When he wasn’t working, studying or camping, he was out with a girl. Lisa WiUiams, whom he met at the Crock and Block, for instance. Lisa drove him nuts because she would always show up for work in her httle school uniform—maroon, knee socks, maroon sweater, white blouse and a green, maroon and yellow plaid tartan skirt. She was petite, about five foot three, a hundred pounds, with shoulder-length blond hair. At their peak, Lisa and Paul were going out maybe twice a week. He managed to talk her pants off once in a ravine, after plying her with wine and giving her a T-shirt that read “Hands Off” on the front and “Property of Paul” on the back. People were walking by when they both had their pants off, so they put them on again and left. Lisa did not think he had an erection.
In Nancy MacEwan’s opinion, Paul changed dramatically after he started hanging out with the Smirnis brothers. The three brothers, Steve, Alex and Van, lived directly across the street from the Bernardos at 24 Sir Raymond. Their parents
INVISIBLE d.rknes. 55
owned a restaurant and the brothers were always trying to buy friends with free drinks and souvlaki. They had that real crude macho attitude about them—particularly Van and Steve—and after a while, Paul started to walk the walk and talk the talk. His whole attitude toward women seemed to change.
One day, Paul just dropped Nancy’s friend Anna and started going after younger girls, in true Smirnis fashion.
The Smirnises were also known to be petty criminals, trading their father’s pizzas for stolen gasoline or night fishing on private property—mostly inane, penny-ante stuff.
In 1982, Paul and his friends began taking a ritual trip to Florida at spring break in March. They met some girls who agreed to see them again. Steve Smirnis drove to Detroit with Paul and the others. At the Knight’s Inn in Sterling Heights, Steve played the big man and got himself arrested for trying to pick up the tab with a credit card a customer had left in his parents’ restaurant.
That was the other thing; Paul was bright. He wasn’t a rocket scientist, but he was bright. The Brothers Smirnis were not. Young Van was the worst. Apparently, he had once fallen from a balcony and hit his head. He had never been right after that. Steve tried two-timing Paul behind his back, with a little blonde named Nadine Brammer, who orchestrated the whole thing so that Paul would find out. All Nancy knew was that it had ended badly.
Then Paul started going out with a young raven-haired girl named Jennifer Galligan, whom he met through Steve Smirnis. Nancy remembered Jennifer for two reasons. First, Jennifer was incredibly submissive. Second, Paul told Chris that he always had anal intercourse with her. It wasn’t so much the fact that they “frequented that style,” as Chris so delicately put it. It was the fact that Paul and Chris talked about it all the time that really got to Nancy.
When Debbie Bernardo finally told her mother what her father had been doing to her over the years, her mother refused to believe her.
“How could you make such things up?” Marilyn demanded. “Why would you say such awful things?”
A couple of days later Marilyn confronted Ken. She asked him how much he loved Debbie and Ken said, “Too much.” At least, that’s what Marilyn told Debbie. Debbie moved to Kirk-land Lake, a once-thriving mining town a long way up north. But she never completely severed the ties.
Less than a year passed, and Paul was serving as an usher at his sister’s wedding. Ken Bernardo gave away his only daughter.
After visiting the Bernardo household, it was not hard for Chris Burt to accept the fact that Paul’s brother and sister hated it there and had left as soon as they could. He knew that Paul’s brother worked in a factory somewhere and that Paul thought David was a real loser and a dweeb.
As for the sister, all Chris knew w^as she had moved way up north to some godforsaken place, as far away from Sir Raymond Drive and that woman in the basement as possible.
Chris’s understanding was that Paul stayed because it was really the only way he could get his education and get a stake. Chris felt sorry for Paul. He had no idea how the guy could take it. Whenever Chris had been over there, the old man never said a word, he just stared at him. He was pretty strict with Paul, because he seemed to want Paul to do well too. But the mother was always nit-picking. Whenever Chris called, he could hear her caterwauling in the background. No wonder Paul never liked to talk on the telephone.
Paul finished high school in 1982 and his parents separated. Marilyn moved into a bachelor apartment in Kitchener. She didn’t bother to ftirnish it. She just put a mattress on the floor. She told Paul that it was all about trying to understand her roots, getting to know her birth sisters, Claudia and Diane.
In her diary, Marilyn noted that Ken was down most weekends. She maintained the apartment for a year, but neither of
INVISIBLE d.rknes. 57
her sisters, Claudia and Diane, had any idea about why they’d been put up for adoption.
Jennifer Galligan met Paul Bernardo on a double date. She was with Steve Smirnis and he was with Diane Wiedman. She was fifteen or sixteen at the time and Paul was twenty-two, tall, blond, blue-eyed—-Jennifer thought he was really good-looking. After they became “boyfriend/girlfriend” they always celebrated the date of their meeting, on August 15, 1986, as their anniversary.
Jennifer had luxuriant, thick, dark hair. Otherwise, she thought litde of herself Jennifer had been adopted, like Paul’s mother. Her parents were devout Catholics. To Paul, she seemed guilt-ridden, obsessed with the Blessed Virgin Mary and neurotic. In other words, perfect for him.
Paul had some unusual characteristics, but Jennifer accepted them. He would twitch and sniff a lot, and he would stare into space for long periods of time for no apparent reason. He would always get sexually aggressive around eleven or midnight and two in the morning. Hunger made him horny; alcohol made him violent. Jennifer felt that Paul really loved and hated her all in one; that he hated himself for being the way he was, but that he was so intrigued by the emotion he felt when he did things to her—when he hurt and humiliated her—that he was addicted to it. He seemed to genuinely like it when she cried out, so she learned how and when to do it.
Like Nancy MacEwan, Jennifer Galligan really wondered about Paul’s relationship with the Smirnis brothers. She thought that Paul wanted to be heterosexual, but that he had real homosexual tendencies. Paul and Van and Steve were always joking around, pushing themselves up against one another.
Part of Jennifer’s bewilderment came from Paul’s strong preference for anal sex. After he took her virginity, he only ever reaUy wanted to do it from behind. That and shove wine bottles into her. She let him do it because she loved him, and because he seemed to get such a thrill out of it.
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here was blood on the glass, on the frame that was ripped out and on the two punched-in panels. There was even blood on the kitchen windows. There was blood everywhere. Jennifer could smell it. The smell of blood made Jennifer sick. Whoever it was had just started banging on the door really hard. When that person kept pounding, harder and harder, Paul got weird and Jennifer started to cry.
“Don’t fuckin’ cry,” he hissed. “What the fuck are you crying about?”
They had been down in the family room. It was Monday night, September 28, 1987, the day Paul started his big, new job at the accountmg firm of Price Waterhouse. He had just come back from a weekend in Texas, where Steve Smirnis had married some girl named Bev from Fort Worth. Jennifer had stopped by to see Paul because she loved him, but things had not been going very well. She was studying nursing and she had brought along her psychology books. Paul said psychology was a good subject for her. Since she was “so fucked up,” she could study herself Insults were not new to Jennifer. They had been going out for just over three years.
When the pounding on the door first started, Jennifer was studying and Paul was sleeping on the couch. Paul went straight up in the air, as if he had been jabbe
d with a needle, and then he landed on all fours beside the couch. He scrambled over to the stairs and peered up at the front door.
“Oh fuck, fuck,” he exclaimed. “She’s seen your fucking shoes …“Jennifer’s shoes were on the landing just inside the front door.
“Come on, get the fuck upstairs,” Paul commanded in a hoarse whisper.
Jennifer had no idea what was going on. Why would her shoes make anyone go crazy?
“Don’t ask questions,” he said, grabbing her arm and dragging her up the stairs into his bedroom.
“Why can’t you just answer the door?” Jennifer blubbered.
“I’m not going to fucking answer the door, man. She’s too fucking weird.” He fixed her with that crazed look of his. “Just shut the fuck up. Another fucking word out of you man, and I’m going to kill you.”
And then the person at the door punched her fist right through the two stained-glass panels that bordered the door and cut her hand and arm really badly.
The neighbors called the police, who came and took Lenore away. Jennifer knew about Lenore. She knew her last name was Marcos. She had found pictures of Lenore under Paul’s bed.
60 STEPHEN wllliams
Lenore was beautiful; a small Filipino girl with jet black hair who had gone to school with Paul and then got a job at the same company.
As far as Jennifer was concerned, Lenore was the last straw. First, there had been the incident at the Halloween dance the previous October 31. She had dressed up in a harem outfit. Because Jennifer had ample breasts and was just dressed in a skimpy litde bra thing with pantaloons that came barely above her pubic hair, she did not want all those geek guys ogling her at the Smirnises’ house, where she and Paul had gone; she wanted to keep her coat on.
She told Paul she was cold and kept it on.
“I’ll show you cold,” he said, puUing her coat oflf and dousing her with a glass of ice water. When she complained, he hit her.
Then there was the time he had tried to strangle her at her graduation. It was at the Harbour Castle Hilton, overlooking the Toronto harbor. Here she was with this really good-looking older guy at her high-school graduation. He had a video camera and everything. Everything was great. Until later, when they went to some deserted place in his car and he put a rope around her neck and made her arch her back. Then he insisted on anal sex and he pulled on the rope. She could barely breathe. Then he got all apologetic and kissy-kissy and lovey-dovey.
Another time he told her to pull down her pants and arch her back and put her bum way up in the air. So she did and he took Polaroid pictures. He told her if she ever left him he would take the pictures and post them on her church bulletin board.
Then there was the trip they took to Florida in August. She wanted to please him and be mature and have a drink and everything, so when he pulled out this ID and gave it to her she was happy. Then he said some girl had loaned it to him.
“Come on, get real—I’m pretty naive, but I’m not stupid,” she told him.
Paul said he had actually bought it at a place downtown where you could buy an ID and all sorts of things. Still, something didn’t ring true.
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To Sheila Blake, young Paul Bernardo was the cream of the crop. Every year the large accounting firm where Sheila worked, Price Waterhouse, recruited a new lot of trainees. Sheila had been the receptionist at the office on Markham Road for more than twenty years and she had seen all kinds come and go.
Sheila talked to Paul all the time. She knew him well enough to know that his home life was troubled. He told her that even though his parents were there he had no one to talk to, so she knew that something wasn’t quite right.
Most of Paul’s work was in the Scarborough area, but he did have a few cUents in Niagara Falls. Craig Munro was Paul’s supervisor. Munro was aware of Paul’s relationship with “the Chinese,” as he called Lenore Marcos. Paul told Munro he had videotaped himself and “the Chinese” having sex. How could he have done that, Munro had asked? Paul said he had the camera propped up on something and Lenore noticed it and Paul told her not to worry, it wasn’t turned on. But it was.
Paul was efficient and got his work done quickly. There were no complaints from clients about Paul Bernardo on any level. He hung around with three or four guys who joined the firm at the same time he had: Joe Falzone, Demetrios Voudouris and Rodney Rego, with whom he had gone to university.
Daniel McVicar was a year behind Paul, but worked with him all the time. He was impressed that Bernardo wore Dack shoes, which were very expensive, and had good suits that appeared well made. Daniel knew for certain that one of his shirts was a Ralph Lauren. They were both earning about $28,000 a year at the time.
Paul always carried a comb and a hairbrush in his audit bag and would give Daniel advice about how he should comb his hair. That was irritating. Daniel viewed Paul and his pals, Falzone and Voudouris, with a slightly jaundiced eye. All three of them had difficulty dealing with the female managers and were known collectively as the MCPs or Male Chauvinist Pigs.
To Sheila, Paul was not only good-looking but also outgoing and friendly; he was definitely the kind of guy on whom all the women did double takes, with the exception of a few of the managers. Maybe he was a bit arrogant and chauvinistic at times, but there were all kinds of men like that and very few of them were as full of life as Paul Bernardo.
One of the things Lenore Hked about Paul in those days was the fact that he hardly drank at all. When they went out to dinner he would occasionally order a cocktail, but it was usually a light drink, a lady’s drink, Hke a Silver Cloud.
Lenore was thrilled when he bought her a LaSalle watch for her birthday in 1986. That Christmas she went to Baltimore to spend the hoHdays with relatives and brought back a picture of a boy she met: Paul went berserk and dumped her garbage all over her apartment floor looking for it. He hit her. And she hit him right back. Then he decked her, knocked her right down. After he calmed down, they made up. He gave her a ring.
Early in March, Paul called Lenore and said he wanted to punish her for not being a virgin. If she let him do it, he would forgive her and never bring the subject up again. It was two o’clock in the morning, but Lenore got in her car and drove to meet him at the deserted parking lot in Fairview MaU. Paul spanked her with his belt while she apologized for having had sex with anyone other than him. Later, she recalled that it had not really hurt, but she knew it was strange and she never told anyone, not even her closest friends.
From May through August, Paul and Lenore took university courses together. She was smarter than he was and that bothered him, but they became very close that summer.
In September, they both graduated with bachelor of arts degrees with majors in economics and commerce, from the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto.
Following in his father’s footsteps, Paul enrolled in the program run by the Institute of Chartered Accountants. He and Lenore both got jobs at Price Waterhouse. The world was their oyster.
INVISIBLE darkness 63
That’s when it really got ugly between them. On a training course instructors had told everyone to meet and mingle, but Paul refused to leave Lenore’s side. She had known he was jealous and possessive, but now it was becoming obsessive. Once they went off into a closet for some privacy and he started hitting himself on the head badly enough to leave bruises on his forehead. Lenore thought it was her fault somehow, because he loved her so much. It was starting to drive her crazy.
She thought about breaking off the relationship. She had suspected that he was cheating on her for a long time, but then again she had always hoped she would fmd somebody like Paul, who loved her and had ambition. He would be hard to replace. She didn’t want to make a mistake, so she was somewhat relieved when she found she had not missed him at all while he was away at the wedding in Texas.
On Monday, she just happened to be in his neighborhood. She had gone to a movie with a girlfriend who lived near S
ir Raymond, so she thought she would drop over and say hello.
She knew there was another woman in the house immediately because she saw the shoes in the foyer. Now Lenore wanted Paul to face the music. She had accused him many times before of being with this Jennifer woman, and he would always deny it. This time she caught him red-handed. Lenore started banging on the door. There was stained glass, but she did not realize it and she put her hand right through it and needed stitches. The neighbors called the police and it turned out to be the most horrible night of her life.
Then Paul met the woman he would marry, Karla Homolka, in the Howard Johnson’s restaurant late in the evenmg on October 17. It was love at first sight. It was as though they had known each other all their lives.
The following weekend Paul accepted Karla’s invitation to come to St. Catharines for a party at her house. They went to a horror film—John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. Afterward while the others partied on, Karla took Paul to her bedroom in the basement. She locked the door and pulled out a pair of
handcuffs—real ones—just like his. Paul had never met a girl, ever, who had her own handcuffs.
And then she told him to put them on her, behind her back. She got down on her knees and she told him to Hft up her skirt. It was as though she was reading his mind, like she knew exactly what he wanted, what he had to have.
For Paul, this was the clincher. All summer long, his other relationships had been unravebng. They had become so turbulent and unpredictable that he had actually approached and fondled a number of strangers—women he came across Scarborough late at night in May and July. He had not actually raped any of them, just grabbed them and touched them against their will. He had shown them his knife, and they had been scared.
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.
Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 6