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On his bookshelf, beside DMS-III, the psychiatrist’s diagnostic bible, was a piece of the Beriin Wall and a picture of Dr. Arndt inside the Roman catacombs—he was kneeling down inside one of the catacombs, surrounded by thousands of human skulls. Hanging next to the picture was an Ojibway dream catcher.
The dream catcher was a wooden hoop with a woven leather web that spoked outward to the hoop’s edge from a large central bead. As Dr. Arndt explained it to Karla, Indian lore had it that dreams float in the night air like moths. The web of the dream catcher allowed the good dreams to pass through; bad dreams became entangled in the dream catcher until they could be sorted out in the light of day.
Clutching the crucifix Sister Josephine had given her, Karla told Dr. Arndt she was sick to death of having to hide all the time. She could not talk to anybody. She started to cry.
“These are the first tears I’m seeing from her,” Dr. Arndt scribbled on a scrap of paper.
Karla wanted all her friends to know what was going on with her—but she could not tell anybody. “I do need help, I do need medication,” she said, sobbing.
She had gone through all her pills again. Dr. Arndt suggested he put her back in the hospital for a few days of sleep therapy.
“Perhaps we will catch some bad dreams,” Dr. Arndt suggested. Karla readily agreed.
After a weekend in dreamland, Karla woke up refreshed. Back in St. Catharines she wrote her friend Kathy about the bottle of beaujolais she had taken to a party and drunk all by herself Karla said her tolerance was “ridiculously high.” but she had had a really good time. “It’s nice to get out of the house once in a while… .”
Karla explained that the media kept coming around all the time because “they don’t have a really good current photo … yet. It’s kind of hke a game now, trying not to let them get a picture.”
She ended her chatty letter with a lament about the hatred
people in St. Catharines unjustly harbored toward her. “I really need single girlfriends,” she added, “to go out and meet men with.”
On June 7, Steve Irwin found the lost audiotapes of Paul Bernardo’s arrest interview. Right after that interview. Detective Irwin had gone on vacation. The tapes had been thrown in with his luggage and forgotten.
Furthermore, the police discovered the entire interview had not been taped in the first place. The technician had forgotten to turn on the tape recorder for the first couple of hours. That same day Detective Irwin was reassigned to Intelligence Services. A decade of chasing pedophiles and serial rapists was over—now he would spend his days chasing hate mongers, neo-Nazis, skinheads and the like.
George Walker picked up the Homolka women early on the morning on June 10. They had an appointment to meet the warden and tour the Kingston Prison for Women. It was a good four-and-a-half-hour drive. Lori Homolka went on about how she had met a boy who was “just amazing.” Lori said she planned to marry him the following summer. Karla turned to Walker and said, “I’ll be able to get a pass for that, won’t I?”
Between 2:15 and 3:45 p.m. they met with the deputy warden and the prison coordinator to discuss Karla’s medical and psychiatric records. They made arrangements to transfer Karla directly from court—on July 6—without remand for assessment or an appeal period, directly into the prison medical center.
On June 10, Karla wrote to Kristy Maan again: “Tomorrow the police want to speak to me again to ‘tie up loose ends,’ so to speak. I’ve heard that they also want to take me back to the house. Why, exactly, I don’t know … Can a person like me ever be forgiven?
“We had such a beautiftil life together in the beginning,” she recalled, of her early days with Paul.
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“Oh, my God, I forgot all about this. This makes me feel disgusting.” Karla took a long pause after Sergeant Gillies showed her two photographs “taken from a video camera.” After all, it was such a beautiful day outside, and she had thought all she would have to do was clarify a few minor details and drive around with the police in their van and show them where she and Paul had dumped “stuff’—stuff hke Leshe Mahaffy’s torso and Kristen French’s crushed Mickey Mouse watch.
Karla felt ridiculous holding those photographs of herself, naked with a prostitute. She had not dressed for such a down-and dirty confrontation. In her crisp white blouse, with a pleated checked miniskirt and long, fitted navy vest, she looked more Hke a schoolgirl than a whoremonger. Her hair was in a long French braid down her back and she wore white tights to complement her blouse and offset her shiny new Bass loafers.
Sergeant Gillies had called George Walker and said that there were a few things the police wanted to clear up. Could they possibly take Karla out to Lake Gibson and back to the house? Walker agreed. They would make a videotape record of their excursion on June 17, 1993.
When the police arrived to pick her up, Karla offered Sergeant Gillies a gift: a blue hairbrush she said Kristen French had used while she was being held captive.
After the bridges and Lake Gibson, where Karla revealed that Paul had also dumped his grandfather’s power saw, they started to drive around in a vain attempt to fmd Kristen French’s discarded jewelry—specifically, the pieces of her Mickey Mouse watch that Karla said Paul had made her discard.
Empty-handed, they went on to police headquarters to identify and initial the photographs Gillies had shown Karla. Then they took Karla to the house on Bayview, so she could show them things there, like places where they might still find fingerprints, maybe even blood.
Karla was looking forward to the house tour. She wanted to see what was left of her personal belongings; rumor had it that her estranged husband’s defense team had scooped up all the
valuables and that enraged her. Sure enough, her hope chest, the silver tray and her beloved champagne glasses were gone. When Sergeant Gilhes was not looking, Karla plucked a tag from an empty hanger in a closet ftiU of empty hangers. It was the tag from Tammy Lyn’s bridesmaid dress, the one Kristy Maan had worn. Karla was not going to leave the house without a trophy.
When the pohce took Karla home, she gave them some more memorabiha: a gray and white skirt and a small bottle of perftime she believed Kristen had worn and used.
The St. Catharines Standard ran an extensive report the following day, describing the phalanx of pohce divers who had descended on Lake Gibson. Apparently, they were searchmg for a power saw at the bottom of the lake.
Later in the day Walker met with Karla and her father to review the doctors’ reports, which would be filed in support of her guilty pleas.
Karla noted another Bernardo bail hearing in her datebook. “Paul bail hearing/SR, Alex’s [Ford] 25th birthday.”
At this bail hearing in Scarborough, Bernardo was charged with three more counts of sexual assault and buggery in relation to two new victims. In an unusual move, “Maximum Mary,” the hard-nosed prosecutor in Scarborough, adopted the Henley Island rape, as well as other charges from outside her jurisdiction. There were so many charges and victims that every newspaper and news broadcast quoted different statistics.
“There is strength in numbers,” Hall told the media when they asked why she had agreed to this unusual move. Vociferous when prosecuting violent sex offenders. Hall told the press that this amalgamation of charges would make it easier for victims to come forward. But there was more to it than that. In her estimation, the more the merrier, because it strengthened her prosecutorial position.
Mary Hall was starting to become a large thorn in her ministry bosses’ backsides. She believed that the Crown law office’s deal with Karla Homolka was unconscionable. Hall thought
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that Karla Homolka was at least as guilty as Paul Bernardo. Her understanding of the nature of the relationship between Paul and Karla differed dramatically from Inspector Bevan’s.
Hall had Bernardo on the Scarborough rapes. She
did not need Karla Homolka. She wanted the maximum the law allowed for both offenders. On the Scarborough rapes alone, Mary Hall was confident she could put Mr. Bernardo away for many lifetimes. While she prosecuted Paul Bernardo for those rapes, the police in St. Catharines could take all the time they needed to develop their case.
Paul was quickly losing his “Baywatch” looks. His dark roots were starting to show. Ken Murray knew that bail for Bernardo was out of the question. The charges were too serious. After umpteen appearances, Murray finally waived Bernardo’s right to a bail hearing. Paul returned to his tiny cell in the Metro East Detention Center. The cell was about the same size as Tammy Lyn Homolka’s bedroom, without the closet space.
Karla wrote Kristy Maan another letter, in which she told Kristy she could not answer all her questions until after she was in jail. She told Kristy that Kathy and Alex had come to visit and that it was weird “seeing all of my fi-iends ‘one last time.’ “
“Yes, I can read in jail,” Karla noted. “I have The Road Less Travelled and a Bible to read. I’m also going to go to Queen’s University and study, probably to be a social worker.”
She thanked Kristy for all her help and said that she had asked God to help her when she left Paul and “look what had happened since:
1. he’s being punished for what he did
2. I got out safely
3. I’m being punished very fairly—they could’ve charged me with 2 counts of first degree murder instead of manslaughter.
4. I’m getting my university education and
5. I’m much closer to my friends and telling no more lies.
Anyway, got to go!” She instructed Kristy to write her soon, at her “new address.”
Karla’s trial began in St. Catharines on the morning of June 28, 1993. The first three days were devoted to legal arguments made on behalf of the media—the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the national wire press, three of the country’s major newspapers—and Stephen Williams, author. The arguments were in opposition to a motion for a publication ban brought by the prosecution. Although Paul and Karla were not co-accused, for the purposes of Karla’s trial the pair were portrayed as such by the authorities.
Outside the courthouse, George Walker postured for the media and declared his client’s goodwill toward the victims’ families and the community in general. Her trial would be expeditious, he assured the press, but it was unlikely the media would be allowed in the courtroom.
In every other case in Canadian judicial history where co-accused defendents were separately tried, publication bans had been requested by a defense law^^er for one of the co-accused.
These requests by defense lawyers made some sense. If two people committed a crime together yet were tried separately— at different times—then, theoretically, evidence made public during the trial of the first person prosecuted would impinge upon the second person’s ability to receive a fair trial.
By now. Ken Murray had reviewed all the evidence, including the videotapes, and he had unequivocally concluded that Karla Homolka was as guilty as her estranged husband.
What Murray had seen helped him to rationalize what was arguably an untenable position. The pohticalization of this case and what Murray perceived as the Crown’s duphcity and arrogance had made it almost impossible for him to function effectively or rationally.
Mr. Murray and his equally deluded client came to the rea—
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sonable conclusion that a publication ban was meant to protect Karla and the prosecution, not Paul Bernardo’s right to a fair trial. Murray called the Crown’s resolution agreement with Karla Homolka a “deal with the devil.” Repeatmg and reprinting the phrase, ad nauseam, the media made of that simple phrase a mantra.
The broadcast and print media had a legion of lawyers lined up to argue rightly, and righteously, that court proceedings should be a matter of pubUc record.
The legal arguments against a publication ban were occasionally impassioned and articulate, but for the most part they were exceedingly tedious and dry.
The most interesting aspect of each day’s proceedings was Karla’s remarkable stillness. She sat behind the bulletproof glass in the prisoner’s dock every day, for seven hours a day, without moving a muscle. It was as if she were a mannequin. Everyone remarked upon Karla’s stillness. Finally, the press began to speculate among themselves that she must be stoned.
At breaks, Lori Homolka would take Karla’s arm and they would leave the courtroom, arm in arm. Otherwise, Karla remained still.
Her chair moved, though. Almost imperceptibly, magically, day by day, Karla’s chair moved until Karla was sitting flush with the right side of the dock. The families of Karla’s victims were sitting up front to her left, while her parents and her sister sat up front on her right with Sergeant Bob Gillies, who had become the Homolka family handler, driver and personaHzed “bulletproof shield.” His peers nicknamed him Bob “Homolka” Gillies.
After Murray Segal and Michal Fairburn made the prosecution’s precedent-setting argument to suppress the details of Karla Homolka’s trial, Tim Breen argued against the motion on Bernardo’s behalf
Ken Murray had subcontracted Breen, a young, articulate, appellate lawyer who lived with Carolyn MacDonald and worked in the downtown law offices of Rosen, Fleming, to contest the publication ban.
Such a ban would ensure that his client, Paul Bernardo,
404 STEPHEN wiiilams
would not get a fair trial, Breen contended-The best way to guarantee his cHent the inalienable right to a fair trial would be if the prosecution’s “deal with the devil” received full pubhc scrutiny and everything Karla Homolka had to say in evidence of these crimes was immediately known to everyone in Canada. Breen was the only one who righdy pointed out that the pohce had manipulated the whole scenario, both in the Crown’s law office and with the media.
Then George Walker had his say. He drew himself up to his full Lyndon B. Johnson height and strode across the courtroom, his gown flowing behind him. Suffused with the spirit of Clarence Darrow, he spoke about his concern for the community: Walker did not give a damn about anyone outside of St. Catharines—this was strictly a regional matter, and no one else’s business.
The modern courtroom tends to be a prosaic place. Today, lawyers stand their ground and ask questions of witnesses or address juries from lecterns.
The flourish, the gowned histronics of the old-style fire-and-brimstone orator, took the lawyers fi-om the big city aback. To see Walker in fiill flight, doing an Ebner Gantry and proselytizing about family values, the integrity of community and victims’ rights, particularly in hght of who he was representing and given the circumstances, was both tragic and comical.
And it was not only how he said it, it was what he said. He said that the Homolkas were victims, too; they had already lost one daughter, and in a very real sense, they were now losing another. They, too, were deserving of compassion.
As far as Walker was concerned, the fi-eedom of the press could be damned as well, because the demand for that so-called freedom was driven by greed. When the kettle calls the pot black, so loudly and unabashedly, it generally takes everyone’s breath away, and Walker’s rhetorical flourishes were no exception. Looking Justice Francis Kovacs right in the eye—another native son—Walker said it: our community. As Justice Kovacs acknowledged the point. Walker, with a swish of his robe, sat down.
The judge adjourned Homolka’s trial on Friday, July 2, for the long Canada Day weekend. Court was scheduled to convene again on the following Tuesday morning, when Kovacs would render his decision on the pubhcation ban.
It was hotter than Hades in St. Catharines; a record-breaking summer. The temperature pushed a hundred degrees every day. There was a guy in a Spiderman costume on the street outside the courthouse handing out pamphlets about the government’s unholy “deal with the devil.” At least Karla was seen for what she was by Spiderman.
Described in the tabloids as ailing, Kenneth Bernardo was paroled. He had done two months of his nine-month sentence. His daughter, Debbie, wrote a letter to the parole board on her father’s behalf
Debbie had already forgiven him for what he had done to her all those years before and now she had found it in her heart to also forgive him for what he had done to her daughter—after all, her father had paid his debt to society.
As soon as Mr. Bernardo hit the streets, he started to try and sell his story about having raised the most notorious sex killer in Canadian history. Since he had barely been on speaking terms with his son since Paul had found out Ken was not his real father and since he had not seen or heard from Paul since Paul got married, over two years earlier. Ken did not know the half of it—a fact that was soon found out.
Over the weekend, Dorothy Homolka went to MultiTech, a retail store in St. Catharines, and bought a color TV for Karla’s prison cell. “My daughter’s going to need this,” she told the clerk. “She’s going away for a while.”
That weekend the Homolkas had a pool party: it started in the late afternoon and went long into the warm summer night. It was a strange, hapless sight, this raucous going-away party for Karla.
The guests were all drinking. Reporters planted themselves on the hill behind the house. The Beastie Boys’ “You Gotta
4o6 STEPHEN wliiiams
Fight for Your Right to Parry^” blared from the boom box. They played some of Karla’s favorite Guns N’ Roses’ songs.
With their long lenses poised, Uke seafarers searching for the first sight of land, the press corps camped on the hill until someone called the cops, who dutifully ran them off.
Behind ciry^ desks, editors poured over the day’s takes, trying to determine whether or not Karla’s breasts were visible in any of the shots. One of the photographers had caught her earlier, topless, sunning herself.
Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 40