Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka: The Ken and Barbie Killers (Crimes Canada: True Crimes That Shocked The Nation Book 3)

by Peter Vronsky

  PAUL BERNARDO and

  KARLA HOMOLKA

  "The Ken and Barbie Killers"

  Volume 3

  by Peter Vronsky

  Crimes Canada

  True Crimes That Shocked The Nation

  ISBN-13: 978-1987902037

  ISBN-10: 1987902033

  Published by:

  VP Publication an Imprint of

  RJ Parker Publishing, Inc.

  Copyright © by Peter Vronsky 2015

  Published in Canada

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  Crimes Canada: True Crimes That Shocked the Nation

  Series Introduction

  In this multi-volume series edited by crime historian Dr. Peter Vronsky and true crime author and publisher RJ Parker, some of Canada’s most notorious shocking crimes will be described and explored, including some of the cases mentioned above.

  Crimes Canada: True Crimes that Shocked the Nation, will feature a series of Canadian true crime books published by VP Publication (Vronsky & Parker), an imprint of RJ Parker Publishing, Inc., one of the world’s leading Indie publishers of true crime.

  Peter Vronsky is the bestselling author of Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters and Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters while RJ Parker is not only a successful Indie publisher but also the author of books like, Serial Killers Abridged: An Encyclopedia of 100 Serial Killers, Social Media Monsters: Internet Killers, Parents Who Killed Their Children: Filicide, and Serial Killer Groupies. Both are Canadians and have teamed up to share shocking Canadian true crime cases not only with fellow Canadian readers but with Americans and world readers as well, who will be shocked and horrified by just how evil and sick “nice” Canadians can be when they go bad.

  Finally, the editors invite their established Canadian fellow authors and aspiring authors to submit proposals or manuscripts to VP Publication at CrimesCanada@RJParkerPublishing.com.

  VP Publication is a new frontier Indie publisher, offering their published authors a generous royalty agreement payable within three months of publishing and aggressive online marketing support. Unlike many so-called “publishers” that are nothing but vanity presses in disguise, VP Publication does not charge authors in advance for submitting their proposal or manuscripts, nor do we charge authors if we choose to publish their works. We pay you, and pay well.

  Background

  In Ontario, Canada, in 1991-1992 two teenage high school girls vanished near their homes or schools in normally safe and cozy small-town communities. One girl was found dismembered and encased in ready-mix cement blocks dumped in the shallows of a fishing pond while the other was found naked in a roadside ditch, her body washed and hair cut off in what police suspected was some kind of bizarre trophy-taking ritual performed by the killer. As it became evident that a serial killer was on the loose, fear gripped the densely populated Southern Ontario tier between Toronto and Niagara Falls, Fort Erie and Buffalo, New York just across the border. Billboards with a mysteriously sinister brown- coloured Camaro reportedly connected to the disappearance of one the girls went up around the region calling on witnesses to phone in tips as parents grounded their high school-age daughters.

  When the perpetrator was identified and arrested in 1993, to everyone’s shock it turned out to be two perpetrators: a young newlywed couple that might have stepped out of the pages of a supermarket checkout line wedding magazine, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. They were so shiny perfect and beautiful a couple that they were dubbed the “Ken and Barbie Killers” referencing the idolized dolls that millions of girls play with. In a mutually sick and twisted pursuit of their darkest sexual fantasies, the two not only lured, kidnapped, held captive, raped, tortured and murdered the girls before disposing of their bodies, but also recorded themselves performing their rapes on videotape. Their serial killer video selfies would become horrific courtroom evidence. While in the past, serial killers have been known to take still photographs or record audio of their victims screaming and begging for mercy, it’s only in the 1980s that small portable video cameras began to be widely available for consumers. Bernardo and Homolka compulsively recorded everything on videotape, leaving behind a horrific record of exactly what organized, sadistic serial killers do to their victims. In criminal history up until then, never have homicidal videotapes as detailed and extensive as those recorded by Homolka and Bernardo been entered into evidence—not even the notorious videotapes of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng taunting and torturing their female victims in California in the mid-1980s. To everyone’s shock, the couple were charged with a third murder when videos revealed they had drugged, raped and killed Karla’s own little sister, Tammy, on Christmas Eve, as the parents slept upstairs, recording that rape on video. Karla would later explain that her kid sister’s virginity was her “Christmas-wedding gift” to her husband-to-be, as an act of atonement for her own lack of virginity. She was later angered by the death of her sister because her parents couldn’t “get over it” and were being all Debbie-downer on her cheery wedding plans.

  Making matters even more controversial, before the police got the videotapes into their possession, Paul Bernardo’s attorney, Ken Murray, on his client’s instructions, took them from their hiding place and concealed them for seventeen months while Karla Homolka made a deal to testify against her husband as a “battered wife” victim in exchange for a substantially reduced sentence on the premise she too was a victim. When the videotapes were finally turned over to police, they confirmed that Karla had gleefully participated in the rapes and torture of the girls, but it was too late to change the deal. Her plea bargain was locked-in. While Paul Bernardo today is locked up for the rest of his life, Karla Homolka has already been free for a decade as of this writing, having remarried (the brother of her recent attorney) and giving birth to three children. Recently, after a leisurely life in the coconuts and sunshine of the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe raising her little darlings, Karla and her happy brood have returned to the bosom of Canada in 2014. The case of the Ken and Barbie Killers shocked, and still shocks not only Canadians, but everyone around the world to this day.

  The Perfect Couple

  When arrested, he was 28 and she was 22 years old. They looked Photoshopped in real life. Paul Bernardo was blond, blue-eyed, tall, athletic, intelligent, charismatic and classically handsome with what many described as an angelic baby face that made women’s blood rush and pupils dilate at the mere sight of him. He was gorgeous. So was Karla with her Barbie doll head of thick shiny blonde tresses. She was brightly blue-eyed, smart, articulate, vulnerably petite with a well-proportioned knock em’ dead body and wholesome central-European milk and honey good looks. He was a university-educated chartered accountant in a big prestigious downtown Toronto Bay Street firm while she was a recent high school graduate who worked as a veterinarian’s assistant but really wanted to be a policewoman or a housewife. Both were brought up in anonymous, middle-middle-class suburbs, attended typically middle-middle-
class suburban schools. They frequented typical high school and college student events and parties. Everything about them was “middle-middle” typical—their tastes and styles were not too high class and not too low class. They were aspiring upscale shopping-mall mediocre with ambitions for super wealth and affluence of the ‘rich and famous.’

  Paul and Karla were married in a lavish, but again, typically mediocre ceremony that could have, and probably did, come from the pages of a bridal catalog. They left the church in an open horse-drawn carriage and honeymooned in Hawaii. They settled in one of those typical, wealthy, middle-sized towns that dot the fertile belt of southern Ontario known as the “Golden Horseshoe” between Toronto and Niagara Falls near the border with the United States.

  They rented a perfect little lakeside Cape Cod–style house on 57 Bayview Drive in Port Dalhousie, a lakeside suburb of St. Catharines, about thirty minutes from Niagara Falls. The rent was twelve hundred dollars a month and Karla and Paul furnished it with typical Canadian pine furniture and throw rugs. Atypically, by the time Paul and Karla left for their honeymoon, they had already raped, tortured, and murdered two adolescent girls, including Karla’s younger 15-year-old sister, Tammy. So perfectly respectable, attractive, up and coming young and inoffensively middle-class was this couple that nobody dreamt of suspecting them as schoolgirls began disappearing in the region—only to be found dismembered and encased in blocks of cement by a pond or dumped naked and dead in a ditch.

  Mean Girl

  Karla Leanne Homolka was born in 1970 and brought up in St. Catharines, an affluent town of about 130,000 people, nestled between Toronto and Niagara Falls. The town is nicknamed the “Garden City” because of the lucrative local agricultural industries—wine grapes, apples, and vegetables. Karla was the oldest of three sisters. Her mother was Canadian—a hospital administrator. Her father emigrated from Czechoslovakia and was a dealer of lamp fixtures and black velvet paintings—the kind that feature Elvis Presley or the Beatles. Karla’s father was described as a quiet ‘out-of-it’ non-entity in a household dominated by four ambitious women, his wife and his three daughters.

  Very little is known about Karla’s home life. Her friends remember her as a bossy little girl who, with no irony intended, was called “The Princess.” She had long golden blonde hair and was a very intelligent child. She had a huge collection of Barbie dolls and read children’s mystery novels like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. She wanted to be a detective when she grew up, she said. Her only weakness was her lack of athletic aptitude. Karla read voraciously, and her reading material during her high school years reflected a gothic taste: true crime, occult, horror, and fantasy books were among her favorites. Her childhood friends remember her as always being extremely dominant in their friendships. Many said that in high school Karla was the cleverest, prettiest, and most popular. She ruled over a pack of Mean Girl high school beauty princesses. They formed a little clique, calling themselves the EDC—Exclusive Diamond Club. The objective, they said, was for each member to find a rich, slightly older, good-looking man, get a diamond, marry, and live happily ever after. Karla was the dominant member of EDC. One girl would later recall, “You didn’t want to get into a fight with Karla because she was going to win. She was the leader.”

  Yet Karla often appeared to be unhappy. Her marks slipped in high school and she seemed to be obsessed only with boys—nothing else interested her. She desperately wanted to get married and leave school, and she went through a string of boyfriends.

  When Karla was 15 and 16, she would dye her hair in garish punk shades of red and black. She was on the Pill and having sex, but so were hundreds of thousands of teenage high school girls. There were arguments at home, but nothing serious. When she was 17, she wanted to visit a boyfriend who had moved to Kansas, but her parents refused permission for her to go. She booked a flight and went anyway, but sensibly made sure to phone her parents when she arrived there to tell them she was coming back in two weeks and not to worry.

  To one girl, Karla showed tiny little scratches on her wrists and said that she had attempted suicide, but the girl, who herself had seriously slashed her wrists, recalls that she did not think Karla was serious about taking her life—it was attention she wanted. There were a few dark tones to her adolescence. In one student’s yearbook she wrote, “Remember: suicide kicks and fasting is awesome. Bones rule! Death Rules. Death Kicks. I love death. Kill the fucking world.” Another girl recalls Karla once whispering in her ear as they sat in the school cafeteria, “I’d like to put dots all over somebody’s body and take a knife and then play connect the dots and then pour vinegar all over them.” Other girls remember Karla simply as a bubbly, cheerful girl who talked about going to university and becoming a veterinarian. She worked part-time in a pet store and liked animals.

  Overall, nothing dramatically traumatic has been uncovered in Karla Homolka’s adolescent history that is particularly different from the lives of millions of typical teenagers. No trace of abuse, family dysfunction, rape, abandonment, or trauma. Everything was middle-middle typical.

  In 1987, when Karla was 17, she and several of her friends drove to Toronto to attend a pet-store convention during a weekend. They booked into a Howard Johnson’s hotel in Scarborough on Progress Road. That Friday evening, after going drinking and dancing, Karla and her friend came back to their room after midnight. They were on the make because they brought back two men with them, but it didn’t work out—they sent the men on their way. Karla had changed into her pajamas and was ready for bed when she suddenly got the munchies. She called room service but was told they were already closed. However, the restaurant downstairs was still open. Karla, still dressed in her pajamas, and her friend went down to the restaurant for a late-night snack. That was the night she met Paul Bernardo.

  “Bastard Child from Hell”

  Hindsight can be cruel, but if there was nothing in Karla's past that signaled a potential for becoming a serial killer, everything about Paul Bernardo did. On the surface, Paul Bernardo seemed as middle-middle class typical as Karla. Paul was born in 1964, the youngest of three children. His father, Kenneth Bernardo, was a successful accountant, while his mother, Marilyn Elizabeth, was a housewife who, in her spare time, was an active Girl Guide leader. Both came from middle-class backgrounds from the prosperous rural town of Kitchener-Waterloo, located in the heart of Ontario's Mennonite farming country and home to one of the world's leading computer science universities and Blackberry. Marilyn's family traced their high-Anglican Anglo-Saxon roots to the United Empire Loyalists--British subjects who rejected the revolution in 1776 in the Thirteen Colonies and migrated north to Canada to become the ruling elite there. What the Daughters of the American Revolution are to the United States, the United Empire Loyalists are to Canada. Marilyn's father was a prominent lawyer in Kitchener and a colonel in the Canadian Army, who had distinguished himself during the war in Italy.

  Paul’s father, Kenneth Bernardo, came from more humble roots. The grandfather, Frank, emigrated from northern Italy but, once in Canada, married into Anglo-Canadian stock and built a highly successful tiling company that specialized in fine marble. His son, Kenneth, grew up in Kitchener, graduated university and was eventually certified as a chartered accountant. Kenneth met Marilyn in Kitchener and it was her father, the “Colonel,” who urged her to marry Kenneth because he had a university degree unlike her other suitors. After they got married, Kenneth eventually went to work for a large accounting firm in Toronto. Kenneth and Marilyn Bernardo settled in Guildwood, a wealthier neighbourhood in Scarborough, a suburb east of Toronto built during the 1950s postwar boom in Canada. Their house had a swimming pool out back, a luxury, considering that Canada’s summers barely last two months.

  Beneath this seemingly happy affluent family image lurked dark shadows. Kenneth beat his wife Marilyn. Her friends recall she became sullen and withdrawn after her marriage. In March 1961, they had their first child, a son, David Bryar, and in December 1962, the
ir daughter, Deborah Gail was born. Between bouts of alternatively being ignored or beaten by her husband, tied down by two young children, in November 1963, Marilyn had an affair with a former suitor and became pregnant with Paul. He was born on August 27, 1964.

  When the newborn infant Paul was brought to Marilyn’s bedside, she was horrified to see a huge purple mark disfiguring his face, like something today out of a Stephen King novel or The Omen or Rosemary’s Baby—a 'devil’s child' mark. Doctors assured her that it was a transient natal blood clot that would fade, and indeed it did after six weeks. But it was an inauspicious start for the baby. Like many serial killers, Paul Bernardo had infant disorders and early illnesses. He suffered from a form of aphasia as a result of a lack of oxygen to the brain during birth combined with a physical deformity in the palate of his mouth. As a child he did not speak, making only animal-like sounds, until minor corrective surgery at the age of five literally loosened his tongue. For several years following, he stuttered and had speech impediments.

  As a child in school, Bernardo was isolated and tormented by other children, who chanted “smelly Barnyard, dirty Barnyard.” Isolation and loneliness as a child is a common trait among serial killers. It’s not that loneliness makes a child into a serial killer, it’s that in loneliness and rejection, the child withdraws into a world of fantasy that often involves control and revenge against the world that has rejected him, and when those fantasies of revenge and control fuse badly with a sexual impulse and masturbatory conditioning, they begin to cook and stew into a deadly brew. Add physical and/or mental trauma to the mix and that still unknown ‘X’ factor that psychologists and criminologists are trying to identify—i.e., why do so many abused children not become automatically serial killers—we begin to then approximate the psychopathological demons driving a Paul Bernardo as a sadistic serial offender.