Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka

by Williams, Stephen, 1949-

  “I just took off like wild thunder. I never ran so fast in my life and I got away and I ran and I ran and I ran, and … he’s going, ‘You fuckin slut.’ I remember him standing outside the car and he’s going, ‘You fuckin slut.’ He goes, ‘Fuck, I’m going to come after you and when I do you’re dead.’ And I ran

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  through the forest, and he obviously didn’t wanna run through the forest. And I remember there were burrs in my hair, there were burrs in my pantyhose, there were burrs on my coat… .

  “I remember running up a hill,” she said, stammering at the end. “I went into a trance where I saw myself standmg at the top of the hill saying, ‘You can do it, c’mon.’ ” Jennifer knew the person at the hilltop was not herself She thought it was Mary, and drew enough strength from the Blessed Virgin to keep gomg until she made it to a girlfriend’s house. She fell asleep on the sofa, her head poundmg. No one called the police.

  Shortly afterward Paul tried to see Jennifer, but her father told him to stay away or face big trouble. Jennifer was afraid. Paul knew her school schedule, knew that she always ran a bit late. He started caUing her at home, offering to propose to her and give her a big diamond ring. He had always told her that an accountant and a nurse would make a good pair.

  Somewhere between her father’s noisy indignation and her own fear, Jennifer slipped away from Paul, but she was always looking over her shoulder.

  When she fmally stopped talking, the sergeant was speechless. The restaurant seemed to fall silent. Gathering his resources, McNiff asked her what exactly she wanted him to do. His “You will want to press charges …” was more a statement of fact than a question.

  But she said no. She just wanted her money back. Paul owed her a lot of money; more than two thousand dollars. He had given her part of it back in cash, but then he gave her some checks and they started bouncing-She just wanted the money.

  There was not much Sergeant McNiff could do about Jennifer’s money, and if she would not file charges, what could he do? What he did do, though, because he was so disturbed by what she had told him, was go back to the station, run a check on this creep, write up a supplementary report and pass it on to the detectives investigating the two bizarre rapes that had happened the previous month right around where Paul Bernardo hved.

  He found that Bernardo had been written up three times

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  before: each time Jennifer had been involved. There had been two assaults—one on March 4 and the other on July 26, 1986. The complainant was Jennifer Galligan. Bernardo was never charged. There was a “mischief under” on September 29, 1987, which involved Jennifer and another woman named Lenore Marcos, but again nothing had come of it. This guy had horseshoes up his ass.

  Sergeant McNifF knew there was something wrong. There was too much coincidence. For instance, the girl who had been raped on December 23 said her assailant drove a white Capri. Bernardo drove a white Capri. McNiff made out a five-page report, dated it January 5, 1987, instead of January 5, 1988—an honest mistake—and it got misfiled.

  Two days later, Karla sent Paul a three-page letter of apology. She had admitted to him that she was not a virgin when they met, and the news had not sat well. “I’m so sorry for what I’ve done,” she wrote. “Hearing you say ‘I don’t love you’ was one of the worst moments in my life … I guess I really screwed things up.”

  Karla did not understand Paul’s obsession with virginity; after all, he had not been one when they met. “If you find your virgin,” she added, “there will be something wrong with her.”

  Forgiveness came quickly. Within the week she was writing him another note and calling him her “fantasy.”

  “You’re the best, you big, bad businessman, you,” she printed neatly. They had both been to see the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street, and she knew that Paul was enthralled with the ruthless stock-dealing Gordon Gekko character played by Michael Douglas. To Paul, Gekko was godlike, as much for his cliche-ridden pronouncements as for his wealth and cutthroat attitude. Gekkoisms sprouted on his bedroom wall, which was covered with inspirational-type quotations. “In my game, you either do it right or you’re eliminated,” was the one Karla was aspiring toward.

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  On his way back from St. Catharines one night, Paul encountered Jean Baxter. Jean was five foot eleven, lithe with long brown hair. She was walking along a quiet suburban street in the late evening. Before Paul dragged her into the yard behind a nearby house he asked her if she knew “where Port Dalhousie was?” She was standoffish, ignored him and walked on.

  He overwhelmed her. Jean tried to fight. Paul had to use significant force to subdue her, tying her wrists with her own belt. He slapped her hard; she welted up badly afterward. Paul had a script. “Say, ‘I’m a little slut. I like this. I love you,’ ” he demanded, so she finally did, while he raped her vaginally and anally.

  Jean gave the Peel Regional Police a resonant description: white, around eighteen years old, between five foot nine and five foot eleven, muscular build, blond, wavy hair, blue eyes, no accent, clean shaven, wearing a black leather jacket, blue and yellow shorts and a white T-shirt.

  They quickly developed a composite that looked exactly like Paul Bernardo, and then they arrested a courier. Bloodwork cleared the courier within a few weeks. When the press asked, the police departments said this rape had absolutely nothing to do with the Scarborough rapes. How could it? It had happened in Peel Region, near Johnson’s Lane and the Lakeshore in Clarkson, halfway between Scarborough and St. Catharines.

  Location had become everything.

  Paul and Karla’s love deepened. They often had sex in his car at Lake Gibson, just off Beaverdams Road. Karla’s style of dress became more sophisticated. Gone were the leotards and boxer shorts. No more perms, her hair became blonder.

  On Valentine’s Day, Karla gave him a coupon entitHng the bearer to “receive one cute, little, blond seventeen-year-old girl to put on her knees between his legs, to pleasure him as he has never been pleasured before.”

  In the spring, she bought a studded dog coUar and wore it for him. She even found a greeting card to go with it, saying: “Sticks and stones may break my bones/but whips and chains

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  excite me/only you know how much.” Obviously, certain things were on Karla’s mind. She started calling his penis Snuffles, and happily noted: “I love it when you shoot in my mouth.”

  For her birthday on May 4, Paul gave her a rmg. She told the Diamond Club girls she was promised and flashed the evidence.

  In Karla’s high-school yearbook her FM—favorite memory—was listed as, “Camping, August 1988.”

  “Camping” was a euphemism for a ten-day trip she and Paul took to see the Mouse at Walt Disney World in Florida. She lied to her parents and told them they were going to Paul’s grandparents’ cottage on Georgian Bay.

  It was on this trip that Paul made his first video featuring Karla. In their hotel room at the Marriott they cavorted, half naked, hamming it up for the camera, wearing those famous mouse-ear hats with their names embossed on the foreheads. They look exactly like what they were—Ken and Barbie on summer vacation at Disney World.

  That was the summer ninety-year-old Frank Bernardo passed away. Ironically, Marilyn and Ken decided to take an Italian vacation to honor his memory. Left alone at 21 Sir Raymond, Paul became inspired and took a series of Polaroids. Karla rather liked the idea of defiling Paul’s mother’s house, especially since Marilyn had called her a “slut” the first time they met.

  In one picture, Karla is laid back, arms above her head, spread-eagled, grinning from ear to ear with her nipples and genitalia covered in whipping cream. Sixteen pornographic Polaroids in all, they ran the gamut from genital close-ups to squeeze-the-nipple shots. She raised her arms with handcuffs on and smiled through her gag. In another, she knelt with her rear end raised and her cuflfed hands beh
ind her head.

  With a timing device, Paul managed to capture both of them in a variety of sex acts, from a rear entry to fellatio. Unlike Jennifer Galligan, Karla did not have to be coerced. She happily inserted the wine bottle wherever Paul told her to.

  eight

  he bedside clock said 4:30 a.m. For a cop early morning calls were never good news. There had been another rape. The victim was at Scarborough Grace Hospital. The guy had a knife. He had told her he was the Scarborough Rapist and the description fit. It was Thursday, August 15, 1989.

  Wolfe had recently assigned Steve Irwin to a task force he had formed to solve the Scarborough rapes. This was the first occurrence since Irwin had been seconded to the task force.

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  Irwin called the two uniformed police officers who had been first on the scene. It had happened on Packard Boulevard, another quiet, weU-populated suburban street in Scarborough. The victim was just off a bus and was walking home around 1 A.M. Four doors away from her own house, the guy had grabbed her from behind and pulled her up between two houses. It was the same modus operandi. First the vagina, then the anus, then the vagina, then the anus and some fellatio. This maniac was nothing, if not consistent.

  When Irwin got there Joe Wolfe was already at the scene, waiting for him. Since he and Wolfe had first met in December, 1987, there had been nine more assaults, bringing the total number of rapes allegedly committed by the same man to eleven.

  Detective Irwin had first seen Wolfe on December 17, 1987. Shortly after that meeting—which had more to do with Margaret McWilliam’s murder than the Scarborough rapist—Wolfe had been promoted to acting staff superintendent.

  In 1988, it had started in April. On April 10, the rapist attacked Norma Keenan. Just off the bus at Clementine Square, Norma had long brown hair. The rapist made her repeat, over and over again, “I love you.”

  Wolfe supposed that there was some kind of voodoo seasonal force at work—the perpetrator seemed to strike in the early spring and summer, then right around Christmas time. In 1988 there had been an occurrence in May, but Wolfe refused to believe the rape in Clarkson was related to those in Scarborough. Then there was Helen Moore on Dundalk Drive in October and Shannon Ellis on Allanford Road in November, and, just after Christmas, on December 27, Linda Cowan on Weir Crescent.

  Then nothing for six months. Long sojourns between attacks confused the police. When a serial rapist stopped it could only mean one of three things: he had died, he had moved away, or perhaps been arrested on another beef

  Alas, the Scarborough rapist came back to life on June 20, 1989, when he raped Lydia Davidson at 15 Sonneck Square in Scarborough. Always in the back of Steve Irwin’s mind was the

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  steadfast notion that whoever was committing these horrific rapes had also killed Margaret McWilliam.

  Irwin had been very young when he was assigned to what was called the Warden Woods Jogger Case. He had probably been assigned because of his previous work on the Alison Parrott case.

  AHson, an athletic, intelligent, green-eyed eleven-year-old had been lured to a busy location in downtown Toronto and abducted in broad daylight. Her body was found on July 27, 1986, in Kings Mill Park, at Toronto’s western edge. The killer had carried her body into the park and placed it, in a contorted, grotesque position, in a wooded area close to a well-traveled road.

  Irwin identified with eleven-year-old Alison. Irwin’s father, Mike, had been killed when he was eleven and Irwin had a vivid memory of that period of his life. Perhaps as a consequence, he had developed an almost familial bond with Alison’s mother.

  Every year, on the anniversary of Alison’s death, Irwin called Lesley Parrott and talked to her. He kept her apprised of things. They had become friends, if you could use such a term for two people brought together by such a tragedy. It might have been this quality that endeared him to his superiors. This was the age of science and the sensitive cop.

  Steve Irwin believed, rightly or wrongly, that the more personal he got about his work, the better he performed. As an investigator, he saw himself as a miner for details; details in people’s memories that had to be excavated in person, at the source. He firmly believed Einstein’s maxim that God lived in the details. There was no detail too small or insignificant not to be important.

  Although much curtailed, both the Parrott and McWilliam investigations remained open, in part because Irwin was so tenacious. The mystery of the two violent deaths haunted him, as did the memory of his father. He could hardly think about either of the two young women or about his father without tears welling up in his eyes.

  His father had not died the night he was shot—February 27,

  1972. The following day eleven-year-old Steve listened to the radio for reports about his father’s condition, hoping against hope that he would be all right. His mother and uncle were standing watch at the hospital. The radio kept playing “Bye, bye. Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levy, but the levy was dry …” and Neil Young’s “A Horse with No Name,” over and over again. Then Mike Irwin died.

  Steve Irwin felt betrayed and cheated by his father’s sudden, violent death. He wanted to know his father much better than he had. He fell into a kind of lockstep with his father’s resonating footsteps, as if, through his own life, his father would become manifest, and the son would finally see, and know, what his father had seen and known. His father had a thing for birds of prey. Steve Irwin became a falconer. He had two birds—a red-tailed hawk and a peregrine falcon. He also had two small children. His father had certain interests and values. Irwin adopted them. Eventually, he had a third child, just as his father had done before him. Then his marriage fell apart. That was not supposed to happen.

  Steve Irwin remembered that he and his brother had gone to the dilapidated apartment building where his father had been shot. Their mother had not wanted them to go, but they went anyway. Where his father had fallen, there was a large bloodstain. Steve just kept staring at it, as if, in the bloodstain he might see something that he would recognize. In a way, he was still staring at that dark stain, trying to see the murderous figure in the carpet.

  Lightheartedly, Suzanne Brand said, “I saw you lurking at the bus stop last night, Paul. You must be the Scarborough rapist.”

  “You should not accuse someone of that,” he shot back.

  They had both worked at Price Waterhouse since 1987, and it was not really that big an office. Suzanne did not have anything against Paul Bernardo, she just did not particularly hke his macho type or his condescending attitude toward vvomen. Some women might like it—such as that blond bimbo he’d brought to the Christmas party—but not Ms. Brand.

  She had been driving home from her husband’s hockey game around midnight when she recognized Paul sitting in his car parked against the curb at the corner of Morningside and Lawrence. She had not really thought about that scene—Paul in his car just sitting at a bus stop—until his image coalesced with a story about the Scarborough rapist in the morning paper. When she had seen him at the bus stop, Paul was staring so intently into’ the bus shelter that he did not see her when she pulled up right beside him and waved. It was the intensity of his oblivious staring that unsettled her.

  The Packard Boulevard assault was particularly brutal. Detective Irwin had arrived at 5:30 a.m. The scene was otherworldly. The emergency task force had lit the area with high-powered spots, which made it look more like the set for a TV movie than a crime scene. The cars were in the driveways, the shrubberies and lawns were dew-laden. They glistened and sparkled in the spotlights. Outside the well-lit areas, dawn was just beginning to break. The radio was calling for thunderstorms.

  They had placed yellow ribbon around the victim’s house, four doors away from where the rape had actually taken place. Cathy Thompson’s ordeal had lasted for an hour and a half She had been gagged with her own sweater and left tied at the wrists, with twine that loope
d around her neck so that it would tighten and strangle her if she struggled.

  “Such a pretty face. It would be a shame if you have a bunch of scars …“he had told her, stroking her face with his knife.

  He had been gone for several minutes, when she heard a twig break. Out of the dark, he emerged again. He was dressed in black. Then he forced a piece of wood into her vagina and told her he would be watching her, always.

  “He told her what she had been doing the night before,” Wolfe said to Irwin. “What she had on, while she was reading in bed. What book she was reading. What time she went to the bathroom.”

  The rapist had taken Cathy’s purse—a black leather Jordache clutch, shaped like an envelope. There were some family

  photos, a few phone numbers written on a piece of cardboard in a red Jordache wallet containing her bank card, her social insurance card, her Simon Fraser University student card, her British Columbia birth certificate and driver’s hcense and Fitness Well membership card. There was three dollars in cash in the wallet.

  There w^as also a mini flashlight, a ladies’ gold-colored ring, a set of keys on a gold-colored band, Hcorice candy, a cream-colored hair pick, a calculator and a packed makeup bag. Wolfe looked at Irwin.

  “Amazing how much stuff women can get in-a purse.”

  Some of the uniformed officers were given the list and told to look in all garbage cans in the immediate vicinity. They started interviewing neighbors around quarter to eight. The guys working the city garbage truck were told about the incident and given the list of stuff firom the purse and told to watch for it.

  Around 8:15 a.m. Irwin drove to 41 Division. No sooner did he get there than he was called back to the scene. They had found footprints in a neighboring backyard. They called the I-dent unit to take impressions and photographs.

  Irwin got talking to one of the neighbors, who told him her daughter Erin, a twenty-four-year-old nurse, had also been stalked and approached. Since the papers had begun reporting on the Scarborough rapist, they got a lot of this type of thing. He was quickly becoming a dark, mythic figure, with a life of his own. Apparently, this man had told Erin he would “get her.” Irwin promised Erin’s mother he would follow up.