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

by Williams, Stephen, 1949-

  “Wow! I don’t know what this woman thinks she’s going to get,” Karla wrote to Kathy Ford. “Paul and 1 are broke.”

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  here were two sides to the segregation unit in the Kingston Prison for Women: punitive and protective. The punitive side was where they sent prisoners who had broken institutional rules. On the punitive side, the women were locked up twenty-four hours a day. They had no TV and were only allowed three showers a week.

  On the protective side, where Karla was, things were different. Every mornmg Karla got up. She worked. She did her

  schoolwork. She attended to her vast correspondence. She watched her own TV. She ate her meals.

  In the evening it varied. Usually everyone in protective segregation was allowed out together for a half hour. Sometimes, if things were tense in the prison—if someone had been knifed or something—they were only allowed out separately, for a half hour. Whenever Karla was out, she made phone calls and took showers.

  Karla had a prison job engravmg nametags with a sixty-eight-year-old retired prison guard named Jerry Rembeck, who was a Czechoslovakian immigrant, just like her father. Unlike other prisoners, Karla wore her own clothes.

  On Tuesdays, the prison chaplain came up to talk to Karla. He did not talk a lot about God but more about how Karla was doing; how she was feeling about things that were going on in the media, for instance. Karla did not have very Christian feelings about the media.

  On January 5, 1994, prison psychologist Jan Heney stopped by, just to wish Karla “Happy New Year!”

  Sergeant Bob “Homolka” Gillies was given a short videotape by Constable Mike Kershaw. It showed a teenage girl happily playing with a Rottweiler puppy at 57 Bayview. The dog looked to be four or five months old. Karla Homolka was operating the video camera. In one segment, the camera was focused directly on the girl’s crotch—she was wearing cutoff shorts, but the shot was held for so long that it was obviously deliberate— and Karla could be heard to say, “I love videotaping.”

  The young girl in this video, whom the police knew to be Jane Doe, was wearing a white Oxford Hall sweatshirt that was disarmingly similar to the garment worn by the hitherto unknown female depicted on Exhibit 121212-39, otherwise known as “Karla’s Sex Video.”

  The Metropohtan Toronto Police had recently charged Paul Bernardo with the sexual assault of Jane Doe. The prosecutors had decided that with Jane Doe and Karla’s testimony, they had enough evidence.

  Fascinated, Sergeant Gillies looked at the tape again the following day. The more he looked at it, the more he saw. For instance, there was some sort of wedding cake off to the side, where Jane and the dog were wrestling. It was not a real wedding cake—it looked to be made from towels.

  Ms. Heney received an unwelcome memorandum. Dated January 7, the subject was Karla Teale. The deputy warden reminded Ms. Heney about their earlier discussion and instructed Jan to bring “closure to your treatment sessions with Ms. Teale as of January 31, 1994.”

  The case was now entirely in Dr. Brown’s hands. Heney was to make sure the files were up to date and a final treatment summary was completed. “The file should then be forwarded to Heather McLean as senior psychologist for secure storage. Again, the file storage issue will be revisited if and when the publication ban is hfted.

  “Thank you for your cooperation and your attention to this very difficult case.”

  Sergeant Gillies called Karla and asked her about the wedding cake. He did not mention Jane Doe, nor did he say why he was asking. Karla was accustomed to non sequiturs from the police.

  The cake was not real, Karla said. It was made of bath towels and had been a shower gift from a neighbor. She could not remember the exact date Lynn Clark had given the shower for her, but it had definitely been a few weeks before the wedding. To Sergeant Gillies and his superiors, that meant if the girl in “Karla’s Sex Video” was one and the same girl as the teenager in the innocuous video with the wedding cake, the incident with the hand and digits had taken place sometime in June, the same month Leslie Mahaffy had been raped and murdered.

  Sergeants GiUies and Beaulieu came for another visit on January 11. They spent forty minutes with Karla and got her to sign a couple of Form 14 consents to continue to release medical and psychiatric information; the following day Inspector

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  Bevan sat in. They talked for an hour and Karla signed two more Form 14s.

  In the afternoon, Beaulieu, GilHes and Karla met with Jan Heney. The pohce needed to get a better feel for the relationship between Karla and the psychologist, and where Karla was at and how she was “coping.”

  At Karla’s request, the deputy warden set up a telephone call for Karla with Sergeant Gillies on January 31. Karla wanted to speak to Sergeant Bob about a pending Metro Toronto Pohce interview. GiUies reassured her that her old friends Metcalfe and Whitefield would be in on the second and third of February and the interviews would be just hke the ones they had conducted at the Journey’s End the previous May.

  The interview took place in a room in the prison’s basement. The prison was under renovation and often Karla’s answers or the Detectives’ questions would be drowned out by nearby construction. Detective Metcalfe wore a windowpane suit jacket and a big-collared white blouse. With her dark brown hair in a ponytail and her bangs pouffed, she looked more hke a 1940s starlet than a hard-nosed detective. The two women sat side by side. Detective Whitefield sat across the table, taking notes.

  Karla’s face was puffy*. Her roots were showing and she had gained considerable weight. Her beige suit was taut. Off the top she told the detectives that the only issue they would be discussing was Jane Doe and that was on the advice of her lawyer, who did not want her mind “confused” while she was busily preparing for Paul Bernardo’s prehminary on the murder charges.

  “Paul raped Jane Doe,” Karla said without hesitation, and then launched into her own pecuHar abridged version of the one sexual assault on Jane Doe. It was Paul who made her contact Jane. It was Paul who made her grind up one Halcion pill in the mortar and pestle and mix it in Jane’s drink. It was Paul this, and Paul that. WTien Jane finally fell asleep, Paul had instructed Karla to lie down next to her and face the other way. Then he had intercourse with Jane. Karla did not see it, but she knew It had happened. Suddenly, Paul leaped up and said Jane

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  was not breathing. Karla ran to the phone and called 911. Then Jane started breathing again, and Karla canceled 911. She drew diagrams and carefully initialed everything. That subject out of the way, Detective Metcalfe and Karla were able to share a joke or two and have a laugh. Detective Metcalfe gave Karla a list of topics they would hke to discuss, including Norma Tellier; Ja-nine Rothsay, who Paul had allegedly raped in the downstairs bathroom at 57 Bayview at Christmas, 1991; various writings that had been seized in the house, the Henley Island rape in April, 1991, clarification on revelations she had made in her interviews about Paul being the Scarborough rapist, and any information Karla might have received about the Scarborough rapes. They also wanted her to elaborate on her sex life with Paul Bernardo. After forty-five minutes they took a break. Karla promised to phone George Walker and get his permission to cover these topics.

  No longer alexithymic, no longer with “no words for mood,” no longer suffering from “flat affect,” Karla was positively frothy when she returned from phoning Walker. Keeping the detectives in suspense, she said she had a few things to tell them first. For instance, did they know that Paul Bernardo had wanted her to have children—daughters—so he could have sex with them?

  Then Karla popped the good news. The session concerning Jane had gone so smoothly that her lawyer had given her permission to answer all of their questions, which she proceeded to do with considerable animated prevarication.

  Gillies and BeauHeu carefrilly monitored Whitefield and Metcalfe’s interviews with Karla. Watching Metcalfe and W
hitefield talk with Karla was too much for the two sergeants from the Green Ribbon Task Force. After Metcalfe and Whitefield left, Gilhes and Beauheu conducted yet another interview with Karla in the afternoon.

  It proved rewarding. Karla provided them with copies of her divorce apphcation and her affidavit. She gave them a note, which she asked them not to review until after she had gone

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  back to her cell—it was a single sheet of paper with more handwritten reminiscences of the abuse and suffering she had endured at Paul’s hand.

  Karla’s memory for the sHghtest trespass had become impeccable: she remembered, in great detail, everything about her sister, even what Paul and her sister had been wearing; the captivities and deaths of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French; but nothmg about the sex acts that had been depicted on the short segments on “Karla’s Sex Video.”

  The Green Ribbon Task force now knew conclusively that the unidentified girl in the one-minute, fifty-eight-second videotape exhibit was the same girl who could be seen in the innocuous video that had been shot by Karla in the late afternoon and evening of June 6, 1991, in which Jane could be seen frohcking with Karla’s dog and Karla could be heard to say, “I love videotaping.” Karla’s discussions about Jane Doe and Karla’s inability to identify her as the unidentified girl in the video shorts perplexed the poHce and the Crown—a bit.

  Sergeant Gillies kept in touch. On February 8, he called Karla and said that her recent note had made them want to speak to her yet again.

  The Crown prosecutors Ray Houlahan and Gregg Barnett arrived at the Kingston Prison for Women first thing Tuesday morning, February 15. Barnett was a soft-spoken gentleman with a small paunch that was accentuated by his penchant for ill-fitting vests. The junior of the two, Barnett was well educated and spoke a number of languages, including Punjabi. Unable to hold in his stomach, Barnett held opinions that he would pop as often as vest buttons. He came off as pompous and arrogant, but he was simply a fastidious wit with a sharp tongue. Karla and the two prosecutors would keep each other company, day in, and day out, every day, all day long, for the following four weeks.

  The process was comparable to that of an actress with her director and producer. Karla’s “induced” and “cautioned” statements and the videotapes made at the Journey’s End and

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  the transcripts of any other statements or comments that she had ever made to the poHce would be reviewed and studied, until all the contradictions and inconsistencies were understood and intellectually resolved. Karla must see the clear path. Soon, she would have every line and word she had uttered about this sordid business committed to memory, with all the various contradictions ultimately resolved.

  The prosecutors showed Karla how to present her evidence, what they wanted to see and hear in court, how she should hold herself, her demeanor, how she should dress, act and speak. Tireless, Karla was the hardest-working witness they had ever protected.

  On Saturday, February 26, Karla decided to sit down and write Dr. Arndt another long letter, starting with a detailed overview of her medications. She had reduced most to minimal amounts and she no longer felt needy in that way.

  In another long, chatty letter, Karla told Dr. Arndt that she was presendy going over her testimony with the prosecutors and she found that stressflil. Since she was not sleeping, Dr. Brown had experimented with some different drugs, such as 500mg of chlorathydrate—“3 days on then 3 days off,”—but that had not worked at all.

  “I’ve adjusted fairly well,” she said of prison Hfe. “As soon as people get to know me they seem to immediately realize that I’m not the horrible person the media makes me out to be. And the staff is absolutely fantastic—guards, administration, hospital stajSF—everybody. They’re really making it easy on me here.”

  Methodically, the prosecutors plodded on—their stamina and determination exceeded only by Karla’s—right through the weekend until they finally took a break on Friday, March 10. A long weekend, and then back at it on Tuesday, March 15.

  Throughout these marathon sessions. Sergeants Gillies and BeauHeu took rough notes; Karla had never seen this many intense older, well-educated, well-spoken, successfiilly employed men with steady paychecks in one room in her Ufe. And thev were all there for her.

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  The prosecutors tried to anticipate every possible line of questioning Karla could expect from Paul’s defense lawyers.

  They discussed her first meeting with George Walker: “I told him basically the gist of it. He told me not to say anything to anybody. I was so upset, I don’t recall if he said he was going to talk to the Crown. I think I told him about Tammy as well as Kristen and Leslie. … I don’t know who mentioned [immunity] first. … I put my trust in Mr. Walker.”

  On March 10, the identification officers joined the session. Constables Ciszek and Kershaw went over exhibits. On March 14, they reviewed Karla’s vast correspondence, including well over a thousand missives she had addressed to her estranged husband, between October, 1987 and December, 1992.

  Karla’s memory about the context for every litde love note and card was infallible. She remembered the circumstances under which even the most insignificant “pillow note” had been scribbled. On March 15, Karla was shown a portion of the video she and Paul had made in Hawaii on their honeymoon. They rationalized her “I love you more than the Hawaiian sunset” sohloquy.

  The following day, they reviewed portions of what the prosecution had been calling the “suicide tapes,” those plaintive audio recordings Paul made after Karla had left him in January.

  During the afternoon session on March 17, Karla shared a new memory: on a trip with Paul to Orlando, Florida, during August, 1992, Paul had followed a girl to her country residence. He had parked on a deserted road and the plan was for Karla to flag the girl over for assistance. Then they would rape and murder her right there. It never went beyond the planning stage.

  On March 21, the deputy warden, whom Karla had somehow successfully transformed into a personal handmaiden, told Sergeant Gillies that Karla was having trouble sleeping and that she was having dreams again. Arrangements were quickly made for Karla to see Dr. Brown more frequently.

  Dr. Brown explained to Karla that her dreams were not reality and that her memories would come back in time. The irony was that her memory was impeccable, except when it came to Jane Doe. Dr. Brown was very kind and understanding, and

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  Karla was slowly starting to change her opinion about him. She also knew he agreed with Dr. Arndt’s diagnoses. She asked. Dr. Brown told her.

  Karla met two new men on March 24. Unsolved sex crimes in the hinterland of southwestern Ontario fell in the purview of the Ontario Provincial PoHce—Karla’s favorite force. Two handsome, distinguished-looking detectives named Aspen and Chapman interviewed Karla about the unsolved murder of Lynda Shaw. Lynda, a twenty-one-year-old brunette engineering student, had disappeared over the Easter weekend in 1990. Her body was found in a wooded area of a stretch of highway on Monday, April 16, 1990. She had been stabbed and set on fire.

  The fire bit was reminiscent of Martin Thiel’s modus operandi in the movie Criminal Law. During their search of 57 Bayview, the police had recovered a receipt from the Royal York Hotel dated Tuesday, April 17, 1990. They also knew that Karla had outpatient surgery at Scarborough General Hospital for dysplasia of the cervix on that day.

  Karla thought she had seen Paul that day, but she was not positive. She thought she saw him that night. But she might have taken the bus to the hospital; she could not remember. There was also a Cantel record that showed a call to the Homolka residence on April 16. Karla did not remember anything about that.

  Karla told the detectives that Criminal Law was a movie they both liked and that she had picked out their new name, Teale, based on Thiel; she had just angHcized it to Teale, Hke the color with a vowel. S
he and Paul even had a heraldic background for the name, which they had bought in Florida.

  “Did he have a fascination with fire?” one of the detectives asked.

  “No. But he did hke to burn things,” Karla rephed, not understanding what she was saying.

  “Like what?”

  “He burned, like, you know, evidence.” She told them

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  about all the things, Hke leather and nylon jackets and jewelry, that he had burned in their fireplace. Neither of the detectives asked her how he burned material that did not burn easily and would have smelled terrible, permeating the springtime atmosphere in their heavily residential area.

  The pohce proceeded to ask her about Lynda Shaw’s possessions. Shaw had a navy purse with a zipper top, a lady’s Seiko watch with an expansion band and an expensive, engmeer-type calculator. Karla had never seen anythmg like that.

  Dismissing the possibility that Paul had anythmg to do with Lynda Shaw’s death, Karla told these detectives what she had already told the Green Ribbon Task Force and the detectives with the MetropoHtan Toronto Police sexual assault squad the previous May: Shaw was highly unlikely. The main thing Karla remembered about Lynda Shaw was that Paul had asked why anybody would want to abduct her?

  “She was not his kind of girl.” Karla said. “She was too big, wrong hair color. You know, wrong hair type. I’m convinced he was not involved in that.”

  Prosecutor R.J. Houlahan wanted Karla to be m the St. Catharines jail the day before she had to testify at Bernardo’s preUminary hearing. She was to be there a day early. Karla was introduced to the two officers who would be protecting her. Her mother would bring bedding and clothing and her “little house” photos.

  Karla called the trailer in the prison yard the “httle house.” Predominantly used by K4W prisoners for conjugal visits, Karla’s httle house was known among the prison guards as the “fuck truck.” Karla filled out handflils of PFVUs (Private Family Visiting Unit forms) long in advance, having carefully calculated her eligibihty periods, to facilitate long weekend visits with her family every sixth week.