Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka
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Or maybe this rower girl could recognize him. Paul was supposed to use her pantyhose—he always had a pair in the car with his knife and a piece of cord, but he would no more pull a stocking over his head than he would put a hat on Snuffles.
In Karla’s estimation, he had been very lucky in Scarborough. Obviously the police were not that smart, or maybe, just maybe, he had been as smart and caretlil as he said he was. Nevertheless, now it was far too close to her home for her comfort.
At this rate, Karla could lose him—forever. And of course, she could go to jail for Tammy. After all, as Paul was fond of telling her when he was mad, she had killed her own sister with her stupid drugs.
On top of everything else, there was this Alison person Paul had met in Florida. Karla did not mind pretending that she was Paul’s sister when the girl called—she sounded nice. But the fact that Alison liked anal intercourse, when Karla did not, really bothered her. Once again, Karla felt she was losing control.
On her twenty-first birthday, Karla wrote Paul a letter: “You hate me. You say you want to go out with other girls … you say I make you sick. You tell me to pack and leave. (You tell me to eat shit and die, etc., etc., etc.)”
She admitted her innate idiocy, her inability to show love
and respect, but she demonstrated her superior intellect with a simplistic tautology: “I think, if we truly loved each other the way we thought we did, in the past tense, we could have been able to overcome anything …”
She went on to admit it was all her fault—sure, he had said things to hurt her, but she had said very hurtful things to him as well and so on, blah, blah: “I want us to be happy like we used to be. I think you hate me too much for that to ever happen …” Paul and Karla drove up to Kitchener to celebrate her birthday and Paul’s Grandfather Eastman’s, which coincidentally fell on the same day. They went to the Charcoal Steakhouse for dinner.
Karla knew she had to do something very special to hold this wild, dangerous man whom she loved so much. On the way to Kitchener, she lifted her skirt, pulled down her panties and mooned a car full of teenage girls. Paul loved it. Then Karla remembered Jane.
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fourteen
t was Paul and Karla’s intenrion to make a lot of money on their wedding. The key was to invite a large number of people to the wedding—whether they knew them or not—and tell them to give money, not gifts. Karla was racking her brain for names, when she remembered Jane. There were some things money could not buy. Jane was one of them.
Karla and Jane first met when Karla was still working at the Number One Pet Center and Jane came in all excited about this
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little Cairn terrier named Toto in the window. Jane was twelve years old at the time. She started hanging around all the time, offering to do odd jobs in the store.
Karla made sure Jane was invited to one of her showers. She also decided to call Jane up and invite her over to the house. Jane was bouncy and blond. She looked a bit like Karla, except she had larger breasts. She really looked more like Karla’s dead sister, Tammy. She would make a perfect weddmg gift.
When Jane got the call she couldn’t believe it. Jane loved Karla. Karla was beautiful and she loved animals almost as much as Jane did. And Karla had been so nice to her when she went into the pet store and wanted to pet Toto.
She had not heard from or seen Karla in three years. The call came right out of the blue. Jane said that she would just love to come over and see Karla’s house and meet her dog.
That first night in June was magical. It was as though Karla was the big sister Jane did not have. Jane was the only child of divorced parents and she lived with her mother in Fonthill, a nearby town.
When Jane got to 57 Bayview, Karla was alone. Karla told her that Paul, her fiance, also lived there, but he had gone out for the night. It would be just hke a pajama party or a sleepover, Karla told Jane. Karla and Jane had a great time. They walked into town and Karla bought Jane dinner. They talked and talked and got caught up on old times.
When they got back to the house they watched a video— Ghost, with Demi Moore. It was so romantic, so sad. They put on some great music and had some drinks and played with Buddy. Buddy was Karla’s Rottweiler. He was just a puppy—a big puppy. He was so great. Karla had a brand-new video camera. Karla loved videotaping; she had made videos for school projects and she took a lot of pictures of Jane playing with Buddy.
Jane had always wanted to try alcoholic drinks, so Karla happily obliged. Karla made Jane some really good drinks. The next thing Jane knew, it was morning and she felt really sick.
When she came downstairs, she met Paul for the first time. Then she threw up. Paul and Karla drove her home. She was in bed with the flu for the next three days. Her mother kept asking her what a married couple in their twenties could possibly want with a fifteen-year-old girl?
Karla called Paul on his car phone. “I have a surprise for you,” she whispered provocatively. “Get home.”
When he got home he could not believe his eyes: Karla had brought Tammy back to life again. And she was asleep on the floor in their bedroom. She was wearing his white Oxford Hall sweatshirt—the one Karla had shrunk. It was pushed up around her neck. Her breasts were much larger than Karla’s. Karla knew that, but she pointed out—again—that hers were better.
Paul was very glad he had reminded Karla about the Boy Scouts’ motto: “Be prepared.” They had crushed a bunch of Halcion tablets—-just in case—and mixed them in a solution that they kept in a test tube in the bathroom. It was blue, hke the water in Lake Ontario, which they could see fi^om the second dormer window in their bedroom. Karla had mixed some of her blue water into Jane’s drinks. She had also brought another bottle of halothane home fi-om work—-just in case.
After what had happened to Tammy, Paul was very concerned about the drugs, but Karla had reassured him. Tammy probably had died because she had had too much to eat and drink just before she was knocked out. It was common medical and veterinary practice not to allow patients food for at least twelve hours before surgery. Jane would be fine. There would be no problem. This time Karla would get it right.
Paul got the video camera. Karla got the halothane and a cloth. She put some halothane on the cloth and held it near Jane’s mouth and nose. This time Karla would make sure the girl got enough air. Paul got started making the video he had wanted to make with Tammy Lyn.
First he had to pull ofl”Jane’s white cotton panties. He held the camera steadier this time, while he lubricated Jane’s vagina. Then he panned to a long shot of Karla administering the
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halothane. In the background there was the usual bedroom mess. Jane was spread-eagled on the floor, with her head slighdy raised on one of Paul and Karla’s new king-size pillows. Karla was intent on her work: holding that halothane-soaked cloth just so close, over Jane’s face.
Next, Karla started performing cunnilingus on Jane. She licked Jane and then raised her head, licked her lips, wagged her tongue back and forth and smiled wantonly for the camera. Then she did the extreme close-up thing, just the way she had the previous Christmas. Only this time Karla pretended to plant a big, fat kiss on the camera lens.
Then she sucked Jane’s breasts, first the right, then the left. When she sat up, Paul caught her smiling face. Karla could get Paul so hard. It was very hard now, so he pulled it out and put it in Jane. This was just too good to be true. Jane was a virgin. He told Karla to keep her down.
“Shit, I’ll have to bust it,” he said, referring to Jane’s hymen.
He focused the camera on his penis as he moved it in and out. Then he rolled Jane over on her side and discovered she had bled on the blanket. He held the camera on the spots of blood and then focused on her buttocks.
“Pretty nice ass, eh?” he said as he used a tissue to wipe the blood off Jane’s thighs.
Th
is was exactly the way it was supposed to have been with Tammy. Karla was truly amazing. Every time things started to get a Httle tense or he became distracted, Karla would do something that refocused his attention on just how great Karla was. Paul guessed he would have to go through with it and marry her now. Where would he ever find another girl like Karla?
Karla had kept her sleeveless lifeguard tank top on, but she was naked from the waist down. She climbed over Jane’s face, held up the tank top and rubbed her clitoris on Jane’s nose and mouth.
“Okay, okay,” Paul said. “Take her hand and put it in your cunt.”
Kneeling beside Jane, with her legs apart, Karla took Jane’s lifeless hand and rubbed it against her labia. She rotated her hips
lasciviously and then got that incredible look in her eyes—that look of incomparable lust and evil that Paul loved so much.
“Put the fingers inside you,” he said, and Karla did just as she was told.
And Karla was right. Jane was just fine. They put her up on their bed and she slept through the night. Reviewing the footage—he had almost fifteen minutes—it was perfect. There were those silly helium balloons fi-om Karla’s shower hovering in the background. Karla looked great. Everything was perfect. What a great wedding present.
The next day, after they drove Jane home, Paul punched Karla hard a couple of times on her upper left arm and on the left side of her back. Karla was dumbfounded. What could possibly be wTong?
“Everything went smoothly with Jane,” Paul explained angrily. “Why couldn’t it have been the same with Tammy?”
It was Thursday, June 14, 1991 and to Leslie Mahaff^’ nothing seemed quite right with the world. It might have been hormonal, or it might have been because of Chris Evans, or her mother, or her boyfi-iend, Grant. Maybe it was a combination o{ things: Chris’s sudden death in that awflil car accident on Monday, her boyfriend, her mother and her hormones. Leslie’s counselor called it “the trouble.”
“The trouble” was that nothing she heard or did seemed relevant to her hfe, except maybe the Doors. LesHe lit a Du-Maurier and leaned against the Rock. She had been arrested for shoplifting a couple of months earher. She had stolen a ca.ssette copy of The Doors’ Morrison Hotel:
“Can’t you feel it now that Spring has come, that it IS time to live in the scattered Sun.”
The cops charged her with “theft under” and she pled out to the Alternative Measures program. As punishment, she had to keep a scrapbook about criminals, their crimes and punishments; write a letter of apology to her parents and donate
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twenty-five doUars to a charity. Now she was seeing a counselor.
But now spring was gone with its scattered sun and Chris Evans was dead; she had just come from the funeral home where they had had a kind of wake that would be extended tonight at the Rock.
There had been a so-called “field party”; it seemed a lifetime ago, but this was Thursday. The accident had happened on Monday night and six kids, including Chris, had got in somebody’s car and taken off and lost control over the crest of a hill on Sideroad One and collided with a huge, old maple tree. Now four of them, including Chris, had joined the spirit in that tree. It was not entirely true that Chris was Leslie’s best friend, but knowing a dead person was a bit like knowing a rock star.
“The trouble” really started at the end of January when Leslie got her interim report card. Some of her marks were awful: 25 percent in visual arts; 35 percent in EngHsh; 54 percent in keyboard but 83 percent in history—she seemed to have an intuitive understanding of events in time and space.
The atmosphere at school had become weird: it seemed to Leslie that her teachers were hiding something, treating her differently, but maybe it was just the accident and Chris’s death. LesHe had no way of knowing that a series of memos about her from the guidance office were circulating among her teachers. The latest one was marked Confidential and requested that Leslie’s teachers call her mother. The urgency was stressed in capital letters, for them to PLEASE CALL MRS. MAHAFFY TODAY, IF POSSIBLE.
It all had to do with skipping classes and making sure Leslie paid for the consequences. Teachers were told not to let Leslie know that her mother was contacting them. Debbie Mahaffy advised “that Leslie is a student who does respond well to praise and will work to achieve it.”
When LesHe did find out, it did not really surprise her. After all, her own mother had gone to a justice of the peace and
sworn out a Warrant of Apprehension, so that the cops could arrest her when she ran away from home.
Leshe had been trying to do the right thing. A few Saturday nights earlier, Leshe had even phoned home from her friend Nina’s house to ask permission to go to the movies and see Tlie Silence of the Lambs. Her mother did not think that was a good idea. Instead of gomg home, Leslie had gone to one of Eric Drage’s parties, got stoned, had sex with Jay Booth and stayed at his place. He was twenty and lived in Room 12 at the Crestwood Motel. It was April 1, 1991—April Fools!
The Crestwood Motel was runaway city. Leslie’s friends, Nikki Eisbrenner and Kristen Fee, were in Room 9. Nikki’s dad had even given her money for the rent. Dave Scott was in Room 10. He was a friend of Jay’s and Grant’s, but he really bugged Leslie. Once, he had grabbed her butt.
Jay had been picked up on three “fail to appears” and a weapons charge. Leslie was left alone for what seemed long periods of time over those two weeks she Hved in Jay’s room. Not that LesHe was necessarily unhappy. The way Jay Booth saw it, Leshe could never bring herself to talk about what was going on inside her.
There were a couple of older guys, friends of Dave’s, real pigs. dirt' looking, like the little, older guy with the mustache, messy brown hair and the beer belly who was always hanging around the motel. Then there was a guy in Room 11, Randy— he was with a strange woman who had a German Shepherd named Ninja.
Leslie had become blase, detached, cool; probably for some vers’ good reasons, but not being particularly self-aware, like many kids her age, she could only express it through malfeasance. It washed over her like the endless water on which her father floated. He worked for the Mimstrv^ o{ Natural Resources. They called it hydrographic surveying. Never around in the summer, Dan MahaSv’ v^as always off” on some lake somewhere, charting its contours.
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Leslie was leaning against the Rock smoking, thinking. A lot of the local teenagers—the cops called them mall rats—hung around the Rock, smoking the odd joint, snorting this and that, gossiping, dropping acid. The newspaper reports described these gatherings as field parties, but they were more than that. This little enclave was almost as high-tension as the hydro wires that disappeared through the vanishing point along this hydroelectric right-of-way.
Leslie made sure Grant knew she had slept with Jay. As far as Leslie was concerned, she would do as she pleased. One night at the Crestwood Motel—the same night Grant banged on Jay’s door—yelling for Leslie to come out at the top of his lungs at three in the morning, yelling out, “She’s a pig,” over and over again—Grant had sat all night in David Scott’s room, the one right next to Jay’s, mixing his feral, jealous rage with booze, getting drunk. Leslie had really crossed his wires.
Some of her friends actually thought Leslie took some perverse pleasure in Grant’s jealous rages. For instance, she knew the less she said, the more frantic Grant would become. So whenever she was around him, Leslie would be deadly quiet.
A couple of weeks before, Leslie’s good friend Amanda Carpino had stayed over at her house. They had gone to Mac’s Milk for Slurpees or whatever, and these guys came reeling out of Carrigan’s Bar. One had a T-shirt on that said I Hate Ritch-ies—whatever that meant. They said they had lots of money and would show Leshe and Amanda a good time. Leslie surprised Amanda and said they did not have enough of anything to show them a good time. Leslie was slowly discovering that “the trouble” c
ould be turned into a profound, irrepressible force. “The trouble” was a source of energy and power, and it did not necessarily have to be self-destructive.
After the police picked her up at the Crestwood, drunk, at 3:30 in the afternoon on Friday, April 12, and took her home, she had run away again. Her mother made her dad take the warrant of apprehension over to the police station again, but Leslie eventually went back home—mostly of her own accord. Nikki convinced her. Nikki, who was sixteen, was like an older sister to Leslie.
Nikki called the police and they picked Leslie up in front of the Miracle Food Mart and took her home. This time Leshe stayed and went back to counsehng.
She made a couple of deals and a few concessions: no drinking, no skipping school. Her parents set up a reward system— allowance on a daily rather than weekly basis, another five minutes on curfew for every week endured without an incident, stuff hke that.
Leslie knew she probably should not be drinking and screwing around all the time. She made it through May pretty well. Her counseler noted: “Leslie has matured over the past few weeks. She believes the situation at home is much improved, in large part because she is actively challenging the trouble.”
Chris and the other three dead kids were going to be buried tomorrow. Leslie ironed the waves out of her long blond hair and pulled on a pair of cutoff jean shorts and her navy kangaroo Georgetown top; she slipped into her leather deck shoes and walked over to the SuperCenter, met Amanda and went to the Rock for a cigarette. At 11:15 a.m., “challenging the trouble,” she went to school to write an exam.
fifteen
xaggerated when dejected or walking deliberately, the men in the Bernardo clan list back and forth on rather large feet, toes pointed out at cartoonlike angles. If on a mission, their gait becomes more pronounced, their bodies leaning toward the anticipated destination, heads hunkered down—not at all unlike the Gotham City—bound Penguin, as Burgess Meredith played him on the old “Batman” television series.