Paul had also began to criticise other things about pretty and slender Karla. Leastways, she started to write herself demeaning self-improvement lists. Friends saw these lists and were horrified that the formerly outspoken teenager was becoming so self-conscious. One such list included the words ‘Remember you’re stupid. Remember you’re ugly. Remember you’re fat.’
She also wrote a reminder to herself to never let anyone know that the relationship was less than perfect. In this, she may have been mimicking her parents, for some people were only shown the Homolkas behaving like the perfect family, and mainly heard about the underlying discord second hand.
Karla’s first goal in life was to get married, and she told all of her schoolfriends that she was desperate to become Mrs Barnardo. She seemed to see the state of matrimony as the most important thing in the world - rather than the quality of the marriage, the genuine love for each other that a couple can have.
That said, she did seem to love Paul in a typically over-the-top teenage way, sending him a note that said ‘You’re a dream come true.’ Later in that same note she became sexually explicit: ‘You know what I love? Having you stick it inside me and making me gasp for air when 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… With you in my life I feel complete. Whole.’
The engagement
Whilst still at school she started dropping huge hints to Paul about wanting an engagement ring. He obliged by buying a large expensive one which Karla showed off at every opportunity. Needless to say, this gave her added status amongst her schoolfriends, most of whom thought that Paul was a fantastic catch. A few of the more mature girls realised that he was more talk than action - but the majority were impressed by his good looks, nice car and expensive clothes. Paul was an immature twenty-something who got on well with impressionable teenagers. Lori’s teenage boyfriend would originally be impressed by Paul.
Karla now gave up her plans to go to university because Paul didn’t want her to. That meant giving up her dream of leaving her parents home and studying to become a veterinary surgeon. For years she had spoken of university as a way out - but now her friends said she saw Paul as her means of escape. The little asthmatic girl who had loved drawing houses was now a shallow teenager who longed for a beautiful house of her own.
Ironically, she was letting less and less of her life remain her own. Early on in the relationship Paul had suggested she stop dying her multi-coloured hair, stop cutting it and let it return to its natural blonde. This she did, even though she tired of it being so long and unmanageable. He also disapproved of her punk-style clothes so soon she was wearing soft sweaters and adopting the preppy style she’d once mocked. Paul loathed overweight and badly dressed women like his mother, so Karla became extra careful about what she wore and ate. Later she would become a much stronger character but for now she was hellbent on pleasing her man, on maintaining the relationship.
Karla left school and found herself a job at a vetinary surgery. She loved the work and her employer was very impressed by her skills, noting she was equally good at working in every aspect of animal health care. But she had to get up early every day to take the bus to work because Paul didn’t want her to learn to drive. Her fiance was showing increasing signs of being a control freak - and Karla was letting herself be controlled.
The next three years passed in this way with the couple enjoying lavish nights out with friends or sipping cocktails around the Homolka’s poolside. There were many good times - invariably captured on video - but whenever they had an argument Karla would end up backing down and writing Paul an incredibly obsequious note. Like Carol Bundy, profiled earlier, Karla was determined to maintain her relationship against all the odds.
Sacrificing a sister
Like most embryonic serial killers, Paul had quickly tired of ordinary sex and found it increasingly difficult to maintain an erection with his by now twenty-year-old girlfriend, Karla. As such immature men often do, he turned his attention to increasingly young girls - and Karla’s little sister Tammy fitted the bill.
Tammy, fifteen, had something of a crush on him, as did many of her school friends. After all, Paul was a six foot tall handsome man with an easy - if superficial - charm. Tammy, with her long blonde hair and wide smile looked very much like a younger Karla, a fact that Paul exploited by getting Karla to dress up in Tammy’s clothes. Karla would murmur that her name was Tammy and that she was a virgin, an image that would stimulate Paul into having sex.
Paul also started standing beside Tammy’s bed and masturbating whilst the teenager slept. Karla stood as look-out in the door, her main concern being that her parents didn’t wake up and find out. She was showing what one psychiatrist would later term a ‘moral vacuity’ and didn’t seem to see this as a violation of her sister’s rights.
By late 1990 the couple had been dating for three years and Paul’s interest in Karla seemed to have waned. It’s possible that she tolerated Paul’s interest in her younger sister because it allowed her to keep him in her home. There they raced around with the camcorder that Karla had purchased, videoing all of the Homolkas who were drinking cocktails and eating snacks. Paul was actually dating other women in his home town and having rough sex with them, something Karla probably suspected or even knew.
One day Paul took Tammy out with him to buy alcohol, a twenty minute journey. The pair didn’t return for six hours and when they did Paul admitted that he’d been kissing the younger girl and fooling around.
It’s likely that Karla was very jealous - though she would later deny that in court when challenged about her motivation for setting up her sister. Karla said that Paul kept badgering her to fix it so that he could take Tammy’s virginity and that he nagged on and on until she agreed.
Because of Karla’s work at the vets, she had access to animal pharmaceuticals. She read up on the subject and brought home Halcion tablets, which she and Paul ground into a powder. Then they asked Tammy if she wanted to stay up late with them and watch a horror video. Desperate to feel more grown-up, the girl agreed. It was Christmas Eve and Tammy’s virginity was to be Karla’s festive gift to Paul. The couple mixed cocktails for the entire family but only put the drug into the innocent teenager’s drink.
Lori went to bed first, followed by Karla’s parents. They saw that Tammy looked tired - and that her speech was slurred - and suggested she also retire for the night, but she mumbled that she wanted to stay up and watch the movie. Paul then gave her a further drink containing a sleeping draught and she slipped into a deep sleep or actual unconsciousness.
Karla then fetched a container of Halothane, a powerful animal anaesthetic that she’d also stolen from her boss. She soaked a rag with it and held it to her sister’s nose and mouth. Halothane is normally inhaled with the careful use of monitoring equipment but Karla was just guessing the dose. Through the rape and sexual assault which followed, she would give her fifteen-year-old sister six times the amount used to knock out a large dog.
As a vet’s assistant, Karla must also have known that animals - and people - musn’t eat or drink before being given an anaesthetic as the risk of vomiting and choking are considerable. Moreover, one of Halothane’s side effects was that it could cause nausea. Poor Tammy had been eating pasta and drinking alcohol so she was clearly at risk.
Paul got the camcorder, switched it on and put it on the floor next to the unconscious fifteen-year-old. ‘Put on a condom,’ Karla said, still holding the rag over her sister’s face. Paul ignored her request and began to undress the helpless teenager. He began to rape the girl, with Karla - whose only concern seemed to be her parent’s fury - constantly telling him to hurry up.
Paul then turned the girl over and sodomised her - the drugs had relaxed her sphincter muscles and made penetration easy. After he withdrew he told Karla to suck on Tammy’s breasts, the camcorder capturing the entire assault. Paul then told her
to perform oral sex on the teenager and when Karla refused because Tammy was menstruating he pushed her head down between Tammy’s legs. The video continued, with Paul demanding that Karla digitally enter her sister. She did and he asked her how her blood-covered finger tasted. ‘Fucking disgusting,’ she says, pulling a face.
It’s clear that Karla doesn’t want to taste Tammy’s menstrual blood yet she’s indifferent to Paul raping and sodomising the younger girl.
Karla now held the camera whilst Paul raped and sodomised the teenager a second time. He then withdrew saying that he thought something was wrong, that she’d stopped breathing. When they turned Tammy over her face had turned blue. ‘Oh my God, I think I just killed my sister,’ Karla shrieked.
The couple tried to resuscitate the girl, dressed her, moved her to another room and called the emergency services. They - and others - noticed a red mark around Tammy’s nostrils, her mouth and even on her left shoulder, as if she’d vomited some caustic agent up. When asked, Karla and Paul said that it must be a rug burn because they’d dragged her into another room where the light was better in order to resuscitate her. This made no sense as they wouldn’t have dragged her face down.
Dorothy, Karel and Lori got up when the police and ambulance arrived and were told that Tammy had stopped breathing. Medics worked hard to get her heart started again. In shock, the Homolkas followed their comatose youngest daughter to the hospital.
Meanwhile a policeman stopped Karla from putting a comforter that Tammy had been lying on, and which might be needed as evidence, into the washing machine. The couple gave statements - which said that they’d been watching a movie and suddenly noticed Tammy had stopped breathing - then they were allowed to go.
Tammy died the next day. In the interim period, Karla didn’t tell the medics that she’d given the teenager powerful veterinary drugs. Perhaps this knowledge would have enabled the hospital staff to save her. The subsequent autopsy ruled that the death was accidental, that Tammy Lyn had choked on her own vomit. The fact that she’d been drugged and menstruating presumably hid the telltale signs that she’d been raped anally and vaginally by twenty-six-year old Paul.
Strangely, the autopsy didn’t show anything untoward, though the red burn mark on Tammy’s face, neck and shoulder remained inexplicable. Death was put down to Tammy choking on her own vomit after imbibing a little alcohol. Despite the makeup skills of the morticians, the mark was still visible when she lay in her open casket on her burial day. The fact that Karla, her big sister, had been present the entire time that Paul and Tammy were together presumably stopped the authorities from suspecting foul play.
Home sweet home
After Tammy’s death, the Homolkas wanted their home to themselves in order to complete their grieving. Karel Homolka had taken the death especially badly and was unable to go to work. And Lori, who had told Karla and Paul not to give Tammy any more alcohol that night, no longer wanted Paul in the house.
The Homolkas asked Paul to go back to his parents, a place he hated. He agreed to leave but then Karla said she was leaving too. Later she’d say that she only went to stop Paul telling her parents the truth about Tammy’s death - but this doesn’t make sense as he was enjoying life with his various girlfriends and had no wish to confess and go to jail.
The Homolkas also suggested that Karla and Paul postpone their wedding, as they could no longer afford it. They similarly went around telling everyone that they couldn’t afford Tammy’s funeral - but within weeks Dorothy had got herself a new car and Karel purchased a new van. But a determined Karla had spent the last three years dreaming of her wedding day, and refused to cancel it.
In late January they moved into their new house, a palatial residence that they got for a reasonable rent because the owner’s didn’t want it left vacant. Karla would write to a friend at length about the house’s decor, a letter which was in turns vain and superficial or filled with rage at the fact that she and Paul were now paying for their wedding by themselves.
Yet she and Paul weren’t totally oblivious to the horror that they’d caused. Both lost weight after Tammy’s death and Paul behaved very strangely at the funeral, stroking the dead girl’s hair and crooning how much he’d loved her. Karla would later say that she knew she could never leave Paul now because they shared this terrible secret between them - and if he told her parents they might never speak to her again.
Not that, to friends, it looked as if she wanted to leave her attractive fiance. She continually wrote to them about how brilliant Paul was, conveniently forgetting that he often chatted up other women in her presence and that he was increasingly calling her names. He even called her a bitch in front of her parents - but his tone was light and no one remarked on it.
If appearances were indeed everything to Karla, you’d have expected her to leave now that Paul had started to belittle her in public. Instead, she seemed to blame herself for each supposed fault that he found in her and wrote him notes of apology almost every day. She would tell him again and again that she loved him and that he was her master, he was the king.
But the king soon failed his accountancy exams because he partied when he should have been studying. Paul then gave up work rather than resit the exams, telling anyone who would listen that he was going to become a rap singer instead. He was showing the classic serial killer traits; an underachiever with majestic plans. Karla seems to have bought into her fiance’s latest boast, so that it became a shared delusion, and began telling friends that he’d soon top the charts.
Paul now made his money solely from smuggling cheap American cigarettes into Canada, something he’d done part time for several years. He often took Karla with him so that they looked like two young people crossing to the states for a special evening’s romance. He also went smuggling with a male friend and kept the authorities from becoming suspicious by constantly changing their vehicle’s number plates.
Paul would go out late at night and steal new plates, peeping into girl’s windows on these journeys and watching them undressing. (Just as Ken, the man he’d originally thought of as his father, had done.) He told Karla about some of these escapades, but she didn’t seem to mind. At least one writer has suggested that she was happy as long as he stayed with her, sharing his erotic fantasies rather than acting them out alone. On the surface, Karla had what she desired - a good looking man and a pretty house in an excellent neighbourhood.
Paul was bringing lots of smuggling money to the relationship but he spent as freely as he made, often picking up the restaurant tab when they went out for expensive meals with other couples. He bought designer clothes and state of the art stereo equipment, went on exotic holidays and enjoyed fine wines. Eventually he ran up such huge bills on all of his credit cards that he had to declare himself bankrupt. Now the only official income they had was Karla’s wage. Her upwardly mobile accountant had become an unemployed bankrupt smuggler, yet still she stayed by him and made increasingly lavish wedding plans.
Three weeks after Tammy’s death, the couple videoed themselves naked in Karla’s house and Karla was heard to say ‘I loved it when you fucked my little sister.’ She added that she felt proud and happy when he raped Tammy, that they could abduct a girl every weekend. Karla had discovered that she enjoyed lesbian sex with an unconscious victim and knew that it made her daring - and hopefully irresistible - in Paul’s eyes.
The second rape victim
In the summer of 1991 Karla delivered another virgin to Paul in the form of a fifteen-year-old girl whom she’d known when she worked at the pet store. Tammy had died after being drugged by Karla - yet Karla was prepared to drug this unsuspecting teenager for Paul to rape and for herself to enjoy. She gave their visitor the same drugs and anaesthetic that she’d given her little sister, knowing that one of the side effects was vomiting as described in her work’s animal compendium. The unconscious girl was then raped by Paul and sexually assaulted by Karla, the camcorder recording the entire event.
Karla is
seen to finger the girl, a virgin - and was later to clean the blood off her before she woke up. When the girl awoke she hurt all over and thought she had flu. She had no reason to suspect her older friend Karla, a fellow animal lover, who treated her in a sisterly way.
Just prior to staging this rape, Karla had found out that Paul was dating another woman and he’d admitted he was thinking of breaking off their engagement. It’s possible that she brought him this new virgin to keep him close to home.
But another video shows her drugging a young girl by herself at a time when the courts would later determine Paul wasn’t present. Karla holds the cloth drenched with anaesthetic over the already drugged teenager’s face and is seen to reapply it frequently. She caresses the teenager’s body and inserts the unconscious fingers into her own vagina. She clearly enjoys having a helpless girl to use as a masturbatory aid.
The second murder victim
Paul would procure the next teenager for himself whilst Karla slept - but she would take part in various assaults on the terrified fourteen-year-old. Paul found the girl by chance when he went driving in a different area, planning to steal yet another set of car number plates.
He parked and started wandering around a nice housing estate. It was around 3 am so he was surprised to find a schoolgirl, Leslie Mahaffy, sitting outside her house in the darkness. They got chatting and she admitted that her parents had locked her out for not keeping to her curfew and that she was too scared to wake them up.
After a few minutes she asked for a cigarette and Paul said he had some in his car. She followed the handsome man back to his vehicle, but was cautious when he invited her to sit inside. She sat on the front seat but kept her legs on the ground outside. It was then that Paul produced the knife and told her to get into the vehicle properly if she didn’t want to die. (She’d have been more likely to survive if she’d screamed loudly and struggled hard at this moment rather than risk being driven to a quiet place of the abductor’s choice.)
Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers Page 22