her only option was to keep swimming and hope he went away. But he didn’t go away. He continued to stare and stalk her from the side of the pool. Then, just as her fear began to give way to real panic, a big group of people burst out onto the roof deck, talking and laughing. Kids jumped into the pool with her as their parents settled into deck chairs. Amid all the commotion, the man disappeared.

  So my friend Paul’s mom got out of the pool, went back downstairs to her apartment, and, being a talented artist, drew that man’s face from memory. She put the drawing into her desk drawer. When the Scarborough Rapist’s arrest was finally reported on the news, her family was sitting in her living room. She saw his face on TV, gasped, and pulled out that picture she’d drawn. It was the same young man who stalked her at the pool that day.

  * * *

  I retold that last part in the simplest way for clarity, but the chronology is slightly different. The man who was eventually identified as the Scarborough Rapist, Paul Bernardo, was first arrested for a series of murders attributed to someone nicknamed the Schoolgirl Killer. After taking him into custody, police learned that the Schoolgirl Killer nickname was inaccurate. In a shocking series of discoveries, evidence was found proving that Bernardo’s wife, Karla, had helped him lure, torture, rape, and murder all of their young victims, including her own fourteen-year-old sister. From then on, the press dubbed them the Ken and Barbie Killers. While under arrest for those crimes, police finally matched Bernardo’s DNA with the Scarborough Rapist’s. His capture put an end to a six-year reign of terror that escalated to some of the most depraved murders in Canadian history.

  * * *

  Had a woman using the pool in her own apartment building put herself in a vulnerable position by swimming in the same spot a serial rapist somehow had access to? Were her expectations of safety unreasonable? Was she any more or less innocent than the Scarborough Rapist’s victims because she wasn’t on a bus at 1:00 A.M. in the morning?

  It’s a trick. None of these questions matter
. Focusing on why women have the gall to walk around in public asking for it all day long is something small minds do when finding a violent psychopath is proving difficult. And although it may bring needed relief to those battered by the day-to-day of trying to catch a serial rapist, I’d bet good money it’s never helped solve a crime.

  The good news is, there were some creative minds hard at work back then. Someone, and it could have been one of these same constables or aldermen mentioned above, finally had an idea that led to the Toronto Transit Commission implementing its Request Stop program. That meant, in the evenings, women could ask bus drivers to drop them off between stops, closer to their destination. And with this small extra step came a new and important message to the women of Toronto: “We will work harder to protect you because you deserve to be safe.” Imagine if the alderman had just said that instead.

  I remember as a kid, there’d be a story on the news about some old judge who decided to free an accused rapist because he decided the victim’s clothing was too revealing. And then my mother would lose her shit. As a nurse and a psychiatric health care worker and a human being, she was disgusted by such backward thinking from someone in a position of authority. But how many people, especially kids, saw that news story and thought, He’s a judge. He knows best. Women who wear revealing clothing ARE asking for it. Suddenly, the official discussion was not about a rapist’s crime but what the victim did to deserve it.

  No one deserves to be a victim of violent crime. And violent criminals don’t deserve to have their actions rationalized away. We once heard from a victim’s rights advocate after an episode where we talked being vigilant about personal safety. She pointed out that there are plenty of victims who were as vigilant as humanly possible and were attacked anyway.