Police videotapes of Karla’s interviews reveal the callous creature lurking beneath the figure of the demure petite blonde. For every day of taping, Karla would wear a different fashionable outfit. A police video camera accompanied Karla’s interview in the house of horror at 57 Bayview as she walked police through the various crime scenes. For this occasion, Karla chose to put her hair into a braid and wear a schoolgirl’s outfit with a short plaid skirt, white hose and little girl school shoes, maybe even the very same “Tammy” outfit she wore for Bernardo. As they walked around the house, Karla asked the police if any of her furniture had been damaged in the police search.
Karla, dressed for the occasion in a schoolgirl outfit, tours police through the house demonstrating for their video camera how the victims were raped and tormented.
In the master bathroom upstairs where Karla was videotaped in the “perfume competition” with captive Kristen French and where Kristen’s corpse was later bathed clean of forensic evidence, Karla is only concerned about what happened to all her cosmetics and perfume samples. At one point when in the basement where Leslie Mahaffey was dismembered, she looks down at the rug and comments that her sister wants it. When the police officer replies that for the time being it has to remain as evidence, Karla complains, “I’ll have to clean it.”[vii]
“We were in a situation we needed to do this.”
When Karla Homolka’s lawyer came forward with offer for her testimony against Bernardo in exchange for a lenient sentence, the prosecutors seemed interested because they had come up with very little evidence in the house linking Bernardo to the murder of Mahaffy and French, other than trace DNA samples to Mahaffy. It proved Mahaffy was in the house, but not that Bernardo necessarily had murdered her. Even though the prosecution had viewed the 1:58 sliced video showing Homolka gleefully assaulting “Jane Doe,” they had only circumstantial evidence for murder charges. As Niagara Police Inspector Vince Bevan, the chief investigator in the case, will later explain about the deal, “Did we want to do this or did we need to do this? We were in a situation we needed to do this.”
As these negotiations with Homolka were taking place, on April 29, 1993, the police search warrant on Bernardo’s house expired. Police had been in the house for seventy-one days, had already renewed the warrant its maximum three times and were now required to vacate the house by May 1.
The owners who had rented the house to Paul and Karla were anxious to take the home back into their possession. But Paul Bernardo’s lawyer, Ken Murray, continued paying rent on the house throughout the period of the police search, legally retaining the house in Bernardo’s possession as per the lease. Raping, murdering and dismembering victims in the house was not a breach of the written terms of the lease. Evicting Bernardo would become a drawn-out process if he decided to be uncooperative with the owners and file appeals. The owners were only happy to give Murray unsupervised access to the house to remove Paul Bernardo’s remaining property that police had not seized for evidence in order that Bernardo would vacate the premises as soon as possible.
On May 6, a week after police had left, Ken Murray and his co-counsel, Carolyn MacDonald, along with office manager and law clerk Kim Doyle, entered the house and guided by Bernardo on a jailhouse phone to Murray’s cell phone, the three “officers of the court” proceeded to the master bathroom upstairs. There Murray climbed up on the vanity and unscrewed a ceiling lamp, reached in with his arm under the roof insulation, and withdrew a stash of six small Hi-8 video cassettes: the rape and torture videos of Tammy Homolka, Leslie Mahaffey, Kristen French, and the original “Jane Doe” tape, that the police failed to find in their seventy-one day search of the small house. And then Murray did something that would outrage everybody and raise a howl for his head; he concealed from the police and the prosecution his possession of the tapes for the next seventeen months.[viii]
Murray had recovered the tapes a week before the plea deal with Homolka had been signed and sealed by the prosecutors on May 14. Had Ken Murray, as defense attorneys in Canada (and perhaps the United States) are required to do when they come into possession of physical evidence, resigned as Bernardo’s attorney and turned the tapes over to police immediately, the deal with Karla might not have been necessary. But Murray didn’t and Karla’s plea deal went through as he sat on the tapes.
In exchange for a guilty plea to manslaughter and her testimony against Bernardo on charges of murder, Homolka negotiated a maximum sentence of twelve years. With good behavior, Karla would be eligible for parole after serving four years, or without it, she was eligible for automatic statutory release after eight years under Canadian penal law, and four on parole. The prosecution agreed not to contest her parole application.
Obstruction of Justice
No wonder everybody wanted Ken Murray’s head after it had been revealed he had been hiding the videotapes. The prosecution, police and the government loved it, because it allowed them to blame Murray for the controversial deal that they gave to Karla, despite the lack of investigative performance of the forensic techs who failed to find the hidden tapes during the prolonged search of the house.
In his defence, Murray stated that while Bernardo instructed him to recover the videotapes, he had also instructed Murray not to view them. Bernardo’s exact written instructions were, “We will have to go through them in the future. At this time I instruct you not to view them.” Murray said he did not know the tapes were evidence. It’s only when Bernardo was charged with the murders on May 18 that Murray first viewed the tapes in his possession, but by then the Homolka deal had been sealed and delivered.
When Murray took the tapes on May 6, he did not know that Homolka was negotiating a deal. (Although it did not take a genius attorney to guess that Karla’s lawyer would be trying to get her a deal.) Murray only learned that a deal had been made somewhere between May 14 and May 17, but he would not know some of details of the deal until six months later, and the full details until a full year later in May 1993.
The problem for Murray is that a defence attorney can conceal what a client tells them in privilege, but they may not conceal physical evidence. Normally in what is known as the “warm gun” principle, when a client approaches an attorney with incriminating evidence like a murder weapon, (a just-fired handgun, thus the “warm gun”) the attorney warns the client off and does his best to weasel out of taking custody of that evidence or being “aware” of its existence. Otherwise the attorney now has become a material witness and must immediately resign from his client’s defence and surrender the physical evidence to the prosecution.
Even defence attorneys are considered “officers of the court” and must act in the pursuit of justice, even while acting in defence of their client. An attorney must give his client the “best defence” but one that is “fair” to the pursuit of true justice that the attorney as an “officer of the court” must perform. To knowingly conceal physical evidence is a criminal offence known as “obstruction of justice.”
Had Murray simply heard in confidence from Bernardo about the videotapes and their location and then did nothing, he might have been acting within attorney-client privilege. But Murray ended up taking the tapes into his custody, physically moving them, duplicating them and concealing them, which was grounds for obstruction of justice. (Damning Murray to a charge of obstruction of justice later was his omission of video duplication costs on his Legal Aid billing because he feared it may tip off prosecution that he had the videotapes in his possession.)[ix]
When the deal with Homolka was made, Murray now felt that he had in the videotapes something that would expose the prosecution’s star witness Karla not as a victim, but for what she was, Bernardo’s enthusiastic co-perpetrator in the rapes and murders of her sister Tammy, Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. This would discredit her as a witness against his client. He argued that since he had not been informed of the details of the Homolka deal or given discovery of her testimony, he strategically withheld the tapes to better mou
nt a defence for his client, Bernardo.
Gradually, however, it began to dawn on Murray, that while the videotapes exposed Karla Homolka and discredited her, at the same time they also exposed and incriminated his client Bernardo in the charges he was facing. It also became clear to him just how immense of an error he might have made in concealing those tapes and the devastating impact this could have on his future career. In August 1994 Ken Murray resigned from the case, retained a lawyer for himself and turned the videotapes over to police on September 22, 1994, as he should have seventeen months earlier. Just in time for the upcoming trial but way too late to have any impact on Homolka’s plea-bargain deal.
After Bernardo was convicted in September 1995 of all charges, in January1997 Murray was charged with obstructing justice, conspiracy to obstruct justice, possessing child pornography and making obscene materials when copying the tapes. The latter two charges were later dropped by the prosecution. Murray’s co-counsel, Carolyn MacDonald, was also charged with obstructing justice and possession of child pornography, although all charges against MacDonald were dropped in May 1997.[x]
The entire Scarborough Rapist-Bernardo-Homolka investigation and prosecution had been such a cluster-fuck that it was evident that Murray was being conveniently scapegoated, as much as he played his role well in the cluster. Wisely Murray chose to be tried before a judge without a jury. On June 13, 2000, the judge acquitted Murray of the remaining criminal charge of obstruction of justice on the grounds that Murray did not sufficiently understand the contents and context of the videotapes to have knowingly perpetrated an obstruction of justice. In September 2000 all law society professional misconduct charges were dropped as well.
“I Hope They Let Me Do My Hair in Jail. I Would Just Die If My Hair Went to Hell.”
The sensational trial of Paul Bernardo began in May 1995. The videotapes would become a focus of the trial as it dragged on in Toronto into the hot summer months. Two 30-inch video monitors on six-foot platforms draped in funerary black cloth faced the courtroom audience and press gallery. Another two monitors faced the jury while the legal teams, the judge and Bernardo had small monitors to view. A huge sound system boomed the videotape audio into the courtroom.
First the prosecution showed the porn video ‘selfies’ Paul and Karla made, close-ups of her masturbating with a wine bottle on 30-inch screens, performing lollypop blow-jobs and licking ass. It was quite the introduction to the prosecution’s upcoming star witness. The lines trying to get a rare courtroom seat went around the block.
Then came the real sick horrific shit: the rape and torture videos of Tammy Homolka, Leslie Mahaffey and Kristen French. The audience monitors were switched off and the videos were shown in court only to the jury and court but away from the audience and press who could still hear the audio.
As Karla waited in her cell for the time when she would be called to testify in court, she preened and primped with her hair, writing her friend Wendy, “am letting my bangs grow. I want to look my best when I go to court and see Paul. I want him to drool when he sees me.” She testified against Bernardo in June, portraying herself as just one more of his victims. Her testimony on that account was hardly believable. The jury had watched the tapes and saw Karla willingly participating and enjoying the rapes and tortures of the victims. But there was nothing they could do. The deal was done. At issue was not her participation in the rapes, but Karla’s testimony on Paul Bernardo’s murders of the girls.
Paul Bernardo admitted to raping the girls. In view of the videotapes, he could take no other position. He denied, however, killing Mahaffy and French. He insisted that both girls died while in Karla’s custody. Near the end of his testimony, Bernardo admitted that he had some “problems” with his sexuality. “Down the road, I’m going to have to seek professional help for it,” Bernardo flatly stated, not understanding why a wave of scornful laughter rippled through the courtroom.
In the end, Bernardo was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1995 (Canada has no death penalty) without possibility of parole for twenty-five years. He was then declared as a Dangerous Offender which under Canadian law allows for “indefinite” incarceration of an offender deemed dangerous to release at the discretion of the Parole Board of Canada. It is unlikely that Paul Bernardo will ever get out of prison alive. Until about 2012 Bernardo remained in isolated solitary confinement, in the protective segregation unit as a sex offender, a leading candidate in the prison system for shanking. The only relief for Bernardo were visits from police attempting to clear other cases of rapes and murderers that they thought Bernardo might have committed.
But in 2012, it was finally decided to risk Bernardo’s life in the prison population. He was last reported to be working in the prison library. In 2014, to nobody’s surprise, the press reported that Paul Bernardo might be marrying an admirer, a 30- year-old woman from London, Ontario, convinced that Paul is innocent. Sporting a recent tattoo on her ankle in cursive letters, “Paul’s Girl,” the woman told the Toronto Sun, “He is a kind man, a Christian, a very nice man.”[xi]
Karla’s prison record would be more controversial. The Mean Girl thrived in prison, taking college courses, engaging in lesbian love affairs and throwing prison block parties. She posed in photos tending flowers in the prison garden and among toys and props used in battered women therapy sessions. In chatty letters from prison to her friends, Homolka wrote on her arrival there: “There are some people, like you, who know that this horror is not of my own making.” She wrote that prison was an opportunity for her to take some university courses: “I want you to know that life in here isn’t as bad as most people think…Hopefully, I’ll be able to finish my degree while I’m here. I’m eligible for parole in four years and intend to be out—for sure!”
Her only worry about prison: “I hope they let me do my hair in jail. I would just die if my hair went to hell.”
Karla did not get out in four years, nor in eight. Public indignation over the deal and a constant barrage of media coverage of Karla’s every prison block party, her lesbian relationships, her love affair through a fence with a male prisoner convicted of murdering his girlfriend, her prison psychiatric file, her university courses, her Victoria’s Secrets gifts, her hair, her personal letters and photographs, all that coverage and public outcry drove the correctional system to keep Karla in prison until she had served her full term of twelve years. It’s all there on the internet in its every sensational detail.
Karla clowning in the prison “theater therapy” room. The sign she holds reads in French: “Do you miss me?”
Karla Unbound
Karla’s prison sentence came to an end on American Independence Day on July 4, 2005, and her release the next day received frenzied helicopter-convoy media coverage. In an attempt to pre-empt the media from hounding her for an interview, she appeared two hours after her release on Canada’s national broadcaster, the CBC, interviewed in French, because she claimed that the French-language Quebec media was the only one that treated her fairly. She was driven straight from the prison to the interview hidden in the backseat of her lawyer, Sylvie Bordelais’s car.
Karla as she appeared in her CBC interview on the day of her release from prison.
(Courtesy of Radio-Canada CBC)
In the nationally televised interview, Karla said, in a very fluent French, “I cry often. I can’t forgive myself. I think about what I did and often I think I don’t deserve to be happy because of what I did. What I did was terrible and I was in a situation where I was unable to see clearly, where I was unable to ask for help, where I was completely overwhelmed in my life… Back then I was seventeen years old. I didn’t know much. I was and I regret it enormously because now I know I had the power to stop all of that. But when I was living through it, I thought I had no power. I was afraid of being abandoned. I absolutely wanted to have a relationship. I did not have self-confidence. There are a lot of things about myself that I didn't know then that I know now... I think I will never be
truly free. Because there are different kinds of prisons. There are concrete prisons and there are internal prisons. And I think I will always be in an internal prison.”
Asked if she still has a relationship with her family, Karla said her relationship was excellent, “My family has never rejected me for what I did. My mother only said that she hates what I did but she loves me, and we have a very beautiful relationship.”
Asked what the first thing she would like to do now that she has been freed from prison Karla replied, “I'd like to have an iced cappuccino. An iced cappuccino from Tim Hortons is what I’d like to do.”
The rest of the media dogged Karla for another six months or so and then tired of it. For a while she lived in Montreal under the name of Karla Leanne Teale, a surname she and Paul Bernardo had adopted shortly before their arrests, based on the serial killer portrayed by Kevin Bacon in the movie Criminal Law—Martin Thiel, one of their favorite serial killers. A camera crew ambushed Karla on the street. She walked away without saying anything. Rumours began to circulate that she might be married, that she was seen with an infant that might be her own. That she was trying to get work as a school teacher. Then Karla disappeared.
“We live well, in peace. We’re handling things.”
Karla had indeed married and had three children. Her husband was Thierry Bordelais, her Montreal attorney’s brother. Karla’s “internal prison” would be a Caribbean island paradise where the two were trying to set up an English language school. She took the name of Leanne Bordelais and the couple moved to the sunshine of French Guadeloupe where they raised their two boys and a girl. When a Quebec film crew in 2013 went to her home in Guadeloupe and caught up with her troll-like husband Thierry there, he told them, “The events took place 20 years ago. She's been out for 10 years. She’s sick of it. She doesn’t want to know.”
Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka: The Ken and Barbie Killers (Crimes Canada: True Crimes That Shocked The Nation Book 3) Page 9
