Finding Karla: How I Tracked Down an Elusive Serial Child Killer and Discovered a Mother of Three (Kindle Single)

by Paula Todd

  The little ones like to move as a pack. The baby, who is barely walking, comes wobble-plop-wobbling in behind the older kids. His hair is golden brown, and his complexion baby-fair. Homolka picks him up, and he grabs enthusiastically for her breasts.

  And yet it appears these three children have emerged without a trace from her body, which is as thin as when she was younger, her arms toned, and her skin polished. It is her face, though, so thin, dark and strained, that tells her tale.

  Neither of us apparently wants to speak of death or disappearance in front of the children. Homolka calls for Bordelais to come watch over them. He doesn’t answer, so she goes back out to the veranda, leaving her children alone with me. I watch carefully that they don’t fall or bump into anything.

  When she returns, she’s slightly panicked. “I can’t find my husband! He’s gone somewhere!” I don’t understand her fear. I’m barely bigger than her and am carrying only a small purse (anything larger would probably have invited a search). The two key documents Homolka wants are folded neatly inside.

  Bordelais reappears, and she relaxes considerably. They move in tandem, maintaining eye contact whenever they can. They speak in low voices to each other, usually in French. They think they know each other well.

  “Okay, do you want to go play with Daddy?” she asks in what can only be described as a sweet and motherly voice. I know there are many people who don’t want to hear this — even fewer who will believe it’s genuine.

  “I know!” she says to the trio. “Why don’t you go and make us cookies and cappuccino?” I immediately think of the Tim Hortons iced cappuccino she was so keen to savour on the day she was released from prison.

  But the kids don’t want to leave her. They swarm her, kiss her. “Come on,” Homolka says. She sees me taking it all in, the children’s affection, how important she is to them. Her hostility eases. “Go to your kitchen and make some cappuccino. Won’t that be fun? Go on, go make some cappuccino!” And off they scoot to their play kitchen on a mission to please mommy. She shuts the door, sits back down and the spell is broken. “How do I know you are who you say you are? How do I know you are a lawyer? How come you are the only one to find me?”

  Of all the scenarios I’d prepared for — including physical harm — this one takes me by surprise. I’m an experienced print and broadcast journalist who’s been on Canadian television for years. As a legal analyst, I’d talked about Homolka’s case dozens of times on the air.

  “I don’t watch the news.” Homolka sneers. “I don’t watch TV.”

  When I suggest she Google me, she smirks: “Anyone can put anything, any lie, on the Internet.”

  Nevertheless, she crosses to her tiny dining area and leans over a computer that sits on a small desk in a tight corner. I hear a few click-clacks, some circling with her mouse. She pops back to her spot on the couch to announce another obstacle: “Okay, but why should I trust you? I have everything to lose. What do you have to lose?”

  That’s not a question I particularly want to dwell on here in her house, with her husband doing the panther pace on the veranda. I explain my work, the intimate and difficult interviews, and mention that I’d published a book about victims of tragedies, including violent crimes. I knew that Homolka considered herself one. I tell her that I treat my subjects with respect, regardless of their past. It’s my job to present the truth so citizens can form views of their own, free of my interference. I have no axe to grind, no column to write. I simply want to know what happened to her after prison.

  “How can I trust you are telling me the truth?” she asks, again and again.

  This is rich, but I hold my tongue. Homolka likes to debate, but her temper is fast and her retorts cutting if she doesn’t win. And while much has been written — and exaggerated — about her cunning intelligence, she really only has one trick: answering every question with a quick question of her own. After that first jab, though, she’s usually got no follow-up. Or perhaps she’s starting to believe me.

  I tell her she would have done well in law school. She doesn’t contradict me.

  Just as we begin making some headway in our conversation, the children are back, carefully carrying a tray of bright cups and plates. They offer me a white plastic cookie. Yum, yum. We all pretend to eat.

  Homolka strokes, coos and keeps her children away from sharp corners. If this maternal care is performed for my benefit, it must have started long before I arrived. The kids are clearly accustomed to affection, competing for her lap and yearning for her praise. The baby snuggles in her arms.

  Homolka is not shy in front of me. She lowers the front of her silky, open-necked top and tucks her baby in to nurse. She will do this several more times over the next hour. Her bra is bright white and cut low, not one of those ugly nursing contraptions. Her breasts are smooth and swollen.

  She looks up at me and barely manages to conceal her pride. I ask to take her photograph and she snaps out of it. “No way. No way in hell. No way!” But, then, just for a second, she arches slightly into an S-curve, baby at her breast, and lifts her face to me. The pose is slightly sensual. It reminds me of something.

  I offer up a less confrontational topic. “You appear to be an excellent mother.”

  She says disapprovingly, “That’s funny that you think you can judge that after seeing me this short time.” Not really, I think, considering she’s telegraphing that message with endless patience and a tinkling mommy voice.

  “I’ve been in really bad places where it’s obvious a child has been neglected,” I say. She softens and nods at me.

  We both watch her daughter hopping and twirling on top of the low coffee table. She’s wearing a burnt-orange skirt and a top with a flounce. (Homolka reportedly loves to sew.) As the little girl dances, the ruffle bounces on her round toddler’s belly.

  “For example,” I say, “this child is perfectly dressed. She’s happy, fun, lovely and she’s used to attention. It’s not very difficult to judge.”

  Karla smiles slightly for the first time, then says, with just a speck of disapproval, “It’s very true. She’s very used to attention.”

  She reaches for her spinning daughter, now precariously close to the table’s edge. “No, no, no. You’re going to get hurt. No, Honey. Do you want to have to go with Daddy on the other side, or do you want to stay here with Mommy?”

  I know that every moment I’m with Homolka could be my last. Though we continue talking, she’s on a hair-trigger and refuses to answer whenever a query creeps toward the past. Sometimes she just shakes her head and stays silent until I change direction. But who challenges a compliment about good mothering?

  You’d be surprised how much you can think about, even when you’re wolf-alert to danger. Thoughts of Leslie Mahaffy, Kristen French, Tammy Homolka — and their suffering families — come to me frequently while I talk with one of their killers. Her life, their death. Their horror, her joy. The children who will never be, the families forever fouled. And a brutal image that will be with me now forever: three little children in love with the woman who helped torture and kill three little children. Someone else’s children.

  Homolka’s baby boy teeters over to me and puts his hands up for a lift. I touch his soft little arm gently to steady him but prevent him from crawling into my lap. I can sense his mother won’t like that. Her body language says, “He’s mine!” She can certainly imagine the fast and lethal touch of a stranger.

  “See,” I say, “I’m not bugging your children.”

  Instantly, Homolka’s stern. “Good,” she says, “because you would be very quickly out of here.”

  I nod. “You see? I get it. I have no desire to hurt anybody here.”

  I study her face. Homolka seems utterly unaware of the truth: that she is the only dangerous person in the room. That she has children her sister Tammy, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French will never know. That her parents have the grandchildren she and Bernardo stole from the victims’ families.

&nb
sp; I offer her the chance to rebut what some people are saying about her — that she is a psychopath who cannot parent, and a child killer who has no right to. But she dismisses me sharply. “I have no interest in rebutting what other people say. I never have,” she says.

  Has that steel always been in the woman who testified that she raped and killed under the spell of her brutish first husband?

  I smile (because it is my best strategy) through her ongoing barrage of questions, waiting for the right place to innocuously slip in mine. I begin to detail the information that led me to her, then pause to ask indifferently, “Are you teaching? Are you a teacher?” Quickly she shakes her head and looks away. Something there. A disappointment. A slight embarrassment, perhaps. Earlier she’d complained to me that it was impossible to get anything official done on the island. “You have to know people,” and apparently she and her husband do not.

  I bring the conversation back to my research questions, about life after prison.

  “Why don’t you just answer the questions you feel comfortable with?”

  She thinks for a moment. “If I am honest with you, I don’t feel comfortable answering any questions from anybody, ever. I said it once.”

  I don’t want to talk about the past, I say. It’s clear she won’t reflect on what she’s done. There are no grimaces of pain or blushes of guilty horror. The only one in this house expected to apologize is me for looking for answers. For Homolka, there’s a thermal wall between what was then and what is now. I am not a psychiatrist, just an observer of people. I can report only that the emotion most often on her face is disdain and annoyance. If she can never forgive herself, as she said shortly after leaving prison in 2005, perhaps she’s managed to put her regret in the deep freeze. Or, as some will say, there are no feelings to numb. The conundrum that is Karla continues.

  Over the course of an hour, she will ask me three times to repeat my six questions. Each time I do, I am careful to phrase them sympathetically because she withdraws at the slightest hint of criticism. And yet, she keeps me with her for almost an hour. If this were anyone else, I’d say she was lonely and slightly bored. Among other things, she wants to hear my impressions of the island and even laughs at my answers. We go for stretches saying nothing at all, just watching and encouraging her children as they play.

  As asked, I begin for her: What are the challenges you faced after prison? What help did you need? Did you get it? What prompted you to leave Canada? How difficult was it to assimilate into Caribbean culture? How has becoming a mother changed you?

  She listens to my questions and again delays. Instead, she conducts her own interview.

  Karla: How did you get here?

  Paula: There’s a cab waiting for me.

  Karla: I mean how did you get to Guadeloupe?

  Paula: By plane.

  Karla: Which company?

  Paula: Why are you asking?

  Karla: Because I want to know.

  Paula: But you won’t answer my questions, so why should I answer yours?

  Karla: I guess you shouldn’t.

  Paula: Well, I will. I don’t care. American Airlines.

  Long silence.

  Karla: What are your questions again?

  Before we can go another round, Bordelais comes back to whisper in French. And then everything changes.

  Chapter Eight

  Suddenly, Karla Homolka gets up off the couch and heads into the bedroom with her husband. Their voices grow loud, and I hear them talking about my visit. They close the door and leave me alone in the living room. I think about getting up to look at the mass of framed baby portraits on the wall, but decide not to risk it. I could be thrown out — or worse.

  A few seconds later, the bedroom door snaps open and Bordelais, carrying a portable phone, comes out to stand over my shoulder. Their lawyer, who is on the other end of the line, has apparently reminded them they have a stranger in their home.

  Still with his ear to the phone, Bordelais asks me — as Homolka already has — how I got to the house, whether I came alone. I tell him (and hope) that a taxi driver is waiting for me out on the street.

  Homolka has now been on the other extension for at least fifteen minutes. I suspect our own chat is about to end.

  Sure enough, when she returns to the living room, both her voice and face are transformed. Empowered and all business. I offer to speak with her lawyer directly, but in a curt voice she says, “I don’t think it’s necessary.”

  And then she comes suddenly to my end of the couch, close to me for the first time. She slides her arm past my head, just an inch away from my hair. It’s the first time I feel a real frisson of fear. With no warning, but without touching me, she clicks on a reading lamp directly over my head, flooding my face with bright light. In that brief moment, she looks down at me and seems to register something. But what?

  She then turns to her children, who’ve followed their parents back into the living room. “Okay, guys. Can you guys go into your bedroom please?” Her son won’t budge. He’s kneeling beside me at the coffee table, writing his name with my pen.

  “Give her pen back, please. You can go in your room and draw with your crayons. Or go in the kitchen. We’ll have dinner very soon.”

  The trio reluctantly dawdle back to their room.

  “Take your drawings and go in your room. We will be there in a minute. Don’t worry! Don’t worry!” The children do not appear at all worried, so I guess that comment is for my benefit.

  Homolka sits back on the couch, taking care to settle in before delivering her lawyer’s message. “A long time ago, I said that I would never speak to anybody, and I’m going to maintain that.” (Actually, the first thing she did when she was released from prison was give a television interview.)

  I ask why.

  “I’m sorry but I have nothing to say.”

  Again, “Why?”

  Almost robotically: “Because the record speaks for itself.”

  I shake my head, “But nothing afterward.”

  She thinks about that again. She seems tempted to take up our previous conversation, but instead tells me she can’t because she does not trust journalists — any of them.

  Some observers believe she tried to punish English-speaking journalists by giving that single post-prison interview to the country’s national French broadcaster. At the time, she had applauded the French for their “less sensational” coverage.

  “Did your lawyer say not to trust me?” I ask.

  “It’s not you, it’s not you,” she says. Her voice sounds genuinely apologetic. “It’s any journalist. I’m sorry, I can’t.”

  Her husband, who has been silent for much of the time, now steps in. “We don’t like the way that you just come to our house,” he says in English.

  “Oh, yeah,” says Homolka. “That too.”

  “That’s not fair,” I say, “There was no other way to get in touch. You’re not listed. You’re not in the telephone book.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Yah-uh.”

  “What else could I do?”

  Homolka shoots back sharply: “Well, you know who his sister is!”

  Indeed, Montreal lawyer Sylvie Bordelais has represented Homolka since meeting her in St. Anne des Plaines prison while visiting other clients. She’s stayed close to Homolka since she emerged from prison and was on camera during the French interview. But Sylvie Bordelais, who is soft spoken like her brother, Thierry, has never publicly acknowledged a family tie.

  When I tell Homolka this, she goes pale. She has just committed a major blunder by confirming for me what others had only speculated. Sylvie Bordelais is indeed Karla Homolka’s sister-in-law. Which means the Montreal lawyer is now advocating for her niece and nephews, in addition to her brother and sister-in-law.

  I try to keep Homolka away from topics that frustrate or anger her, although it’s difficult. “I had no other way of contacting you. There’s no email. There’s nothing,” I say.

  She nod
s with a small smile. “That’s good,” she says. “That’s not the reason why, though. Even if you had contacted us another way. We don’t like that — you just ruined my . . .” She searches for a word. “I was going to say ‘day’ but . . .” and trails off. And there it is again, that jarring understatement she’s become infamous for.

  Homolka returns to my request to participate in research for my book. Now she tells me she can’t without “thinking and researching and thinking and talking.”

  I say, “You need time to reflect?”

  She nods and looks straight ahead, lost in thought. Then, in a quieter voice: “And I don’t bow to pressure anymore.” Pressure? I assume she is referring to the beatings and emotional battering she testified were used by Paul Bernardo to force her into finding him victims and then joining him in rape and death.

  She goes back to my research.

  “This is not something I want to talk about. Nobody cares. Nobody cares,” she says.

  “They do care about you,” I say.

  It takes her time to explain that she thinks the world is only interested in wishing her ill.

  Yes, I admit, many only care about her in “a negative way.”

  She looks grim. “Yes, I know,” she says. “I know.”

  It appears that her lawyer has reminded her that any suggestion I might make in my book that Homolka was griping about her post-release treatment would fuel further hostility. “Just so I can be clear,” I say, “you don’t have any interest in talking about what happened because nobody cares about you?”

  A whoosh of a sigh, and then a nod. It appears Homolka may very well appreciate how despised she still is.

  Then, she adds: “Nobody cares, and everything I’ve said is off the record.” She waves her hand back toward the past and reddens. This is the first time she has uttered the phrase “off the record.” I’m not sure whether she’s reddening because she’s been scolded for the latitude she’s already granted me, or because she knows her demand is ridiculous. I want to stay a little longer to observe the family, so I explain we could go off the record as of this moment.