Bernardo did not escape police attention as a suspect in the murders. Again, it was Bernardo’s acquaintances, Alex and Tina Smirnis, who had first gone to police in September 1990 about the Scarborough rapes, who through a personal acquaintance in the Ontario Provincial Police brought Bernardo up as a suspect in May 1992. The tip came in like this in a police report:
PC Haney received info from anonymous party re Paul K. Bernardo 27 Aug. 64 from 57 Bayview Dr. [Port Dalhousie] St. Catharines. Mr. Bernardo was a suspect in the Scarborough rape cases & lived in Scarborough. He has been seen hitting women & raped a girl in his basement while his wife was upstairs. He has a Nissan 240SX, yellow, 660HFH. He is attracted to small women with short hair. He attended Scarborough College. Male is very violent and hostile–short hair–shaves hair on back of head–wavy and curly on top–appears intelligent and perceptive–admits to beating wife–has hit girls on three occasions. Went to Scarboro College. Has been questioned by Metro for Scarboro Rapist. Aggressive toward women. Raped a girl in basement of house. Can only grow hair on chin. 21 Sir Raymond Richmond 2 years ago moved to St. Cth. likes small petite women, short hair Scar. Rapist susp. clothing good tan. had been in Florida and had tan. Once rape takes place he disassociate with friends and family for a few weeks. Drives 89 Nissan 240.Yellow. 660HFH
On May 12, 1992, two detectives appeared at the Bernardos' house, the very house in which the two girls had been raped and murdered. Again, as in every previous instance, a criminal background check on Bernardo came back showing no prior charges. The police officers filed the following report.
On 92.05.12 investigating officers attended at 57 Bayview Dr., and interviewed PAUL BERNARDO, dob 64.08.27. Paul BERNARDO had been called in as a possible suspect by P.C. Rob HANEY, BEAVERTON O.P.P. (705) 426 7366.
Paul BERNARDO had been questioned during the investigation of the Scarborough Rapist.
Paul BERNARDO resides at 57 Bayview Dr., with his wife KARLA (maiden name HOMOLKA). They were married on June 29, 1991. Karla works at the Martindale Animal Clinic as an Animal Health Technician. Paul is an Accountant but presently unemployed. When questioned about his whereabouts on April 16th, he stated he would most likely have been home as he is writing the lyrics for a song.
Paul BERNARDO does not own a Camaro. The only vehicle registered to the BERNARDO'S is a 1989 Nissan 240 licence 660 HFH (Ont) 2 dr. yellow.
Paul BERNARDO advised he was called in on the Scarborough Rapist investigation and asked to supply hair samples, to which he complied. He appeared slightly nervous while being interviewed but was willing to answer all questions.
Detective Nesbitt who had conducted the interview would later state:
We had the information he had been called in to Metro on the Scarborough Rapist. What threw me off, when I asked him “have you ever been in trouble?” he said immediately “no I haven't but I was called in on the Scarborough Rapist investigation and gave samples” and they showed him the composite and he said “I have to be honest I do look like the composite.” He was quite open and honest about it. We went through his history of when he got married… Knowing when Leslie was abducted and the week previous he was getting married. It didn’t sound logical that he would be out abducting her and cutting her up and then getting married. He was well groomed and it was a well-kept house… I looked at the car and here you got a new model Nissan. I am under the impression we were looking for an older car. My partner had a Camaro and we agreed it didn’t look like a Camaro. It was a month after the abduction and you are asking what you are doing on April 16th. He couldn’t recall but he believed he was home…His wife was working and he picked her up… I called Metro the next day because after his interview we interviewed a couple of other people… He appeared slightly nervous. That was normal because it was such a serious offense. That didn’t put in a lot of weight. Most were nervous.
When the whole case was over and done with several years later, and government review of its failures would report:
When putting Nesbitt’s interview with Bernardo in context, it should be noted that it is common in serial predator investigators for the police to interview the killer several times without connecting him to the deaths. Predatory psychopathic killers can be very plausible and appear very innocent. They do not typically reveal themselves during police interviews. It is a commonplace of such investigations that the Yorkshire Ripper was interviewed by the police at least 9 times during the course of his six-year series of 7 attacks and 13 murders. The GRT investigators were keenly aware of that spectre. As one of them said:
We were all told and lived with the fear that we would interview the culprit and not know. We all lived with that fear.
This fact was stressed to the investigators by Inspector Bevan:
We used the Bundy thing over and over again. How he was interviewed several times before someone caught on, and how when you are dealing with a psychopath, it is not only in their nature, it's their practice to win interview situations like this, so you don't go in there expecting to find someone with it stamped on their forehead….because they're probably going to be very congenial with you and look totally normal and the whole situation is going to look normal to you… Nobody wanted to be the person who spoke to this guy and missed him… I’m not attaching any kind of blame or onus on the people who spoke to him and didn't pick up on the fact that he was the one because he was pretty good.[vi]
The shocking truth of the matter is, that in unsolved serial killer cases, the perpetrator’s identity is often already somewhere in the police paperwork, sometimes even among lists and interview reports on people police have already identified as possible suspects, met, and interviewed, not just once, but multiples of times.
“Leslie’s coming for you! She’s down there in the basement. Right where I cut her up.”
As soon as police left, Bernardo and Karla now hid the videotapes and Paul’s favorite knife in the insulation of the rafter in their garage. Karla would later testify that Paul told her to destroy the tapes if police came back or if he was arrested.
Bernardo and Homolka went on for another eight months. There were more beatings for Karla, Bernardo was out stalking and raping women, Homolka and he engaged prostitutes for three-way sex. Bernardo was drinking heavily and beating Karla almost daily, and was now striking her in the face and pulling out clumps of her hair. Once Bernardo threw her down into the cold cellar, turned off the light, and bolted the door, screaming down to his terrified wife, the horror movie fan, “Leslie’s coming for you! She’s down there in the basement. Right where I cut her up.” Karla spent the night locked in the dark cellar with her ghosts.
Bernardo drove around with Karla in the car, pointing out women he was stalking and telling her he was going to rape them next. Once, while watching a woman on the street, he masturbated, making Karla look the other way. At other times, he had Karla perform fellatio on him as he watched his potential victims. She stupidly stood by her man as he disintegrated.
“Raccoon Face”
Bernardo owned a Maglite—a long-handled flashlight manufactured out of gun barrel–hard anodized 6061 aluminum. The flashlights are carried by police officers because of their durability and usefulness as a baton. There are several cases of individuals being killed from blows of a Maglite wielded by a police officer. When Bernardo began to beat Karla in the face with the flashlight on December 27, 1992, now in fear of her life, she finally ran. Before escaping with her eyes almost swollen shut black and blue, she attempted to retrieve the videotapes that they hid in the garage, but by then Bernardo, suspicious of Karla, had moved them. Badly bruised and swollen, Karla showed up at her parents’ house on January 5, 1993. They immediately took her to an emergency ward and Bernardo was charged with domestic assault that night.
In order that Bernardo could not find her, the Homolkas sent her to Toronto to stay with her aunt and uncle, Patricia and Calvin Seger. The tenants in the Segers’ apartment building nicknamed the mysterious blonde with the
bruises under her eyes “Raccoon Face.” Within weeks, however, Homolka was out partying at a disco and quickly found herself a new lover. She told him nothing about her past other than that she was going through a “bad divorce.”
“Raccoon Face”
Hospital photos of Karla Homolka
In the meantime, Bernardo was rambling around the empty house, shouting for Karla. “Snuggle Bunny, are you home, Karly Curls?” He recorded a videotape directed to Karla in which he threatened suicide: “I need you, Kar. I love you, my princess, my queen, my everything. I think about you every day now…I realize now you’re never coming back. Fucking kills me, pal. I wish I just could have been given a second chance to make things right…I know you had to leave, and I don’t blame you. In fact, it was the best thing you could have done for me. It snapped me out of whatever state I was in. It made me realize how much I care for you…You are the most special person who ever touched my life. Yes, even more than Tammy. When you know you’ve lost it all, and there’s no one to turn to, death’s welcome mat is the only place you can go…Okay, I fucked up this life, right? When I go to the other side, okay, I’m going to make it better for you there. I’m going to set something up real nice. So when you come, it’ll be all right. You know what I’m saying?”
Busted
When it ended, it ended fast but dirty. On February 1, 1993, three weeks after Karla left Bernardo, like a time bomb with a twenty-six month fuse the Bernardo’s DNA sample finally came back from the Centre of Forensic Studies to the police. In the wake of start-up pains, Ontario government-funding cutbacks, and bureaucratic mismanagement, it had taken twenty-six months to run the tests which, had they been made a priority, could have been done in a month. Paul Bernardo, the polite young accountant, was their man.
The police immediately deployed a twenty-four-hour surveillance around Bernardo. They followed him as he stalked women in his car. Police began to focus in on him as a prime suspect in the Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French murders. On February 9, police visited Karla Homolka at the Segers’ home They pointedly asked her if she had ever cut anyone’s hair and whether she had been in the church parking lot from which French was kidnapped (without telling Homolka why they were asking). Homolka was in a state of panic. After the police left, Homolka told her aunt and uncle that Bernardo had videotaped her and Bernardo having sex with Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, and that Homolka had looked for the tapes before she left. The Segers immediately took her to see a lawyer, George Walker, who now began to shelter Karla as a client.
On February 14, Walker confirmed for police and prosecution that Bernardo was not only a rapist but a murderer and that some of the sexual assaults on Mahaffy and French had been recorded on videotape and that Homolka had looked for them unsuccessfully before she had fled 57 Bayview Drive. She thought that they were kept in the same hiding place as the knife Bernardo used to intimidate his victims, and she thought that the knife was in its hiding place but not the tapes.
On February 17, 1993, Bernardo was arrested and charged with the Scarborough rapes.
As Bernardo was pulled out of the house and taken away to jail, the police immediately began an intense forensic search of the house on 57 Bayview. Wearing spaceman-like suits so that they did not contaminate the site, the police forensic technicians tore out the walls, they drilled holes in the floor, they wrenched out the plumbing, they ripped out the carpeting, pried loose the baseboards, vacuumed up every loose hair and piece of lint, and dusted every square inch for fingerprints. The police technicians spent seventy-one days inside the Port Dalhousie death house, and despite knowing that there were videotapes of the assaults on Mahaffey and French, except for an edited 1:58 minute video showing a comatose teenage girl being sexually abused by both Bernardo and Homolka, police could not find any other video evidence linking Bernardo to the two murdered girls.
At first police thought the unconscious victim in the 1:58 video clip might have been Kristen French, but the teenage victim would be later found alive and identified only as “Jane Doe”. By identifying a rental movie VHS video case visible in the background of the occurring rape and checking local video store rental records for the title, police determined the date of attack as being the night of June 6-7, 1991, shortly before the couple’s wedding day. But experienced police evidence technicians completely failed to find a key piece of evidence secreted by Bernardo in the house in a hiding place as moronically simple as one used by kids to hide their stash.
“The ‘cycle of abuse’… She was a naive, simple, innocent helpless child…”
Karla Homolka, in the meantime, had been told by everybody—doctors, police, nurses, social workers, family, and friends, all unaware of her role in the crimes—that obviously she was a battered wife. She was a victim here. Soon Homolka began to believe it herself and, smart as a whip, she read up on battered spouse syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder, mastering the jargon and its symptoms. In describing her relationship with Bernardo, Karla frequently used the terms “cycle of abuse” and “learned helplessness,” terms set out in Lenore Walker’s definitive 1979 book, The Battered Woman.
On the advice of her attorney, George Walker, Karla was hospitalized on March 4, 1993 at Toronto’s former Northwestern General Hospital for seven weeks of psychiatric observation and treatment for dysthymia, also known as “reactive depression,” and severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as defined in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Manual, D.S.M. III-R. Karla put on a good show for the psychiatrists at the hospital. Videotapes of Karla being interviewed by police show a very prim, well dressed, hair demurely tied back or falling gently around her small shoulders, intelligent, articulate young woman speaking calmly and evenly, but in a thin, helpless little girl’s voice. Karla looked small and gave off a vibe of feminine vulnerability that draws one into a protective urge; the cops and the doctors fell for it and ate up everything she dished out.
The head psychiatrist at Northwestern General, Dr. Hans J. Arndt, compared Karla to a concentration camp survivor. Dr. Andrew Malcolm, a staff psychiatrist with extensive forensic experience and a clinical psychologist concluded that Karla was an extreme case of “abused spouse syndrome” and was a classic victim of torture. The psychiatrist reported:
In addition there are all of the factors that constitute psychological torture as defined by Amnesty International. There was social isolation, exhaustion stemming from deprivation of sleep, monopolization of perception through the exhibition of intensely possessive behaviour, threats of death against the person or the person’s relatives, humiliation and denial of power, and the administration of drugs or alcohol to diminish self-control. Karla was systematically subjected to all of these things. Karla was subjected to repeated sadistic sexual attacks. She was humiliated, beaten, tied up and raped over a period of years. She was manipulated into being a participant in what eventuated in the death of a much-loved sister. She was advised on her wedding night that her new husband was a rapist. She was told that if she ever tried to leave her husband he would track her down and kill her. Or else he would kill her remaining sister and her parents. She was living with a sexual sadist and she was convinced that from this bewildering fate there was no escape.
Years later when the case was over and Karla’s participation in the rapes and murders revealed at the trial, Dr. Malcolm continued to defend Karla, insisting she was Bernardo’s victim, “She was a naive, simple, innocent helpless child who was impressed by what her parents thought of her catch and what her little girlfriends thought of her catch. She was overwhelmed by this fellow.”
Despite the fact that Karla was living at home with her family and Bernardo was visiting her only on weekends, Karla claimed she was helpless to resist Paul’s demands to assist him in the Christmas drugging and rape of her little sister. When a journalist cornered Dr. Malcolm on this issue, asking him how Karla could have been under such control of Bernardo while still living at home when she offered up her li
ttle sister as a ‘present’ to Bernardo, the psychiatrist weakly responded, “She became dependent on him. He controlled her. He advised her she was worthless. I don’t think she was a full-blown battered wife but I think the early beginnings of it were already under way. She was already falling into his thrall at that point. That was my opinion when I saw her, that she was in fact an ‘influenced’ person.”
Asked if she wasn’t therefore a “battered spouse” at that point when she participated in the sexual assault on her little sister, what was she therefore suffering from? Dr. Malcolm could only concede, “I can’t really answer that. I think it was an outrageous act.”
Karla was actually becoming jealous and resentful of the attention that Bernardo was focusing on her little sister. She would later recollect how angry she was when, during a pool party at their house, Tammy and Paul snuck off by themselves and remained absent long after all the guests departed while Karla was left alone simmering in humiliation.
Karla played the role of traumatized victim with aplomb. Whenever police would come up with something Homolka had neglected to mention, like, for example, her luring and drugging on her own initiative of Jane Doe for Bernardo to rape, Homolka would claim ‘post-traumatic stress–related memory loss’ as a result of her victimization by Bernardo.
Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka: The Ken and Barbie Killers (Crimes Canada: True Crimes That Shocked The Nation Book 3) Page 8
