Karla’s MMPI profile was characteristic of severely disturbed people. MMPI scores resembled the strange markings on Mark DeMarco’s Masonic skull: Karla’s score was “814362*“79‘0-/ 5#.L#F”K/”.
These kinds of people, Karla’s kind of people—people who score “814362*“79‘0-/5#.L#F”K/”—harbor feelings of hostility and aggression but are unable to express them.
“They feel socially inadequate, especially around members of the opposite sex,” Dr. Long wrote. “They lack trust in other people, keeping them at a distance and feeling generally isolated and alienated.”
People with Karla’s MMPI score are most often diagnosed as
schizophrenic. They get headaches and cannot sleep. They are easily confused and distracted. They are people who respond as Karla did, tending to be unhappy and depressed, and they “have a flattened affect.”
Neither Dr. Long nor Dr. Arndt thought Karla was schizophrenic. In their view, she was hardly “socially inadequate.” She did harbor “feelings of hostiHty and aggression,” but she was more than able to express them. Karla seemed to be noth-mg hke her MMPI profile.
During the Rorschach test, Karla was shown a bunch of ink blots. By interpreting the responses. Dr. Long created a portrait of her personality, which was an appropriate description for test results that were always subjective to the psychologist who gave the test.
The thematic apperception test, or TAT, was comprised of a series of postcards with themes on them. It was a similar exercise to the Rorschach test—in both cases the psychologist subjectively interpreted what the patient said in response to visual stimuli—except that the Rorschach ink blots were abstract and the TAT postcards were literal, like cartoons. The patient was shown a postcard and asked to tell the psychologist a story about what he or she saw.
One TAT card had a little sad-faced boy forlornly clasping a violin. There was another with a woman whose substantial breasts were exposed, draped across a bed, and there was a man standing there with his hands over his eyes. The patient was asked what they thought when they saw the postcards? Had the man just raped the woman or had they just had sex? What was the postcard’s story? However the individual responded, it meant something in context with everything else.
There was one card that showed a vagina, and another which every^one saw as a penis. If the patient saw a beautiful flower, then the doctor knew that the person was not being forthright or forthcoming.
Dr. Long saw Karla’s responses to the TAT postcards as unusual and unique. Her responses suggested that Karla was extremely shallow; that there was “poor integration at deeper levels.”
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“The patient’s stories contained themes suggesting feeHngs of being trapped,” he wrote. “That is, an inabiUty to extricate herself. The themes also frequently involved victimization and violence.”
During Karla’s entire stay at Northw^estern General Hospital she was completely stoned. Dr. Arndt preferred the term “dis-inhibited.” Over the nine days and almost thirty hours of testing and interviewing Dr. Long conducted, Karla ingested thousands of milligrams of tranquilizers, sedatives and antidepressants.
For example, the day before Dr. Long came to see Karla for the first time, she took 300mg of Sinequan, a mindbending antidepressant used to sedate psychotics. A reasonable daily dosage of Sinequan for someone diagnosed as psychotic was 50mg. The Sinequan had been combined with lOmg of Valium, and 75mg of Nozinan, another powerful antidepressant, which also had a sedative effect. Nonetheless, Karla was wide-awake and eager to take her tests.
Dr. Long observed that Karla “enjoyed her work as a veterinary’s assistant and this was evident in my discussions with her, as well when she alluded to some knowledge she had about French Poodles which she related to me in an extremely enthusiastic manner.” She had obviously discovered Dr. Long preferred French poodles.
At the beginning of April, it became very clear to George Walker and Hans Arndt that they needed to find another psychiatrist who had credibility with the prosecution. Dr. Arndt tried to interest Dr. Glancy again. Again, Dr. Glancy deferred.
Drs. Long and Arndt were viewed with some skepticism in the prosecutor’s office. Dr. Long was getting a bit long in the tooth. Both he and Dr. Arndt most often testified as expert witnesses for the defense. Dr. Arndt’s reputation as a proponent of “sleep therapy” did nothing to instill confidence with the Crown law office, either.
With a case this high-profile, and under these unusual cir-
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cumstances, it would be prudent if they could deliver a diagnosis that gave the prosecution a higher comfort level.
Dr. Andreu^ Malcolm, a dour psychiatrist who was highly regarded by prosecutors, would be ideal. Dr. Malcolm had frequently been called to testify on behalf of the prosecution over the past thirty years. Dr. Arndt called Dr. Malcolm on April 2.
On Monday, April 12, Karla got a letter from her sister Lori, lamentmg the fact that she and Karla could not have a “sleepover.”
“Sometimes I feel that you are slipping away and I don’t know you any more,” Lori wrote. She confided to Karla that she was not happy, or as strong as people assumed her to be. “It really sucks when you have to act like your life is fine.”
In a P.S., Lori told Karla that she had heard about Karla’s LEG test, the one that would prove Karla’s skull had been fractured by Paul.
“It’s good … in a sick sort of way, because you’ll have proof that he really physically hurt you. We all know that he did, but other people may choose not to beHeve you.”
Lori went on to tell Karla that she had never felt so close to Karla as she did then; that she kept all of Karla’s letters and reread them all the time and pretended Karla was talking to her.
“I think I’m going insane,” Lori reported.
In neurologist Dr. Morgenthau’s April 13 report to Dr. Arndt, he stated that Karla had told him she had discomfort in the “left frontoprietal region” of her skull. Karla said that she had sustained a depressed skull fracture when her estranged husband had beaten her. “However,” Dr. Morgenthau wrote, “this was not proven by X-ray. Basal skull fractures were suspected, and these again were not proven by X-ray and CT scanning.”
From Dr. Morgenthau’s perspective, there was nothing wrong with Karla. It was his conclusion that the massive amounts of medications she had been ingesting had caused her seizure and whatever tremors she had allegedly experienced. Karla’s EEG was perfectly normal.
Dr. Arndt had been encouraging Karla to write a letter to her parents telhng them about Tammy Lyn. Right after Easter, during one of their therapy sessions, Dr. Arndt perceived her emotional anguish to be so severe that day that he prescribed 30mg Valium by mouth, 4()mg intravenously and another intramuscular needle with lOmg of Valium at 10:30 p.m. Since Valium administered i.v. and i.m. can be considered double the potency, her total intake of VaHum that day was the equivalent of 130mg, in addition to large amounts of the other drugs that she took. As Dr. Arndt noted in a letter to George Walker, “These are heroic doses and indicative of Karla’s requirements.”
Karla told Dr. Arndt that Paul Bernardo had made Kris ten and Leslie drunk before killing them. He would make them do “shooters,” she said. Karla drank, too. Kristen was killed on a Sunday morning. Karla had only had one drink with Kristen.
With Leshe, Karla said she was drunk. Karla had served her sister Tammy Lyn eggnog with rum. When Paul was having sex with Karla’s comatose sister, he was drunk. Then Karla said: “I’ve been here in the hospital for twenty-five days and haven’t had any alcohol, and it doesn’t bother me.”
In spite of the “heroic doses” of serious sedatives, Karla sat down and wrote the letter about Tammy Lyn to her parents in one sitting, on lined paper, in her neat, loopy script. It was a perfectly composed, grammatically correct, unblemished missive; no corrections, false starts or crossed-out words.
Dear Mom, Dad and Lori,
&n
bsp; This is the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write and you’ll probably all hate me once you’ve read it. I’ve kept this inside myself for so long and I just can’t lie to you any more. Both Paul and I are responsible for Tammy’s death. Paul was “in love” with her and wanted to have sex with her. He wanted me to help him. He wanted me to get sleeping pills from work to drug her with. He threatened me and physically and emotionally abused me when I
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refused. No words I can say can make you understand what he put me through. So stupidly I agreed to do as he said. But something—maybe the combmation of drugs and the food she ate that night—caused her to vomit. I tried so hard to save her. I am so sorry. But no words I can say can bring her back. I have thought many times of killing myself but I couldn’t put you through the pain of losing another daughter and sister again. I don’t blame you all if you hate me. I hate myself I hve with the pain of knowdng I unintentionally killed my baby sister every day. I think that’s the real reason I put up with Paul’s abusive behavior—I felt I deserved it for allowing him to drug and rape my beautiful baby sister. I loved her so much and never wanted to do anything to hurt my “Tamsikins,” please believe me. I would gladly give my life for hers. Nothing I can do or say can bring her back. I don’t expect you to ever forgive me, for I will never forgive myself
Karla -XOXO—
She gave the letter to Dr. Arndt for safekeeping. April 13 was a busy day for Karla. Dr. Malcolm visited for the third time and conducted another hour-long interview.
From Karla’s chart, w’hich she dutifully read the following day, she had been portrayed as suitably distressed: “20:45—up to nursing station—states she cannot sleep: is not tired at all, requesting /.r. push—call put through to Dr. A.”
Fifteen minutes later. Dr. Arndt arrived. He recorded that he found his “patient quite depressed … too moved by all that happened today for the medication to properly settle her down. Nozinan does not seem to touch her; the VaUum has been given already in rather large quantit'. therefore I will trs-and switch her to Tegretol and see whether it will control her; memors’ for recent events and concentration are quite bad.
“Interestingly, she wants meds to be given i.v., not even i.ni. [intramuscular],” Dr. Arndt noted, quoting Karla sa)‘mg, “I have a high tolerance for pain, I have a high tolerance for medi—
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cations.” Dr. Arndt decided to put his depressed, upset patient “on forty-eight-hour sleep therapy.”
At 12:01 A.M. on April 14, Lori Homolka wrote her sister another letter. She told Karla that they were all “really worried” about her.
“We all seem to think that you feel we are going to abandon you and not love you any more because of what has happened. Please don’t ever think that way. We’re your family, Kar, and we love you unconditionally. What has happened to you is in no way your fault, you did what you had to do to survive and we are so glad for that. You are such an incredibly strong person which I have always admired.”
She went on to reassure Karla that she knows who Karla is: “The gentle, kind and loving person that you’ve always been.” The letter is signed, “Your pissy little sissy, Lori,” and the Homolka sisters’ trademark ”yiOXO.”
Karla tried to explain to Dr. Arndt that her high tolerance for drugs was based on the fact that she had drunk at least sixteen ounces of alcohol a day while married to Paul Bernardo.
Dr. Arndt had a few nagging doubts. Karla had led him to believe that she was “heavily sauced” much of the time she was married to Paul. She also told him she hardly ever missed a day of work. If she was sauced all the time, how would she have been able to function at work every day?
There were other things that did not fit with his final diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder and a reactive depression. Her relationship with the man from Brampton, for instance. The fact that she continued to correspond with Jim and sent him nude Polaroids of herself was inconsistent with a diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder.
If Karla woke up at 4:00 a.m. she would make sure the nurses recorded the fact that she was awake at 4:00 a.m. on her chart. This vigilance was atypical of heavily depressed persons with PTSD.
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Dr. Arndt never satisfactorily reconciled these dichotomies, nor did he resolve all his other doubts. In his role as Karla’s therapist, he viewed such resolutions as irrelevant. In Dr. Arndt’s mind—the way he had rationalized it—he had become Karla’s treating physician and therapist.
In Dr. Arndt’s mind, that was also why they needed Dr. Andrew Malcolm. Since Dr. Arndt had become her treating physician, Walker needed another psychiatrist to do the forensic assessment for the court. Dr. Arndt’s real responsibiht' had become Karla’s well-being.
Karla was discharged from the psychiatric ward of Northwestern General Hospital on April 24, 1993. By 11 a.m., Karla was in George Walker’s Niagara Falls office.
On April 29, 1993 Dr. Christina Plaskos perceived Karla to be “rather flat …” She noted that she “has gained 15 lb… . she IS on a number of meds … I’m not really sure why she was put on these meds … I found her not to be depressed but basically lacking emotion …” Karla told Dr. Plaskos she was going to be charged with manslaughter.
On April 30, Karla made a specific note in her datebook that the search warrants for 57 Bawiew had expired, on the anniversary of the police discovery of Kristen French’s body.
Twice extended, the warrants had facilitated an exhaustive ten-week exploration of every nook and cranny in the Bernardo household. Sixteen top crime-scene specialists from all over the province had crawled over every inch of the small house at 57 Bayview.
They had jackhammered the cement in the basement and the garage, dug up the lawn, punched holes in the walls and ceihngs, stripped the carpets and the contents of the house, seized books and videotapes, pulled out pot lights, taken paint chips and generally decimated the house.
The people w^ho owned the house, Rachel and Brian Delaney, were diligently portraying themselves as victims, too. They wanted the government to buy the house. In the meantime, through Inspector Vince Bevan, the people of Ontario rented
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the house at the same rate Paul and Karla had paid. Inspector Bevan personally delivered a rent check drawn on the Green Ribbon Task Force account, every month like clockwork.
Drs. Long, Malcolm and Arndt had long discussions about Karla’s motivations in Dr. Arndt’s basement. “In these discussions finally arose the idea that once Tammy was done, the rest became automatic—the rest is not really much of a problem,” Dr. Arndt explained. “You see, once she was an accomplice, it didn’t make any difference what happened afterwards. You see, she had to go on—so that is the one thing I was looking for— the hook. Where is the hook?
“The hook? It was Tammy. Prior to that, you know, it was the son the mother and father didn’t have and stuff like that. I think it was Tammy that just sealed it for her, because at that point she was an accomplice, she was a participant in the killing of a daughter, and so she didn’t want to have the ‘son’ killed or the other daughter and so on it goes.
“That’s the argument that I proposed—and that’s what got our Dr. Malcolm on line—because he was looking for how come that all of these various things happened—where is this lady coming off? What is this woman? But once we had this crucial event, which was Tammy … If she would have squealed, well, she was under a threat that—one, it would be shown to them that she was involved with Tammy, and secondly, she was constantly under threat that he would harm the others. Whether this was truly the only thing that happened I don’t know, but this is what she explained and it certainly makes some sense.”
The doctors agreed that Karla was suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, Dysthymia or “reactive” depression and alexithymia, which literally means “no words
for mood.” The condition is “typified by difficulty recognizing and verbalizing feelings, a paucity of fantasy life and speech and thought that are concrete and closely tied to external events.”
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Inspector Bevan told a news conference that police were watching a second suspect, someone, he said, who was “not a threat to the pubhc.”
The press, acting as pubhcit- agents for the owners of 57 Bayview. dutifully reported that a house in which such horrors had been perpetrated could no longer have any value as real estate.
On April 3t>. Murray Segal and George Walker had a big chat on the telephone. They arranged to meet and conclude their deal.
Walker lett the Falls and met with Segal in his office at 72m Bay Street in Toronto between ten o’clock and noon. Segal told Walker he felt there needed to be additional charges for Karla’s role m her sister’s death. Walker did not see that at all. Tanmiy might have been the hook for Dr. Arndt, but briefly she be- , came Karla’s stumbling block. . I
Intuitively and through scutdebutt he had picked up around courthouses in the Niagara Region, Walker knew that the po-Hce had found scant hard evidence in the house.
They were probably in no position to either inculpate or exculpate his chent as an accomplice. Karla was still as crucial to Inspector Bevan’s case as she had been when she went on her ‘“soma” hohday. Unknown to Walker, Bevan had already discussed the matter with the -ictims’ families and secured their complicit-.
By the time Walker got back to the Falls at 1:30 p.m., Tammy Lvn had been reduced h-om a stumbUng block to a small bone of contennon. On May 2, Segal and Walker had almost reached a compromise. Walker had agreed that they would accept something for Tammy, as long as it did not entail new charges. He talked to Dr. Arndt about his forthcoming session with the Homolkas and Karla’s “Tammy” letter—a meeting which proved to be a non-event. Mother read the letter in front of everone and shrugged. Karel Homolka slumped in his chair.
Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 37