They had been talking about Tammy Lyn, videotape, who heard what, which instructions Paul had given to Karla, in what form, and now Sergeant Gillies wanted to go back to the beginning? Even Karla was slightly taken aback.
“Mm-hmm. You want to go back when I first met him, or you want to go back to when everything started happening?”
“That is up to you to decide,” said Sergeant Gillies, not necessarily the most gifted manager of “induced” statements. When he made such comments he would either lower his chin, looking pointedly at his subject, or turn his head sideways, look away and wiggle his eyes.
Karla, at her most conciliatory and cooperative, said, “Well, it’s whatever you want to hear. Well, I already told you. Well, I guess what I told you before, you may as well toss that whole thing out, because I didn’t tell you the truth on everything, as you know. Whatever you want to hear.”
Karla did another run-through of the events and demise of the two schoolgirls before they paused for a late-afternoon break.
“I remembered a couple of things while you were gone,” Karla told Detective Metcalfe at 4:50 p.m., just after they resumed. “Nothing of real significance, but I think I should tell you.”
Karla proceeded to tell the detectives that Kristen French
had resisted Paul. “And she said things, you know: ‘Some things are worth dying for.’ And then he showed her the videotape of LesHe—the part where she says her name, and … in order to scare her. And Kristen was very strong, and she didn’t even act scared. And I just wanted you to know that, because I think it is something her parents would like to know, and she was very, very strong, and didn’t show a lot of emotion throughout the whole thing.”
“We appreciate you telling us that,” said Detective Metcalfe gratefully.
“Like, I just want to help,” Karla said definitively.
There was a power failure at Journey’s End at 5:58 p.m. on the second day—Karla’s first day of “cautioned” statements. Everyone agreed that was a sign they should stop.
The day had been devoted to a detailed discussion about what had happened to Tammy Lyn Homolka. They had just started on Leslie Mahaffy when the lights went out. Karla’s “induced” and “cautioned” statements were characterized by abundant, precise detail.
Karla was anything but “flat” when she and her mother went shopping at a nearby mall that evening. She was effervescent. They went to Miracle Mart, a dress shop—Karla would need new clothes for court—and a pet store; Karla always checked out the pet stores.
She kibitzed with their police escort about dogs, pets, favorite movies and the fact that she wanted Buddy to have a career as a breeding stud. She and her mother dined at the Keg. Karla told the police that she had really wanted to become an Ontario Provincial Police officer.
Then mother and daughter went to the movies. Indecent Proposal was playing at a nearby theatre. Indecent Proposal was a movie about money and sex. Demi Moore’s husband—played by Woody Harrelson—lost all the couple’s money in Vegas, and a wealthy older man, played by Robert Redford, offered them a
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million dollars if the wife would spend one night with him. After their girls’ night out Dorothy and Karla had a police escort back to their hotel. Karla asked the police if they carried guns and explained how she and George Walker had met and all about how Karla had arranged for him to get his Dahnatian. The Walkers called the dog Spencer. She would hke to go to the movies again the following night, she said.
“During the search of your residence, a videotape was found,” Sergeant Gillies continued. He described the segment with the hand and the comatose girl cryptically, as if the details were a closely guarded secret. Although Karla had stopped talking directly to Mary Lee Metcalfe, and Gillies regularly asked questions or interjected, Karla played to the antipathy they imagined Karla felt toward Gillies because of his sex.
At this point, Karla was aware that this 1:58 minute video was the only “porno” they had found. How would Karla have explained Jane? The last thing Karla wanted anyone to know was that she had done exacriy the same thing she did to her sister to another, young teenage girl, whom she had befriended and personally lured into the house, a week before Paul brought LesHe Mahaffy home—three weeks before their wedding and six months after she killed her sister.
“Can you tell me the circumstances surrounding the making of that tape?” Sergeant Gilhes asked. Karla could not. Gillies talked on about the possibihty that there was yet another young woman.
“With another woman … what do you mean by ‘another woman?’ ” Karla retorted.
“Not Kristen or Leslie,” Sergeant Gillies said.
Karla replied with a question. “Was it Tammy?” Her interviewers did not know that Karla had already told Dr. Arndt a month earlier that whoever it was, the girl was still alive, and Karla chose not to enlighten them.
GiUies could not say.
“Well, I am sure it would be Tammy,” Karla stated categorically, advising the officers that the only girls she had ever had oral sex wnth were the dead trio.
Over the four days and thirty hours of videotaped legal statements Karla covered the same ground time and again. She repeated the same stories, sometimes adding a new wrinkle, sometimes omitting a previously told detail. Because her “affect” remained flat, the only sign that a question was daunting or that she was floundering was her syntax. The mtervnewers were totally msensitive to Karla’s state of mind. The truth, or the consequences, of her “cautioned” statements, was between Karla, her god and the Ministr' of the Attorney-General.
“Karla, can I stop you for a minute?” Detective Metcalfe mter-jected. “Were there any other occasions where you had oral sex with another female, other than Tammy, Kristen or Leshe? Perhaps w^hile you were on vacation …”
“On vacation? No, no, definitely not. There is no other incident that I recaU.”
Detective Metcalfe tried another approach. “Was there ever any other time that you were videotaped …”
“Well … I was videotaped with my fi-iends, I was videotaped with my dog.” Karla played dumb. “Do you mean like videotaped in a sexual way?”
That was what she meant.
“Yes, there was another time. There was a video that Paul and I made. It was—I think, it was after Tammy’s death. Yeah, it was, it was while my parents were away at a ftirniture show, so it would have been in January. January or February, after Tammy’s death. We made a tape of us having sex together, basically of us having sex together in front of the fireplace.” i
Sergeant Gillies handed Karla another still picture taken from the one-minute, fifty-eight-second video. Karla looked at it closely. “That’s me, I’m sure. And I don’t know whose hand
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that is. I don’t know who that is.” The hand in Karla’s vagina had become, by now, an infamous, indehble image in the minds of approximately one hundred detectives and prosecutors.
“Whose hand might that be?” GilHes asked.
Studying the photograph intendy, Karla digressed. “That’s in our house, because I can recognize it from that thing there— that’s the pull-out handle on the drawer of Paul’s dresser. It’s definitely not my parents’ house, so it’s our house … on Bay view. So that would have either been Kristen or Leslie,” Karla said, even though she had already told Dr. Arndt it was neither.
“Were there other incidents of digital intercourse?” Whenever possible, the police preferred euphemisms.
“Oh, probably,” Karla replied cavalierly. “With both girls, I’m sure. I can’t remember specifically, but with both, I’m sure.”
“In this picture, what does it show the other girl wearing?”
“It is a sweatshirt. It looks like a sweatshirt, and I don’t know if that’s underwear or—I don’t know if it is underwear or just the bottom of the sweatshirt. … It looks like a sweatshirt to me, anyway.”
>
“The fact that the girl would appear to be wearing a sweatshirt, does that help you identify who that party is?” Gillies’s voice had a hint of frustration.
“Well, I don’t think …” Karla started backpedaling syntactically. “Like I said, I am pretty sure that I didn’t lend anything to Kristen or Leslie, but I guess I was—I am sure I am incorrect, because it obviously appears that this person is wearing a sweatshirt. But I can’t tell from the body.”
“The picture I showed you earlier today is from the same video.”
Karla absorbed Gillies’s statement but did not acknowledge it. “It looks like my sister Tammy. It just gives me an impression. But that’s definitely not Tammy. Do you have any other pictures?” Again, Karla responded to a question with a question, which brought Gillies to a standstill.
“Not with me right now, but 1 will get some others.”
392 STEPHEN wllliams
“Like, are these clips right after one another or something?” Karla asked.
“Yes.”
“Okay, then based on that, this is the bed.” That was a revelation. “It’s not a pillow, it’s probably the bed, because if that’s the door, then the bed was right here.” Karla pointed at a small spot on the photograph. “I don’t know. I am going to have to think about them.”
Gilhes, starting to give up: “The top picture depicts a hand which appears to have an article of clothing or a rag or something in it.” That was a vague image of Karla’s halothane-soaked rag.
“Okay,” Karla obftiscated. “Possibly—I don’t know, I really don’t know" Then something struck Karla as odd. “How come this one is so good, and this one is so blurry?”
“I don’t know the answer to that question,” Gillies repHed. He might not have known the single frame in question had been laboriously plucked from the edited tape worked on by enhancement experts.
“Oh, okay. But vou can get a clearer one of this, you think?”
“I hope to, yes.”
And that was that. The police and the prosecutors just dropped the topic. They had so much information—too much information—and what they realized about the extent of Karla’s involvement was, in and of itself, disturbing enough. It was unimaginable that Karla’s involvement could be any more nefarious or complex.
After what she had told them about Tammy Lyn, Leslie Ma-haff)’ and Kristen French and what had happened to them, how could there be anything else more seditious that she had avoided telling them?
Toward the end of the third day—Sunday, May 17, 1993, at 8:30 P.M.—Karla said to the detectives: “I don’t know if you are doing it because you feel I need it. but I don’t need as many
breaks as we are taking … so you guys break for whatever you want to break for, don’t worry about me.”
Karla had a unique quality. The more difficult and trying her circumstances, the stronger she became. She consumed other people’s emotional distress the way she consumed drugs. She was a sponge for attention; the closer and more intently she was scrutinized, the more she opened up. She fed on her facilitators’ astonishment and abhorrence. On the morning of the third day, it got to be too much for Detective Metcalfe; she became ill and had to be excused from the interview. Karla solicitously said that she hoped the detective would soon feel better. Detective Metcalfe was replaced by her partner, Ron Whitefield.
Gillies, Metcalfe, Whitefield and other observers—everyone had who reviewed the thirty-plus hours of taped interviews— were left with two indelible images: one verbal, the other visual.
The visual image was of Leslie Mahaflfy’s head being dropped, “plop,” by Paul Bernardo into the wet cement. Karla had told them, “Well, he kind of joked. Like, I guess he had to joke—I don’t know if he was sickened by it or not. But he was kind of joking about it and saying, that, you know, when he—I don’t even like saying it—you know, when he cut her head off, he just held it up to him and looked at it and just plopped it in the cement.”
The verbal image was Kristen fiercely declaring, “Some things are worth dying for.”
Paul Jason Teale a.k.a. Paul Kenneth Bernardo was formally charged on May 18, 1993, with two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, as well as two counts of kidnapping, two counts of unlawful confinement, two counts of aggravated sexual assault and one count of causing an indignity to a human body. He made a brief but sensational court appearance on the nineteenth.
The pohce told a frustrated press corps that they might well be laying more charges against Mr. Bernardo in the near future.
At noon Karla was escorted back to St. Catharines General
Hospital to provide blood, hair and saliva samples as agreed in the resolution.
It took four officers to ferry Karla and her mother around town: Staff Sergeant Murray MacLeod, Sergeants Osier and Whiteway and Constable Ciszek. From the hospital they went to police headquarters, where MacLeod continued to interview Karla in Room 221—about the problem he was having with his pet Schnauzer. The dog was suffering from something the vet had called separation anxiety. Karla was understanding—Buddy had suffered from separation anxiety, as well. She explained the treatment and prognosis in detail. Staff Sergeant MacLeod was relieved.
At 3:45 P.M. Karla was “transported”—as it was recorded in MacLeod’s notebook—across the street to the courthouse. Karla made a brief appearance wherein she waived her right to a preliminary trial and elected for trial by judge alone. She did not enter a plea. Bail was set at $110,000. She was remanded to June 7, 1993. At 5:20 p.m., MacLeod and Ciszek took the Homolka women—Karla, Lori and Dorothy—home.
Inspector Vince Bevan and the Niagara Regional Police held a formal press conference the following day to announce what had already been widely reported—Bernardo had been charged with nine counts of murder and mayhem.
They had also charged his estranged wife, Karla Bernardo nee Homolka, of St. Catharines, Ontario, with two counts of manslaughter. According to police, Ms. Homolka’s parents had put up their house to make the $110,000 bail and Karla had been released to their custody.
Inspector Bevan made a point of telling the press that there were twenty-two stipulations to Karla’s bail, including that she phone him every day, not leave the house without advising police an hour in advance, never leave the house without a family member and abstain from nonprescription drugs and alcohol.
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Steve Irwin’s immediate superior had been talking to an officer who acted as a Haison between the Toronto police and the Green Ribbon Task Force.
The prosecutors had made it known to the Green Ribbon Task Force and Inspector Bevan that they had the impression the interview with Bernardo—the one Irwin had conducted at Hal ton on February 17—had been audiotaped. Inspector Bevan had been assured that they were videotaping the interview but apparently the technician had forgotten to put a blank tape m the videocassette recorder. Now, the prosecutors were wondering where the audiotapes were?
Detective Irwin did not know what to say to his boss. It appeared he had lost them.
Karla and her mother kept an appointment to see Dr. Arndt. Karla was feeling very badly. “Compared to what,” Dr. Arndt jotted in the margin of his notepad.
“The phone rings every five minutes,” she whined. “Everyone is fine, except for me.”
She told Dr. Arndt that she had talked to the police for three full days in Whitby.
“They videotaped everything,” she said.
Karla was surprised to find Sister Josephine in Dr. Arndt’s waiting room. Dr. Arndt was talking to Karla’s mother, so Karla went into the waiting room to read a magazine.
After she and the nun exchanged pleasantries, Sister Josephine said she had something for Karla. Sister Josephine gave Karla a small wooden crucifix.
Karla was dehghted. It was just the way it had happened in Michelle Remembers, wh
en Michelle was given a cross wrapped in tissue paper by Father Leo. Just as Father Leo had told Michelle, Sister Josephine told Karla, “If you’re feeling frightened, you can hold on to this. …”
After the Homolkas left Dr. Amdt*s office. Sister Josephine
genth’ accused Dr. Amdt of a conimance: he had |Jaiined the whole thing, Irom putting the sister in the same room at the ho^ital to this coincidence of ^pointments. The aster had decided to take die doctor’s advice. She had given Kada the crucifix, after aD. The timing seemed rigjit. Although it might not do any good, it could not do any harm. But whether it was j God’s will or Dr. Amdt’s was another question.
“But the way I organized this,” Dr. Amdt later said, a ghnt in his eye and a “who, me?” look of setf-effacement, “it was purely coincidental—a very coincidental meeting. But everybody knows diese things don’t happen by accident or for no reason.” Dr. Arndt suggested it did not matter whether it was his doing or the Almighty’s; in the end the fleeting relationship between Karia and the sister seemed to have been good for both of them.
Kim Doyle, Ken Murray’s office administrator, law clerk and die haison betw een Murni>’ and his client, Paul Bemanio, bemused. Shortly after ihey had returned from the excursion 57 Bayview, Murray had rented 'ideotq>e equipment capable of cop>ing 8mm video cassettes onto the larger, VHS form: -
It was the fact that Murray had f^dd cash diat cau^t Doy attention. Since Bernardo’s defense was beit^ paid by L^^gal Aid, any expenses—computers, telephones, videocassette pla -ers and recorders—would havte been covered under the cer: cate. It was not very hard tor Kim or Murray’s junior, Caroiyn MacDonald^ to imagine what Murray had taken out ot the house that m^t or why he had surreptitiously rented die taping equipment.
By May 28, there was htde question in Kim I>oyle’s mind that Ken Murray had watched the videot;q)es and made copies.
Now that Kaiia was out of the hospital. Dr. Amdt’s sessions with her took place in his office, which was in a modest rwo-story house just north of the hospital.
Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 39