It was Debbie Purdie’s story about Karla that Kristy thought most strange. Since that night in 1987 when Karla brought Paul back to the hotel room at the Howard Johnson’s in Scarborough, Knsrs’ had been fascinated by Karla. There was just something about her. How did a teenage girl from St. Catharines snare this rich, well-fixed, good-looking older man with the great car?
Debbie and Karla had been out shopping before the wedding and they had stopped in a pet store. Karla picked up a big leather studded dog collar and tried it on. Debbie said to her, “That’s a bit big for Buddy, don’t you think?”
Karla replied, “Well, actually it’s for me.” Karla bought the dog collar. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said, “but Paul gets off on this stuff”
eighteen
he first thing Sergeant Larry Maracle saw when he got to the Faywell Road Bridge early Sunday morning was a man holding a fishing pole. That would not normally be remarkable. A lot of people fish around Lake Gibson and the reservoir. But this guy was not fishing. He was using his fishing pole to prevent a human torso firom drifting under the bridge.
“The torso was that of a female,” wrote Sergeant Maracle in his notebook. “It was minus the head and appendages. There
were no obvious scars or trauma to the torso, other than dismemberment.”
Sergeant Maracle, a full-blooded Mohawk Indian, was a large, able, steady man. The officers on the scene the night before had found everything but the torso. Maracle had just been assigned to the investigation. What he saw—the torso bobbing upright, held by the tip of a fishing rod—he found unsettling.
It was pulled from the water. The police took pictures, numbered the cement blocks, one through seven, put them in plastic bags and shipped everything to the pathologist at Hamilton General Hospital.
Exhausted from the nightlong celebration of their nuptials, the newlywed Bernardos spent a quiet day resting at home on Bayview Drive. They did some last-minute packing. Traveling light, Karla packed a single-burner hot plate.
By the time pathologist Dr. David King and his assistants began to extricate the body parts from the cement blocks the following morning, Paul and Karla were boarding a plane in Buffalo. From there, they would fly to Chicago, then make their connecting flight to Hawaii.
Sergeant Maracle went to Hamilton General Hospital. He was there with Sergeants Walkinson and Briggs, Dr. King’s assistant, Paul Swioklo, and the Niagara Regional Police identification unit’s Constable Michael Kershaw and a civilian employee named Smith.
They used a sledgehammer and a chisel: Block 1 contained the left upper arm; Block 2, the right upper arm; Block 3, the head; Block 4, the right forearm and hand; Block 5, the left thigh, the lower right leg and foot; Block 6, the right thigh and left lower leg and foot; Block 7 contained the left lower leg and foot and left forearm and hand.
The procedure was partially videotaped and Constable Kershaw took dozens of still photographs. There were no tattoos or scars. There was no jewelry or clothing; no ring lines on any fingers; no nail polish on any nails. Her hair had been reddish
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brown to blond. It was lighter colored at the ends. The ears were pierced. The eyes were brown. The teeth had braces.
Sergeant Maracle had been working on the Melanie Warner case when he was called to Lake Gibson. Melanie Warner was reported missing on May 14, 1987. Her stepflither had been charged with first-degree murder, but her remains had never been found. Melanie could easily be the person whose remains were in these cement blocks. Sergeant Maracle brought photographs and dental records with him the following day.
The postmortem team now included two particular specialists from Niagara Falls, dentist George Burgman and orthodontist John Thompson. The only way to identify this dead girl would be through dental records. They X-rayed the head and the other body parts. It was determined tliat whoever this was, she had been about fifteen years old and her name was not Melanie Warner. They collected various samples and then put the body parts in cold storage for the night.
Sergeant Maracle called Child Find. They gave him the names of four missing teenage girls: Leslie Mahaffy, Kim McAndrews, Melanie Warner and an American girl from Minnesota, Shannon Burns. He struck Melanie Warner off the list. Both Mahaffy and Burns had blue eyes, so that left McAndrews.
On Friday, they laid out the body parts in a way that they might have fit together. It looked like a grotesque puppet without strings. They took photographs and measurements. There was a tentative cut in the bone on the right femur of the torso, close to where the bone had ultimately been cut through. That helped Dr. King conclude that she had been dismembered with a power saw.
She had been approximately five feet five or six inches tall. Half of the right humerus bone was missing. The body parts weighed ninety-one pounds. Alive, the girl had weighed between one hundred and ten or twenty pounds. They removed the upper and lower jaws and gave them to the dentists.
Dr. Thompson took twelve periapical X-rays and made a plaster model of the jaw. When Drs. Burgman and Thompson got together later that day and compared information, they knew who it was.
Leslie Mahafiy had a speed bracket-type brace on her upper and lower jaw, a formidable combination of hooks, coils, sprmgs and arch wires that was uncommon in North America. This, along with four missing bicuspids and a filling matched Leslie’s profile.
The next day the police drove the jawbones to Bracebridge, where Leslie’s dentist was vacationing. He confirmed what the other dentists had concluded. That afternoon. Detective Sergeant Bob Waller began to organize Superintendant Laidlaw and Police Victim Services member Pat Smith for a long, dark drive to Midland, where the Mahaffy’s were staying at the Park Villa Motel. It was Wednesday, July 10, Debbie Mahaffy’s forty-fifth birthday, when the police arrived and told her it was her daughter.
Because the girl had brown eyes, the police had earher assured Mrs. Mahaffy that it was not Leslie in Lake Gibson. But Debbie Mahaffy had not believed them. She instinctively knew that death and cement could turn even the bluest eyes dirty brown.
Paul and Karla had a hell of a time on their honeymoon. They made a video record: footage from the airplanes as they island-hopped, combined with some stalking scenes, as well as many, many interludes with Paul and Karla having fun in their hotel rooms.
They caught some crabs by the seashore and brought them back to their room.
“I killed one. Show them the one I killed,” Karla demanded, grinning at the hotel sink full of the remaining live crabs.
“I think it went down the drain. Sorry, Kar,” Paul said ruefully. Then they boiled the crabs on the hot plate Karla had shrewdly packed.
Karla wore a bikini, and remarked how boring one particular excursion they took had been. In one video segment, framed against a magnificent sunset, Karla delivered a soliloquy to her new husband, who happened to be showering at the time.
“The beauty of this ocean, this beach and everything here
does not come close to equaling the love I feel for you, sweetheart,” she extemporized, as she videotaped the sun sinking into the bay from their hotel-room balcony.
Rain and clouds dogged the honeymoon. They returned home with the requisite trinkets and Tshirts and a section of the Honolulu newspaper dated July 11, 1991, featuring an article headlined, “Pulled off road and raped, says woman in Maui.”
Karla’s parents picked them up at the Buffalo airport and told them the poHce had found body parts in Lake Gibson and identified them as the remains of that litde girl from Burlington. Paul and Karla were seized by fear and astonishment. After all the trouble they had gone to to make sure Leslie would never be found. Karla was frantic. She knew she should have taken the day off work and supervised the cement work.
On Wednesday, Karla got another prescription for Halcion from a new doctor named Lovegrove. She also went back to Dr. Jaeger and refilled her other prescription for Halcion. Karla now felt she was well prepared for any opportunity that might
present itself They had Jane and her mother over for dinner to allay the mother’s concern about Jane’s relationship with Paul and Karla.
Jane’s mother continued to be perplexed by the couple’s inordinate interest in her fifteen-year-old daughter. But Jane loved Karla and her mother could not reason with her. Paul’s strange, impassioned rant about his untenable relationship with his mother, and the fact that his father was not his real father, did nothing to assuage her concern. But Jane was turning sixteen and her mother felt powerless.
Paul and Karla began to go out together looking for new “sex slaves.” Paul developed a real thing for a waitress from the Red Hot Chili Pepper, a beer-and-wings joint in downtown St. Catharines. He and Karla followed her home a couple of times. One night they succeeded in videotaping the waitress undressing through her bedroom window. She stood in the window, naked and rubbed lotion all over her body. Paul became so excited he could not steady the camera. As soon as he got
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back to the car, he masturbated furiously. Karla thought it was too flinny.
Occasionally, Paul encouraged Karla to go out on the front lawn at three in the morning and strip. He would watch from the wmdow and masturbate while Karla danced around, bumping and grinding, stark naked on the street. If the neighbors saw it, nobody ever complamed.
When she saw the car m her rear4ew mirror, Rachel Ferron could not believe her eyes. It was the same car—a gold late-model Japanese make—that had followed her two nights earlier. This time, she could not shake him. She had been driving all over St. Catharines for the past tvo hours, trying to get away, wondering what to do. She kept driving by her boyfriend’s house, waiting for him to get home and save her. Finally, he got home and she pulled into his driveway. By that time, she had the car’s license-plate number and knew the car that was following her was a gold Nissan.
Rachel and her boyfriend looked out the window and saw someone in the bushes two doors down. They raced outside, but whoever it was ran away. The two got in Rachel’s boyfriend’s car and started to drive around looking for the Nissan. They found it in a tavern parking lot just up the street. Once they had stopped and made sure she had the right number, they went back to the boyfriend’s house and called the poHce. The uniformed officer who took their report determined the car belonged to Paul Kenneth Bernardo. He lived at 57 Bayview Drive in Port Dalhousie. Rachel reported being followed twice again by the same car before the end of the month, but she never heard anything from the police.
On Monday, July 22, 1991, Constable Michael Kershaw, the identification officer for the Niagara Regional Police, took time out from the Mahaff^’ investigation to interview a handsome newly wed couple named Bernardo about a breakin at their home on Bayview Drive. They had been on their honeymoon
and estimated that there had been thirty thousand dollars worth of stuff stolen.
Entry apparendy had been gained through the basement window on the east side of the house. Paul Bernardo provided Constable Kershaw with a detailed list: VCR, Pentax 35mm camera, Compaq III computer and printer, Boss DR50() rhythm drum, Foster model x-26 recorder/mixer, Sony T77 camera, ladies’ 18K soHtaire ring with a 2 ct. diamond valued at $17,538, a 14K ladies’ gold ring with .35 ct. diamond valued at $1,955, a men’s Citizen quartz watch and an Alexander Julian watch, both valued at $288, and a 14K men’s yellow gold ring with .50 ct. diamond worth approximately $1,955, some dishes and cash. The total loss was exactly $30,286, according to Mr. Bernardo’s calculations. He had taken out an insurance policy six weeks earher.
Constable Kershaw was slightly suspicious. They were so specific about what they had lost, and had itemized it and valued it so quickly. But the veracity of their claim was a matter for their insurance company. If they could prove they had the stuff in the first place, even if they had burgled themselves, it would be difficult to reject. “Break and enters,” petty thievery was all too common in St. Catharines. Constable Kershaw was far more concerned about the Mahaffy sex killing and wanted to get back to his work with the cement and paint and the exact nature of the bone cuts. He had been in touch with Dr. Steven Symes in Tennessee, the world’s only expert in saw cuts made through human bones. That was interesting stuff. Constable Kershaw might even have to fly to Memphis.
The appointment of thirty-four-year-old Staff Sergeant Vince Bevan on Monday, July 15, as head of the Mahaffy investigation was met with incredulity by Superintendent Jim Moody. Big Jim, as he was known among the rank and file, was liked and respected by the rank and file, but not necessarily the brass. Therefore, his voice was not always heard.
Big Jim was staff superintendent. Number 11 Division, which meant he was responsible for policing in Grimbsy, St.
Catharines, Beamsville, Thorold, Port Robinson, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Virgil, St. David’s and Queenston. Staff Superintendent Moody had extensive experience with major crime investigations. Had it been up to him. Moody would certainly not have chosen Vince Bevan to lead a homicide investigation, let alone one as difficult as the Mahaffy case. Nevertheless, someone did.
The Niagara Regional Police had been formed by the politically motivated amalgamation of a dozen separate police forces forty years earher. As a consequence, there had been eleven too many chiefs of police; some o{ them were put back on the streets, walking beats.
Forty years later, the force was still racked by nepotism, vendettas and infighting, to such an extent that the government had just convened a multimillion-doUar commission of inquiry to investigate everyone and everything, including Vince Bevan’s late father, Superintendent Frank Bevan.
Big Jim had known Frank Bevan well before Frank retired and died. Frank had been in charge of purchasing. He was an able and dedicated administrator. Big Jim understood and respected paper-clip counting, and old Frank could count with the best. Vince Bevan might share his father’s administrative skills—his most recent job before he was appointed to the Mahaffy investigation had been the installation of a computer system—but he sure as hell did not share his father’s self-knowledge. Unlike his son, Frank had know^n he was not an investigator.
A few years earlier. Sergeant Vince Bevan had arrived at a murder scene near the monoHthic power station on the Niagara River. The victim was facedown, dead in the grass. Bevan turned the guy over so he could get a look at his face. Big Jim went berserk.
Superintendent Moody and Staff Sergeant Vince Bevan personified the conflicting forces that crippled modern poHcing.
Big Jim, who was everything that his name suggested—Irish, Catholic, rotund, large, dogmatic, old school—believed in fundamentals such as shoe leather, common sense and intuition.
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He did not believe in bureaucracy or computer technology or rhetoric. Big Jim did not have a university education.
On the other hand, Bevan w^as bright, university educated, heavily papered, through a multitude of special police courses and seminars, and believed that the key to effective policing was computing and community.
Bevan nodded toward the old methods much the way he genuflected in front of the altar on Sunday mornings—he too came from a long line of Irish Cathohcs—but when push came to shove, Bevan found refuge in a worldview that had cachet and currency: information management and data processing.
Bevan’s kind of policing caught a lot of people with parking tickets and traffic violations. While Big Jim fumed and pontificated, Bevan assimilated every bit of information that came his way.
Big Jim had been able to do something about Bevan then. He could do nothing now. The Mahaffy investigation was out of his jurisdiction. Jim Moody was only a couple of years from retirement himself He had rocked enough boats. He knew who had put Bevan in charge and why. Bevan had the paper and nepotism prevailed, in spite of the Colter Commission. But Big Jim no longer had a stomach for batdes he could not win.
Deputy Chief Peter Kelly enthusiastically briefed Staff Sergeant Bevan the following d
ay. Since LesHe Mahaffy had come from Burlington and was well known to the Halton Regional Police, but her body parts had been found in St. Catharines, it was decided that the investigation would be joint. It was agreed that Bevan, perceived as a good administrator and information manager, would be the head honcho, but he would work with Staff Sergeant Bob Waller and other members of the Halton force. They had interviewed a couple of the Mahaflys’ neighbors about a suspicious man they had seen that Saturday morning. They interviewed the clerk who worked in the Mac’s Milk store. He said a man had come into the store and asked if he had seen a fourteen-year-old girl. Khalid Haslam described Dan Mahaffy.
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The police determined what kind of cement had been used—Kwik-Mix—and that it hkely had been purchase^ at a Beaver Lumber outlet. They were running down credit-card receipts, but that was the proverbial needle in the haystack. Being a man who saw the future of policing almost exclusively in terms of information and database-management terms, haystack needles were Staff Sergeant Bevan’s forte.
All they really had to go on at that point was the paint on the cement blocks and the cement itself—crushed and sifted for hair and other debris.
The paint was unusual. It was industrial, generally applied to engines and motors. Bevan motivated the troops to pursue the paint—what exactly it was, who manufactured it. The next step was to interview all those who might have had an opportunity to obtain the paint at the factory level.
Among the hundreds of people they interviewed, they identified a strange thirty-two-year-old factory worker named Jonathan Yeo, who had a history of aggressive, sexually deviate behavior. Yeo worked at Dofasco, a steel mill in Hamilton.
The paint was not inconsistent with the black paint used in the Dofasco plant. Yeo lived with his wife outside the nearby town of Grimbsy, about ten minutes from Lake Gibson.
Bizarrely, Yeo was living next door to another diabolical figure named John Peter Stark. Stark was the object of a massive, ongoing Metropolitan Toronto Pohce investigation into the disappearance and suspected murder of his teenage daughter’s best friend, Julie Stanton. Stark lived with his wife, Alison. Shordy after the pohce began to investigate him. Stark picked up and moved way up north to Napanee. Bevan was highly suspicious of Stark because whoever killed Leshe Mahafry had gone to a great deal of trouble to try and conceal her body. Julie Stanton’s body had not yet been found, and wasn’t until June of 1996.
Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 19