Killer Couples (7 page)

That night, Paul and Karla drove Kristen’s body to Burlington, where Leslie Mahaffy had lived, hoping police would immediately suspect a homegrown attacker. There, at an illegal rubbish dump, they dragged the body to the top of a ditch and let it roll down, covering it loosely with leaves. Kristen French, whose life had started out with such hope and promise, ended up at the bottom of a ditch on a rubbish tip – a final, ultimate indignity.

Meanwhile, the net was starting to close in on Paul Bernardo. Despite a police error, which had the whole of Canada on alert looking for the wrong type of car they were convinced had been used in the French abduction, questions were finally starting to be asked about the fresh-faced former accountant.

One of his childhood friends, troubled by some of the remarks Paul had started to make about raping women and still struck by his resemblance to the composite picture of the Scarborough Rapist and by the coincidence that women in St Catherine’s had started being raped and murdered right after Paul had moved there, had contacted the police. Within days, a couple of officers were outside his door.

Though Bernardo was nervous, this was a call he’d been expecting. And by this stage, his arrogance had grown into a deep-rooted conviction that he was above the law, so he was relaxed around the two officers – a responsible citizen with nothing to hide, but nevertheless willing to do anything to help police with their investigations into this horrendous crime.

‘I already talked to the police back in Scarborough,’ he told the officers, when they asked whether he’d had any previous dealings with the law. ‘I guess I look a lot like the picture of the guy they put out there. I gave them some samples.’

The investigating officers were impressed. They already knew about the Scarborough connection, but the fact that Bernardo had volunteered the information so readily worked in his favour. Also in his favour was the wedding photo in pride of place, showing him and his strikingly attractive wife. Would a handsome, friendly guy like this, with a gorgeous wife and a lovely home kept so beautifully neat and tidy, really go round kidnapping and torturing young girls? It just didn’t seem credible. Once again it seemed as though he was off the hook.

Despite its outwardly well-cared-for appearance, life in the Bernardo house was rapidly disintegrating, however. Karla, who’d always put her own comfort above everyone else’s until she met Paul, was now locked in a battle for her very survival. Paul’s violence was getting out of hand and while there was a time when his abject sorrow and tenderness afterwards had almost made up for the pain, nowadays there were few
apologies. Instead, everything was her fault, everything had to be punished. Even the fact that her husband was finding it harder and harder to reach sexual climax, requiring more stimulation each time, more graphic images, more role play, more violence, was somehow her fault. She wasn’t good enough for him; she wasn’t sexy enough. No wonder he had to go out trawling for other women – it was all her fault!

Karla was getting beaten, but she was still no victim. There was enough of the old spirited woman left to resent what was happening and to want out. But Paul had too much over his wife for her to ever leave him. Karla Homolka, who’d got top grades throughout high school and been marked out for great things, wasn’t about to end up in prison for the rest of her life. And she certainly wasn’t about to risk losing the love of her family, who she increasingly saw as a safe haven from the nightmare that was the rest of her life and who, she was sure, would hate her if they ever found out what really happened to Tammy.

Paul had graduated from hitting Karla with his fists to using a flashlight, that way it didn’t hurt him so much. Trouble was, it left more visible marks. One day, early in January 1993, Dorothy Homolka received an anonymous phone call at home. Later, this would transpire to be at the instigation of someone with whom Karla worked.

‘You’d better get help for your daughter,’ the caller said.

Arriving at the animal centre, Dorothy was horrified by what she saw. Karla had enormous, blue-black bruises on her face and one of her eyes was full of blood. Not only this, but she’d
been beaten so badly around the legs that she could hardly walk.

‘I was in an accident,’ Karla lied to her mother. ‘I’m not coming home, Mom. I can’t leave Paul.’

But no caring parent could stand back and watch the life being literally beaten out of their child. The following day, the Homolkas turned up at Karla and Paul’s house. Karla was there alone, in a worse physical state than she had been the day before.

‘Get your things! You’re coming home with us,’ Karel ordered, so full of anger and contempt for Bernardo that he could hardly speak.

‘I
can’t
,’ Karla protested weakly. ‘I
can’t
leave him!’

But Karel wasn’t going without his daughter. While mum Dorothy and younger sister Lori gathered some of Karla’s things together, Karel physically manhandled his eldest daughter towards the car. Finally she stopped resisting and, almost gratefully gave in to the inevitable.

‘Fine, but just let me get something, OK?’ Karla picked her way painfully back to the house, where she hobbled from room to room, clearly looking for something. Where had Paul hidden those video tapes? They had to be somewhere: the music room, maybe the roof insulation? Eventually she returned
empty-handed
to the car. But as they pulled away from the kerb, whatever frustration Karla felt at not being able to locate what she was looking for evaporated away. She was really leaving; she was escaping.

The house they’d moved into with such high hopes now held
so many terrifying memories, so many ghosts. In the past few weeks, she’d even started to hear voices echoing around the magnolia walls and empty, girlish footsteps padding around on the grey carpeted floors. The dead were still at large in Bayview Drive and no amount of bleaching and vacuuming could get rid of them. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ she’d mutter to herself in justification. ‘There wasn’t anything else I could have done.’

But ghosts are there to bear witness to the truth, and they always know when a person is lying.

As Karla settled back, watching the house grow smaller and smaller in the wing mirror of the car, she felt as if she’d been trapped inside one of the machines used to crush cars at the scrap-yard, but now she’d miraculously been released. Suddenly she could breathe again and the fear she’d kept bottled up inside threatening to choke her started to melt away. The nearer she got to her parents’ house, the stronger she started to feel.

Of course Paul wasn’t going to tell anyone anything. Why would he? He had more to lose than she did. The man who prided himself on being cleverer than anyone else, unfettered by the laws of normal men, wasn’t about to let himself be shut away in a prison cell for the rest of his life.

She was still young, just 23. She could start her life over again, put the horror of the last few years behind her.

Even when her family insisted on checking Karla into hospital and filing assault charges against Paul Bernardo, she still clung to the vision of her shiny new life. With Paul banned from coming anywhere near her, she was free to go wherever she
wanted. She could retrain for a new career, meet a man who’d treat her properly, have a few babies…

It never occurred to Karla that wherever you go, your ghosts come with you.

Paul was arrested on 17 February 1993 and then released back home, where he wallowed in self pity at what he saw as Karla’s desertion of him. Where once he’d got his thrills making videotapes of women and girls suffering, now he threw his energies into audio tapes on which he poured out his own grief and heartbreak. Often, he threatened suicide, shrieking about the grim reaper at the door. But though the reaper knew Bayview Drive well enough by this point, it was never Bernardo he came for.

Out of hospital and living with an uncle and aunt, where Paul wouldn’t find her, Karla went from strength to strength – buying new clothes and even meeting a new man she was crazy about. Life was just opening up for the former Mrs Bernardo but then the gates slammed shut again.

At the beginning of February 1993, the lab results from the Scarborough Rapist case finally came back. Of the five samples submitted, only one matched the DNA taken from the victims. The name on the sample: Paul Bernardo.

Immediately, the Bayview house was put under surveillance and police from Scarborough began talks with counterparts in St Catherine’s as to whether there might be any links between earlier rapes and the more recent schoolgirl murders. While Bernardo’s every move was closely monitored, officers decided
it was time to have a chat to the one person who might be able to shed some light on the ex-accountant’s shady past: his wife.

If there was one skill Karla Homolka had honed over the last few years, it was that of saving herself at any price. When the police turned up and asked questions about Paul’s past and his sexual preferences she knew it was only a matter of time before the game was up. They’d search the house, find the videos, and unless she worked out a strategy, she’d be right up there in the dock beside her ex.

Karla had once been one of the brightest students in her class. It was about time to put those brains to use. First, she read up on everything she could about Battered Woman Syndrome – where women in abusive relationships become conditioned by sustained and habitual violence to act in ways that are completely out of character. Then she consulted a lawyer.

Karla’s defence was that Paul Bernardo had controlled her by fear for so long that she had lost all free will to oppose him and had helped him fulfil his twisted fantasies because he’d threatened to kill her and her family, and later on, because he’d also threatened to reveal the truth about Tammy. She had been an unwilling victim in all of this, she asserted. He alone had carried out the murders – she had only helped him cover them up. She was willing to tell everything she knew to get Bernardo convicted in return for immunity from prosecution.

As Bernardo was arrested for his involvement in the Scarborough rapes, the authorities were negotiating over Karla’s demands. Everyone knew that she was too deeply involved for
blanket immunity, but if they could work out a plea where she received two lesser sentences for manslaughter of ten years each, to run concurrently, she could be out in three years or four at most. It was a pretty good deal. Even after evidence about Tammy’s death accumulated, and the sentence was upped to twelve years, this was still an attractive offer. She might even be able to serve time at a provincial psychiatric hospital instead of a regulation prison. If she played her cards right and everyone bought the Battered Woman defence, Karla Homolka could be out of captivity and free to start her new life well before her thirtieth birthday.

At the beginning of May 1993, Dorothy, Karel and Lori Homolka opened a letter written by Karla and handed to them by the psychiatrist who’d been treating her.

‘This is the hardest letter I’ve ever had to write and you’ll probably all hate me once you’ve read it,’ she began, before going on to confess that she and Paul had been responsible for Tammy’s death. Paul had been in love with the younger girl and wanted to have sex with her, she told them. He had forced Karla to help him by getting and administering the drugs used to sedate her while he raped her. When she’d vomited and stopped breathing, they’d done everything they could to bring her back, but in vain.

‘No words I can say can make you understand what he put me through,’ lamented the ever self-serving Karla. ‘I don’t expect you to ever forgive me’.

Incredibly, the Homolkas did just that. Faced with the
prospect of losing another daughter, so close on losing the first, they chose instead to believe that Karla had been as much a victim as Tammy. It was Paul Bernardo who had done these terrible things. Karla, like the SS guards in the German concentration camps, had merely obeyed orders.

When details emerged of Karla Homolka’s plea bargain, the Canadian public were outraged. It was a deal with the devil, they protested, not buying the whole Battered Woman thing. But the authorities persisted. Without Karla’s testimony, the only evidence they had to link Paul Bernardo with the murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French was largely circumstantial, despite a thorough search of the house. Sure, they could try to get both the Bernardos convicted of murder and locked up for life, but there was always the chance that the case would collapse. They were in no doubt that Paul Bernardo was a dangerous psychopath. The only way to be sure of keeping him off the streets for ever was to give Karla a deal that would allow her back on the streets in a few years. It was, as they would repeatedly try to explain, the lesser of two evils.

At her trial in June 1993, which was subject to a blanket publicity ban, a pious-looking Karla Homolka, wearing a smart office-style suit, her long blonde hair tied demurely back, pleaded guilty to two charges of manslaughter and was sentenced to twelve years in prison.

What the authorities didn’t know as they shrugged their shoulders and batted away yet another barrage of criticism was that locked away in a safe at the home of Bernardo’s lawyer were
six videocassettes showing the rape, torture and murder of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French as well as the last traumatic moments in the life of young Tammy Homolka. These tapes proved beyond doubt that Paul Bernardo had committed unspeakable crimes against these young defenceless girls; what they also proved was that Karla Homolka had played a much more active and seemingly enthusiastic part in the process than she’d previously admitted to. What was unconfirmed, however, was who had actually carried out the murders themselves.

If those tapes had been available at the time of Karla’s trial, who knows how differently history might have turned out? They could have been enough to convict Paul without Karla’s testimony and they would certainly have been enough to cast considerable doubt on the Battered Woman defence.

As it was, the tapes didn’t surface until September of the following year after Paul Bernardo’s orginal lawyer quit and his replacement, John Rosen, took over the case. Bernardo had been demanding he commit perjury by destroying the tapes and putting forward the case that he had never met either Leslie Mahaffy or Kristen French.