Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka: The Ken and Barbie Killers (Crimes Canada: True Crimes That Shocked The Nation Book 3)

by Peter Vronsky

  Witnesses recalled that the Bernardos’ home life was “stormy” and that husband and wife had separate bedrooms. When Paul was a child, his mother, grew obese, passive, and depressed. She was no longer feeding her children and hoarded food under her bed in her basement bedroom while the family fridge remained empty. The house was in filthy condition. When Paul was about 5 or 6 years old, he apparently ran away from home and remained absent for several days. Paul’s older brother, David, said that nobody in the family even asked him where he had been.

  Like Ted Bundy, Bernardo learned in late adolescence that his origins were not those he had thought they were. He was 15 or 16 when his mother after another in a series of bitter arguments with his father, burst into Paul’s room and threw down on his bed a picture of a man and declared that he was Paul’s real father. It was a total shock to him. Afterwards, she would refer to her son as the “bastard child from hell.” Paul began referring to his mother as “bitch” and “whore.” In an interview, his father confirmed that Paul was not his biological son, but said, “That’s his hang-up. That’s never been a hang-up with me.”

  When his grotesquely obese mother would come up the stairs from her dark basement bedroom where she kept the lights off and curtains drawn, his father would comment, whether they had company or not, “Boom, boom, boom, look out, here comes the big, fat cow.” Paul would describe to his high school buddies how his father would creep down into the basement in the night to have sex with “it” before scurrying back to his own bedroom.

  Paul’s parents: Marilyn and Ken Bernardo

  All this was shocking to Paul’s high school friends, because by high school, Paul was well turned out: neatly dressed, preppy, handsomely attractive to girls, hardworking and reliable, rarely missing a day in school. His grades in maths and sciences were in the eighties. He was likable and personable. But a few of his friends who visited his home, later remarked on the disordered and chaotic home life and his bug-eyed crazy-haired mother lurking in the dark at the bottom of the basement stairs and the filth and disorder of the house he lived in.

  It was even worse than that. When Paul was a child, his father repeatedly sexually abused Paul’s sister Deborah since she was nine years old. The entire family would gather on Sunday evenings, huddled together on the couch in a darkened room to watch Walt Disney while the father fingered the little girl so roughly she would cry out in pain. The mother would gurgle from her end of the couch, “What’s going on there?” but would never intervene. Deborah would have to draw the curtains in her bedroom when undressing for bed because Kenneth would climb out on the roof to watch her through the window, claiming he was inspecting the gutters in the dark. At night Kenneth would creep into her room to molest her. A heavy sleeper, Deborah took to sleeping with a barricade of nutshells and garbage cans full of coins while clutching a flashlight. When she’d be awakened by the sound of her father coming for her, she would shine the light into her father’s face in an attempt to ward him off. In a bizarre twist, on the same day that Paul Bernardo was arraigned in court after his arrest, his father, Kenneth, by then aged 58, was appearing in an adjoining courtroom for his sentencing hearing after pleading guilty to repeatedly and indecently assaulting his daughter 20 years earlier, between January 1969 and June 1974. She pressed charges as an adult after she became convinced that he was molesting her own daughter.[i]

  Paul’s father did not confine his psycho shit to the privacy of the family home. A female neighbor called police after observing him while sitting in friend’s car across the street, peeping into her windows while dressed in his pajamas. According to the classic FBI study of serial killers and sexual murderers, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives (1988) by John Douglas, Robert Ressler and Ann Burgess, this places Paul into a category that 50 to 53 percent of all serial killers can be found in: parents with criminal and psychiatric records.

  “Big, Bad Businessman”

  Despite the sick home life, on the surface Paul grew up to be a popular and athletic youth by his high school teen years. He was remembered as a popular summer camp counselor who was very kind, gentle, and helpful to children. He worked successfully as an Amway salesman and became involved in Christian television broadcasting. He appears as an extra in a movie about cancer marathon runner Terry Fox. He was involved in counseling boy scouts. Again, everybody who remembered Bernardo from those days commented on his kind demeanor and his angelic face.

  Bernardo was, however, developing a secret life. Since about the age of 10, he was collecting women’s lingerie advertisements, although so were probably millions of other 10-year-old boys. But there was more to it. Some of his fantasies he was taking “out on the road” and acting them out. The neighbors caught him window-peeping several times, and on one occasion the police were called for the son like for the father. Friends recall that by the time Bernardo was in his late teens, he was an avid aficionado of pornographic videos and slasher horror movies.

  When Paul was 19, he entered the University of Toronto to study accounting like his father. His girlfriend from that period later testified that he would enjoy having rough sex with her. He would take her in his car to deserted factory parking lots, choke her with a cord, force anal sex on her, and order her to masturbate with a wine bottle. By the age of 19, he was already heavily scripting ritual rough sex.

  During his college years, Bernardo began supplementing his income by smuggling tax-free cigarettes from Niagara Falls, New York, into Canada. He was developing a psychopath’s double life, engaging in risky behaviour that, if exposed, threatened to bring his ‘public’ life crashing down. He saw himself as an “outlaw” and even when later gainfully employed as a chartered accountant in a blue-chip accounting firm, he continued his smuggling activities. It’s what psychopaths live for, a desperate search for an emotional charge from taking secret life risks that threaten their otherwise emotionally flat “normal” day-to-day life. As a smuggler, Bernardo became intimately familiar with the terrain that lies between Toronto and the Falls, which would eventually become his stalking and dumping ground.

  One night in October 1987, Bernardo and a friend walked into a Howard Johnson’s hotel restaurant on Progress Road in Scarborough for a late-night coffee. The instant Paul laid eyes on a cute little blonde sitting at a table in her pajamas, he immediately went over to her. They chatted for about an hour, Bernardo spinning stories of his business ambitions. The 17-year-old Karla Homolka was enthralled by the handsome, aggressive, confident, blond, 23-year-old Paul; she called him the “big, bad businessman”—like in “the big, bad wolf.” Homolka and her friend invited the two men upstairs to their room. An hour later, Bernardo stripped Karla’s pajamas down around her ankles and the two fell into bed while the other couple presumably fell into the other bed. Karla and Paul had mated immediately in some kind of frenzied chemistry of animal sexual lust for each other—the meeting of dark souls from the opposite poles of hell.

  Paul and Karla shortly after they met, December 1987

  Wives and girlfriends of sexual sadists prison study

  When the Bernardo-Homolka case broke, a lot of people were shocked by this partnership of a female in serial sadistic rapes and murders. They should not have been. It actually is not all that rare. Almost one out of every six serial killers is a female and very frequently, the female is acting as a partner with a male.

  During the mid-1930s, psychologist Abraham Maslow made a number of studies of how sexual behavior related to dominance. He noted that, in captivity, the most dominant monkeys engaged in almost constant sex, and that the nature of the sex was often “abnormal”, the male monkeys sometimes mounting other males and even instances of dominant females mounting males. Maslow concluded that sex in those circumstances was an expression of dominance, rather than a primal reproductive urge. He noted that when a new monkey was introduced into the group, the lowest dominance monkeys would react with the most violence. Maslow concluded these attacks were the type of low-esteem violence not
ed in humans.

  Maslow then turned his attention to young college girls, whom he interviewed in great detail. Maslow concluded that female sexuality is also linked to dominance. He found that people fell into one of three categories: high-dominance, medium-dominance, and low-dominance.

  High-dominance women were the most sexually active. They were promiscuous, sexually adventurous and uninhibited. Medium-dominance women tended also to be very sexual, but would usually relate to one male partner at a time. Low-dominance women had a very negative opinion of sex, engaged in it infrequently, and felt its only purpose was for reproduction. Maslow noted that the characteristics had nothing to do with sexual drive. Women in all three categories had the same level of drive, but the amount of sex that women in each category engaged in differed.

  Maslow found that, in most relationships, women preferred males who were slightly more dominant than themselves but within the same dominance group. It was very rare for a woman in Maslow's survey to be interested in any male from a lower dominance group. Maslow found that most medium-dominance women found high-dominance men too frightening, and the same for low-dominance women when it came to being with medium-dominance men.

  In certain situations, however, partners from different dominance groups mate, and a very severely disturbed dynamic begins to emerge. The reason often is some type of emotional or psychological disorder that leads an individual to prefer mates from a different dominance class. High-dominance individuals with personality disorders and a need to sadistically dominate their mates may seek out partners in a lower-dominance category, while low-dominance individuals can be compelled to act out abusive scenarios by seeking out higher-category mates. The result is often a slave-like, almost hypnotic relationship between two parties, where one partner totally dominates the other, yet both are desperately dependent upon the other. Sometimes, the one vital element that a dominant partner lacks in order to unleash a homicidal fantasy is provided by the submissive partner.

  In California in the late 1970s-early 1980s, Charlene Williams, a 24-year-old highly educated young woman with a tested I.Q. of 160, raised in a stable, wealthy prominent family, a talented violinist and highly motivated, one evening, while buying recreational drugs at a club, met Gerald Gallego, a convicted criminal and sex offender. Charlene was instantly attracted to Gallego’s “outlaw” persona and married him.

  Like Karla Homolka, Charlene was probably a high-dominance woman who needed a high-dominance man—Gerald was perfect. He fantasized, along with his bi-sexual wife Charlene about keeping virginal young sex slaves at a remote country house. On his daughter’s (from another marriage) fourteenth birthday, he sodomized her and raped her friend as Charlene watched. Things went wrong when one night the both of them seduced a 16-year-old go-go dancer. The three-way sex was fine, but the next day, after coming back from work, Gallego found Charlene and the dancer having sex without him. He became enraged, threw the girl out, and stopped having sex with Charlene. Charlene then suggested that they kidnap, rape, and murder young girls. Killing between September 1978 and November 1980, they often kidnapped girls from Sacramento shopping malls. They also killed in Nevada and Oregon, often beating in the heads of their victims with a tire iron or shooting them with a .25-caliber pistol. They buried alive one victim, a pregnant woman. In three instances, they kidnapped two women at a time. Gerald shared the victims with Charlene, who liked to bite one girl as another performed oral sex on her. She bit the nipple off one of the victims.

  They were eventually apprehended after murdering ten girls they had used as sex slaves, and Gerald Gallego was sentenced to death, while Charlene Gallego, in a hauntingly prophetic turn as to what will happen with Karla Homolka, received a sixteen-year sentence in exchange for testifying against Gerald as a “battered spouse victim.” While in prison, she continued her education, studying a range of subjects from psychology to business to Icelandic literature.

  On July 17, 1997, Charlene was set free and reverted to her family name of Williams. In an interview, she claimed that she was as much a victim of Gallego as the other girls: “There were victims who died and there were victims who lived. It’s taken me a hell of a long time to realize that I’m one of the ones who lived.”

  Charlene said of Gerald Gallego, “He portrayed to my parents that he was a super family guy. But soon it was like being in the middle of a mud puddle. You can’t see your way out because he eliminated things in my life piece by piece, person by person, until all I had around me were members of his family, and they’re all like him, every one of them…. Prison was freedom compared to being with him.”

  Like Karla, Charlene now lives the good life, independently wealthy under an assumed name in Sacramento where she says she spends her free time doing charity work. In a 2013 interview, she said of the victims, “You know, I tried; I tried to save some of their lives… I tried to get away. I tried, and people, especially women, will say, ‘Well, if you want to get away, you can always get away.’ It’s not that easy; it’s not that easy at all,” she said. “I don’t know (why Gallego didn’t kill me), because he sure tried.”

  Asked about her former partner in the rapes and murders, she said, “He is just one sick bastard, he was. I would’ve done anything I could if I could’ve stopped him. I know I couldn’t have stopped him; I tried to stop him. I put him on death row. Am I proud of that? Yes I am.”[ii]

  In the late 1970s, Carol Bundy (no relation to Ted Bundy) accompanied her lover, Douglas Clark, as he picked up and murdered prostitutes on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. At one point, he severed a girl’s head and brought it home. Carol washed and set the victim’s hair and applied makeup to the head in order that Clark could have sex with it. Eventually Carol brutally murdered a male victim to impress Clark. In England in the 1960s, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, “The Moors Murderers,” killed five children and youths, recording one girl’s rape on audio tape, and more recently, Fred and Rose Mary West tortured, raped and murdered ten victims, including their own daughter, in 1971-1987. And in the early 1950s, in the United States, we had the notorious “Honeymoon Killers,” Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, who killed two women and a child they lured through ‘lonely heart’ ads in newspapers. It’s not uncommon.

  It’s when you have a mating of two high-dominance individuals, like Karla and Paul, when one is marginally submissive, but otherwise high-dominance, that one begins to get into crazy town. In 2002, Janet Warren and veteran FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood published the results of interviews with twenty incarcerated former wives and girlfriends of sexual sadists, seven of whom participated in the killing of a total of nineteen victims.[iii] Four of the women involved with murderers were actually present at the murder and were charged as accomplices, and two can be easily identified as Charlene Gallego and Karla Homolka, even though the study does not identify the participants by their actual names.

  Seventeen (85 percent) of the women in the survey were raised in an intact family and had no previous arrest histories prior to meeting their mates. The other three were arrested for minor charges: stealing a tube of lipstick at the age of fourteen, a typewriter from work, and a check from work. Seventy-five percent of the women had graduated high school or had some college education, and 50 percent were in either a skilled or professional labor category. Twenty percent were students at the time they met their partner. Only four of the women reported alcohol or drug abuse, suicide attempts, or mental health issues prior to their relationship with the sadist. The researchers concluded that the majority of these women “lived rather conventional, stable, and noncriminal lives before the initiation of the relationship that culminated in rather radical changes in their behavior.” This is diametrically opposite to what we know of solo female serial killers, who tend to have unstable family histories, relatively poor academic performances, juvenile criminal records and psychiatric histories.

  Other aspects of their childhood histories, however, more closely resembled those of solo female serialists
and male serial killers as well. Thirty-five percent of the women reported abusive family discipline, and nearly half (45 percent) reported continual sexual abuse in their childhood; 30 percent identified their father as the abuser when they were between the age of 4 and 8. The sexual abusers included fathers, brothers, a grandmother, an aunt, a sister, and other acquaintances. There were no cases of sexual assault by strangers reported.

  When asked why they became involved in abusive and sadistic relationships, 75 percent of the women replied that it was out of love and desire to please the man. Two women described themselves as extremely naïve, two indicated that they wanted to get away from home, and one could offer no explanation.

  The majority of women (85 percent) stated that the men were gentle and caring when they first met them, gave them surprise gifts (65 percent), took them on trips (40 percent), and had a “great deal of money to spend on them” (85 percent). When asked why they remained in the relationship, only three of the twenty women attributed it to love; eight said they were either naïve or stupid and hoped their partner’s behavior would improve; one for financial dependency and one for emotional dependency. Only seven women reported they remained out of fear of their partner.

  Asked why they left the relationship, eight said out of fear for their lives; three out of fear for their children’s lives; three because their partners were arrested; five for other reasons; and one was left by her partner. Fear appeared to be almost equally (35–40 percent) the motive in a large minority of cases why the women either remained or left the relationships.