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

by Williams, Stephen, 1949-

  Murray and Rosen went to the Barrister’s Dining Room in Osgoode Hall, next to the central courthouse in downtown Toronto where Justice LeSage’s chambers were. Rosen told him that it would be necessary for him to prepare a proper, brutally honest affidavit explaining why a senior counsel in the middle of the highest-profile case in Canadian judicial history had to withdraw. If he did not have very good reason, Murray could be sure the Law Society would investigate, and if they found him to be simply incompetent, his professional status would be compromised and his career in jeopardy. Rosen strongly recommended that Murray take his position very seriously and make sure his affidavit was sound and accurate.

  It was after 5:00 p.m. the same day when Rosen got a call from the office of another highly respected criminal lawyer, Austin Cooper, Q.C., elder statesman of the criminal bar. Cooper’s office called Rosen to say that Murray had retained Cooper to represent him. Why would Murray do that, Rosen wanted to know?

  The following day, Cooper himself called Rosen back.

  “What ethical problem?” Rosen asked incredulously when Cooper uttered the phrase. Cooper said that he had not explored the exact nature of the problem, only that he was going to accept Murray’s word that an ethical issue existed. Rosen

  suggested to Cooper that Murray’s word would not be good enough. There would have to be a definition of exactly what the ethical problem was.

  “What would you do?” Cooper asked.

  “I’d treat him as a client and read him the riot act,” responded Rosen, who felt it would best serve all concerned if truth prevailed.

  When Austin Cooper called Ken Murray and told him what Rosen had said, Murray finally came clean and told his counsel that he was in possession of the notorious videotapes.

  Perceiving the serious nature of his new client’s problem. Cooper went to the Law Society, where an ad hoc committee could render an unbinding opinion. Rosen heard nothing further until the Labor Day weekend was over.

  By Wednesday, September 7, sensing something was amiss, John Rosen put in a call to Paul Bernardo. All that had occurred so far was a strange subterfuge. Because of Murray’s aberrant, unpredictable behavior and what Carolyn MacDonald had told him, Rosen was highly suspicious. He felt he was being used, that he was dangerously close to the edge of some abyss.

  Rosen spoke to the superindendent at the Niagara Regional Detention Center and asked him to have Paul Bernardo call. Preoccupied with other matters, Rosen was shocked to find that by two o’clock he had still not had a call back. He called the jail again and tore a strip off the perplexed warden who said he had dutiflilly relayed Rosen’s earlier message.

  A few minutes later, Paul called and apologized. He had been distracted by two visitors—Ken Murray and Ken Murray’s lawyer. Apparently, Murray no longer wanted off the record. Bernardo was totally confused and asked Rosen if he would come down and see him. Paul now wanted Rosen, not Murray, to represent him but he did not want to talk in fi-ont of the guards on the telephone.

  Rosen drove to Thorold again that night with another lawyer firom his office. After talking to Bernardo, Rosen quickly

  realized that Murray was engaged in some elaborate chicanery and the situation was quickly disintegrating. Rosen retained another prominent Canadian criminal lawyer, Clayton Ruby, to assist him in deahng with this festering issue. Ruby agreed, but wanted no part of the trial itself

  On the morning of September 12, a Toronto tabloid newspaper reprinted a bevy of Karla’s letters to Kathy Ford. Karla felt as if she was going crazy—again. She called George Walker, furious. What are we going to do about this? she demanded.

  John Rosen appeared with Clay Ruby before Justice LeSage. Austin Cooper appeared for Ken Murray. Court was barely in session when Cooper tried to preempt the proceedings and submit a letter from the Law Society and a sealed package to Justice LeSage.

  Justice LeSage would not play Judge Ito to Cooper’s Robert Shapiro. He refused to accept the package and letter. LeSage instructed the lawyers to sort it out in conference, and then he adjourned the court.

  By now, Rosen had a good idea what was in the package. The press was frantic. This was the biggest show since Homolka’s trial.

  When court reconvened, the lawyers had agreed among themselves that the package would be handed over to Rosen, who would then examine the contents and do whatever was “legally, ethically and professionally” correct. There was a small unpubhshed caveat: Rosen would undertake not to say anything derogatory about Ken Murray.

  Court adjourned and the lawyers went back to the conference room. The package was opened and tipped out to reveal six 8mm videocassette tapes. Rosen, Ruby, Cooper, Peter West, Ken Murray and Carolyn MacDonald were all in the room.

  “What about the copies?” Rosen asked.

  “There are no copies,” Cooper rejoined.

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  Rosen was about to contradict him, when Murray weakly spoke up from the back of the room. In a weak voice he told them that the copies were at his farm in Newmarket. Cooper, a tall, distinguished, balding man closing in on seventy, held himself in check.

  Too much of a gentleman to publicly display his extreme displeasure, Cooper ordered Murray to drive directly to his farm with another lawyer from Cooper’s firm and retrieve aD copies of the videotapes and deliver them to wherever Rosen stipulated.

  They were promptly dehvered to Clay Ruby’s offices on Prince Arthur Avenue in downtown Toronto. With Carolyn MacDonald, Rosen and Ruby watched the tapes at Ruby’s Rosedale home the next day. MacDonald had known there were tapes, but she had never seen them. They were all horrified by what they saw. Rosen got up, went into the washroom and cried.

  On Thursday, September 22, 1993, Inspector Vince Bevan was given the perfect excuse for his deal with Karia Homolka—six 8mm-format videotapes. If Ken Murray—who had earber made a point of telling Bevan’s identification officers point-blank that he was not “just another scumbag lawyer”—had given up these videotapes when he found them in May, 1993, as any honorable man would have done, the “deal w^ith the devil,” as Murray had so volubly and publicly called it, would never have been done.

  God worked in mysterious w^ays. When the inspector delivered the videotapes to the I-dent officers the following day, Bevan thought Karla Homolka might be assailable after all. Even the compliant victim of a sexual sadist could not be that forgetfril.

  Each tape had a label that appeared to be in Paul Bernardo’s handwriting. One of them even had one of those httle heart-shaped cartoonlike stickers that Karla put all over everything. The labels were cryptic descriptions identifying the victims and

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  scenarios depicted in each segment. Constable Kershaw made a number of VHS copies of the videotapes.

  On September 24, Inspector Vince Bevan gave I-dent oflficer Richard Ciszek two sealed boxes containing videotapes. The one box, bearing Center for Forensic Science seal number 1N01142, was opened for examination. The second box remained sealed.

  The opened box contained six 8mm tapes. The tapes were photographed and Inspector Bevan requested they all be dusted for fingerprints.

  On September 27, Sergeant Gilhes had a telephone conversation with Karla. He told her they now had all the videotapes, particularly those relatmg to her sister, Leshe Mahaffy and Kristen French. Sergeant Gillies and Karla talked for about ten minutes.

  The videos were screened for all the members of the Green Ribbon Task Force in the boardroom on the second floor of the Reimer Tower in Burhngton on October 11. Afterward, Bevan arranged counseling for the forty odd members of the task force.

  The tapes were viewed in sequence. First, the tape labeled “Red Hot Chih Pepper,” which depicted an unknown girl being photographed through her bedroom window, followed by footage of murder victims Leshe Mahaflty and Kristen French. The second tape depicted Kristen French, and Tammy Homolka being drugged and raped by Paul and Karla. By far the most distressing sequenc
e—as far as Inspector Bevan’s credibility was concerned—was the eighteen-minute segment that showed Karla Homolka doing exactly the same thing she had done to her dead sister to Jane Doe.

  Throughout the segment Karla could clearly be seen pouring repeated doses of halothane onto a cloth and holding it over the already comatose Jane Doe’s nose and mouth. They saw exactly where the short chps on “Karla’s Sex Video” had come fi-om. And just as she had on the short clips, Karla seemed to be having herself one hell of a time. There were approximately three and a half hours of videotape.

  It was all there—everything, except for the actual killings.

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  On the strength of any ten-minute segment from the segments deaUng with LesHe Mahaff>^ and Kristen French, an aurally challenged, one-eyed jury would convict John Rosen’s new chent, Paul Bernardo, on all nine charges. They would also have convicted Karla Homolka on the same charges, but she was not available for indictment or trial.

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  n February 1, Sergeant Bob Gillies went to George Walker’s Niagara Falls offices and supplied him with transcripts from all of the pohce interviews with Karla in which Jane Doe had been mentioned. He also showed Walker selections from the videotapes, including Karla and Paul’s attack on the comatose teenager.

  There were things Walker had heard and seen over the years that he could have lived without. In the two and a half hours

  that Gillies was in his office, Walker saw a great deal more of such things. After the sergeant left at 10:00 p.m., Walker seriously wished he was back in Montserrat.

  The similarity of the attack on Jane Doe to the one that had killed Karla’s sister, and the extent of Karla’s participation in the attack on Jane, were two of the things Murray Segal wanted to discuss with Walker when Segal went to Walker’s office on February 7. Karla’s salacious thirty or forty seconds with what turned out to be Jane’s hand in the short tape had not really presented a problem for the Crown or the police. The compliant-victim concept covered a lot of questionable behavior.

  But the tapes that Ken Murray had were mind-boggling. Karla had done to Jane exactly what she had done to her sister only six months earlier. This fact brought a lot of second-gues-sers out of the woodwork around the Crown law office. That Karla could not remember or did not remember or would not remember any details about that assault was difficult for many officials at the ministry to accept. Some individuals simply did not beheve Karla’s story.

  Walker was quick to point out that Karla had mentioned Jane a couple of times during her “induced” and “cautioned” statements. Had he not brought Karla’s dream about which she had written Walker on October 6, 1993, to the police and Segal’s attention?

  Karla had wanted to talk about Jane with Sergeant BeauUeu when Beaulieu showed her the short tape in December, but Beaulieu had told her to wait for the Toronto detectives. Walker would come back to these points and a few others time and again, over the next four months.

  Segal left Walker’s office around 10:00 p.m. The following day Walker received a formal letter signed by Segal. For such a serious matter, the missive was remarkably chatty and familiar. Segal conceded they had known about the tapes, but had failed to find them.

  “Once the police were in possession of them, they had to be authenticated and studied,” he advised. “Your client must now be interviewed respecting them, first by the poHce and then by the Crown Attorney.”

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  Segal then went on to tell Walker just about everything the prosecution was thinking about Karla’s situation. With regard to the videotapes and Ms. Homolka there were basically three areas to explore, Segal wrote.

  The first areas of exploration were relatively innocuous and basically related to expanding the police and prosecution’s understanding about what had happened to whom, when and how. For instance, they needed Karla’s observations on conversations and activities depicted on the newly found videotapes.

  In the six and a half hours of videotape there was some amateurish voyeurism, including two girls shot undressing at night through their bedroom windows. There were also two surreptitiously taped segments of girls urinating. In one of these segments, there appeared yet another unidentified girl.

  There was also the seventy-minute segment featuring Karla and Paul in a variety of sex acts in which Karla impersonated her recently departed sister. Since their star witness had a starring role, the authorities expected that more and better information should be forthcoming.

  In light of what the authorities now knew had happened, the Jane Doe issue had become more complicated. Segal acknowledged that Walker had brought a sex attack on Jane Doe to their attention in late 1993, but Karla had said that Paul had raped her friend—she had said nothing about her own considerable involvement. This was problematical.

  Karla’s statement that Paul had done it appeared to be contradicted by the videotape segment in which Jane is obviously comatose and Karla can be seen, once again, holding a halothane-soaked cloth over the face of a teenage girl. Karla appeared to be anything but unhappy. It did not appear that she was being forced to participate. The Crown knew that this was the tape from which the short clip featuring the hand in Karla’s vagina had been taken.

  “Your client has been questioned on a number of occasions, sometimes under oath, respecting her recollection of her involvement with Jane Doe,” Segal wrote, adding that he understood Karla seemed to be mistaken about her own involvement.

  “I understand your client appears to be committing a sexual

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  assault on Jane Doe and administering what may be a stupefying drug.” He noted that Walker had been shown the scenes earlier that month.

  Segal fortuitously told Walker exactly what the authorities were going to do next. Segal agreed with the pohce that any further questioning about Jane should be under caution. Walker knew that meant they were very concerned about the discrepancies between what they had already been told and what, in fact, had actually happened.

  To do this, the poHce were going to go down to Kingston, read Karla her rights and question her about Jane. Given what they now knew, they would question her about what she said she knew or did not know Once that approach had run its course, they would show her the actual tape and finish questioning her with the tape as a visual aid. They set aside the entire day of February 20 for this undertaking.

  Then they would go over the rest of the videotapes. This review would be done under oath, but not under caution. In other words, there was nothing else in these hours of videotape that really concerned or surprised the Crown law office or the pohce. Segal figured the whole process might take five days.

  Segal’s letter then became curiously circumspect. He suggested to Walker that they might obtain expert opinion about Karla’s avowed memory lapse and the inconsistencies between what she said had happened and what really had happened.

  “Might obtain” was an interesting way of putting it, since they had already done so and nobody was more aware of that fact than George Walker. Walker knew that the prosecution had already called in three more doctors to consult and examine Karla with regard to battered woman’s syndrome, posttraumatic stress disorder and the Crown’s portrayal of Paul Bernardo as a sexual sadist. He knew that the prosecution had retained, at great expense, a psychologist named Dr. Chris Hatcher from Cahfornia. They had flown Dr. Hatcher in one cold December day and driven him all over God’s green acre. Karla did one ten-hour stretch with Dr. Hatcher and she had really hked him. He was relatively young, tanned and handsome, with distinguished silver streaks in his dark hair, very intelligent and soft-INVISIBLE darkness 475

  spoken. In Karla’s words, the California doctor was a “godsend.”

  On the evening of February 8, George Walker checked into the Kingston Holiday Inn. First thing the next morning he was at the prison. Walker took great pains to explain Karla’s tenuous position
to her. He did not want her to underestimate the gravity of her situation or have anyone think, in retrospect, that he had not properly advised her.

  In Walker’s file there was a handwritten note marked 9:00 A.M., February 9. In longhand he noted he had advised Karla that there was a definite possibility the prosecutors could charge her with any number of things in relation to Jane Doe, including sexual assault, unlawful confinement, perjury and administering a noxious substance. These were all serious charges and could quash her deal. If prosecuted and convicted on any of these charges, she could easily get a life sentence.

  The meticulously written document stated that there was no inducement for Karla to cooperate with the police or the prosecution. Nothing the police had said in the past—regardless of how she perceived her relationship with them—meant anything now. If the police and the prosecution were not satisfied about her memory loss, they would charge her as soon as look at her.

  If Karla was charged, anything she said to them, at any time, would be used against her. She had the right to retain counsel and refuse to cooperate. If she waived that right she did so at her OWN RISK!!! (Walker printed OWN RISK!!! in big letters with three exclamation marks on this sheet.) Then he printed out, READ LETTER ABOVE & FULLY UNDERSTOOD BY CLIENT, dated Feb. 9/95. He signed it and asked Karla to sign it. She did: Karla Teale, which was the name she had decided to use in prison.

  In reality, neither Karla nor Walker was terribly concerned. Karla had simply “forgotten” about Jane Doe. The prosecution would not want to renege or recant because it would look bad. Karla had a lot of things going for her.