was widely reported and humiliated the family. Ken later said his brother was a sadist twice diagnosed as a psychopath. Raymond eventually became a police officer.
In 1957, Ken graduated from Wilfrid Laurier University with a bachelor of arts degree. That fall he went to work at Pearson and Matthews, an accounting firm in Guelph, Ontario. Guelph, another university town, renowned for its veterinary college, was a half-hour drive east of Kitchener.
Although Marilyn was ambivalent about Ken, on May 20, 1960, ten days after her twentieth birthday, she married him. It was a small, unassuming ceremony held at the Eastmans’ home on Claremount Avenue, a distinctly white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, upper-middle-class address. The groom was twenty-five, but didn’t have many friends. Aside from a couple of Marilyn’s friends and immediate family, there were few guests.
Marilyn had been unable to make up her mind between Ken and another suitor named Bill, so the Colonel, as her father was affectionately known, decided for her. Colonel Eastman had always been determined Marilyn would marry an “educated man,” and that left Bill out.
The newlyweds moved into a tiny apartment at 266 Victoria Street. Following in his father’s footsteps. Ken started smacking Marilyn around.
In March, 1961, they moved into a slightly larger apartment on Ahrens Street. He smacked her around some more. On March 25, Marilyn gave birth to their first child, David Bryar. Their daughter, Deborah Gail, was born the following year, on December 14, 1962. Ken was still smacking Marilyn around when he passed his institute exams in 1963. In recognition of the fact that he was now a chartered accountant, the family moved into a little bungalow at 121 Wilfrid Street. Then Ken changed jobs and went to work for Rohm and Haas Canada Limited on the outskirts of Toronto.
Between the way he treated Marilyn and the inordinate amount of time Ken spent commuting, studying and working, it all became too much. Marilyn Bernardo remembers exactly what she was doing on the day Jack Kennedy was shot. She had
sought and found refuge in Bill’s arms. Thus, Paul Kenneth Bernardo was conceived.
In early January, 1964, the papers were fiill of stories about the Boston Strangler. His final victim, nineteen-year-old Mary Sullivan, had been found in her apartment, propped up on her bed, naked, with a broomstick stuck in her vagina and a large pink bow tied under her chin. Resting against her left foot was a gaily colored card which read, “Happy New Year.”
Right from the time Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadian Orchestra struck up the band for “Auld Lang Syne” and the big red ball dropped in Times Square, there wasn’t much chance 1964 was going to be very happy.
The 8mm Zapruder home movie, which had inadvertendy caught the graphic details of Kennedy’s assassination, had been replayed over and over again on many hundreds of millions of tiny screens in households all over the world; the grainy image of Kennedy’s head snapping forward zapped an entire generation’s innocence like zombie dust.
About forty-five days after Kennedy took the bullet and Marilyn lay down with Bill, the ball dropped in the Bernardo household as well. Ken was resigned to his fate, but he would be damned if he would stay in a one-horse town and continue to be cuckolded.
By January 29, Marilyn, Ken and their two young children, Debbie and David, were celebrating his twenty-ninth birthday in their new home on Abbeyville Avenue in Scarborough, a sprawHng, strip-mailed suburb on the eastern flank of Toronto.
Marilyn was disconsolate. What could she have been thinking? No man in his right mind wanted a woman with two small children, and Bill was no exception. She had never Hved anywhere other than Kitchener. Married to a man who ignored and beat her, isolated from her family and friends, with two small children and another man’s child in her belly, she was totally alone.
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The mark on baby Paul’s head turned out to be exactly what the obstetrician had said it was: a large transient blood clot. It faded from his face six weeks after he was born.
In her diary, Marilyn described Paul as her “easier child, much quieter than the other two.” As her friend Elizabeth pointed out, to the detriment of their friendship, compared to the other two, a pack of hyenas would be considered quiet.
Not that their friendship mattered much anymore, anyway. Elizabeth and her husband, David, were very surprised to be asked to be the godparents, when Ken and Marilyn had Paul baptized at St. John’s Anghcan Church in Kitchener on November 29.
They reluctantly agreed, for old times’ sake. They had stopped sociahzing with the Bernardos long before they moved to Scarborough. The Marilyn Elizabeth knew had become increasingly sullen after her marriage. This Ken Bernardo person was very quiet and temperamental. When he did say something, it was invariably of a negative cast.
Paul was a year old when the Bernardos moved to 21 Sir Raymond Drive in Scarborough’s Guildwood Village. For Marilyn this was the next best thing to going home. Another quiet, predominantly white, middle-class neighborhood, it sat on the edge of the bluffs overlooking Lake Ontario. The two-story house had a carport and a big front window. Ken began budgeting for an in-ground backyard swimming pool.
“This one is not the least bit affectionate,” Marilyn wrote in her diary. She described her youngest child as “very selfish and stubborn” and listed his allergies—orchard grass, elm, ash, poplar, cotton linters.
Then Marilyn discovered Paul couldn’t talk. By two and a half, most children were talking a blue streak. “Stammers a lot,” Marilyn dutifully noted.
As it turned out, Paul’s tongue was attached to his palate by a strange flange of skin, like the webbing on a duck’s foot. He made sounds, but they were unintelligible, more animal-like than human.
Once his parents realized that Paul was Hterally tongue-tied, he was thoroughly examined. He was sent to a speech therapist
46 STEPHEN wiiiiams
named Bonnie Gross at the Scarborough General Hospital. In her report, she noted that Paul had passed all the other childhood milestones; it was natural that his inability to communicate caused him considerable frustration.
All they had to do was snip the duck’s webbing. On his grade-four report card his teacher described his academic performance as satisfactory, but said Paul failed to apply himself “because he is of a talkative nature.” The Bernardos rejoiced.
Paul had always loved himself. Even as an inarticulate child in primary school, his teacher praised his early penchant for neatness and accuracy^ He grew up to be very beautiful and talkative, indeed. And many, many women loved him as he loved himself
Neat and fastidious and beautiful, he found them at school or summer camp, at work, dehberately or by chance. There were Karen, Nadine, Lisa, Victoria, Kim, Joanne, Anna, Le-nore, Laura Lyn and many, many more. They all agreed he was a silver-tongued devil. Basically, he managed to talk the pants off most of them.
Then one day, shortly after he started grade ten, for no reason he ever understood, his mother stormed into his room, threw a photograph of a man on his bed and told Paul he wasn’t who he thought he was at all. He was not Ken Bernardo’s son, he was really this man’s son. She said he was a bastard and he might as well get used to it.
four
ooking at that picture on his bed was hke looking into a mirror. The guy in the photograph looked exactly like him. Paul was both repulsed and fascinated. His mother was a real bitch, just like his father said. Sometimes his father would sit on the couch. It did not matter whether they had company or not. When his mother came lumbering down the stairs, his father would say something hke, “Boom, boom, boom, look out, here comes the big, fat cow.”
48 STEPHEN wiiilams
At the time, his mother was Hving Hke some giant troll in the basement. She never fed them. She hid food under her bed. There was never any food in the refrigerator. It was an austerity thing. His father did not want to be eaten out of house and home.
His friend Chris Burt didn’t really beheve him, until he came over one day and saw it with his own e
yes. Paul went to Sir Wilfrid Laurier Collegiate Institute. He was in grade ten. So was Chris. To Chris, Paul seemed so together. He was always well dressed. Girls liked him. Paul had even introduced Chris to his girlfriend, Nancy MacEwan. And here he was, Hving in an incredibly filthy house with no food in the cupboards. And there his mother was, blinking in the dim half-Hght at the bottom of the stairs. She had big, pufiy eyes and her hair stood on end like a Brillo pad.
Paul told Chris about how his father would sneak downstairs in the middle of the.night Co have sex with “it,” then run back upstairs to his own bedroom.
Paul never told Chris or anyone else that his old man was also sneaking out of the house trying to look in the neighbors’ daughter’s window. •
One nigljt in June, Ken sneaked out and got caught. The police came to the door around three in the morning. They asked old Ken what he thought he was doing prowling around in his nightclothes, peeping into other people’s windows.
Apparently the twenty-six-year-old woman, in whose basement bedroom window he was trying to peek, had been sitting outside her house in a girlfriend’s car at the time. She watched Ken come out of the house, cross the street, go up her driveway and walk right to her window, without any hesitation—meaning he had done it before.
Her blinds were closed, so he gave up and scurried back to 21 Sir Raymond. He was wearing white pajamas with a blue pinstripe. The women freaked and called the cops. There had been rumors in the neighborhood about him, but she had never beheved them because he was friendly with her father.
The old man was stressed right out that night. Ken stood at the door, shaking, and his Coke-bottle glasses were all fogged
INVISIBLE d^irkness 49
up. The cops took note. They no more beHeved his lame, cock-amamy story about being woken up by a noise and having to check it out than Paul did. But there wasn’t much they could do except warn him and write up a report. Then there was the business with Paul’s sister.
Debbie did not remember exactly when the sex stuff started, but she knew it had been going on long before her mother got sick and her parents started sleeping in separate bedrooms. It just got a lot worse after they moved back from Barrie. Her father had taken a job in Barrie and moved the whole family up there for a year. And then they all came back to their old house on Sir Raymond and everybody was happy. Debbie was ten years old.
Her little brother Paul, who had always been a little different, suddenly became outgoing and talkative. He had started playing soccer when they were in Barrie and he signed up for the Guildwood league when they came back to Scarborough.
He joined the Cub Scouts. He started playing baseball in the community house league. Ken Bernardo even started coaching the team. That lasted about a year. Like Debbie, Paul started to swim seriously and take lessons at the YMCA. In the end, they both got National Lifeguard certificates. On the surface, everything appeared normal.
But it was not. Marilyn Bernardo became really mean, and she looked different. Her skin dried out. It felt like the sandpaper on Ken’s workbench in the basement. Debbie’s mother was always yelling. Her hands, face and eyelids puffed up. Her nice, shiny hair grew dull and britde, and her fingernails were a funny color.
And Marilyn Bernardo got really fat. Debbie knew her mother was sick, that it was not reaUy her fault, but she did not understand what a thyroid was. For some reason, areas around the Great Lakes, and particularly Lake Ontario, on whose shore they lived, were the most fi-equent sites of thyroid disorders in the world. Even if Debbie had understood, it wouldn’t have made any diflference.
Her mother started staying in her room all the time, with the curtains drawn and the Ughts off. She stopped cooking and doing chores. Both her mother and father told Debbie she would have to try and do the housework—before and after school. Debbie was not very good at cooking and cleaning. And her mother was always yelling at her and her brothers. Their father would tell them that it was not their mother’s fault that she was sick, but then he would make fun of her and call her a “bitch.”
Her father started sneaking into Debbie’s room at night. He told her not to tell her mother, because it would just make her angry. Because Debbie was a heavy sleeper, she started putting shells and old coins in a metal garbage can and lodging the garbage can in front of her bedroom door. She slept with a flashhght. When her father tried to open the door there would be a hell of a racket, and she would shine the light in his face.
Debbie always made sure her curtains were closed because he used to climb out on the roof and try to watch her undressing at night. He would say he was just checking the eaves trough, even though it was dark.
She remembered it occasionally happened during the week, but the garbage-can thing seemed to help. Then there was Sunday night. Every Sunday, the whole family would settle down in front of the TV to watch “Walt Disney” and her mother would lie down with the boys and her Daddy would call her over.
He would sit there and finger her, while they watched Mickey Mouse. Sometimes it hurt and she would say “ouch.”
“What’s going on there?” her mother would ask. But she never did anything.
Once, during the day, when Marilyn had taken Paul and David out somewhere, Ken cornered her in the small bedroom upstairs, and laid down on top of her and started going through the motions.
“What are you doing?” Debbie demanded.
“I’m making love to you,” he told her.
Squirming out from underneath, she managed to run off. It
INVISIBLE darkness S^
would be another eight years before Debbie figured out how to run off for good.
The revelation that Paul was a bastard had a devastating effect on him, but it was relatively invisible. He quickly realized that it gave him a certain cachet, particularly with the girls he selectively told. It created in him a difference that set him apart, eliciting sympathy and interest. But it was a cancerous fact, as much for the way in which he was originally told as for the way in which it was subsequently handled—or rather, not handled. Neither the man whom he now knew to be his stepfather nor his mother would confi-ont the issue. He managed to find out his real father’s name and that he had an insurance business in Kitchener. But that was it. His mother refused to ever discuss the subject. The only real change: whenever she yelled at him, which was often, she now called him the “bastard from hell.”
CHAPTER
five
^ancy MacEwan had a vivid memory of Noel Francisca’s grade twelve law class on the afternoon of January 24, 1980, not because of the severed head in the pail but because of Paul Bernardo’s question.
Nancy Hked Paul. He was going out with her friend Anna. And Paul had introduced her to her Chris Burt, the boyfriend Nancy would eventually marry.
Two homicide detectives made a presentation that day.
They showed the class frill of teenagers a tray of slides, in—
INVISIBLE darkness S3
eluding one of a naked torso and another of a severed leg. One slide was a blowup of a tentative cut that went through the flesh and partially into the thigh bone. The detectives explained that people who cut up bodies often make one or tvo tentative cuts before they choose their exact spot. It meant that the killer was probably inexperienced. There was a small piece of metal that had lodged in the bone, and it caught the light of the flashbulb and ghstened like a diamond in the sun.
The torso had been wrapped in green garbage bags and tossed in a Dumpster. Identification was difl^icult without the other pieces, but forensics told them it was the torso of a southeast Asian female who had given birth at least once. Shortly afterward they found the leg, wrapped in an unusual burlap coffee bag.
From soil samples, they determined the bag had been in Kenya and Montreal. They tracked the bag from an importer in Montreal to a repackaging distributor who gave the discarded bags to a woodworking company. Two men who worked for the woodworking company had killed the woman.
&nbs
p; But it wasn’t the story about how the coffee bags bagged the bad guys—or the gruesome slides of the woman’s head with its black eye, which they found in a pail—that stayed with Nancy. It was Paul’s question.
“If two people were committing sodomy in their own home,” he asked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, “how would the pohce be able to charge them? Would they sneak into the house to watch them and then arrest them?”
The class broke into uproarious laughter.
Regardless of the fact that he was a bastard, that his mother was a complete bitch whom he was beginning to wish dead and his father a sexual deviant who molested his half sister and tommed around the neighborhood peeping in the middle of the night, Paul Bernardo was determined to make something of himself The anomaly was the fact that Paul became a real chip oflF the old step-block. Like his stepfather, he was also good with numbers. Throughout high school he maintained average
STEPHEN willi.r
marks, but he almost always scored in the eighties in maths and science.
And like Ken Bernardo, Paul was remarkably consistent. He hardly ever missed a day of school. He wanted to get ahead. He liked money and was not afraid of work. From the time he started high school, Paul worked part-time after school.
He started out delivering newspapers. Occasionally, he found work as a security guard. He waited tables in restaurants—the Crock and Block on Markham Road, Mother’s Pizza, the Howard Johnson’s out by the airport.
In one of the restaurants, he met a small-town Amway entrepreneur, Byron Breen, who sponsored Paul as a distributor.
He studied judo. He became a Queen’s Scout, the highest rank a young knot tier could achieve. He went to camp every summer. He was a counselor-in-training at Camp Wabanaki on Vernon Lake in Muskoka and he trained to be a leader at Camp Ki-Wa-Y, a YMCA camp on the outskirts of Kitchener. He had a few summer romances, friendly affairs mostly. Laura Mason let it go further than that. One night they had intercourse in a cornfield. “It wasn’t that memorable,” she recalled. “It was Mennomte style, just quick.”
Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 5