Killer Couples (5 page)

A few days later, as if she were commenting on a new joint hobby, Karla suggested she and Paul should kidnap more virgins for his sexual pleasure. ‘If you want to do it fifty times more, we can do it fifty times,’ she told him. ‘We can do it every weekend.’

Even a hardened psychopath like Paul was stumped by that one, but when he asked why the woman to whom he was engaged would voluntarily bring back other girls for him to have sex with, Karla’s response was unequivocal: ‘Because I love you, because you’re the King.’

Not long after, Karla willingly participated in another of
Paul’s home-video productions. In this one she dressed up as her dead sister while having sex with Paul, even holding Tammy’s photo over her own face, pretending to be the virgin he’d so set his heart on.

‘Karla will never know about us,’ she boasted to Paul, in her imitation-Tammy voice, on her knees between his legs, never letting herself lapse out of the role she’d so enthusiastically assumed.

Proficient as Karla’s play-acting skills doubtlessly were, nothing could alter the fact that she wasn’t the real thing, the virginal young girl of Paul’s fantasies, however. Once again she decided to make Paul a present of a girl who possessed the one attribute that she herself would never have again. With her sister Tammy dead, Karla remembered a young girl called Jane whom she’d befriended a few years before at the vet’s clinic where she worked. Jane would be around 15 now – the perfect age for her nearly 27-year-old fiancé.

By this stage Karla and Paul had moved to their own home on Bayview Drive in upmarket Port Dalhousie, St Catherine’s. When Jane arrived there, responding to Karla’s invitation to spend a ‘girlie’ evening together, she immediately fell in love with the smart clapboard house with its spotless grey carpets and jacuzzi. Really, she thought to herself, Karla Homolka was exactly the kind of woman she wanted to be in a few years – well-off, confident, beautiful… And although she had yet to meet Karla’s fiancé, who was out for the night, somehow Jane just knew he’d be gorgeous.

The evening was everything the young, impressionable girl could have wanted. She and Karla went into town for dinner and then returned to the house to watch videos and have a few drinks together. And if Jane noticed her drinks seemed to have a funny aftertaste, she certainly wasn’t about to say so. She was only 15 and her knowledge of alcohol was very limited. This must be the way it was supposed to taste, and if Karla wasn’t complaining, she wasn’t about to show her lack of sophistication by mentioning it.

Soon, in an exact re-enactment of the Tammy scenario, Jane was unconscious, which was how Paul found her when Karla called him back early to the house.

‘Such a clever girl,’ he told her approvingly, once again unable to believe his luck in finding the one woman who was unfazed, even aroused by his unusual sexual appetites.

The rape of Jane followed exactly the same script as that of Tammy, only this time Karla was monitoring the girl’s airways as she administered the halothane. Even during the part where she herself took part in the assault, licking her lips lasciviously for the omnipresent video camera, she still kept an eye on the other girl’s breathing. This time there were no mishaps, for when Jane woke up the following morning she had a terrible hangover but no recollection of anything after she passed out.

‘Nice to meet you,’ she said politely, when Karla introduced her to her fiancé, Paul.

Just as she’d thought, he was gorgeous – and so polite and funny too. Karla really did have it all.

But if Karla had been hoping that by procuring Jane for Paul, she’d be able to sustain his interest for a while, she was mistaken. It seemed like the more action he got, the more he wanted, and the greater the level of violence he used.

As 1991 wore on and their wedding planned for 29 June drew ever closer, Karla became increasingly anxious that Paul would tire of her and that he’d abandon their lavish wedding plans and go off with someone else. To her, this was unthinkable. By this stage, she was indoctrinated to think that she needed Paul in her life – in fact, his life and his needs were more important than her own. And for a girl like Karla who’d always made herself her number one that was really saying something. Then there was the wedding – the best champagne, a horse-drawn carriage, the ceremony in a little church on Niagara-on-the-Lake, the fairytale hotel overlooking the Niagara River… even pheasant stuffed with veal. Everything was planned with meticulous detail. She wasn’t about to let anything jeopardise her hard work.

So when Paul woke her a couple of weeks before the wedding telling her to stay upstairs as he’d brought home a young girl to play with – someone he’d snatched off the street at knifepoint – Karla didn’t make a fuss. Perhaps she thought it would be like the other times, that he’d do his own thing and then return the girl back to the street.

While Karla obediently dozed back off to sleep, seemingly unconcerned about what Paul had just told her, downstairs the terrified Leslie Mahaffy was finally beginning to realise what was happening to her. Just a few hours earlier, she’d been a
typically cocky, rebellious 14-year-old, who’d arrived home past her curfew to find the doors of her house locked against her. Her mother had thought she’d teach her a lesson. What she could never have reckoned on was the possibility of her daughter running into someone like Paul Bernardo.

By this time Paul had more or less given up accountancy in favour of the more lucrative but riskier alternative of smuggling cigarettes over the nearby border from the US back into Canada, where they were far more expensive. To help in this new enterprise he had to keep changing the plates on his car, and it was while prowling the streets in nearby Burlington, searching for number-plates to steal, that Paul had run into Leslie.

There are some coincidences that fortuitously send your life spinning in a different, better orbit, and others so cruel they take your breath away. Paul Bernardo wasn’t even looking for a victim that night, but Leslie literally walked right into his path. It was his lucky night – and the start of her descent into hell.

‘You got any cigarettes?’ the 14-year-old asked him, after he’d told her he was casing one of her neighbours’ houses to break in.

He smiled at her, playing the part of the loveable rogue to perfection.

‘Sure,’ he told her. ‘They’re in my car. Come and get one.’

As he’d just come back from a smuggling expedition, there really were plenty of cigarettes in Paul’s car. Also there was the knife he used to force Leslie inside, and the sweater he tied around her head as a blindfold. The terrified youngster got one
last look at the familiar streets of her neighbourhood before the whole world went dark.

Back at Paul and Karla’s home, Leslie didn’t know it yet, but her nightmare was only just beginning. The whole of that first night, Paul ‘played’ with her – raping her virginally and anally, getting her to give him oral sex… Whatever degrading act he could think of, Paul had Leslie do. And, of course, he videotaped it all. He even videotaped her on the toilet, her evident embarrassment and shame just adding to the thrill he was getting from the whole experience.

When Karla got up the next morning, she was fed up. Not, as you might think, because her fiancé was shut in the spare bedroom with a young girl he’d picked up off the streets two weeks before their wedding. No, the thing that really got to her was that their best champagne glasses were out on the dining room table. What a cheek! She really resented the fact that Paul had used the ‘good’ glasses with someone else, some stranger at that. It was so disrespectful.

Later that evening, however, Karla had calmed down enough to join the other two. After all, the relationship books all advised marrying couples to find some joint interests and she was determined to start married life on the right foot, supporting her man any way she could. And if his interests happened to lie with brutally raping and assaulting young girls, well, who was she to question it? Best to join in when told, and to enjoy it, because when it came down to it, some of it was fun and it made Paul so happy.

The last thing Karla wanted to do was make Paul angry. There was the big lavish wedding, just days away, to think about and then there was the lifestyle she and Paul led, one that would be impossible on her meagre vet assistant’s wages. Plus, the
ever-present
worry of Paul’s unpredictable and increasingly violent temper. When he was fed up, who was it that suffered? Yep, that’s right, little old Karly-Curls, that’s who! And finally, there was the tape of Tammy’s rape. If that ever came to light, Karla would lose everything she held most dear. No, Karla Homolka knew she had everything to gain from standing by her man.

Under the ever-watchful gaze of the video camera, Karla took her turn having sex with Leslie, seemingly oblivious to the other girl’s barely disguised terror. Then she got behind the lens as director, holding the camera steady while Paul subjected his young victim to a string of horrifyingly violent assaults.

Leslie’s screams didn’t really have much affect on Karla. It wasn’t as if she could do anything to help her, right? Paul would be so angry if she did anything without his permission – she just couldn’t risk him hitting her, or worse still, showing anyone the video of what they’d done to Tammy. Besides, Karla had done her best to make Leslie feel comfortable – asking her questions about her family, her favourite things to do at the weekend… They’d had a nice little chat. Really, if she just relaxed a little, the younger girl might find she actually enjoyed the rough stuff, just as she herself often did.

Did Karla know at that point that the agonising hours Leslie Mahaffy spent as the couple’s unwilling sex slave would be the
last of her short life? Was she already aware that her own face and Paul’s, contorted with desire and flushed with sexual exertion, would be the last the young girl would ever see?

Whatever the case, the outcome remains the same. Some time after being kidnapped and repeatedly raped by both Karla and Paul, Leslie Mahaffy was killed. Later in court each partner would accuse the other of the murder. Paul claimed Karla, jealous of the attention he was lavishing on his new ‘toy’ and anxious not to be identified, had killed Leslie while he was briefly away from the house. Karla, in turn, claimed Paul had strangled her so she couldn’t go to the police.

The matter of the disposal of Leslie’s body would be similarly blame-shifted between the couple, with Karla claiming minimal involvement and Paul insisting she was the key player. What’s not under dispute is that, following her murder, Leslie’s slight 14-year-old body was kept under a shelf in a dark cupboard off the basement, while the couple entertained Karla’s parents to a Father’s Day meal.

What would Dorothy and Karel have said if they’d known that just beneath the table where they were tucking into a chicken dinner, Leslie Mahaffy’s body lay in lonely solitude, growing colder by the minute? Just how might their feelings have changed for their son-in-law to be, who even now sat chatting and joking opposite them? What would they have thought of their eldest daughter, their high-achieving Karla, had they known what secrets she was hiding behind her curtain of blonde hair?

Later, Karla would recall how her mum offered to go down to the basement to fetch some potatoes from the cupboard where Leslie’s body lay wrapped in its black plastic shroud.

‘No, wait! I’ll go!’ she’d shrieked as she realised what was happening. Jumping up from her chair, she’d just managed to get to the basement door before her slower-moving mother.

Once Karla’s parents had left, again the couple’s statements diverge. At some point, Bernardo came up with the idea of cutting Leslie’s body up and encasing the parts in cement blocks, which could then be dumped in nearby Lake Gibson. Did Karla, as she was to claim, become so repulsed by the idea that she finally got up the courage to stand up to Paul and refuse to participate, despite having conspicuously failed to do so just hours before, when such firmness could have saved Leslie’s life? Or did she, as she was to do again and again, accede to his demands out of a mixture of fear, obsessive devotion and what psychologists would later describe as her innate ‘moral vacuity’?

The unavoidable reality is that Leslie’s body was brutally dismembered in the couple’s basement with a power saw. The fact that no evidence of this was ever discovered, despite meticulous police searches of the house, indicates the whole area must have been shrouded in tarpaulin.

For a few gruesome hours one or both partners concentrated on cutting Leslie’s body into pieces, not flinching when the blood sprayed out, or the bones cracked apart. Could Paul Bernardo, increasingly erratic psychopath, have patiently and methodically done all this alone? Or was it, as Paul insisted,
Karla, the experienced veterinary surgeon’s assistant, who then washed the individual body parts down before placing them in ten separate plastic rubbish bags? These were then encased in blocks of quick-drying cement, which Paul bought from a local hardware store and dumped from the bridge into the waters of Lake Gibson. With breath-taking arrogance, he would even return the bags of cement he didn’t use to the store, signing his name and address on the refund form.

Could one human being really do to another what Paul did to Leslie, possibly with Karla’s help? Could one person really slice into another’s flesh, cutting bone from bone, tearing tissue apart, watching the blood pool and congeal on surfaces and floors, thick and tacky as carelessly spilled cough medicine? Could a person pick up a young girl’s unattached foot and carry it to a sink? What about a hand? A torso? A head? Could a person do all this and still remain sane?

More than a decade on, Canadians would still debate these points.

On 29 June 1991, two weeks after the killing of Leslie Mahaffy, Karla and Paul were married in a ceremony so opulent that people would talk about for weeks and months to come. While the wedding guests tucked into their pheasant and gulped down their champagne, a man fishing with his son at nearby Lake Gibson made a horrifying discovery: a piece of a girl’s thigh, partly encased in concrete, lay just beneath the surface of the lake, uncovered by the low tide.