Kelly cuffed Bernardo and read him his rights on the three Scarborough rapes that carried conclusive DNA evidence. Constable Symonds searched him. The constable placed Bernardo under arrest for the murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, as well as for the sexual assault of Cheryl Jenkins on Henley Island. There was as yet no evidence, except Karla’s word, to support any of those charges. Constable Symonds also arrested Bernardo for the rape of Norma Tellier, a tenuous charge that would probably have collapsed if it had been tested.
Bernardo asked to call his lav^er. Instead of following his instructions to allow Bernardo to call his lawryer from the house, Kelly demurred and said it would be easier if Bernardo called once they got to the police station. Kelly said he did not feel he could uncufF him and give Bernardo privacy—which was his right.
At 4:42 P.M. Constable Symonds and Detective Kelly escorted Bernardo through the security garage at the Halton Regional PoHce Headquarters in Oakville and into the prop room.
The prop room was the Major Crimes squad room, redecorated for Paul Bernardo’s sake. It was supposed to provide what FBI profiler John Douglas called “the high ass-pucker factor.”
All twenty-eight drawers in a black filing cabinet along the left wall were labeled in large, readable black letters with such things as FORENSIC EXHIBITS A, B, C. Above the cabinet there was a map of Scarborough with colored pins marking the location of each rape. Close by, with large, readable letters, was
a BERNARDO & HOMOLKA FAMILY TREE poster that had obviously been prepared with great care. There was also an assignment board:
Tcafii Assigrimetits Results
Another wall-size chart listed the names of fifteen victims of the Scarborough rapist, the locations of the attacks, the dates, time and DNA results.
On the wall next to that chart there were two blowups of a fingerprint, labelled W and X, then a series of pictures of Bernardo’s Nissan 24()SX shot from different angles, surrounded by four or five paragraphs of typescript concerning the car, with the heading, BERNARDO’S VEHICLE—1989 NISSAN 660 HFH.
Between the two exhibits there was a washroom. The washroom door had been deliberately left open. The closed door next to the bathroom was labeled Polygraph Room.
On a nearby desk there was Norma Tellier’s Tasmanian Devil t-shirt, a poster from the Little Mermaid movie, and the stuffed toy Paul had given her, partially covered by a plastic bag. A gray-beige telephone had a yellow tape label, which read Scarborough Rapist.
There were large bristol-board projects devoted to Bernardo’s associates, and Paul Bernardo’s family tree, with connecting lines, photographs and captions.
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Just outside of Interview Room 2, which was Bernardo’s destination, were the Child Find photos of Kristen and Leshe, a picture of Paul, a newspaper clipping and the Scarborough rapist composite drawing. In the corner was the piece de resis-. tance: a life-size mannequin dressed like Kristen French, complete with a torn Kettle Creek bag.
The mannequin wore a long black wig and was missing one loafer. It was obvious that a great deal of time and effort had gone into the prop room. Detective Irwin had even proposed that they try and get Karla as a live prop, but according to Inspector Bevan, that idea was a bit premature.
The idea was to lead Bernardo through the room— quickly—and weaken his resolve. However, if Bernardo was the classic psychopath and sexual sadist the articles and the psychiatric consultants and American law-enforcement people said he was, the prop room would have the opposite effect. It would flatter and empower a man who had the psychopathological profile that Dr. Peter Collins and Inspector Ron MacKay had described. If Bernardo’s interview was any indication, exposure to the prop room did just that.
When Staff Sergeant Murray MacLeod and Constable Richard Ciszek entered the house. Buddy came running, madly wagging his stub of a tail, and did what he always did when he met new people—pissed all over the floor. Constable Ciszek put Buddy on a leash, brought in the Humane Society attendant, who had been waiting outside in a van, and sent Buddy straight to the pound.
Sergeant Beaulieu was so excited he had left all his notes and files back at the task-force headquarters in Beamsville. Detective Irwin seized the moment.
“Do you remember me, Paul?” Irwin asked.
“No,” Bernardo said flatly.
“Picked hnt off his pants,” scribbled Beaulieu on his notepad. Irwin was immediately vexed.
Paul slouched in the chair, his right leg crossed over his left knee. He appeared heavily bored. He was not about to admit to Irwin that he remembered him. Paul wanted to know when he would get something to eat. He wanted to call his lawyer.
Irwin told him to wait until they covered a couple of things—they wanted to go over the charges again, to make sure that he had been properly read his rights and understood his circumstances.
“You got married, June?” Irwin asked.
“You know that. June 29, 1991,” Bernardo replied.
They moved on to the honeymoon in Hawaii. Irwin and BeauHeu had been told by the consultants that it would be good to quickly establish they had information they would not otherwise have without Karla’s cooperation. “Was there an incident? Something about the camera?”
Bernardo looked at Irwin incredulously. “No comment.”
“No comment?”
“No.”
“When you gave her a swat for dropping it, was that because you were angry at her or yourself, or just some frustration coming out?” Irwin saw something flash in Bernardo’s eyes, so he decided to push it.
“No comment.”
“No comment?” Time to segue. “How did you feel when you hit her on the fifth of last month? You said ‘no comment’ earlier, but we’ve opened that door up and you’ve talked …”
“I said that I probably would get, you know, convicted of it … and that’s because, in domestic disputes, the girls usually win,” Paul explained, pausing to pick at the ever more elusive pieces of lint on his track pants. “That’s just a common thing.”
“So what about it, how did you feel when you hit her?” Irwin was encouraged by Bernardo’s candor and verbosity.
While he and Beaulieu drove from Beamsville to Halton, they had reviewed what they had learned in a seminar on interviewing techniques. Particularly appealing to the two officers was the “ninety-five/five” interviewing technique.
The idea was to let the suspect to do 95 percent of the
talking, and both Irwin and Beaulieu agreed that was exactly what they would try to achieve with Bernardo. This discussion about the assault charge was the first indication that Bernardo might just accommodate them. Bernardo let out another long sigh and looked at the ceiling.
Irwin pushed: “Isn’t there some emotion there, Paul?”
“No comment.”
“I would feel pretty shitty if I …”
“No comment.”
“Hit someone.”
“No comment.”
“No comment?” Irwin’s voice carried his mounting frustration. So much for the ninety-five/five technique.
“Okay, tell me, what’s a safe ground to talk to you about? Some things you don’t mind talking to us about and other things this ‘no comment’ phrase comes up. Give us some clues about what you want to talk about. I just wanna hear a little bit about you.”
“Well I’m not in a conversational mood right now,” Paul said matter-of-factly.
“No?”
“Why would I be?” Bernardo fixed Irwin briefly with his baby blues.
“I don’t know. Certainly neither one of us should be, but here we are. It’s human nature to talk to people. We’re living beings that are able to communicate on such a high level …”
Bernardo cut him off “Except for maybe dolphins and whales. They communicate on a high level.”
“Yeah,” said Detective Irwin, lost in aspirations about ninety-five / five.
“Monkeys can
learn up to five hundred words,” Bernardo said.
“But not as many as the thousands and thousands …” Irwin retorted. Bernardo cut him off again.
“No. No. Exactly. You’re right,” he said.
“So, to communicate and talk is a natural thing?” Irwin asked.
“Certainly,” Paul noddingly agreed.
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Irwin glanced at Beaulieu, but the sergeant was busy scribbling notes. The element of surprise can be very effective in these kinds of interviews, they had been told. Non sequiturs work.
“Certainly, that’s why we’re here. To communicate and talk,” Irwin agreed amicably. “Just out of curiosity. Why did you start having sex with Tammy?”
“No comment.”
At quarter to eight there was a knock on the interview room door. Irritated by the interruption, Irwin answered it. Detective Sergeant Waller gestured for him to come out. When he did, the older officer confronted the young detective. He told Detective Irwin that he was off the interview strategy.
Irwin pushed past him and went into the outer offices. He looked to his superior. Staff Inspector Steve Marrier. Marrier gave him a thumbs-up.
Cops and consultants were gathered around two video monitors. Inspector Ron Mackay, the RCMP profiler, was there as were Dr. Peter Collins from the Clarke Institute in Toronto and Special Agent Chuck Wagner from the FBI in Buffalo.
One of the few police officers in Canada trained as a profiler by Behavioral Sciences at Quantico, Inspector MacKay was a tall, white-haired, laconic man.
Dr. Collins was Abbott to Mackay’s Costello. A forensic psychiatrist. Dr. Collins was a short, stocky guy with a balding dome, rimmed by thinning dark hair. Dr. Collins’s claim to fame was reconstructing and interpreting the fantasy life of psychopathic sex killers. He and Inspector Mackay seemed to go everywhere together. Detective Sergeant Smollet was still there, as was Jim Kelly, one of the arresting officers.
With a quarter of a century behind the badge. Waller was a large man with a rotund face who had a penchant for brown suits. He had been working with Inspector Bevan since the beginning.
Waller had little use for the two Steves—Marrier and Irwin—from Toronto. In the end^ it was science, not prescience or police w^ork, that had fingered Bernardo, and now the two Steves were swaggering around as if they had solved the crime of the century.
Another Toronto cop, Ron Whitefield, handed Steve Irwin a bunch of papers on which questions for Bernardo had been scribbled by Inspector Mackay and Dr. Collins.
The fact that Irwin had seized control of this interview was irksome. The real issue was the murders, not a bunch of rapes in the sprawling suburban nightmare of Scarborough. All Detective Irwin’s victims were alive. He had had his chance and blew it. Nor had Irwin alerted anybody that a prime suspect in a series of major crimes was on the move and headed in their direction.
Since Bernardo had moved to St. Catharines in February, 1991, for one reason or another the poHce in Niagara had run him through CPIC seventeen times. How different the response might have been if Irwin had only bothered to enter Paul Bernardo’s name in the system.
Irwin made a point of methodically retrieving messages from his pager. He gathered some reports and notes and returned to the interview room. Waller tried to talk to him again, but Irwin was not about to be advised.
As Detective Irwin came in, Bernardo asked to go to the bathroom and was taken out by Beaulieu.
When Inspector Bevan finally entered the Major Crime office, Waller was waiting for him. Waller knew that Bevan had visited the French and Mahaffy families first, but he had not expected it to take as long as it had.
Halton was midway between Toronto and Niagara; they had better audio-visual facilities than the task force or the Niagara Regional Police, and Bevan, always politic, saw it as another good compromise to arrange for Bernardo to be interviewed there.
It was 8:30 p.m. They had been grilling Bernardo since 4:45
P.M. Because Bernardo had not been allowed to call a lawyer, anything they got would be inadniissable.
Inspector Bevan watched the monitor while Waller talked to him. According to Waller, Marrier had said that the Toronto police never stopped interviews just because the suspect asked for a lawyer—he had to refuse to answer questions and demand a lawyer. Marrier said there was “case law” to back them up. If that were the case, why had Marrier not raised it during the many discussions they had had on this very issue over the past ten days?
Then Marrier told Bevan that he actually agreed with Waller—the interview was probably a bust but they might as well let it go, because it would be good for Inspector Mackay and Dr. Collins to get a better read on Bernardo.
Waller recalled Marrier’s recalcitrance. The task force had politely asked if he would be prepared to delay Toronto’s arrest so the task force could build up evidence. His response had been “less than enthusiastic.” And now that Bevan had been forced to pop Bernardo prematurely—earHer than Inspector Bevan had wanted to, before the deal with Karla Homolka was done—nothing would surprise Waller.
Inspector Bevan knew there had been problems with the arrest—he should probably not have instructed his officers to charge Bernardo with the murders. But Bevan agreed with Staff Inspector Marrier about one thing. Even if the interview was totally bungled, it did not really make any difference. Short of a flill and complete confession, nothing Bernardo said was going to change the course of history. It was the DNA in Scarborough and the evidence given by his wife in St. Catharines that would put the nails in Mr. Bernardo’s coffin.
Bevan had barely said a word during Waller’s diatribe. When Waller was through, the inspector simply asked Waller if he could use his office to make a couple of phone calls. That was one of the qualities that inspired loyalty in men such as Detective Sergeant Waller.
Fifteen or twenty’ minutes later. Waller watched Bevan emerge from his office and approach Inspector Mackay, Dr. CoUins and Chuck Wagner. They talked briefly and then Bevan
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sat down to watch some more of the interview for himself One minute Irwin was asking Bernardo about what jobs he had as a teenager, the next he was on about rap music. The interview was obviously out of control. The inspector watched Bernardo yawn, pick lint from his pants, cross and recross his legs, yawn again, slouch, sigh. The guy was bored stiff and making a mockery of Detective Irwin—who was indeed dominating the interview—and the whole process.
Bevan heard Sergeant Beaulieu identify singer Cris Cross as “the guy who wore his pants backwards,” and smiled.
After five minutes of watching the detective’s talk show, the inspector left the building. Over the hour he had been there, Bevan had barely said a word. By ten o’clock he was back at his desk in Beamsville, working on his search warrant.
As Bevan left the building. Detective Irwin came out of the interview room again. Marrier told him he was doing a good job. Irwin asked Marrier about Bernardo’s repeated requests for a lawyer. Marrier told him not to worry.
“He’s a classic psychopath,” Dr. Collins and Inspector Mac-kay told him. “There’s no point in trying to appeal to his conscience,” Dr. Collins said, gesticulating to make his point. “He doesn’t have one.”
Irwin went back to the interview with instructions to emphasize Bernardo’s “failures,” and a distinct impression that there was no great urgency in arranging a lawyer for Paul Bernardo.
“You used a term ‘looping’ before,” Sergeant Beaulieu observed. “What do you mean by that?” Beaulieu was well aware of Lori Homolka’s Christmas story and how strange she had found Bernardo, the way he had talked about birth, death and “looping,” which she assumed to be a mystical Masonic theory that devalued the importance of individual life or whatever. Basically, Lori thought, it demonstrated that Paul was crazy and
he had put her poor sister under some spell during which Karla was made to commit a
ll those horrible crimes.
“Looping. You take a beat and you repeat that beat—^you know, like a computer analyst would.”
“What do you mean, a computer analyst would?”
“Oh, if 1 put a beat on track, say something goes da-da-da-da-da-da … What it would do is repeat that point because it’s all digital and wavelengths …
“Mm-hmm?”
“To repeat that beat, so go da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and then on for as long as your memory would …” Bernardo coughed “… your computer memory could hold it.” Bernardo cleared his throat. “Basically, because you would go on forever …” Bernardo suffered from allergies and took antihistamines all the time. He was starting to get congested.
“You would go on forever?” asked Beaulieu incredulously. Neither Irwin nor Beaulieu had a clue what Bernardo was talking about.
“Yes, it’s like an error. In one of your computer programs. I don’t know if you ever took that in school—it goes around and around and around. It just doesn’t exit … it’s just a term in music.”
“How long have you been working on this album of yours?” Beaulieu asked. He was about to foUow Dr. Collins’s sage advice and emphasize a Bernardo failure.
“I said before, a year, year and a half—part-time, full-time.”
“Did you ever enter negotiations with a recording company?”
“No,” Bernardo replied. “Not yet.”
“Do you expect to?”
“Hope to. Hope to, I mean soon …”
“What state of completion are you in, if you had to guess?”
“Oh, see, a lot of it’s in my mind, you know, because you have a song and you know what you know—what beat’s going to go in that song, like, what the song’s about and blah, blah, blah, and then it’s a lot of preparation time, you know. If you wanna be a writer you gotta go into love songs and pull out how people feel, you know. And you can’t just say, ‘There, I
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Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 33