Killer Couples (8 page)

Bernardo’s new lawyer handed the tapes in, but by then it was too late to do anything about Karla’s sentence.

After his three-month trial in the summer of 1995, Paul Bernardo was found guilty of all charges, including two counts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for twenty-five years.

To this day, he languishes in an airless prison cell the size of a
walk-in cupboard, locked up for twenty-three hours a day for his own protection. Gone is the cocky self-confidence, the belief that nothing can touch him; gone is the sordid secret life he hid from everyone except Karla. In his cell, with its clear glass wall facing into the prison wing, there are no secrets. Bernardo, once the pretty boy, is now pasty and out of shape, his grand plans and ambitions long forgotten in the deadening routine of daily prison life.

Karla Homolka, on the other hand, is now free. Even though the huge wave of public resentment against her after the tapes were played in court meant she served her full prison term, she was released in 2005 and is trying to build a new life for herself in Montreal under a different identity. She has even had a baby.

For the still-suffering families of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, this is yet another outrage they have to deal with: Karla has her freedom, her fresh start, her future, but where was she when their daughters were begging for their own freedom, for their own futures?

Wherever she is now, Karla must be keeping her past very close to her, projecting a fresh image to the world, a blank canvas on which to draw her brand new life. And if sometimes, on the quietest nights, the ghosts still call to her, if she hears their restless footsteps padding softly through the darkest corners of her mind, well, she isn’t about to complain.

Sometimes life gives you a second chance – whether or not you deserve one.

B
arrowgate Road, in Chiswick, West London, is the kind of place estate agents always bill as ‘one of the area’s premier roads’. Wide and leafy, with an eclectic mix of Edwardian terraces and large 1930s semis, its residents enjoy easy access to the River Thames to the south east and the chic restaurants and boutiques of Chiswick High Road to the north. Essentially, you have to be pretty well-heeled to live here, where properties routinely go for over a million pounds, but even among the successful, designer-clad residents, Ann Hunter stood out.

Elegant, exotic-looking, with the complexion and physique of a woman far younger than her 49 years, Ann Hunter, or Carol Ann Hunter as she was officially called, was the woman who had everything. Not only was she beautiful and wealthy, she was also one of the UK’s top businesswomen. Her current job, running the
Tommee Tippee baby product empire, was just the latest in a series of high-profile managerial positions she’d held, each one more prestigious than the last. Like any successful business person, she put profit above everything, never allowing sentimentality to influence her decisions, with the result that she enjoyed a reputation for ruthless efficiency in her professional life.

On the surface, her personal life also seemed idyllic. When she wasn’t enjoying the company of her two children, Ann was usually to be found with her new partner, Anton Lee, an urbane, Oxford-educated financial advisor. The two enjoyed weekend trips to European capitals, where they’d visit art galleries and eat at fine restaurants. Or they’d stay at home in the three-storey Chiswick house, companionably filling in the cryptic crossword in
The Times
.

But, as is invariably the case, not everything in Ann’s life was quite as perfect as it appeared on the outside. Buried deep inside that pristine, gym-honed exterior was a parasite that was even now gnawing away at her insides, leaving behind it a trail of disease and decay, and keeping her awake at night. A woman who prided herself on her astuteness, Ann Hunter had no doubt who was responsible for this feeling of being eaten alive from the inside out. Colin Love, her ex-partner of twenty-two years, and his new wife Judy.

‘I’ll never be free of them,’ she complained, snuggling up in Anton’s arms, one night in July 2005. The two had fallen asleep after a post-dinner glass of rum. Typically, Ann had slept badly and had woken in the early hours with the usual nagging ache.

‘If we didn’t have children I could just cut all my losses and move on completely. But as it is, he’ll always be in my life for the next twenty-five or thirty years – him and that bitch!’ She spat out the last word like a bad oyster, as she always did when mentioning anything to do with Judith Crowshaw (she could never, ever think of her as Judith Love).

Anton Lee winced. Ever since he’d first started advising Ann Hunter on financial matters, he’d been completely smitten. At first, he’d been Colin’s advisor, but when the couple had split up, he’d started advising Ann separately, and before long he was hopelessly and unexpectedly in love. Past 50 now, Lee had given up on meeting a woman who ticked all the right boxes – intelligent, good company, successful, attractive. As far as he was concerned, Ann Hunter was the answer to the dreams he hadn’t even known he was harbouring. It was fate that they’d found each other at this stage in their lives. He knew they could be completely happy together if only she could get over this obsession with her former partner.

‘He won’t necessarily be around forever,’ he murmured in her ear, brushing aside a lock of her long, straight black hair to nuzzle into the hollow between her shoulder and elegant neck. ‘You never know, he might be in an accident. Accidents do happen, you know.’

Who was it who added the phrase: ‘or can be made to happen?’ Was it Hunter – raging against being replaced by a woman she considered her inferior in both looks and intellect? Or was it Lee, desperate to placate the lover he adored?

It doesn’t really matter. This was a drunken conversation in the early hours of the morning, the kind lovers often have that are forgotten by the following day. And yet, somewhere within this half-whispered, half-dreamlike conversation lay the seed of a plan that would take hold in Ann Hunter’s mind until it was all she could think about, a plan that would eventually bring this ‘perfect’ life she’d built up crashing down, burying a whole family in its ruins, as well as Lee himself – a man who loved too much.

For Colin Love, marriage to Judith Crowshaw in 2004 was a new beginning. For more than two decades, he’d been with Ann Hunter, nearly ten years his junior, ever since they were both ambitious young executives working for Avon Cosmetics. They’d gone on to have two children, but while Ann’s career continued to enjoy a meteoric rise, his own reached a plateau. In their ultimate years he’d felt increasingly sidelined, remaining with the children in the couple’s London home while his wife commuted to Cramlington, Northumberland, in the north-east, where her company had its headquarters. Weekends in the fifteenth-century manor house they owned in the picturesque Bedfordshire village of Wilden were frequently rushed, with Ann pulling up late on a Friday in her BMW X5 sports car, drained and exhausted. By the time she’d finally relaxed, it was time to pack up and leave again. Life seemed to be an endless round of clearing out fridges and leaving notes for the milkman, with precious little quality time together.

‘It’s like we’re leading separate lives,’ Colin, now working as a part-time business lecturer, confided in friends.

Increasingly left to his own devices in the evenings, Colin started idly perusing the Internet, looking for ways to fill his time. Like millions of others, he joined the Friends Reunited site in May 2003, hoping to reconnect with people with whom he’d lost touch in the initial single-minded phase of his career. Having spent the last thirty years making a success of his life, in mid-life he was discovering a certain hollowness that he was hoping to fill by re-establishing some of the less complicated relationships of his past. He was also curious to know what had become of some of the people he’d known in what increasingly seemed like another life altogether.

When the name Judith Crowshaw appeared on his screen, Colin Love was taken aback by the wave of emotion that engulfed him. He hadn’t seen her in thirty-four years and yet the jolt of recognition brought on by the sight of her name cut through the intervening years, leaving them shredded in a pile, like so much waste paper.

Judith had been his college girlfriend when he was just 18. They’d gone out together for three years, but had lost touch completely when they split up. Now there she was again, a symbol of a different time. All he had to do was click on a key to send a message and the door to the past would magically swing open for him. It really was that easy.

After he’d sent the message, Colin was surprised at how jittery he felt.

‘For goodness’ sake, it’s just a casual enquiry,’ he told himself sternly. ‘Just catching up with an old friend… She probably won’t even get back to me.’

When her name flashed up in his inbox, he was again surprised to feel an intense stab of excitement. As his fingers momentarily hovered over the keyboard, he allowed himself to relish the anticipation before clicking on the message.

Anyone who has ever bought into the whole Friends Reunited phenomenon will know how rapidly adult personas painstakingly built up over years, even decades, can crumble in the face of childhood ghosts. Managing directors, judges, policemen, doctors… All become school-kids again, slotting straight back into long-forgotten classroom roles.

The last time Colin Love had seen Judith Crowshaw was when they’d been young adults with their whole lives before them, anxious not to get tied down too soon. Now they were
middle-aged
and wondering if life was somehow passing them by.

That first email was closely followed by many more, each one more intimate than the last. If you’ve ever attended a school reunion you’ll know how quickly intimacy can be restored where there’s a shared past. Before long, Colin, increasingly distanced from his high-flying partner Ann, was feeling a closeness that he hadn’t felt with anyone else in years. Somehow those early bonds were still there, despite the passage of time. In fact, their new maturity only seemed to deepen the affection they’d put in place all those years before.

Of course circumstances could have been better. Judy was
married, Colin all-but married. But when life throws you a wild card, an unexpected chance to change direction and start over, either you grab it with both hands or risk a lifetime of regrets.

But Ann Hunter didn’t see it coming. She was not a woman used to rejection. Socially, professionally and personally, her entire life had been one seemingly effortless progression up the ladder. As the daughter of a jewellery designer mother from British Guyana and an English father who once made a living prospecting for diamonds, she had enjoyed an exotic childhood moving around the world, from South America to Europe to Africa, Australia and the Middle East. Her globetrotting background ensured she wasn’t intimidated by any social or professional situation, although it also had the effect of setting her apart from everyone else. Ann Hunter was the sort of woman who tended to command respect rather than affection.

And that was always enough for her. Working until late at night during the week, and away at weekends, she simply didn’t have time to cultivate close friendships or indulge in girlie nights out. Besides, she’d rather spend free time with her children Amber and Ashley, and with Colin. Why not? They had the kind of lifestyle most people can only dream of. Holidays in the Caribbean, expensive clothes… Sure, the downside was that she worked long hours, but she loved her job and knew she was good at it. As far as she was concerned, life was pretty much as good as it could be.

When asked by a local paper, interested in her top businesswoman status, what was her biggest extravagance, she cited her children and antiques. Her greatest fear was fear itself,
and the answer to the question ‘who or what makes you smile?’, was a simple: ‘My partner, Colin’. They were the responses of a successful businesswoman whose family kept her grounded – except that by the time the interview was printed in June 2005, all that had changed.

By August 2003, the relationship between Colin Love and Judith Crowshaw, which had started as an Internet correspondence between old friends, had become something much deeper. Both believed it was worth taking the chance of being together, despite the initial upheaval and unhappiness this would inevitably cause.

Ann was still an attractive woman, Colin reasoned. She’d be a great catch for anybody; she’d soon find happiness with someone else. But breaking the news was more traumatic than he could have imagined.

‘You can’t leave me,’ Ann’s voice, usually so strong and emphatic, was tremulous with shock. ‘Think of everything we have together. Think of what you’d be throwing away.’

When she realised his mind was made up and there was nothing she could do about it, Ann’s shock turned to outrage. She was the one who called the shots in her life, the one who was in control. How dare he turn his back on her and their perfect life together!

Ann just couldn’t come to terms with the idea that Colin had found someone else. All her life, she’d got what she wanted. She’d always been the one who was chosen, the winner. It was agonisingly frustrating to discover she’d lost out in a
competition she hadn’t even known was taking place. Sooner or later, Ann had always known that she’d be replaced in the business world – even successful executives have a shelf life – but never, ever had she imagined that she’d be replaced in her personal life.

All the time Colin was packing his things to move full-time into the Bedfordshire house, Ann was expecting him to have second thoughts, to realise what an enormous mistake he was making. But he was not about to turn back now. It was as though a door had opened just enough to allow him a glimpse of a garden through the crack, so he couldn’t go back to the way things had been: he wanted out.

Shaken, emotionally wounded, Ann brooded on the other woman who’d stolen her partner, her children’s father. She’d have to be younger, was her first thought – beautiful, ambitious… In her mind, she envisaged a copy of her own youthful self. So when she discovered that her love rival was actually a personal assistant, a few years older than herself, with an ordinary, pleasant middle-aged face and a body that reflected her years, her confidence took another major blow.

It just didn’t make sense to her. Ann had a personal trainer, she worked hard to maintain a physique many women half her age would envy. She was successful, well travelled, cultured… What on earth did that woman, that chubby troll, have?

The more she thought about Judith Crowshaw, the angrier she became. On the outside it was business as usual. She made the weekly trips up and down to Northumberland and kept up
her rigorous regime in the gym, but inside she was seething, particularly when Judy moved into the Bedfordshire house that had always been ‘their’ country retreat.

When the couple first bought the house, the deal was that it would be solely in Colin’s name and that he’d pay the mortgage each month, but it was Ann who paid the deposit. She’d also paid the mortgage on occasions when it had made more sense to do so. Now she couldn’t bear to think of ‘that woman’ making herself at home in the house she’d helped to buy, sitting on furniture she’d helped to choose, cooking in the kitchen she’d helped to design.

It was a severe blow to her dignity and pride, as well as her heart. For Ann truly loved Colin, and had always imagined them growing old together. But, if she thought things were as bad as they could get, she was wrong. In 2004, Colin and Judy announced they were getting married.

Although Ann and Colin had been together twenty-two years, they’d never tied the knot. ‘It doesn’t make any difference once you have children,’ she always told herself. ‘It’s just a piece of paper anyway.’ Plus, with her as the major breadwinner, she didn’t need the economic security that women often get from being married and knowing they’ll be provided for, should the relationship fail.