Then she talked about their wedding: the horse-drawn carriage, the sit-down dinner, how great it had been and what a great time she had. They had videotaped the whole thing. It was the best day of her life, she said.
The detectives failed to notice the incongruity between the description of her wedding and marriage during the interview on Tuesday night and how she seemed to view it all completely differently as they passed the exits for Niagara-on-the-Lake.
Cross-border shopping was not as economical as it had been, Karla said. Things were getting cheaper on the Canadian side and it was not really worth it anymore. Karla said she really hated the drive between Toronto and St. Catharines.
“You know,” she said pensively, “my ultimate downtime would be on a desert island.”
About where they were going, however, Karla was secretive and curt. Her directions were barked, like commands. The tone of her voice lost its good-natured camaraderie. When she gave
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directions, it was as if she were a haughty starlet ordering hired drivers.
The contrast between the way she gave directions and how she otherwise gabbed away as though they had known each other for years and were simply out for a Sunday drive did catch both detectives’ attention, but they did not know what to make of it. They really had no idea who or what Karla was. This was Thursday afternoon; they had only just heard her name on Monday. Karla was an enigma.
They turned left onto Victoria Street. Beyond the picture-perfect Falls and sideshow museums on Clifton Hill, Niagara Falls was a one-horse, border town.
Flat, with strip malls and two-story buildings, it had more in common with the industrial boondoggles in Upper New York State than any small Ontario town.
“Right there,” Karla snapped as she pointed to a parking lot surrounded by a large wrought-iron fence at the corner of Queen and Victoria. “Pull in there and you can park—for free.”
Across the street, there was a big Catholic church called St. Patrick’s and a pawnshop. Above the door of the pawnshop, there was a large rhinoceros head that looked as if it had come right through the wall. The rhinoceros always got double takes. Below the rhino head was a big sign that simply said BUY SELL TRADE PAWN—MARK DEMARCO.
Detective Metcalfe politely asked if Karla wished for them to stay in the car and wait for her. Karla pooh-poohed that idea and invited them mto George Walker’s law offices as though they had just arrived home after a long journey.
Surprised, the detectives sheepishly followed her. Half an hour early—it was barely 2:3C)—Mary Lee sat beside Karla in the waiting room and read a Maclean’s magazine. Walker’s office was on the second floor. At three o’clock the receptionist told Karla to go up.
When George Walker emerged from his meeting with Karla, he seemed to have completely lost his tan. His second wife, Lori
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Walker, a pert blonde herself, fifteen years Walker’s junior, who also worked as his bookkeeper, looked at him with quick concern. The Walkers had just returned from their home on the British West Indian island of Montserrat, where they always spent the month of January.
Walker was a man who wore bespoke suits. He looked a lot like former American president Lyndon B. Johnson. Walker tanned quickly and deeply. At that moment, he looked as though they had never been in the Caribbean. He had become a sickly beige color. Lori really had not been paying much attention. When he mumbled something about Karla, Lori was surprised. She thought Karla had come and gone three-quarters of an hour earher.
“George, what’s wrong?” Lori asked. But Walker waved her off He was having enough difficulty drawing breath—talking was out of the question. It was Lori who had arranged this meeting. Walker did not handle any family law matters. He had told Lori to tell Karla what he always told women who approached him about domestic disputes and divorce: “Tell her to kill the bastard, then I’ll defend her.”
Lori had reminded him who Karla was and said that she had just given her fifteen minutes on Thursday. Walker could at least give Karla a htde fatherly advice, considering how well Karla had treated Kelly, Walker’s beloved Dalmatian.
Karla had told her new lawyer that she and Paul had been involved with the death of her sister, and that she was there when Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French were killed. She had not killed them, but she was there.
Karla told him there were videotapes of the sex, not the killings—somewhere. She had looked before she left—they were supposed to be on the storage platform in the garage—but Paul must have moved them. Karla wanted immunity. In return, she would be willing to testify against Bernardo. Could Walker get her immunity, she wondered? Walker wondered too.
There was a terrible cruelty in coincidence: because the Walkers took their dogs to this particular vet—Dr. Patti Weir at
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the Martindale Clinic (there were hundreds of options in the Niagara region, where vets were as ubiquitous as doughnut shops)—Walker became Karla Homolka’s father confessor and her defender.
In such disarmingly matter-of-fact terms, she had told him what no one else in the world yet knew: a tale of such nightmarish, unimaginable degradation, sex. death, hes and videotape as to defy the imagination. What Karla readily admitted she had done and witnessed, made young Robin Walker’s crime look like a youthful transgression.
In thirty years of criminal practice, Walker had never been dumbfounded. When Karla left his office Thursday afternoon, George Walker could simply not imagine this Httle “wisp of a girl” anything but a victim of a diaboHcal SvengaH. The mind compensates for behaviors that defv’ explanation. Disbelieving, Walker went on automatic pilot: he was already thinking about using the battered woman’s defense, even though, strictly speaking, it did not apply.
Battered women did not participate in the kidnapping and confinement of teenage girls whom they sexually assaulted themselves. Nor did battered women give their fiances their younger sisters for Christmas. They did not thoroughly clean house and destroy evidence after they had stood idly by and watched their batterer murder young, helpless schoolgirls. Abused women did not help dispose of the lifeless, dismembered bodies of their batterer’s victims.
Occasionally, very-rarely, the battered woman would strike out against her abuser and kill him. There were only a few precedents where the fact that a woman was battered was considered to be a sufficiently mitigating factor for acquittal or a lesser charge and much reduced sentence.
Karla had told Walker far more than he had ever wanted to hear but she certainly had not told him evervthing. The sister, Leslie, Kristen, videotape—she had been there through everything, but had not actually killed anyone. What else did he need to know?
Although he could not imagine Karla as anything but a victim, as he learned more and more and came to know Karla
better, a profound ambivalence would replace his initial credulity. But the issue now at hand was to give his new client the best defense possible.
What could he do for Karla? It really all depended on the police and their disposition. He was skeptical about blanket immunity under any circumstances, but it was certainly the place to start. And what was there except the battered-woman thing? Walker was very glad he had made arrangements to go back to Montserrat for a couple of weeks at the end of February. He was going to need another respite.
When Karla came down after only an hour, Mary Lee asked if her lawyer wanted to speak to them. Karla said, “No,” the same way she had given them directions. When they asked her where she wanted to go, she just said, “Home.”
As they started to retrace their route. Detective Whitefield glanced in the rearview mirror. Karla looked as though she had fallen into a trance. Mary Lee asked if there was anything Karla wanted to discuss.
“Nothing. I don’t want to answer any questions,” she said, imperviously. “Was that her lawyer’s advice?” they inquired. That, too, was a q
uestion, Karla replied—hadn’t she just said that she would not answer any questions?
Given Karla’s newfound recalcitrance, the detectives told Karla that they were now convinced that Karla knew a lot more than she had let on and they were very surprised that Walker had not wanted to talk to them.
“Was he aware we were there?” Mary Lee asked Karla.
“Of course,” Karla repHed. “And he thought it was very kind of you to provide me with transportation.”
On the way back. Detective Metcalfe told Karla that she had extensive experience with child-abuse mvestigations. She told Karla, at some length, how victims of abuse would disassociate themselves and become “spots on a wall,” in order to cope. Karla came alive. In spite of Walker’s admonitions, she talked
about how she was so fearful of her estranged husband that every’ night before he was to pick her up she always had to go into the bathroom and urinate half a dozen times.
Karla had read a lot of books about abused and battered women. In the hospital, the social workers had talked about patterns and cycles of abuse. Her girlfriend, Kathy Ford, who never liked Paul, was working at a women’s center in Skanea-teles, New York, and had given Karla a sheaf of hterature on abuse and battery. Even her new physician. Dr. Christina Plaskos, an attractive, young brunette whom Karla greatly admired, had told Karla she had been abused.
Once in the hospital in January, Karla had been instantly surrounded by empathetic and understanding people. She became the center of attention. Karla took keen notice of how the detectives were now trying to comfort her, bribe her with their empathy and sensitivity.
Totally unaware of the kind of person they were dealing with, the two detectives flew bUthely blind. What they did was provide Karla with a model for the kind of behavior and response that she could expect from authority figures. Their counsel was a precious gift. It gave Karla the essential element all grifters must have—the courage of their convictions, even though those convictions are based on absolute fictions.
Metcalfe and Whitefield persisted, indefatigable. They told her that they would understand any situation in which she might find herself; no situation, for an abused woman such as herself, was “beyond hope”; no matter what, Karla was not beyond help. They told her that it had taken a great deal of courage to leave Paul. Having him charged, now that took “real guts,” Detective Whitefield said.
Then they got into what the detectives erroneously called the “battered-wife syndrome” and why so many women stayed in abusive situations. As police officers they had a lot of experience with abusive husbands and Karla could rely on them for support and help. Between Niagara Falls and Brampton, by keeping her mouth shut, Karla got a further education.
When they pulled into the Segers’ parking lot at 5:30 p.m., it was dark. After they stopped, Karla continued to sit in the back—
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seat, motionless. The detectives were reluctant to break the spell. They thought Karla was scared and did not want to leave their protective company. They thought she was thinking over her options. They continued to talk, Karla continued to Hsten. They expostulated, Karla said nothing.
Whitefield said that Karla’s sister Lori had repeated the phrase that Karla had told Lori that Paul always said to Karla: “Prepare yourself for nightly terror.” Mary Lee said that only Karla really knew what that meant and only she could stop the “nightly terror.” Detective Metcalfe thought she saw tears well up in Karla’s eyes.
Mary Lee Metcalfe and Ron Whitefield would not see Karla again until the middle of May.
That night George Walker had more unexpected visitors; around 11:30 p.m.. Sergeant Bob Gillies and Constable Matthews came by his house. They were from the Green Ribbon Task Force. They said they were very eager to talk to Karla. It was as Walker suspected. There had been absolutely no communication betw^een the task force and the Metropolitan Toronto Pohce.
Gillies told him the Crown might be w^illing to deal—in exchange for information. To Walker, that meant Inspector Bevan wanted to make a deal. In any plea-bargaining process, the compliance and wholehearted approval of the police for the deal was essential.
Their abiding interest and patter also told Walker that there had been a serious connection made between the suburban rapes in Toronto and the murders of Leslie Mahaffy’ and Kristen French. The Scarborough rapes were not Walker’s problem. His client did not have a penis. With the murders, he was deeply concerned.
Inspector Bevan was waiting outside the police building in Niagara Falls when Gillies and Matthews pulled up around 12:30 P.M., eager to report. Walker had said he would be talking to
Ray Houlahan first thing in the morning. Houlahan was the senior prosecutor in St. Catharines. It was just as Inspector Bevan suspected—and Karla’s fingerprints on the map would confirm—Karla was in it right up to her blond bangs.
Bevan wondered what the FBI would have to say about Karla. So much for their theory about two scrufiy male laborers. Then again, so much for King Camaro. Whatever, he would soon have all the evidence he would ever need.
twenty-four
irst thing in the morning, George Walker went to regional prosecutor Ray Houlahan’s office in the St. Catharines courthouse. Houlahan was an intense, mustached, compact man with a thinning head of gray-streaked, brown wiry hair. As a youthful aspirant to labor organizing, Houlahan had once met Jimmy Hoffa and had become a lifelong fan. Even though Hoffa was now dead and defamed, Houlahan remained steadfast and quick in Hoffa’s defense. Houlahan was also a formidable ballroom
dancer. Divorced and pushing sixty, Ray Houlahan, like Walker and Homolka, was a dog lover, as well. Although his dog had been dead a decade, its bed was still under his office desk.
The meeting lasted half an hour. George Walker told Houlahan that Paul Bernardo had killed Leslie MahafFy and Kristen French; that his client, Karla Bernardo, had been there and had been forced to participate. He told Houlahan that Bernardo had apparently videotaped long segments of the sexual assaults but not the actual killings. Karla wanted immunity. She was divorcing Bernardo. In return for immunity, she was offering her damning testimony.
Houlahan said that he would have to put Walker m touch with someone at the head office. Houlahan did not have the authority to negotiate a deal such as this. Walker had expected that. He also knew with whom he would likely be negotiating—the director of the Crown law office, Murray Segal. Segal was a gnomish, stocky jurist with curly black hair, whom Walker knew well. As young lawyers, they had both done a good deal of appellate work in the Toronto Appeals Court. Walker liked Segal. He was looking forward to seeing him again.
Houlahan had Inspector Bevan into his office at 11:00 a.m. He told the inspector what Walker had told him. The inspector said he would gladly get in touch with Murray Segal. It was Houlahan’s decision to push up the process, it was Bevan’s job to make the call. The police and the prosecutors were two peas in a pod.
“You’re asking me to buy a pig in a poke,” Murray Segal responded good-naturedly, when George Walker suggested blanket immunity in return for Karla’s testimony against her estranged husband. Segal said he simply did not know all the facts yet, so Walker would appreciate that he could not do a deal even if he wanted to.
During their first conversation on the afternoon of February 12, Walker established what he wanted and Segal estabHshed his reticence.
“God knows how much she knows about what he did,” Walker said sagaciously to Segal. Walker described Karla as a ‘little wisp of a girl,” a phrase he would use many, many times during their negotiations.
Murray Segal was not as ignorant of the situation as his manner suggested. He had been briefly exposed—his peer and co-lort Casey Hill was already hard at work on a search warrant for Bernardo’s house in Port Dalhousie with Detective Irwin. Segal cnew their work had to do with the Scarborough rapes. He was iware they had a good deal of science on Bernardo.
Segal also
understood that less than five days before the 3reen Ribbon Task Force had not had a clue about Karla Homolka or Paul Bernardo, let alone evidence linking them to :he murders of Leslie Mahaffy or Kristen French.
Walker quickly sketched out what he knew for Segal. Karla lad told him that she had been involved with the deaths of Mahafly and French—although she did not do the killing herself, she had been there and had watched Bernardo kill the girls. The two of them had also had something to do with her y^ounger sister’s death, although Walker had not yet got to the Dottom of that malfeasance.
Segal really knew very little about Karla Homolka, and he did not have a fix on who or what Paul Bernardo was. He yvondered how many crimes they might be talking about? He wondered if Karla was the genuine article? Maybe the crimes ivere too serious and plentiful for a plea bargain? Maybe he did not have the authority to conduct the negotiation? But from what Walker had told him, he said his gut feeling was that “the people” might be best served by a twenty-year sentence for Karla in return for her testimony, because Walker knew as well IS he did that technically Karla was guilty of first-degree murder.
They talked about lawyers’ letters, derivative evidence, even parole issues. Once Segal had a better grasp of the variables and bad established that he was the one who should be negotiating with Walker, they should get Karla in as soon as possible.
By the time Segal rang off, Walker knew that all his assumptions were correct. The Niagara police had absolutely nothing
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on Paul Bernardo in terms of the murders, which was very good as far as his chent Karla Homolka was concerned.
On February’ 12, 1993, the Ontario provincial government officially approved the Bernardos’ application to change their name to Teale. It was also the day Inspector Vince Bevan reclaimed Bernardo, or Teale, for the Green Ribbon Task Force.
Bevan convened a meeting at task force headquarters around the same time Walker and Segal were talking. All involved Metropolitan Toronto Police personnel were required to attend. The roster included Staff Inspector Steve Marrier, Detective Sergeant Bruce Smollet, Detective Ron Whitefield, Detective Constable Mary Lee Metcalfe, Detective Constable Janet Neate and Detective Steve Irwin.
Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 31