Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka

by Williams, Stephen, 1949-

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  There was their son-in-law, their beloved “weekend son,” handcuffed, hunched over, with the hood of his parka pulled up over his head, stooped between two plainclothes police officers as they led him across the front lawn of that nice pink clapboard house where the Homolkas had spent so many happy hours— every-hour on the hour, on every channel.

  While Lynn was at the Homolkas’ house, a teenage girl— whom Lynn later found out was Norma Tellier—came over with her mother. Norma’s mother had a different last name; Lynn did not catch the woman’s first name.

  Norma, who appeared to be very upset, told Dorothy that Paul had raped her. Lynn could not quite get a fix on Norma or the situation. Norma had been Tammy Lyn’s best friend. When Paul raped Norma, Karla was asleep in the guest bedroom. She knew Paul was going to do it, but there was nothing Karla could do, according to Norma. None of it made any sense to Lynn.

  Norma told Dorothy that she had already told Lori everything in detail. Then she and Lori had both told Karla, while Karla was still in the hospital. Karla had told them to forget it, so Lori had torn up her notes. If Karla said to forget it, Dorothy decided, then that was what Norma should do.

  After Norma and her mother left, Dorothy said Karla was going to make a lot of money on the books that would be written about her.

  “Karla wiU be very wealthy when she gets out,” Dorothy declared, sipping her drink.

  But Lynn was still surprised to get this latest call. Dorothy never missed work. She had even come back right after her youngest daughter had been buried. Dorothy could easily have taken a week or two of bereavement leave. Instead, she had told everybody at the Shaver that she wanted to get back to work because Paul, who was hving with them, was so down about Tammy it was difficult to watch, and Lori was just moping around the house.

  Lynn agreed to go shopping for Dorothy. She left work, picked up Lori Homolka and went to the A&P. She bought groceries and took them back to the Homolkas’ house. When

  she got there Dorothy and Karel were sitting at the kitchen table, half drunk, laughing and joking around. They never bothered to thank or reimburse her.

  The police finally executed the search warrants and entered the house in Port Dalhousie late in the day on February 19. A crime-scene analysis of this magnitude was like an archaeological dig. The object was much the same as well—knowledge about the past through artifacts.

  Like the site of a dig, the house was divided into a grid, whose hundreds of individual sections were all assigned numbers. Using laser lights, metal detectors, high-powered industrial vacuums, jackhammers and plain old magnifying glasses, the I-dent officers began to collect all manner of visible and invisible artifacts such as wall spots, fingerprints, flakes of skin, hairs, fibers and various unidentified dried secretions. Everything that came out of the house had a number and a grid designation. The number of exhibits would eventually exceed a thousand.

  Outfitted in sterile white suits that made them look like Ebola fighters, the identification officers felt and acted like the heroes of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  Inspector Bevan toured the site and was shown numerous marks that appeared to be blood spots on the walls; there were newspaper clippings related to the crimes, test tubes with curious contents.

  They found a chronological list of all the Scarborough rapes, with Detective Steve Irwin’s card attached. It was handwritten on a pad of legal-size paper. There were detailed descriptions of the attacks and the various suspects’ descriptions, including eight dates in reverse order from May 4, 1987, through May 26, 1990. Beside each date the main intersection nearest the assault was noted—in a diflferent second script that looked very much like Karla’s. The house that Paul and Karla had occupied was no Ark, but it was a forensic treasure trove.

  Paul Bernardo was not only a sexual deviate, rapist and murderer; he was also a pack rat. It appeared that he had kept every scrap of paper, every receipt, every note, letter and photograph

  that had ever come into his possession. He had kept the security guard’s uniform he wore when he worked at the Hospital for Sick Children during his university days. In the bedroom closet they found a brown paper bag full of soiled women’s panties. Spike the iguana’s skin was in the garage.

  The cops discovered a cache of what they had been told by the FBI was predictable reading material for a sexual deviant. Books with titles such as Suffer the Children, Punish the Sinner, Flowers in the Attic, Dark Angel, Tfie Funhouse, Tlie Fury, Fallen Hearts, Petfect Victim, In Broad Daylight, A Deadly Silence, Lisa, Hedda and Joel, In His Garden, Tlte Violent Year of Maggie MacDonald, Ritual Abuse, Bitter Blood, A Killing in the Family, Across the Boarder, Tlie 1-5 Killer, Wlio Killed Cindy James?, Masquerade, Tlie Ultimate Evil, Childgrave, Small Sacrifices, Teacher’s Pet, Tlie Anarchist’s Cookbook, Petals in the Wind, Wlien the Wind Blows, Life with Billy, Poisoned Blood and Tlie Confessions of Henry Lee Lucas.

  Henry Lee Lucas was suspected of as many as five hundred murders between 1951 to 1983. He was convicted of nine. After being released from prison for the murder of his mother, he teamed up with another psychopathic killer named Otis Toole, whose mother called him “the devil’s child.”

  The book about Toole, Devil Child, was there as well. After Toole introduced Henry Lee to satanism, Lucas became a member of a religious cult and practiced necrophilia. Toole was serving a life sentence in Starke, Florida.

  All of these books and many others were about violent sexual crime, criminals and victims, the occult, ritual and wife abuse. From the research done by Special Agents John Douglas, Roy Hazelwood and Robert Resslor and their psychiatric consultant. Dr. Park Dietz, the FBI had determined that 83 percent of the men maintained collections of items related to sexual or violent themes or both.

  There were hundreds of books, including a well-marked copy of Tlie Compendium of Pharmaceuticals and Specialities, 22nd Edition, with Halcion and halothane marked in highlighter, and a copy of American Psycho under Karla’s side of the bed.

  Two loose items jammed in the copy of American Psycho by

  American writer Bret Easton Ellis were a thin book review clipped from a Toronto newspaper, entitled “Book a Sad Comment on Our Society: American Psycho is Sicko,” and a receipt from WaldenBooks in upper New York State, dated April 17, 1991, 8:50 p.m.

  Detective Constable Mike Demeester from the Green Ribbon Task Force was sent home to review American Psycho: His report read in part, “Patrick Bateman is 26, blond, handsome ‘yuppie’ who spends more time on facials, workouts, lunch than at work. Bateman is very image-conscious. ‘Boy next door’ kind of image. Tries to impress his friends with money; feels that most women are attracted to him; drinks scotch and uses cocaine. Uses Halcion to help him sleep; has a beautiful girlfriend; he treats her and other women as objects … enjoys the grief he causes victims’ families and friends; sexually degrades women by having them perform oral sex after anal intercourse; ideal woman—good-looking, satisfies sexual desires and keeps her mouth shut; videos his girlfriend making love to another female; collects pornographic books and videos such as Lesbian Vibrator Bitches, Inside Lydia’s Ass, Cunt on Cunt, and his favorite movie, Body Double. Scene where power drill used on woman; makes obscene phone calls; knowledgeable about Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, Hillside Strangler and Ed Gein.

  “Some of the scenes in the book depict the forcing of a can of hair spray into one victim’s vagina; torturing victims with fire, coat hangers, power-nail gun, inserts a rat into a living victim’s vagina, dismembering a victim prior to death …

  “Uses mace, gloves, knives, electric chainsaw, scissors, silencers, power drills, and eats parts of some victims, raw or cooked. Kills both men and women, homeless, prostitutes, friends, and ex-girlfriend… . Has sex with severed heads of female victims …”

  Demeester listed the similarities between Bateman and Bernardo: “Age, hair, image, moody, explosive, pretty wife, degrading sex (wine bottle in vagin
a?, anal sex), videotapes, stalks victims, sex before death, Halcion.”

  They also found a slew of how-to-succeed books and business tomes, as well as Nancy Drew books and a copy of Crime

  and Punishment by Dostoyevski. The police seized Crime and Punishment until one of che better-read prosecutors finally told the police that Crime and Punishment was a classic and probably did not fall into the FBI’s category of suspicious reading material.

  There were audiotapes on which Paul was heard decrying his hopeless state and talking about his intention to commit suicide because Karla had left him, and tapes with pulsating beats over which he talked and rambled about his “deadly innocence,” and it all sounded relevant and incriminating.

  There were hundreds of videotapes. Most of them were taped or purchased movies or taped television shows. For instance, it appeared that they had taped every episode of “The Simpsons” over the previous two years. It would take half a dozen police officers a number of months to fully review all the video material, but they had great expectations.

  Then they found a short, one-minute-and-fifty-eight-second video in a briefcase at five in the afternoon on Sunday, February 21. The tape confirmed what they had been told by Karla Bernardo’s lawyers—that Paul and Karla made homemade sex tapes. Except that all this one showed was Karla Bernardo wiUingly, lasciviously participating in explicit lesbian sex acts with two unidentified females.

  The identification officers first viewed this tape on Bernardo’s videotape equipment in the Uving room. After about ten seconds they knew they had something relevant and got very excited. This “artifact” was duly marked and then removed from the house and taken to the mobile command post, a big trailer that resembled a movie star’s Winnebago, parked outside the house.

  It was parked on the far curb and had replaced the doughnut shop as the meeting place of choice for all police involved in the investigation. Inspector Bevan viewed the tape first thing Monday morning, February 22. Karla’s ex-chauffeur, Detective Mary Lee Metcalfe, happened to be there at the same time. She did not know what to make of her battered charge after she saw what came to be known in policing circles as “Karla’s Sex Video.”

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  In the first segment Karla is prone and naked on a king-size bed in what appears to be a hotel room. She is with another woman who could have been her body double.

  To the left, only partially in frame, Paul Bernardo is seated by the bedside, leanmg forward, with a drmk m his hand, intently watching while the woman sucks Karla’s right breast and fondles her genitaha. The segment is obviously filmed by a stationary camera, which the pohce rightly assumed was hidden.

  On the tape, Karla can be heard expressing her pleasure with what the woman is doing to her and tells her—as she spreads her legs wide for the camera and the woman’s probing hand— that she does not mind that the woman’s lipstick has left a ring around her nipple. They all giggle. This segment is approximately forty-five to fifty seconds long.

  The scene suddenly changes. In the second segment, Karla is performing cunnilingus on a different woman in a different setting. Naked from the waist down, with legs splayed open, the mystery woman could not be identified; neither upper torso nor face was visible. The camera was obviously hand held by a third party as it zoomed in for a close-up.

  Karla worked away on the girl’s pubis, then she lifted her head and pantomimed—Ucking her hps, smiling and kissing the camera. Her eyes were half closed; it was the unmistakable look of a woman who was enjoying her work.

  In the third very short scene, Karla was raised up on her knees. Taking the girl’s lifeless right hand, Karla slowly lifted her tank top, proudly displaying her own very blond pubic region, and inserted the girl’s middle finger in her vagina, all the while coyly smiling and licking her lips.

  In these last tvvo short segments there was only ambient sound, no dialogue. Because the young woman was obviously comatose and had dark pubic hair and because the scene plainly had been shot in the Bernardos’ master bedroom at 57 Bayview, Bevan assumed it was Kristen French. LesHe Mahaffy was a natural blonde.

  Bevan had a meeting with the prosecutors that afternoon at Ray Houlahan’s office. Murray Segal, Casey Hill and the re-

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  gional director for Niagara, Jim Treleavan, who worked out of Hamilton, were also present.

  Bevan told them about the videotape, and advised them he believed the comatose girl was Kristen French. He had arranged to have the tape taken to the Ontario Provincial Pohce lab in Toronto to be analyzed.

  Bevan knew only too well that Kristen French was missing the top part of the baby finger on her left hand. With the elaborate equipment in the police lab, they might be able to isolate a frame that would show the girl’s left hand and thereby conclusively identify Kristen.

  Whoever the two women with Karla were—the first one was adult, awake and appeared to be a willing participant—the problem this tape presented for Bevan was Karla’s demeanor. She certainly did not look like anybody’s victim. Nevertheless, Inspector Bevan now needed Karla Homolka more than ever.

  That Saturday, Bevan announced a news blackout. In the midst of Bevan’s blackout, the Ontario Provincial Police issued a press release that declared Bernardo a suspect in the unsolved sexual homicide of Cindy Halliday. Her nude and partially burned body had been found along a highway a hundred miles north of St. Catharines on April 20, 1992, the day after Karla and Paul killed and disposed of Kristen French’s body.

  Halliday’s was only one of a hundred unsolved sex slayings of young women between the ages of eleven and twenty-eight in southwestern Ontario since the early eighties.

  George Walker looked at the news reports and shook his head. True to form, it looked like the cops were going to try and pin most of those unsolved sex slayings on Bernardo. Everything they did was bad for Bernardo, which was good for his client, Karla Homolka.

  On Monday, February 22, Walker went over sources for bail money with the Homolkas. The deal was close to being done. The Homolkas were going to have to come up with at least a

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  hundred thousand dollars to keep Karla at home while she fulfilled her part of the forthcoming plea bargaining. Mrs. Homolka was obviously distressed by this exercise.

  Dorothy’s sister Carol, and her husband, Robert, who lived in Sarnia, had a house worth approximately $220,000. They were apparently willing to help. Dorothy’s brother Allan in Mississauga could get a letter of credit for ten thousand dollars. And Don Mitchell, the Homolkas’ good friend who had got Paul into the Masons for Karla, said he would be willing to put up five thousand dollars. Walker advised the Homolkas to get it organized right away.

  “They’ve got the search warrant and Karla’s going to be charged with murder.” It was mid-afternoon on February 23, when Dorothy Homolka called Lynn McCann again. Lynn could not tell whether Dorothy was in her cups or not.

  “Where am I going to get the money from?” Lynn knew it was a rhetorical question and said nothing. “Maybe from my brother.” It was as if Dorothy were talking to herself “We might have to mortgage the house.” This immediately suggested to Lynn that the Homolkas’ house was paid for, making them better off than almost everybody Lynn knew

  Lynn was not quite sure what Dorothy needed money for— she assumed it was for legal fees or bail, or something like that, but it was not the first time that Dorothy had obsessed about money on the cusp of a tragedy.

  There had been a lot of inappropriate wailing and gnashing of teeth about money when Tammy Lyn had died. Then, a couple of months after the funeral, after Paul and Karla had moved out, Dorothy and Karel seemed to have all kinds of money. Karel got a new van. Dorothy got a new car.

  Dorothy revised her original story about being broke and told Lynn that she had forgotten that they had between twenty and thirty thousand saved.

  In spite of the fact that she had gone around
disavowing Karla’s forthcoming nuptials, thereby angering Karla and precipitating the move to Bayview Drive, less than six months later

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  the Homolkas put on the most lavish wedding anyone had ever seen. At the most swank hotel in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Even the drinks were free.

  The fact that Karla was going to go to jail had not been reported. But the fact that Dorothy said Karla was going to jail suggested to Lynn that Karla was far more deeply involved in the actual murders than anyone in St. Catharines had imagined. Still, Dorothy did not seem the slightest bit fazed. She just kept asking the rhetorical question, over and over again—“Where am I going to get the money?”

  Walker and Segal met again between 4:00 and 6:30 p.m. on February 25 at Walker’s offices in Niagara Falls. They had been at it for two weeks and they were down to the short strokes.

  Segal came prepared to do the deal on the following basis: manslaughter—one for Mahaffy, plus somethmg, and one for French, plus something. He and Walker had agreed, in principle, that Karla’s sentence would be ten years for each victim, but that the two terms would be served concurrently.

  That would make Karla eligible for full parole in three years and four months from the date she went to prison. Segal agreed that the provmce would not ask for increased parole eligibility—if she behaved herself in prison, she would be out in three years, four months.

  Further, Segal agreed the Crown would write a letter to the parole board supporting early parole for Karla, on behalf of both the Attorney-General and the poHce. The parole board would be officially advised that Karla had been helpful and that her testimony had been essential for the conviction of her ex-husband.

  Both sides would go before a judge in chambers to establish judicial approval a priori. This was very rarely done, but Walker did not want to take chances. Therefore, there would be a court reporter present at this closed-door meeting.