Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Read online

  INVISIBLE

  DARKNESS

  The Strange Case Of Paul Bernardo

  and Karla Homolka

  Introduction

  Why would anyone want to write a book about one of the most savage sprees of violence in North American history? Probably only one question is asked as frequently of the author of such a book, namely: “What do you think of Karla?” I’ll apply myself to the former, leaving the latter to Stephen Williams, whose three years of research has furnished, within these pages, as comprehensive and decisive a response to the Karla enigma as anyone might wish for.

  In the summer of 1995, the jarring contents of the Bernardo-Homolka saga spilled out for the first time in a Toronto courtroom. The news media knew a stunning story when it saw one, and the public found itself wallowing in every last morsel of minutiae. People quickly divided into two camps. The clear majority surrendered to the barrage, clinging to each account with horror and amazement. A minority assiduously attempted to shade their eyes from the goings-on.

  I am not so foolish as to argue there is anything noble about the fascination most of us feel for tales of murder, any more than there is anything noble about slowing to gawk at an automobile collision. But both compulsions have at their roots the same human well-spring—empathy, horror, identification and the need to witness just how far human beings like ourselves can go in harming other human beings like ourselves.

  While those who opted to filter out anything to do with Bernardo and Homolka undoubtedly passed a more carefree summer, evidence is lacking that they w^ere any more virtuous than those who succumbed and anguished through Canada’s trial of the generation. To watch, recoil and analyze is human. The day will hopefully not be soon upon us that we are so satiated we lose our capacity to both gape and grapple with the question of how fellow human beings could carry out such acts of depravity!

  With the acting out of the final scenes, the names Paul and Karla have become as recognizable in many quarters as Bonnie and Clyde. Yet, even that parallel falls in some ways short of the mark. The acquisitive, morally vacuous, would-be hipsters from Southern Ontario achieved a plateau of notoriety all their own through a trail of torture and savagery so numbing it seems inconceivable it could ever become the stuff of fond folklore. Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka were like gasoline and fertilizer. While we will never know just how dangerous they might have been had each operated solo, we do know that put together, they packed enough explosive potential to blow up the entire neighborhood.

  Beyond feeding our need to know, there is a second reason a project like this is necessary, even laudable. Contrary to many other murder stories, a great deal must be learned from how Bernardo and Homolka became what they were and how they were finally brought to ground. At the moment, the record is splintered and incomplete.

  The number of important issues raised by the case is almost endless. It includes the privacy rights of victims in the face of virtually unprecedented intrusion, the largely uncharted art of plea bargaining, whether there is a limit to the public exposure of videotaped torture and the seeming inability of police forces to work together. In addition, Bernardo and Homolka will certainly not be the last stranger-to-stranger serial killers in our midst. Only by grasping what factors give rise to them and their mode of operating can we hope to more swiftly catch those who follow in their footsteps.

  Williams is a rather rare bird these days in the world of true crime writing: a writer rather than a journalist. For three critical years, this afforded him an advantageous perch. In not being obliged to file daily news stories, he had few distractions or obligations. It also meant he could largely avoid the compromising loyalties, alliances and enmities that tend to build between daily journalists and the sources upon whom they rely for information. Williams was ultimately privy to a great deal of information, but the results suggest he felt beholden to no one. Neither the insights he was afforded into the inner workings of the investigation nor the strategies of the Bernardo defense camp have dulled his blade.

  To be sure, some will not care for his characterization of the authorities who worked agonizing hours only to have their quarry evade capture due to a combination of inexperience, bad luck and ineptitude. But it needs to be said that contrary to the feel-good approach that marks much of the post facto inquiry into the Bernardo-Homolka disaster, it takes more than heroic effort to make a hero. Indeed, few other police investigations can have yo-yoed so dramatically from superhuman effort to unforgivable stupidity.

  Some readers may even arch a brow at Williams’s treatment of Karla Homolka, the chilly figure who raises this case from a merely sordid tale to one that is compelling in its complexity and enigma. They will be few in number. Apart from her sad fan club of feckless pals and a coterie of mental-health professionals who ought to know better, no one is buying into the vision of Homolka as a misbegotten victim in this Shakespearean tragedy. The vast bulk of the pubic has loudly expressed its view of Homolka—not that even this consensus about her calculating nature and her barely perceptible soul is likely to penetrate the tightly strung cocoon in which Homolka huddles against the world.

  Finally, there may be those who complain that the worst villain, Paul Bernardo, has received less scrutiny than his wife.

  It is true, he does. But for good reason. Bernardo belongs to a well-known breed of giggling, garden-variety psychos who are destined to spin out of all control and reveal themselves. Unlike Homolka, he got his just desserts and will never present a danger to us.

  Homolka, on the other hand, would walk among us again. And soon. While the nature of Bernardo is clear, Homolka presents an infinitely more complex and challenging puzzle. Indeed, her mscrutabihty is a central part of why she seems likely to rank as one of the world’s most infamous female outlaws. Until now, few, if any, of the many questions that swirl about her have been adequately answered. How was such a person bred? Would Bernardo have killed without her encouragement and cool sense of survivalism? To what extent, in reality, might Homolka have actively participated in the murders of Kristen French and Leslie Mahafiy?

  Any serious inquiry must also look into the way Homolka was handled by the authorities once she came to their attention. That they sat down at the negotiating table with her as a tool to entrap Bernardo was quite understandable, even astute. But that they continued to backfill and justify their actions even as the truth about her complicity and duplicity leaked out—plumping all the while for her virtue and victimhood—was a sad and weak-kneed felling. We need to know Homolka thoroughly, if only to better guard against her once she is free. We must also

  ensure that we are never again collectively taken in by the hopeful notion that a woman can never equal a man in the capacity to do evil.

  Kirk Makin Toronto, 1996

  PROLOGUE

  “I’m psychic.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I do now. I give psychic readings.”

  Psychic readings? The last time I saw Nikki had to be twelve years ago. She was flat on her back on a leopard-skin rug. My olfactory memory of the stripper was specific. There was about her an intense, musk-based fragrance, this due to an addiction to Opium, a popular perfume of the eighties. The scent

  lingered even now, though I was under the impression Yves St. Laurent had long since abandoned the product. She had always been Rubenesque. A favorite dancer at a legendary dive called the Silver Dollar, by now she was, shall we say, post-Rubenesque. Still, Nikki looked good.

  “You’re writing a book ab
out the murders,” she said, lighting a cigarette in the dim light of Buddy’s Bar. The bar is a proscenium of sorts for all manner of bad actors who enter, strut and exit this incredible play I’ve come to observe. If 1 learned anything from my long sojourn here, I learned that if you linger long enough center stage at Buddy’s, chances are you’ll end up changed—not necessarily for the better.

  Buddy’s is on the main floor of the Parkway Hotel, Convention Center and Bowling Lanes, one of half a dozen hotels in the small city of St. Catharmes, Ontario, twelve miles up the road from Niagara Falls.

  The door near the large horseshoe-shaped bar where Nikki and I are sitting leads into the bowling lanes. The sound of flying bowhng pins can be deafening. It’s a beer, shots and wings joint that is about as “poHtically correct” as Nikki. In fact, the whole town of St. Catharmes is just about as “politically correct” as Nikki. Maybe that’s why we all have become, we observers, so comfortable here.

  I give psychic readings. But Nikki didn’t have to be psychic to know that I was writing a book about “the murders.” I’d been living in the hotel since not long after a twenty-six-year-old ex-Price Waterhouse accounting trainee named Paul Bernardo had been arrested on February 17, 1993, and charged with sixty-two counts, including aggravated sexual assault, wounding, sodomy, assault with a deadly weapon, buggery, kidnapping, anal intercourse, confinement, indignity to a human body, as well as the murders of two schoolgirls, fourteen-year-old Leslie Mahafly’ of Burhngton, Ontario and fifteen-year-old Kristen French from St. Catharines. It quickly became the most highly publicized arrest in Canadian history.

  But it was the troubling presence of Paul’s strikingly attractive wife, Karla, that made this dark local play turn into a worldly operatic event. Once it was understood that Karla’s

  youngest sister was alone in her parents’ basement with Paul and Karla when she suddenly and mysteriously died on Christmas Eve, 1990, the case attracted the attention of the world press.

  Newsweek dubbed them “The Ken and Barbie of Murder and Mayhem.” Paul and Karla are iconic, Baywatch-gorgeous specimens of the young, upwardly mobile, educated middle class. At first sight it was impossible to believe these paradigms of contemporary suburban life could be so deeply depraved. But here I am waiting for a cop named Vince Bevan, when Nikki the stripper-turned-psychic tells me:

  “You know, they called me in on this case. Vince Bevan, the cop in charge—I’m sure you know Vince. He called in quite a few of us, you know.”

  “You mean strippers?”

  “No, silly, psychics.”

  She blew a smoke ring that hung like a halo over her VO-and-ginger. “It’s fascinating. Bevan looks a little like Tom Selleck. I’ll bet you’re done waiting for him, too.”

  Maybe she is psychic, after all. I haven’t seen this woman in a decade. And tonight of all nights she walks in here, of all places, and tells me about Vince Bevan. She was right. I was done waiting. He phoned two hours ago and cancelled.

  A wise person once said coincidence is God’s way of maintaining His anonymity. This chance meeting with Nikki and her seeming second sight is a small example of what I’ve otherwise discovered; coincidence forms the nucleus of this story.

  I wanted to speak to Inspector Bevan about psychics. Why he was so fascinated with them, especially with regard to the murdered victim Kristen French. I had heard Bevan, a good Cathohc, a believer in people such as Nikki, as well as the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, sent a hair clip that belonged to Kristen French to a psychic in Nutley, New Jersey, a few days after Kristen was kidnapped in 1992. Now I wanted to know what makes a guy like Bevan choose a psychic in Nutley, New Jersey, over Nikki in Niagara Falls?

  The psychic in Nutley said she saw a leg floating in Burlington Bay. Ten days later, they found the French girl’s body in a ditch—with both legs. Two months later, they found a leg in the bay, but it belonged to someone else. I guess we all live and die by the choices we make, except Kristen French or Leslie MahafFy. I’m unclear how their choices determined how.^they died. j

  Somehow, Bevan also mistakenly concluded Kristen had been held captive for thirteen days before she was killed. That, and the fact his task force mistook lividity markings for signs of ritual abuse, precipitated a call to an expert in satanic cults. Bevan did not discover that Kristen was only held for three days until Karla Homolka told him and a pathologist explained how death marks the body.

  At the same time, Bevan had a dozen eyewitnesses hypnotized. The results were disastrous. According to his report, all the eyewitnesses said the abductors drove a Camaro. It was cream colored, they said. People all over the region started calling in their neighbors’ sons because they drove Camaros. Paul and Karla were driving a gold Nissan when they abducted Kristen. A few weeks later the hypnotist himself fled the country, in a flurry of patients’ accusations about his own sexual conduct. It didn’t take long before Bevan went around publicly talking about the dead girls as “his ghosts.” Possession is, as they say, nine-tenths of the law.

  I had all kinds of questions for Inspector Vince Bevan, with whom I was destined to have a half a dozen conversations and ultiniately read everything he had to say in hundreds of pages of reports and testimony. In the end it turned out I learned far more from Nikki, who, inexplicably, was never far from the truth.

  “They think Bernardo raped and wasted these two schoolgirls, cut one of them up and put her parts in little cement caskets,” she said. “But I see two people—neither of them look much like this guy Bernardo. I see two people, both have similar feminine features.”

  No one, except maybe Nikki, ever took this thing to the next step. “In one of the papers, you know, they called them Ken and Barbie,” she said. “In Barbie’s world, everything is an accessory—including Ken,” and she looked at me with a knowing half smile.

  “What brings you to Buddy’s?*’ I asked, unable to resist Nikki, as always.

  “My mother’s dying. … I was born in Niagara Falls, you know.”

  I had just read in the local paper that the city of Niagara Falls was almost bankrupt. The only thing that was going to save it was a casino and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s plan to build an eight hundred and ninety million dollar transcendental-meditation’ theme park there called Veda Land.

  Because it was so low rent, all gimmicks, trinkets and trash, even twelve million tourists a year—a vast majority of whom were Japanese—couldn’t save it. It had come a long way since Marilyn Monroe made Niagara with Joseph Gotten in 1951 and kissed him tenderly on the Maid of the Mist. As if she were reading my thoughts, Nikki laughed and said, “We always called it Nicaragua.”

  Earlier, before Nikki arrived, a guy named Mark DeMarco had walked into Buddy’s with his bowling bag and sat down. DeMarco is a small, sturdily built Italian, forty-three years old, with a certain self-conscious macho edge. DeMarco owns a pawn shop in Niagara Falls. He has the largest collection of Evel Knievel memorabilia in the world. His shop is truly an amazing place. Above all, DeMarco knows what’s going down in Niagara Falls and St. Catharines. But I was also warned that he’s given to hyperbole.

  Mark once told me he knew a beautician from Darte’s Funeral Home, where Kristen French was prepared for burial. He said the beautician claimed Kristen’s head had been shaved and her tendons cut—a sure sign of ritual satanic abuse. I did not believe this, but as always with DeMarco, I was fascinated by the unorthodox pitch of the man’s mind. When he first entered Buddy’s, I immediately wondered what was in his bowling bag. This guy was no bowler. Looking around furtively he had unzipped the bowling bag and pulled out the most sinister human skull I have ever seen. “Keep it below the table,” he had whispered. Once again I had been stunned by DeMarco.

  The skull was small and obviously old—it looked to be the head of a young girl. The jawbone was held in place by a single

  strand of 12-gauge black wire. It had a kind of yellowish sheen, as though it had been coated with
shellac. And it was literally covered with elaborate, precise etchings; a plethora of hand carved signs such as swastikas and a cross made from a series of squares; dates such as 1717 and 1871. The etchings were blackened, so the skull looked as if it had been elaborately tattooed.

  There were symbols, such as an eye within an isosceles triangle and words in capital letters, such as BLUE POWER DRUID, incomprehensible phrases such as No CATRO or FQHAT or KALI—YUGA and others, such as By the Sign I will Conquer … No Yellow, No Red, «No Black, No. Women, Only Pure … PURE MEN IN CONTROL— DOGMA … Novus ordo sec … which meant “New World Order.”

  “No CATRO” I recognized as a homophobic warning from the Greek catro for “homosexual.” The others were obvious messages of “zero tolerance.” But what did “BLUE” mean, and why were “DRUID,” and “KALI,” a Hindu god, cut into a cranium along with “666”—the Mark of the Beast?

  In the occult, numbers have significance, which explains why they were all over the skull—“1, 3, 5, 7”—but not what they meant. And words and names such as “Moloch, Vedas, Sumerian, Cabala”; the skull was just covered with stuff such as this, obviously chiseled with a steady, fastidious hand. In and of itself, a human skull is unsettling. This one was very disturbing and definitely some kind of ritual talisman. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

  “It’s Masonic,” DeMarco had said. He told me this old guy came into his shop all the time. He said he was a Masonic historian and he brought in this big, coffee-table-size book with a title something like Hermetic Masonic Rosicrucian Lore and Mysteries. It was violently colored and had all these weird signs and symbols; the guy said it helped him understand the markings on the skull. According to him, the skull was a totem that had belonged to a splinter lodge in the southern United States and it had been carved sometime after 1871.

  DeMarco remembered what the old man said about the name Moloch, because it was eerie and apropos: Moloch was the name of the divinity to whom the people of Judah in the last ages of the kingdom had sacrificed their own children. Mark DeMarco wanted me to buy the skull of a sacrificed child for $5000.