During a conversation Webster had with another gang member he found out that McCafferty intended to kill him. The plan was to wait for him to come out of his workplace then to shoot him. Webster saw them waiting outside his workplace and called the police, who arrested McCafferty, Meredith and Whittington. The police found an arsenal of weapons in the men’s possession. On the way to the police station, McCafferty confessed to the murders.
At his trial in February 1974, McCafferty pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder on the grounds of insanity. His five co-accused – Todd, Howe, Meredith, Whittington and Webster – all pleaded not guilty to the same charges. Mick Meredith and Dick Whittington were found guilty of the murders of Ronald Cox and Evangelos Kollias and each sentenced to 18 years in prison. Richard Webster was found guilty of the manslaughter of Cox and sentenced to four years in prison. Julie Todd was found guilty of murdering Cox and Kollias and sent to prison for 10 years. On 20 May 1974, having just turned 17, she was found hanged in a bathroom at a detention centre. Carol Howes was found not guilty on all counts. Eight months pregnant with McCafferty’s child when the verdict was handed down, Howes made a passionate promise from the dock to McCafferty. ‘I’ll wait for you Archie,’ she sobbed. ‘No matter what, I’ll always be waiting for you with our child.’
The jury returned a verdict of guilty against McCafferty on all counts and dismissed his claims that at the time of the murders he had been insane. He was sentenced to three life sentences. All the time he was in prison, he kept telling people of his need to kill four more people and that he would do so if ever released. Even locked away, he was a problem prisoner for the authorities. Police believe that he was a member of the secret ‘murder squad’ that acted as judge, jury and executioner behind the walls of Parramatta Jail in 1981. They believe the squad was responsible for four murders within the prison. In September 1981, Archie was charged with the murder of Edward James Lloyd, who was stabbed to death in his cell. Archie’s co-accused, Kevin Michael Gallagher, was eventually found guilty of the murder.
It was proved that McCafferty was present while the murder took place and, though he strenuously denied the charges, he was found guilty of manslaughter and given a further 14 years. McCafferty protested his innocence and appealed against the sentence, claiming that he had been framed. To prove it, he named those who were responsible. This automatically made him an outcast within the prison system. For his own protection, he was transferred from one jail to the next in search of a permanent home.
In November 1981, McCafferty was found in his cell with 10 foil-wrapped packages containing heroin, for which he received a three-year sentence. The prison authorities were also aware that there was a price on his head for giving evidence against other prisoners.
As no parole period had been given, it was clear that he would spend the rest of his life behind bars, but he kept applying for parole. In October 1991, his application for parole was heard before Mr Justice Wood. The judge granted him a 20-year parole period dating from 30 August 1973. He became eligible for release on parole on 29 August 1993. After many years, his anger had subsided and he was looked on as a model prisoner. Was this for real or was he playing games with the authorities? In any event, he convinced the parole board, who agreed that he was indeed a changed man who was no longer a danger to society and decided that he would be released on parole. The only condition of the parole was that Archie would be deported. On 1 May 1997, he was sent back to his native Scotland, where he had several minor brushes with the law and was given two years’ probation for threatening to kill police officers.
On 21 July 2002, McCafferty was arrested in New Zealand for failing to declare his criminal convictions when he arrived in the country. McCafferty was believed to be on the first leg of a secret journey back to Australia, and he was voluntarily deported back to Scotland immediately. At the time of writing he is still resident in Scotland living under an assumed name.
CHAPTER 2
CANADA
PAUL BERNARDO AND KARLA HOMOLKA
Paul Bernardo (b. 1964) and Karla Homolka (b. 1970) became known as the Ken and Barbie Murderers due to the fact that they resembled the Barbie and Ken children’s dolls. When the couple first met in 1987, he was an accountant and she worked in a veterinary clinic. As soon as they met, she became infatuated and obsessed with him to the point that she would do anything and everything to retain his love, even to the point of murder. At first, she did not know that he possessed a warped and evil mind and had a history of violence and sex crimes. This would soon re-emerge in their relationship. When she did find out, she encouraged his sadistic sexual behaviour.
Between 1987 and 1992 in Scarborough, a Toronto suburb in which he lived, Bernardo committed a series of rapes and sexual assaults on 13 women. His modus operandi was simple. He would loiter around bus stops in sparsely populated areas and wait for unsuspecting women to get off a bus and start to walk away. He would then grab his victims from behind and pull them to the ground, where he anally raped them and, after performing oral sex on them, he would simply let them go.
Karla knew exactly what Paul was doing and encouraged him. One victim even remembered seeing a woman with the rapist with what appeared to be a video camera in her hand. The police at the time took no notice of this part of the victim’s evidence. However, they did believe that all the attacks had been the work of the same man. It would not be until 1990 that the police finally decided to publish an identikit picture that the victims had agreed upon as being a likeness of their attacker.
That picture, plus the $150,000 reward, initiated a wealth of information. It wasn’t long before Paul Bernardo’s name came to the notice of the police. He was visited by the police and elected to give voluntary DNA samples. These samples, along with 230 samples from other suspects, were sent to the forensic laboratory. Only five of the samples had a similar DNA make-up to the attacker. Paul Bernardo was one of those five. His sample was resubmitted for additional testing in April 1992. By that time, Bernardo had stopped raping women. There was not the urgency there had been two years earlier when the attacks were in progress and so the samples and forensic examination were treated as non-urgent.
When Bernardo and Homolka first met, Karla was not a virgin and this played on Bernardo’s mind. He told her that to make up for this, she should allow him to take the virginity of her younger sister, Tammy. But he said it must be done without her knowledge and he wanted to film it. Without even contemplating what he was suggesting, Karla agreed and obtained some sedatives from the clinic where she worked.
The day of 23 December 1990 was a day that would end in tragedy. On this day, all the family members were together at Karla’s home. Bernardo began plying young Tammy with drinks laced with the sedatives. It wasn’t long before she passed out. When the other family members went up to bed, Karla and Paul started on Tammy. Karla first held a rag containing an anaesthetic over Tammy’s face. Bernardo then proceeded to rape her, filming the act at the same time. Then he ordered Karla to carry out sexual acts on her sister. While this was taking place, Tammy regained some form of consciousness and was violently sick. Karla tried to put her in the recovery position and clear her throat but it was too late. Tammy had choked to death on her own vomit. Now faced with a dilemma, they dressed her, hid the drugs and camera and called an ambulance. Everybody was led to believe that Tammy had died from accidentally choking on her vomit with no other factors involved.
Bernardo vented his anger on Karla. He told her that she would still have to find another girl to take the place of Tammy. Karla knew of one girl who was very similar in appearance to her dead sister, called Jane. Karla invited Jane round to the house that she and Bernardo were now sharing. Karla plied her with drinks, again laced with sedatives. It wasn’t long before Bernardo arrived home and saw the sleeping Jane. He and Karla then set about sexually abusing the unconscious girl. First, Karla committed sexual acts on the girl, which were filmed by Bernardo. Then Bernardo raped her both
vaginally and anally; Karla filmed those acts. The following morning, Jane had no idea what had happened.
After their marriage, Bernardo had started smuggling cigarettes across the border and needed to use stolen number plates to disguise his frequent visits across the American–Canadian border. It was the need for these number plates that brought him into contact with his first murder victim, Leslie Mahaffy, aged 14. On the night of 14 June 1991, while cruising around one night looking for plates to steal, he saw Leslie walking along on her own. At knifepoint he forcibly abducted her, taking her back to his home. He took her inside and, while Karla slept, he began to videotape Leslie naked and blindfolded. Eventually, Karla woke up and joined Paul, who told her how he wanted her to make love to Leslie, filming every moment like he was a director making a movie. After she had finished, Bernardo raped Leslie viciously and brutally. As a result, Leslie died. Her body was dismembered and taken to a local lake where the body parts were tied to concrete blocks and discarded.
However, on 29 June 1991, a man and his wife were canoeing on the lake when they came across a concrete block with some pieces of what they believed were animal flesh encased in it. They later went back to the spot and, with the help of a fisherman, pulled out the concrete block and looked at it closely. Inside the block was the calf and foot of a young woman. The remaining body parts were later recovered.
On 16 April 1992, another teenager, Kristen French, was abducted from a car park. Karla had lured the pretty girl over to their car on the pretext of asking directions. When Kristen stood by the car looking at Karla’s map, Paul forced the girl into the back seat with his knife. Kristen, who was a bright, intelligent girl, did everything she could to cooperate with this depraved couple and their outrageous and humiliating demands. She believed that cooperation was her only chance of survival. The ordeal became worse and worse. The more she cooperated, the more sadistic Bernardo became. While holding her captive and with the camera running, Bernardo urinated on her and also attempted to defecate on her without success. He held her captive for several days before killing her and dumping her body in a ditch. This time, they didn’t cut the body up, and as a result the police didn’t connect the two murders. On 30 April 1992, Kristen’s naked body was found in the ditch.
In late 1992, Bernardo started becoming violent towards Karla and she reported him to the police. She eventually moved into a refuge away from him. His name again came to the notice of the murder squad officers who were aware that, because the DNA samples from the previous rapes had not yet been examined, he had not been cleared. After visiting him and talking to him, they decided to put him under surveillance. In early February 1993, when the police investigation intensified, the police wanted to interview Karla. They also wanted to fingerprint her and question her about a Mickey Mouse watch in her possession that was very similar to Kristen French’s watch. She realised that the police had linked the rapes to the murders. But Karla did not confess to the police. Instead, she told her uncle that Bernardo was the rapist and a murderer. He in turn consulted an attorney, who advised Karla to sit and wait to see what transpired.
In February 1994, Bernardo was arrested for both the rapes and the murders. His DNA had been positively matched to the rapes. On 19 February, police executed search warrants at the home address of Paul and Karla and found a wealth of evidence. Bernardo had a written description of every one of the rapes. The police also found a home video that showed Karla participating in lesbian acts with two other women.
Karla’s legal team then went to the Attorney General’s office with what they had and set out to plea-bargain. It was discussed that Karla would get 12 years in prison for being involved in the murder of the two victims, but the sentences would be served concurrently. This would mean she would serve only 12 years and would be eligible for parole in three years with good behaviour. It was even agreed that no objections to parole would be made. Arrangements would be made for her to serve out her sentence in a psychiatric hospital instead of prison. All of this would be in return for her giving evidence against Bernardo.
Her separate trial took place on 28 June 1993. In the interim period, a psychiatric report on her had been prepared. The sentence she received was as agreed. But her greatest test was yet to come when she would come face to face with Bernardo in court. This didn’t happen for almost two years due to legal arguments. These revolved around the videotapes of the rapes and murders, which Bernardo had given to his defence lawyer in the belief that the prosecution would not be able to obtain them and use them in evidence. However, the prosecutors knew of the tapes from Karla and had secretly recorded Bernardo’s lawyer’s conversations with him. Eventually, the pressure increased on his lawyer, who felt obliged to withdraw from representing Bernardo and in doing so turned the tapes over to the prosecutors and withdrew from the case. A new legal team was appointed to represent Bernardo.
In May 1995, the trial began and the damning videotapes became crucial to the prosecution. On 1 September 1995, Bernardo was found guilty of the kidnappings, rapes and murders of Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, and the death of Tammy Homolka. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, eligible for parole after 25 years. He subsequently lodged an appeal.
As they each served their sentences, the hostility between the couple grew stronger. Bernardo prepared for his appeal in 2000, while Karla made plans for her pending parole in 2001. Bernardo was unsuccessful in his appeal against his conviction, citing legal issues.
Due to her bad behaviour while serving her sentence, Karla was not paroled as expected after three years, and a recommendation was put forward that she should serve a further four years. Bernardo had launched a second appeal, which was also rejected. He is still behind bars in one of Canada’s toughest maximum-security prisons where he is locked up for 23 hours a day to protect him from attacks by other prisoners.
On 8 March 2001, Karla Homolka was officially denied parole. The cited grounds for the refusal were: ‘The board is satisfied that, if released, you are likely to commit an offence causing the death of or serious harm to another person before the expiration of the sentence you are now serving.’
Her case, however, would be reviewed each year up until July 2005, when her sentence ended. Prior to her eventual release, Karla took on a new identity. Changing her name to Karla Teale and altering her appearance, when finally released she tried to blend back into society, but for some time after she was hounded by the press who regularly traced her whereabouts, despite the fact that she repeatedly changed her name.
On 9 February 2007, it was reported that Karla Homolka had found a new partner and had given birth to a baby boy.
WAYNE BODEN, AKA THE VAMPIRE RAPIST
Wayne Boden (b. 1948) became known as the Vampire Rapist after his distinctive MO of biting his female victims’ breasts. He was responsible for a two-year reign of terror in a suburb of Montreal, where after stalking his female victims he attacked, raped and murdered them in a perverted and sadistic manner.
On 23 July 1968, Norma Villancourt, a 21-year-old teacher, was found dead in her apartment. She had been raped and strangled, her breasts savaged with bite marks. Police found no sign of a struggle. Twelve months elapsed before the killer struck again. Shirley Audette had been strangled and her body had been dumped at the rear of an apartment complex in West Montreal. Though fully clothed when found, she had also been raped and the police found bite marks on her breasts.
On 23 November, Marielle Archambault left work in company with a young man she addressed as ‘Bill’. When she did not arrive at work the following morning, Marielle’s employer went to see if she was ill. He found her dead body on the floor of her apartment living room. She had been raped and her breasts had been savaged with teeth marks. The police found a crumpled photograph on the floor, identified as ‘Bill’.
On 16 January 1970, the killer struck again, murdering Jean Way, 24, in her apartment. Way’s boyfriend found her naked body on the sofa; she had been subjected to bite marks
on her breasts. As before, police officers could find no sign of a struggle. It was not until 1971 that the killer struck again, this time 2,500 miles away in Calgary. His victim was Elizabeth Pourteous, a teacher, reported missing from work on 18 May. Her apartment manager was called and he found her body on the bedroom floor. Raped and strangled, she had also suffered the by-now-familiar bite marks on her breasts. A forensic examination revealed a broken cufflink near the body. Police were given details of a young man she had been seen with on the night she died. He was driving a blue Mercedes. A friend of the victim told police that Pourteous had recently started dating a new acquaintance named ‘Bill’.
On 19 May 1971, a police officer found the Mercedes car parked near the murder scene. Wayne Boden was arrested half an hour later, walking towards the car. He told police that he had moved from Montreal a year earlier, admitted seeing Elizabeth Pourteous on the night she died and identified the cufflink as his own. The final major piece of evidence was from a forensic orthodontist, who compared a cast of Boden’s teeth with bite marks on the victim. This was the first such case where this type of evidence was used in North America. He was found guilty of the murder in Calgary and then returned to Montreal where he confessed to the other murders. At his trial he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was also suspected of the murder of Norma Vaillancourt, a student aged 21 who was murdered on 23 July 1968. However, in 1994 another man, Raymond Sauve, was convicted of this crime. Wayne Boden died at Kingston Regional Hospital, Montreal, on 27 March 2006 of natural causes after being confined in hospital for six weeks.
The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers Page 7
