Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  In each of the cases, even though there was evidence that the female partner contributed equally to the crimes—or even exceeded her male partner—the female always received a lighter sentence. Society is not ready to recognize that a female can be as potentially sadistic and murderous as a male—especially within a male-female couple context.

  Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo—the Ken and Barbie Killers

  In Ontario, Canada, the case of Paul Bernardo and his wife, Karla Homolka, was hauntingly similar to the Hindley-Brady, Gallegoses, and Bundy-Clark killings. The difference was that they had more advanced technology with which to document the rapes and tortures of their victims: They filmed everything on videotape, leaving behind a horrific record of exactly what an organized, sadistic serial killer does to his victims. In criminal history, never have homicidal videotapes as detailed and extensive as those recorded by Homolka and Bernardo been entered into evidence—not even the notorious videotapes of Leonard Lake and Charles Ng.

  Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka have been called the “Ken and Barbie Killers,” after the perfect little dolls that so many girls play with. When arrested, he was 28 and she was 22 years old. Paul Bernardo was blond, blue-eyed, tall, athletic, intelligent, and handsome with what many described as an angelic face. She, too, had a head full of thick blonde tresses, was blue-eyed, smart, petite with a well-proportioned body, and good looks. He was a university-educated accountant and she was a recent high school graduate who worked as a veterinarian’s assistant. Both were brought up in anonymous, middle-middle-class suburbs, attended typically middle-middle-class suburban schools. They frequented typical high school and college student events and parties. Everything about them was “middle-middle” typical—their tastes and styles were not too high class and not too low class. They were upscale, shopping-mall mediocre.

  Paul and Karla were married in a lavish, but again typically mediocre-in-taste ceremony that could have, and probably did, come from the pages of a popular bridal magazine. They left the church in a horse-drawn carriage and honeymooned in Hawaii.

  They settled in one of those typical, wealthy, middle-sized towns that dot the fertile belt of southern Ontario known as the “Golden Horseshoe” between Toronto and Niagara Falls near the border with the United States. They rented a perfect little lakeside Cape Cod–style house for twelve hundred dollars a month, about thirty minutes from Niagara Falls, and furnished it with typically Canadian pine furniture.

  Atypically, by the time Paul and Karla left for their honeymoon, they had already raped, tortured, and murdered two adolescent girls, including Karla’s younger 15-year-old sister. Both crimes they recorded on videotape. So perfectly respectable, attractive, and inoffensively middle-class was the couple, that nobody suspected them of anything as schoolgirls began disappearing in the region—only to be found dismembered and encased in blocks of cement by a pond or dumped in a ditch naked.

  Karla Homolka—the Mean Girl

  Karla Homolka was born in 1970 and brought up in St. Catharines, an affluent town of about 130,000 people, nestled between Toronto and Niagara Falls. The town is nicknamed the “Garden City” because of the lucrative local agricultural industries—wine grapes, apples, and vegetables. Karla was the oldest of three sisters. Her mother was Canadian—a hospital administrator. Her father immigrated from Czechoslovakia and was a dealer of lamp fixtures and black velvet paintings—the kind that feature Elvis Presley or the Beatles.

  Very little is known about Karla’s home life. Her friends remember her as a bossy little girl who was, with no irony intended, called “The Princess.” She had long golden blonde hair and was a very intelligent child. She had a huge collection of Barbie dolls and read children’s mystery novels like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. She wanted to be a detective when she grew up, she said. Her childhood friends remember her as always being extremely dominant in their friendships.

  Many said that in high school Karla was the cleverest, prettiest, and most popular. Her only weakness was her lack of athletic aptitude. Yet Karla often appeared to be unhappy. Her marks slipped and she seemed to be obsessed with boys—nothing else interested her. She seemed to urgently want to get married and leave school, and she went through several boyfriends.

  When Karla was 15 and 16, she would dye her hair in garish punk shades of red and black. She was on the Pill and having sex, but so were hundreds of thousands of teenage high school girls. There were arguments at home, but nothing serious. When she was 17 she wanted to visit a boyfriend who had moved to Kansas, but her parents refused permission for her to go. She booked a flight and went anyway, but made sure to phone her parents when she arrived there to tell them she was coming back in two weeks and not to worry.

  To one girl, Karla showed tiny little scratches on her wrists and said that she had attempted suicide, but the girl, who herself had seriously slashed her wrists, recalls that she did not think Karla was serious about taking her life—it was attention she wanted.

  There were a few dark tones to her adolescence. In one student’s yearbook she wrote, “Remember: suicide kicks and fasting is awesome. Bones rule! Death Rules. Death Kicks. I love death. Kill the fucking world.”

  Another girl recalls Karla once whispering in her ear as they sat in the school cafeteria, “I’d like to put dots all over somebody’s body and take a knife and then play connect the dots and then pour vinegar all over them.”

  Karla read voraciously and her reading material during her high school years reflected a gothic taste: true-crime, occult, horror, and fantasy books were among her favorites.

  Karla and her Mean Girls friends formed a little clique they called EDC—Exclusive Diamond Club. The objective, they said, was for each member to find a rich, slightly older, good-looking man, get a diamond, marry, and live happily ever after.

  Other girls remember Karla simply as a bubbly, cheerful girl, who talked about going to university and becoming a veterinarian. She worked part-time in a pet store and liked animals.

  Overall, nothing has been uncovered in Karla Homolka’s adolescent history that is particularly different from the lives of millions of typical teenagers. No trace of abuse, family dysfunction, rape, abandonment, or trauma. Everything was middle-middle typical.

  In 1987, when Karla was 17, she and several of her friends drove to Toronto to attend a pet-store convention during a weekend. They booked into a hotel in Scarborough. That Friday evening, after going drinking and dancing, Karla and her friend came back to their room after midnight. They were on the make because they brought back two men with them, but it didn’t work out—they sent the men on their way. Karla had changed into her pajamas and was ready for bed when she suddenly had the urge for a sandwich. She called room service but was told they were already closed. However, the restaurant downstairs was still open. Karla, dressed in her pajamas, and her friend went down to the restaurant for a late-night snack. That is where she met Paul Bernardo.

  “Bastard Child from Hell.”

  Hindsight can be cruel, but if there was nothing in Karla’s past that signaled a potential for becoming a serial killer, everything about Paul Bernardo did. On the surface, Paul Bernardo seemed as middle-middle typical as Karla. Paul was born in 1964, the youngest of three children. His father, Kenneth Bernardo, was a successful accountant, while his mother, Marilyn, was a housewife, who in her spare time was an active Girl Guide leader.

  Both came from middle-class backgrounds from the prosperous rural town of Kitchener-Waterloo, home of one of the world’s leading computer science universities, located in the heart of Ontario’s Mennonite farming country. Marilyn’s family traced their origins to the United Empire Loyalists—British citizens who rejected the revolution in 1776 in the Thirteen Colonies and moved to Canada to become a ruling elite there. Her father was a lawyer and a colonel in the Canadian Army, who had distinguished himself during the war in Italy. Kenneth Bernardo’s father came from more humble roots: He emigrated from Portugal, but once in Canada, he had
built a highly successful tiling company that specialized in fine marble.

  After they got married, Kenneth and Marilyn Bernardo settled in a wealthier part of Scarborough, a suburb east of Toronto built during the 1950’s boom in Canada. Their house had a swimming pool out back—a luxury, considering that Canada’s summers barely lasted two months.

  Beneath this optimistic family portrait lurked dark shadows. When Paul was a child, his father had repeatedly sexually abused Paul’s 9-year-old sister. On one occasion, neighbors called police after catching him peeping into their windows dressed in his pajamas. This places Paul into a category that 50 to 53 percent of serial killers in the FBI study can be found in: parents with criminal and psychiatric records. (In a bizarre twist, on the same day that Paul was arraigned in court after his arrest, his father, Kenneth, by then aged 58, was appearing in an adjoining courtroom for his sentencing hearing after pleading guilty to repeatedly and indecently assaulting his daughter 20 years earlier, between January 1969 and June 1974. She pressed charges as an adult after she became convinced that he was molesting her own daughter.)209 Witnesses recalled that the Bernardos’ home life was “stormy” and that husband and wife had separate bedrooms. Paul’s mother grew obese, passive, and depressed.

  When Paul was about 5 or 6 years old, he apparently ran away from home and remained absent for several days. Paul’s older brother, David, said that nobody in the family even asked him where he had been.

  Like many serial killers, Paul Bernardo had an early illness—a form of aphasia as a result of a lack of oxygen to the brain during birth. As a result, he did not speak until the age of 5 and for several years following he stuttered and had speech impediments.

  Like Ted Bundy, Bernardo learned in late adolescence that his origins were not those he had thought they were. He was 16 when apparently his mother, after another in a series of bitter arguments with his father, burst into Paul’s room with a picture of a man and declared that he was Paul’s real father. She would refer to her son as the “bastard child from hell.” In a recent interview, his father confirmed that Paul was not his biological son, but said, “That’s his hang-up. That’s never been a hang-up with me.”

  As a child in school, Bernardo was isolated and tormented by other children, who chanted “smelly Barnyard, dirty Barnyard.” Nonetheless, Paul grew up to be a popular and athletic youth in his teens. He was remembered as a popular summer camp counselor, who was very kind, gentle, and helpful to children. Again, everybody remembered his angelic face.

  Bernardo was, however, developing a secret life. Since about the age of 10, he was collecting women’s lingerie advertisements, although so were probably millions of other 10-year-old boys. But there were other things—the neighbors caught him window-peeping several times, and on one occasion the police were called. Friends recall that by the time Bernardo was in his late teens, he was an avid aficionado of pornographic videos and slasher horror movies.

  When he was 19, he entered the University of Toronto to study accounting like his father. His girlfriend from that period testified that he would enjoy having rough sex with her. He would take her in his car to deserted factory parking lots, choke her with a cord, force anal sex on her, and order her to masturbate with a wine bottle. By the age of 19, he was, as the popular saying goes, “one sick little puppy.”

  During his college years, Bernardo began supplementing his income by smuggling tax-free cigarettes from Niagara Falls, New York, into Canada. He became intimately familiar with the area that lies between Toronto and the Falls. He also began to develop a sense of himself as an “outlaw.”

  “You Have Opened My Eyes to a New Way of Thinking and Being.”

  On night, Bernardo and a friend walked into a hotel restaurant for a late-night coffee. The instant he laid his eyes on the blonde in the pajamas he immediately went over to her. They chatted for about an hour, Bernardo spinning stories of his business ambitions. Homolka was enthralled by the handsome, aggressive, confident, blond, 23-year-old Paul; she called him the “big, bad businessman”—like in “the big, bad wolf.” Homolka and her friend invited the two men upstairs to their room. An hour later, Bernardo and Homolka were in bed together. They had mated immediately in an animal lust for each other.

  Psychiatrists are still trying to fathom the relationship of Bernardo and Homolka. Karla was a dominant, aggressive young woman, yet she became totally submissive to Paul. Karla was no doubt a high-dominance personality, and believed that she needed a strong and willful man in her life. The psychopath Bernardo matched the bill. The final link in the formula was Homolka’s total lack of any sense of morality. Despite her intelligence, for whatever reasons, she lacked a moral compass. When she came together with the psychopathic, amoral Bernardo, and went along with him into his fantasies, the path to murder was laid.

  By the time Paul Bernardo arrived in St. Catharines the next weekend to see Karla, she had told all her Exclusive Diamond Club friends that she had met her Prince Charming. He called at her home and met her parents and then the two went out to see a movie: The Prince of Darkness, a horror film about the unleashing of an evil spirit into the world. Afterward, Karla had invited some of her friends home for a small party. All who met Bernardo agreed with Karla—he was a dream boy.

  During the party, Karla and Paul slipped away into her bedroom upstairs. When they closed the door, Bernardo noticed Karla’s jean jacket hanging on the handle: It had a pair of handcuffs sewn to it as decoration. Karla told Paul that he could use those on her. He handcuffed her to the bed and they had sex.

  Paul was bright and charming with her parents and appeared to be an attentive boyfriend. He called Karla his “Little Princess.” He would visit every weekend and Wednesday, bringing flowers and gifts. Homolka would always be ready for him with a syrupy-sweet little note. Hundreds of these notes would be entered into evidence later at his murder trial. After some time, Homolka convinced her parents to allow Paul to spend the night at their house on the couch, so that they could spend more time together during his visits from Scarborough. During the night, Paul would sneak up to Karla’s bedroom and make his way back down to the couch before her parents got up.

  Karla noticed that Bernardo seemed to want to have less vaginal sex with her and preferred that she fellate him instead. Whenever they had vaginal sex, Bernardo seemed to be unable to climax. They would drive to a popular fishing location, Lake Gibson, and there Bernardo would have Karla perform fellatio on him in the car.

  One night at her house, Bernardo rose at night and went around the back to watch Karla’s 12-year-old sister Tammy undressing to go to bed.

  In December 1987, two months after he met Karla, Bernardo committed what is believed to be the first of a series of rapes in Scarborough. It was every woman’s nightmare: The victim got off the bus near her home late at night. She was jumped by a stranger from the dark, dragged out of view, raped, and sodomized. This means that by the time Karla had met Paul, or shortly afterward, he was already committing brutal rapes. When arrested for murder, Paul was also charged with twenty-three rape-related counts that occurred in Scarborough.

  In the meantime, Bernardo was letting his true colors show to his 17-year-old girlfriend, Karla. He now ordered her to call herself names when she gave him fellatio: “cocksucker, cunt, and slut.” They had to be in that precise order. In the car at Lake Gibson, Karla would have to say as she began fellating him, “My name is Karla. I am 17. I’m your little cocksucker. I’m your little cunt. I’m your little slut.”

  Then in December, Bernardo announced that since Karla was not a virgin when they met, they should have anal sex. Karla refused and this became a source of stress in their relationship for two months. Bernardo demanded that Karla invent a name for his penis. She came up with “Snuffles.”

  A letter sent by Karla to Paul included a love coupon, which stated: “The bearer will receive one cute little blonde 17-year-old to put on her knees between his legs and satisfy his wishes.” In an accompan
ying note, Karla wrote:

  Dear Paul,

  You’re a dream come true. You are the best, my Big, Bad, Businessman. I’ve been fantasizing what playful things to do with your body all day. Your strong chest. Your muscular arms. Your beautifully shaped legs. Your hard, flat stomach. And Snuffles, oh wonderful Snuffles. The pleasure I get from touching, from licking, from sucking Snuffles, is indescribable.

  You know what I love? Having you stick it inside me and making me gasp for air while my parents are in the next room. I love it when you shoot it into my mouth. I want to swallow every drop, and then some. The power you wield over me is indescribable. When we sit together on the couch I have to use all my strength to keep from ripping off your clothes. You make me so horny…

  I love you an amount I never thought possible. Words can’t even come close to expressing my feelings. With you in my life, I feel complete. Whole. With you by my side nothing can go wrong. You have opened my eyes to a new way of thinking and being. I will love you forever, no matter what.

  Karla XOXOXO

  In the car at Lake Gibson, Karla was then expected to follow this script: “I love having Snuffles in my mouth.”

  “And what are you?”

  “Your little cocksucker.”

  “What else?”

  “Your little cunt. Your slut. I want to suck on Snuffles all the time.”

  In February 1988, after Paul Bernardo threatened to drop her, Karla finally agreed to anal sex. He brought Karla back to his parents’ house while they were away on vacation. As usual, by the time Karla had agreed to anal intercourse, Bernardo was ahead of her. Now he wanted to take pictures as well. Setting up his Polaroid camera, he had Karla masturbate with a wine bottle. He then had her get on the bed and he penetrated her anally. At one point, he tied a black electrical cord around her neck and yanked on it. In his hand, he held an eight-inch-long hunting knife. He told Karla not to worry, that the two props excited him more. The dated photographs were later entered into evidence.