After returning from Quantico, Maracle briefed the troops. Supervising Special Agent McGrary had added a proviso to the FBI’s profile: since Kristen French had been severely beaten and there was deep musculoskeletal bruising around her rib cage, he recommended that the task force concentrate on individuals who had been previously convicted or were suspected of having committed violent sexual assaults.
Kristen French was buried on Karla Homolka’s twenty-second birthday. Four thousand mourners turned out for her funeral. Paul Bernardo addressed a birthday card to Karla: “To my lovely, loving wife,” and gave her another stuffed toy. Paul and Karla made plans for a summer vacation. Karla wanted to see the Mouse and Paul said he would take her back to Disney World.
The Green Ribbon Task Force was officially formed on Tuesday, May 5, 1992. Task force members began busily videotaping everything, as per the FBI’s advice. They set up a hidden video camera at Kristen’s grave site. The task force had been amply funded by the provincial government through the Ministries of the Attorney-General and Solicitor-General. They set up hotlines—toll-free numbers for tips—^and rented their own offices in Beamsville, Ontario, a small town just up the highway from St. Catharines.
As the head of the Green PJbbon Task Force, Inspector Vince Bevan became autonomous. Although professional courtesy prevailed, he no longer answered to the chief of the Niagara Regional Pohce. His bosses were bureaucrats at Queen’s Park, seat of Ontario’s provincial government, and until the money ran out, that was akin to not having any bosses at all.
Now obsessed with the Camaro, Bevan spent days writing
and releasing a voluminous report about the Camaro for the Halton District Body Repair Association, which allegedly reached all twenty-two hundred body and paint shops in the area. He described the car in very specific terms: “Paint code #84 ‘yellow beige,’ manufactured between 1975-79, average condition, paint finish dull, very plain, no chrome or pinstrip-ing.”
He was also busy with television. He called Marge Critchford, a producer for “America’s Most Wanted” and wondered if they were interested—now that Kristen French had been murdered.
Constable Scott Kenney and Sergeant Brian Nesbitt were assigned to investigate hotline tip 241. The call had been received on May 1. Rob Haney, an Ontario Provincial Police officer in Beaverton, Ontario, called it in.
Constable Haney was a regular at the Smirnises’ coffee shop in Brown Hill. Although he said his source wanted to remain anonymous. Constable Haney had been talking to Van Smirnis, who, destitute and unemployed, was serving coffee for his mother and father.
Haney gave particulars of Paul Bernardo, who lived in Port Dalhousie and who had been questioned in Toronto as a suspect in the Scarborough rapes. Haney said Bernardo was aggressive toward women; he had raped a girl in the basement of a house, and could only grow hair on his chin.
Bernardo liked small, petite v/omen; he had short hair and wore similar clothing to the Scarborough rapist. He had a good tan; he had been in Florida once, and a rape had taken place. Whenever a rape took place in Scarborough, he would dissociate himself from his friends and family for a period of time.
The report was long and disjointed. Constable Haney concluded by saying that Bernardo was a very violent and hostile individual who had short hair that was wavy and curly on top and shaved at the back of his head. He appeared to be intelligent and perceptive. He had admitted to beating his wife and had hit other girls on at least three occasions.
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Karia wrote and thanked Debbie Purdie for her birthday card.
“I’m getting pregnant. I can’t wait,” she said, explaining that her pregnancy was contingent on Paul getting a contract to make his rap album.
She also told Debbie that she had got an iguana named Spike from the clinic and that she and Paul were going to change their last name to Teale.
It took ten days for the tip from Constable Haney to get to Sergeant Nesbitt. Following the day Sergeant Nesbitt got the tip, he ran a computer check on Paul Bernardo—through CPIC—Canadian Police Information Center. Anyone in Canada who is charged with or suspected of a major crime by any poHce organization is supposedly entered in the system. No one had ever entered Paul Bernardo.
Accordmg to CPIC, Paul Bernardo had no previous criminal record, nor had he had any police contact concerning criminal activity. Sergeant Nesbitt and Constable Kenney decided to call on Paul anyway, mainly because they had been told to.
At 2:00 P.M. they drove over to 57 Bayview. From an upstairs window, Bernardo watched the plainclothes detectives approach the house. He pondered his hmited options.
Nesbitt and Kenney noted that the house and property were well kept and nicely groomed. There was a light gold Nissan 240 SX—^license-plate number 660 HFH—in the driveway. The vehicle was clean and in good shape.
The detectives, who were both short—Nesbitt was stockier than Kenney, who looked much younger than his forty years— knocked on the front door. When they did not get an answer, they walked around behind the garage. Nesbitt noted that there was a backyard with a large deck, partially enclosed by a privacy fence. No one was home. They started back to their cruiser.
Upstairs, Paul was resolved—he would have to confront them sooner or later. There was no time like the present. Steeling himself, he opened the front door.
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Walking back to the front steps, Nesbitt and Kenney identified themselves and showed Paul their badges. Nesbitt explained that they were investigating the death of Kristen French and that his name had surfaced in their investigation. Paul invited them into the living room. Struggling to get a grip, he sat down and tighdy clasped his hands together in his lap.
The detectives noted that the house was clean and well appointed. A wedding picture was prominently displayed. Paul’s wife was an attractive, young blonde. There was a Masonic certificate on the mantel. The young man was good-looking, with fine features. He appeared to be well-spoken and in good physical shape. Nesbitt described the look as “preppy” in his notes. His hair was short on the sides, slightly longer on the top, with a bit of a wave.
When Nesbitt asked if he had ever been involved with the pohce in the past, Paul readily admitted that he had been called in as a suspect in the Scarborough rape investigation because he looked like the composite they had pubHshed in the papers. At that point, Paul knew that he had them and he relaxed.
He went on to explain that he had been interviewed by Toronto pohce officers in November of 1990 and had voluntarily supplied samples for testing.
He told them his wife was a local girl, Karla Homolka, and they had been married in June, 1991. He told them that she was an animal health technician who worked at the Martindale Animal Clinic. She was there now—if they wanted to speak to her. He told them that he was an accountant, but he was currently unemployed.
Sergeant Nesbitt asked him where he had been on Thursday, April 16, 1992, around three in the afternoon. Without hesitation, Paul said that he was probably home, alone, writing lyrics to a rap song that he was composing. He said that he actually spent most of his time at home alone writing lyrics. He said he was going to become a rap singer, Hke Vanilla Ice.
The detectives asked him about cars. Paul told them that the only vehicle he and his wife had was the car in the driveway.
Had he ever owned a Camaro or had access to one, or had he driven a Camaro? Of course, Paul already knew they were
looking for someone who drove a Camaro. If they had anything concrete—from Scarborough or Niagara—they would not be chatting away like this. The visit only lasted fifteen or tw-enty minutes. As they left, Paul watched them look at the Nissan again. It was amazing. They were clueless.
Nesbitt and Kenney got into their cruiser, circled the block and pulled up a block away so they could look at the Nissan and see if it looked like a Camaro—from a distance. They both agreed it did not look
anything like a Camaro.
When Nesbitt got back to the station he ran another computer check on Bernardo. Nothing had changed over the past four hours. The next morning. Sergeant Nesbitt decided to call the Toronto Pohce about the Scarborough rapes. He talked to a detective on the sexual-assault squad. The Toronto detective told Sergeant Nesbitt that he wanted to speak with either Staff Inspector Joe Wolfe or a Detective Steve Irwin. Detective Irwin was in charge of the Scarborough rape investigation. Nesbitt left a message.
When Karla came home from work, Paul told her he had been “as cool as a cucumber” with the police. She bought it, but it scared her. What if they had come with a search warrant? They would have found all the videotapes in her hope chest. They decided to move them right away. Paul had a hiding place, high in the insulation of the loft in the garage.
They also decided it was time to move on the name change. Karla had suggested Teale after the rapist and serial killer Martin Thiel (pronounced teale) in the movie Criwinal Law.
Paul chose a new middle name—-Jason, after the hockey-masked murderer in the movie Friday the TliirteetitJi. He also had a pal he liked named Jason—anything but Kenneth.
He filed the formal apphcation to have his and Karla’s surname otTicially changed from Bernardo to Teale and his middle name from Kenneth to “Jason” on May 15, three days after Kenney and Nesbitt’s visit.
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Detective Irwin finally called Sergeant Nesbitt—eight days later—on May 20. Nesbitt was busy, helping the Green Ribbon Task Force move to its new headquarters in Beanisville. Inspector Bevan had personally negotiated the rent for the old town hall. He had got an excellent deal.
Nesbitt told Irwin about the tip and the interview he had had with Bernardo. Detective Irwin told Sergeant Nesbitt that Paul Bernardo was one of many suspects from whom they had collected samples. With budget restraints and staffmg problems at the forensic center, Bernardo had yet to be cleared.
Irwin and Nesbitt commiserated over the magnitude of their respective cases and how overworked they were. There were so many suspects and so little time. Besides, without science, Irwin observed, nobody in Toronto could get their sexual-assault cases to court anyway. Detective Irwin jocularly referred to his unit by its nickname—the hair-and-spit unit. Irwin agreed to fax Nesbitt some more information.
Nesbitt got three pages and a cover sheet a few hours later. Irwin noted on the cover sheet that he had photos and a video of Bernardo.
The three short pages included a supplementary report about Irwin’s interview with Bernardo on November 20, 1990, and a bit of information about the tips they had received, to which their interview had been a response.
Detective Steve Irwin did not send the notes from the interview with Alex Smirnis and his wife, Tina—since both sources were Smirnises the contents of the tips were remarkably similar—nor could he locate the five-page supplementary report Sergeant McNiff had filed after his meeting with Jennifer Galligan in January, 1988.
In Sergeant Nesbitt’s opinion, the information he received from Detective Irwin was of no assistance to his investigation.
“There was no information linking our investigation with the Scarborough rape investigation,” the sergeant noted.
In the interim, Nesbitt found Rachel Perron’s stalking reports from the summer of 1991, which identified Paul Bernardo as the stalker. He ignored them too.
Even though Paul Bernardo was an uncleared suspect in the
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Scarborough rapes, unemployed, with no ahbi on the day Kristen French was abducted, and at twenty-eight-years of age had the singular ambition to become a white rapper like Vanilla Ice, he was eliminated as a suspect.
Big Jim Moody just shook his head when he found out about the stalking reports. He had been on vacation in the Caribbean and then he came back and discovered that a task force had been formed and Bevan had been put in charge.
To Big Jim’s way of thinking, one of the first things any police investigator would do when investigating a series of sexually motivated homicides would be thoroughly monitor and investigate any stalking reports that involved complete strangers. Particularly when they were marked by unusual behavior—such as the use of a video camera.
At that point Big Jim did not know that Sergeants Nesbitt and Kenney had been tipped and had interviewed the guy both Rachel Ferron and Lori Lazaruk had reported for stalking.
He did not know that Nesbitt and Kenney had actually found and reviewed Rachel Ferron’s report after they interviewed Paul Bernardo. Nor did he know that Nesbitt and Kenney knew that the man Ferron’s report identified was the very Paul Bernardo who was one of five uncleared suspects in the Scarborough rapes, on whom the Metropolitan Toronto pohce were doing serious science. He did not know that the rapes had mysteriously stopped after Bernardo moved to St. Catharines. It was not Big Jim’s job to know those things, it was Inspector Vince Bevan’s.
Not only were Inspector Bevan’s investigative skills in question, his administrative and information-management skills were not nearly as accomplished as Big Jim had previously been led to believe. If they had been, Rachel Ferron and Lori Lazaruk’s reports would have been red flagged and in front of the inspector in a matter of hours. Instead of being “cleared,” Paul Bernardo would have been put under twenty-four-hour surveillance and thoroughly investigated. All Big Jim could do was shake his head.
At the end of May, Karla went into the flower shop and asked Lori D’Ascenzo to come out back and talk. Behind the cHnic, beside the Dumpster, she told Lori that someone was watching her. Karla said that her husband’s personality had changed too. She asked if Lori thought there might be a spirit in the house. Lori told her it was not a spirit, it was a ghost—a woman’s ghost—and it did not Hke her husband. The person had died suddenly or violently, Lori said, and she did not know she was dead.
“How would I get it out of the house?” Karla asked.
“You should put ammonia down all the drains in the house,” Lori said. “Ghosts don’t Uke the smell of ammonia.”
Lori gave Karla an amethyst and told her to keep it in her pocket: the amethyst would absorb all of the bad karma around Karla. At night she was to put the amethyst on the east window and allow the morning sun to soak up all the negative energy it had accumulated while it was in Karla’s pocket.
She also told her to put holy water and consecrated ashes in every corner of her house. And a pink carnation in the front window.
“And you should tell the ghost to go with God’s love to the white light.”
About two weeks later, Karla came in to see Lori. Karla was her old, bubbly self again and happily reported that the ghost seemed to have left and she and her husband were no longer fightmg.
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‘ he corpse was wearing a fine black necklace, as well as a beige bra, a once-white Tshirt—which was inexpHcably inside out—and a pair of soiled panties. The T-shirt had a blue-and-red circular postage-mark symbol. It said, Via Downtown Montreal.
They pulled it out of the water in broad dayHght at the Harbor Game and Fish ramp in Port Dalhousie and put it under one of those yellow emergency blankets. It must have floated up
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when the flood gates at the north end of Martindale Pond were opened for the first time on May 23, 1992. Even though six months in the water had grotesquely distended the remains, it was obviously the body of a small, slight female. She had been no more than five feet tall and weighed well under a hundred pounds. Her hair had once been long, beautiful and blond.
Inspector Bevan, who was already on the scene when Sergeant Larry Maracle arrived, correctly guessed it was Terri Anderson, the little girl who had gone missing the previous November.
[ohn “Bubba” Matille went to Niagara Regional Police headquarters on Church Street in downtown St. Catharines and described an incident he had witnessed at Paul Bernardo’s h
ouse. What he had seen made him think that Paul might have murdered Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French.
John was a university student. He shared a house on Linwell Road with Andy Douglas. Andy was a business-administration student at Brock. Douglas knew Paul Bernardo and had been in Bernardo’s wedding party. As his nickname suggested, Bubba was a big, strapping lad, whose claim to fame was his wrestling prowess. Everybody said Bubba had Olympic potential.
One afternoon, he and Andy had met Paul Bernardo for beers on the patio of the Port Mansion, a bar on the main street in Port Dalhousie, overlooking the boat launch and Lake Ontario. Afterward, they had gone back to Paul’s house.
Andy noticed a photograph of a pretty, young girl prominently displayed on the top of the television in the hving room. One of the guys asked who it was and all of a sudden Paul started getting upset and crying. Not really knowing what was going on, they tried to comfort him, but Paul started hitting himself on the head. He kept saying, “I don’t fucking care … you don’t fucking know. … I just don’t fucking care,” over and over again, and they believed him.
“She fucking died in my arms, right in my fucking arms,” he repeated a dozen times, continuing to hit himself with his closed fists in the face and head.
In the midst of this scar>’ performance, Bubba managed to figure out that the photograph was a picture of Paul’s dead sister-in-law. Tammy Lyn Homolka. Bubba’s roommate, Andy, was aware of the circumstances. The girl had died suddenly at Christmastime in 1990. At one point Andy calmly suggested that Paul should just try and let it go, try to get over it, and Bernardo had attacked him and started whaling on Andy. It had taken some effort on Bubba’s part to get Bernardo off Douglas.
Bubba had never seen anything like it. He could not get the incident out of his head. Then he heard some of the other guys saying Bernardo really looked like a composite drawing of the Scarborough rapist in Toronto, and that he had been interviewed by police in Toronto.
Bubba became convinced that Paul Bernardo could have murdered Leshe Mahaffy and Kristen French. He had no proof, just a gut feehng.
Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 26