Returning to the fist was not natural; a little laxity on the part of the falconer and he forfeited his falcon. Even after years of manning, a single kill could send the most exquisitely well-conditioned bird into paroxysms of wildness.
Detective Irwin thought about sexual predators a bit the way
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he thought about birds of prey, except he had respect and love for the birds.
Between May and September members of the sexual assault squad had submitted more than one hundred and thirty suspects’ samples to the forensic center for sector status and blood typing.
Then Detective Irwin got two reports identifying Paul Bernardo as a possible suspect. One, dated June 28, had been called in by a bank employee. The second report was from a nurse named Tina.
Tina had called on September 12 because her husband’s friend Paul Bernardo looked a lot like the picture in the paper. Tina said she knew, secondhand, that Paul Bernardo would date one woman and have one or two other girls on the side. According to Tina, Mr. Bernardo would wait until a girl had had too much to drink and then take advantage of her.
“It must be him, then,” Irwin thought to himself sarcastically. But there was something else that caught his attention. Something other than the coincidence of two unrelated people reporting the same person: Tina said Paul Bernardo had been “called in” on a previous rape investigation—one in December, 1987—but he had never been interviewed.
“Tina the Nurse” was Tina Smirnis, married to a lifelong acquaintance of Mr. Bernardo’s, Alex Smirnis. Irwin and his partner. Sergeant John Munro, invited the couple to the sexual assault squad room to discuss Tina’s report. After the forensic revelation of the day before, Irwin and Munro had become busy going after the blood of the twenty non-secretors. Alex and Tina showed up at 10:00 a.m., Tuesday, September 26.
As it turned out, for some reason Alex had put his wife up to her call. Now, he did all the talking. The son of Greek immigrants, he said he was a Christian and an entrepreneur who had owned a number of businesses, including a car-rental outlet, but at the present time he worked in his parents’ restaurant in Brown Hill.
Alex had a video of his wedding, in which Paul Bernardo could be seen. He also had two still pictures of Bernardo, one about four years old and the other from their wedding.
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Alex had two brothers—Stephanos, who was older, and Van. Stephanos lived in Youngstown, New York, and owned a video store in which their younger brother. Van, worked.
The Smirnis brothers were large boned, tall, with thick thighs. Alex was dark-haired and swarthy, like his brother, Stephanos, who also had a substantial proboscis. Van was fairer, but equally full in the face. Alex wore a mustache that made him look a bit like a heavyset Snidely Whiplash.
Alex had lived all his life across the street from the Bernardo family, at 24 Sir Raymond Drive. The Smirnises had moved away in 1986 or ‘87, but Paul kept in touch—more with his brothers than him. Alex described Paul as a “person who has tried but not achieved.” For instance, he had tried to become a chartered accountant but had failed.
Paul’s mother had psychiatric problems and drank, Alex explained, describing Marilyn Bernardo as outlandish, untidy and loud. Apparently, Ken Bernardo was not Paul’s real father and his mother called Paul her “bastard child.”
Alex knew Paul had dated a girl named Jennifer and, for all Alex knew, might have “beaten the shit out of her.” Paul always had young girlfriends who were petite, small and not too bright.
A girl named Karla Homolka from St. Catharines, with whom Paul had had sex the first night they met, was one example. She was only eighteen years old, then, and still in high school, whereas Paul was in his twenties. Alex told the detectives that Karla had said, “If you want to know anything about girls, just ask Paul.”
In Alex’s opinion, Paul Bernardo’s morals “had gone by the wayside.” Paul often had two or more girls on the go at the same time. Paul had been dating another girl named Marie Magritte most of the time he had been seeing Karla.
Marie lived on Lower Raymerville in Markham, Ontario. She was a waitress. She was twenty-two, European and intelligent. The way Alex saw it, Marie had been very badly used by Paul Bernardo. Paul was also planning on relocating to St. Catharines, where Ms. Homolka lived, and getting married. This was all very sudden and out of character for him.
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Alex went on to discuss Paul’s sex life in detail. Paul was very domineering and liked rough sex. He had talked to Alex about having anal sex a couple of times. Paul had this fantasy about about having sex in his business suit with his briefcase in his hand while his wife was in a housecoat, Alex said breathlessly.
Paul had been out driving with Alex’s younger brother and he said something about getting some girl and raping her.
Alex told them that Paul had been in Florida in March the previous year, again with Van. Paul had taken a tipsy girl up to his room and raped her when she passed out.
Alex spoke in non sequiturs: his phrasing was awkward and stilted, but he seemed to know more about Paul Bernardo than Steve Irwin knew about his own brother.
Alex said Paul had been a professional worm picker for the past two or three seasons. He always had a van in the spring for worm picking, but he drove a 1980 or 1981 white Capri, otherwise. Recently, he had leased a 1989 gold Nissan 240SX. Alex thought he had worked in accounting somewhere for the past year and a half
Alex summed up his longtime neighbor and friend as sly, manipulative, trendy, a preppy dresser, a braggart and an instigator. According to Alex, Paul was an insecure non-smoker, maybe left-handed, who would drink to fit in. He was secretive and did not Hke people going into his room. At one point, Alex thought Paul had been involved in Christian television broadcasting. Paul wore leather jackets. He had extended credit. Alex knew Paul always carried a knife in his car.
Listening to Alex Smirnis was a contact sport. By the time Alex and Tina left, Detective Irwin and Sergeant Munro felt like they had been whacked in the head a half a dozen times. At least now Irwin knew what a real Christian looked hke. They did not know whether or not to take Alex Smirnis seriously.
What they did know was they needed to pull the file on the December 27, 1987, rape of Mary Booth. In that file, they found Sergeant McNiffs incorrectly dated supplementary report about his meeting with Jennifer GaUigan and what she had
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told the sergeant about her violent, tumultuous relationship with Paul Bernardo.
The behavior that Jennifer GaUigan described confirmed a great deal that Alex Smirnis had said. More than that, Mary Booth said her assailant w^ls driving a white Capri. And the street she was raped on, Bathgate, was only a couple of blocks from Sir Raymond Drive. The composite drawing that had been developed from Mary’s description was surprisingly similar to the one that Irwin had arranged to have published the previous May.
The Scarborough rapes were not the only sexual assaults in the city. With one thing and another, Irwin did not get to Paul Bernardo’s door until late in the afternoon on November 19, almost two months after they had talked to the Smirnises and pulled the Mary Booth file.
It was a thirty-minute drive from 40 College Street to 21 Sir Raymond Drive in rush-hour traffic. Paul was not home. A lanky man about six feet with wispy hair and Coke-bottle glasses, who appeared very nervous, answered the door. He said he was Paul Bernardo’s father, Kenneth. Irwin and Munro identified themselves and gave Mr. Bernardo their cards. The elder Bernardo assured the detectives that he would have his son call them.
And he did. The detectives invited Paul Bernardo downtown for an interview. He arrived at the sexual assault squad offices at 4:00 P.M. Irwin and Munro interviewed him in 3A, a special room the sexual assault squad had set up on the third floor. An unusual room in a police building, 3A had subdued lighting. The decor was early Holiday Inn, with a couch, chairs and a coffee table. It was wire
d for sound and could be set up for video equipment. Ironically, 3A was most often used to interview the victims of sexual assaults and had been designed to put them at ease.
At twenty-six, Paul Bernardo was only three years younger than Steve Irwin and barely a year younger than gray-haired
John Munro. He appeared to be slightly nervous, but that was natural.
“Come on, guys,” he joked, “this is worse than a job interview.” Paul talked freely and openly. He had a degree from the University of Toronto. He was one exam away from chartered accountancy: the exam could be taken as many times as necessary; it was offered twice a year by the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants. He had worked for big accounting firms for the past couple of years. He was currently unemployed—by choice. He had other plans.
He was deeply in love and would soon marry a beautiful girl named Karla Homolka and move to St. Catharines, where his fiancee was currendy working as a veterinarian’s assistant. They were going to start a company together, manufacturing and seUing motivational tapes.
He told the detectives he knew he looked like the picture in the paper. These three brothers he knew kidded him about how much he looked like the composite. He did not think it was very funny. He would never do anything like that to any woman. He did not need to rape women; he always had lots of girlfriends.
Detective Irwin talked about the Scarborough rapes and Margaret McWilHam’s murder. McWilliam had been murdered on August 27, 1987. Paul remembered his dad telling him about that—it had happened on his twent'-third birthday. Paul had been in Florida with his girlfriend.
Irwin and Munro asked him if he could provide samples, so they could use science to categorically eliminate him from any further suspicion. Sergeant Munro explained his rights. In Canada a suspect was not obliged to provide a blood sample, but Paul Bernardo said he was more than happy to do it.
All the coincidences—the white Capri, the proximity of Bathgate to Sir Raymond Drive, his striking resemblance to the composite, the graphic details of his strange sexual proclivities, which Sergeant McNiff had documented during his interview with Jennifer Galligan, the fact that he really did not know exactly where he had been when Sharon Moon was raped in
May—they all dissolved with the detectives’ suspicions in an aftershock of recognition.
Detective Irwin and Sergeant Munro saw themselves in Paul Bernardo, and they could not imagine themselves capable of such heinous, despicable sex crimes. Paul did not appear angry, he seemed happy. He didn’t hate women, he loved them. He was not secretive, he was forthcoming. Paul was far more credible than his detractor, Alex Smirnis, who, with his awkward, strange way of speaking, might just be trying to collect the reward.
It just did not seem possible that such a well-educated, well-adjusted, congenial young man like Paul Bernardo could be responsible for such horrible crimes. Without hesitation, Paul pricked his fmger with the lance they had given him and left a dollop of blood on a cotton swab. He pulled out a tuft of hair and spit on a blotter. He was pohte and soft-spoken. Paul Bernardo was gone by 4:45 p.m.
Science would be the final arbiter. In Steve Irwin’s opinion, things were so bad that a cop could not get a prosecutor to court on a sexual assault charge without the science anyway. Once he had handed the samples over to Kim Johnston at the Center for Forensic Science the following day, Paul Bernardo was out of sight and out of mind.
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jt was around 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday, November 20, and Karla was sitting in her bedroom in the basement readmg the Compendium of Pharmaceuticals ami Specialties.
She had been verv^ busy for the past two or three months. It was one thing having to plan a wedding the size of the one she and Paul were going to have; it was quite another to have to plan your sister’s rape at the same time.
Thank God she had already picked out her wedding dress in
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September—the Ilissa design by Demetrios from Tatter’s Lane in Niagara Falls, New York. Paul was such a sweetie. He had helped her pick it out, put down the deposit and everything. And she had most of the bridesmaids’ measurements—except Debbie Purdie’s—so that was well in hand.
Karla had come to the conclusion that the only way to do Tammy properly was to knock her right out. The VaHum Karla had for her cat Shadow’s urinary problem, crushed and sprinkled on Tammy’s spaghetti, had not worked at all.
When she and Paul experimented, mixing crushed VaHum in Tammy and Tricia’s drinks during the summer, the taste had been bitter and Karla was sure both of them had noticed it.
Then she went out and got a prescription for some sleeping pills called Elavil, but the Compendium had said Elavil had a gradual, cumulative effect, so she had not even bothered to fill it. Finally, she figured out exactly what to do.
Being in charge of the drug registry at work, Karla had a working knowledge of the Compendium of Pharmaceuticals and Specialties, the large medical reference work that gave detailed information about every drug on the market. The compendium was updated every couple of years. Karla “borrowed” the outdated twenty-second edition from the clinic and brought it home. In the past, her mother had taken Halcion, a well-known prescription sleeping pill, and it seemed to work very well. Karla read up on Halcion. It sounded ideal.
Halcion had the fewest contraindications of all the sleeping potions, and the compendium said it was safe. It was real easy to get, too. Cats and dogs were often prescribed sedatives, but the chnic seldom stocked the drugs. The vets would ask Karla to order whatever was required from the drugstore in the opposite plaza. Karla would walk across the street, pay for it, and bring the prescription back. She and Paul could easily crush a half a dozen pills and mix them in her sister’s drinks at Christmastime. That should do the trick. Tammy would make a great Christmas present for Paul.
Because of the fiasco during the summer and the fuss Paul had made when Tammy started to wake up, Karla knew she had to really put her down this time. At the clinic they used an
inhalant anesthetic called halothane to put animals out for surgery. Karla knew all about halothane. It was part of her job to administer the anesthetic to animals during surgery.
She did that by monitoring the regulator on the oxygen tank through which a very small amount of halothane was vaporized with oxygen and dehvered to the animal through the mask. Vaporized in a ver^’ low ratio—one or two parts per hundred parts oxygen—was the only way halothane was to be used. It could be very dangerous in concentrated form.
Since halothane was not a regulated drug and Karla was in charge of maintaining the drug dispensary, she could easily put a bottle or two in her bag. When she got home, Karla put the plain brown bottles in the cupboard under the sink in her washroom downstairs.
The stealing part bothered Karla, and she still had bad memories about the Ketamine incident with Dr. Ker at her old job. Just to be on the safe side, she advised the vets at Martindale that they had best install a new vaporizing regulator because the one they had was not working properly. It had been mixing far too much halothane with the oxygen.
She had really thought this thing with Tammy through. After all, she did not want to kill her own sister; she just wanted to knock her out and give her to Paul for Christmas. They sedated animals before they put them to sleep for surgery, so it should be all right to do it to her sister. There was some risk without the proper equipment—she would have to put the halothane on a cloth and hold it over Tammy’s face—but she would make sure Tammy had plenty of air and check her breathing regularly.
That settled in her mind, Karla focused on her wedding. She was just about to pick up her pen and write “Dirty” Purdie another letter about how wonderful her wedding dress was and ask her—for the third or fourth time—to send her measurements and the money for her bridesmaid’s dress, when there was an insistent tapping on her window.
“What are you doing here?” she exclaimed whe
n she saw him. She opened the basement window. Paul sometimes came to see her on Wednesdays, but never on Tuesdays. Her pleasant surprise quickly dissipated. He looked and sounded real upset.
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“I need to talk to you,” he whispered. “It’s really, really important. Don’t tell your parents I’m here.” Karla was almost frantic—what could possibly be wrong? She ran upstairs and told her mother she was going out for a walk.
Paul was bent right out of shape because he had been called in by the pohce: he told her about the interview and about giving the samples. He told her he had pricked his finger for the blood. He had had to do it, or else they would have been really suspicious.
Karla had never seen him this upset. He was totally panicked. They were just driving aimlessly around St. Catharines. Karla tried to reassure him. She was sure the police did not really know anything, that it was just routine. After all. Van Smirnis had been going around saying Paul looked just like the picture in the paper.
The bastard had probably called him in. If the police had anything on him, they would have arrested him right there. Hadn’t Paul always told her he was careful? Besides, she had been with him that night in May when the girl was raped. Karla knew that for sure, and she would say so.
“What if they decide to arrest me, just because they can’t find anybody else, because I look hke the composite?” And he kept repeating, over and over, “What if they charge me, what if they charge me?”
Karla was totally resolved. She knew she had to put a stop to this aberrant behavior of his. Karla told him to stop worrying. She said the pohce would not charge people just to solve a case. Paul said the detective had talked a lot about Margaret McWilHam. If they compared his samples to samples taken from Margaret McWilliam, Paul would be absolved.
Paul said the pohce told him that it would probably be a month or so before they had the results from his samples. They went to the library. While Karla checked out books on computer programs, Paul went through the newspapers on microfiche. With the detailed eye of an accountant, he noted the dates of all the rapes attributed to the Scarborough rapist, the name of the newspapers that had reported the story, the public
Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 11