Challenged by the journalist, “You say it’s the past. But three children are dead,” Thierry replied, “It’s gone on for years. We don’t care, we don’t read about it. All those close to us don’t read it, so we don’t care. Some people will keep on for the next 50 years. They can keep it up. We live well, in peace. We’re handling things.”
Asked if he felt his wife had done the time she deserved for her crimes, he said, “That’s the Canadian justice system’s problem. They decided to make a deal, which they have to respect. The government can’t do anything. The deal was done a long time ago. They can’t do anything. Now she’s living her life.”
As Karla’s dutiful husband sent the camera crew on their way, he told them, “The greatest, best known journalist in the world, Oprah, an American, called us for an interview. If she wouldn’t talk to Oprah, we’re not going to talk to reporters of no standing that we know of that I can see.”[xii]
“I have no interest in rebutting what other people say. I never have.”
Karla had been found in 2012 by journalist Paula Todd, who described in her book Finding Karla: How I Tracked Down an Elusive Serial Child Killer and Discovered a Mother of Three how she ‘cold called’ Karla at her Caribbean home and managed to spend an hour with her. Todd noted that Karla was petite and her shiny blond tresses had gone dull and lines had developed in her forty-two year old face and her mouth had thinned, but overall she remained attractive. Todd was seated in their living room and observed Karla and her three children:
Homolka and Bordelais’s first-born has her oval face and the slight build of his father. His skin is a soft mocha and his dark hair shot with tufts of blond. In time, I will learn he is quiet, thoughtful and, after some nudging, obedient. He speaks both English and French and has a soft, gentle voice. He likes to write his name and draw pictures.
Following close behind him is an entirely different creature. Homolka’s middle child, about three years old, is a precocious, round-cheeked extrovert. She has the dark-chestnut colouring of her father. Her hair is a mass of shiny black curls. She clambers up into her mother’s lap, pulling at her face, her breast, her arms. She makes happy little-girl sounds.
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.[xiii]
Todd was left with the impression that the children were accustomed to her affection and attention and were well cared for by Karla. She observed that Karla was smart and quick on her feet but had only one trick: answering a question with another question. She was sensitive to slightest hints of criticism and quick to lash back. Overall, Karla said to Todd much less than she had said to the CBC in her 2005 interview. In the end when Karla tells Todd, “I have no interest in rebutting what other people say. I never have,” we already knew that.
Most recently, Karla Homolka’s name came up in the case of the internet video necrophile Luka Magnotta when in 2007 he fabricated a rumour that he was dating Karla. Then when in 2012 Magnotta was mailing around the country dismembered body parts of his victim, he used Karla’s surviving sister Lori’s return address on one of the packages. Lori Homolka, a cashier at Zehrs who had changed her name to Logan Valentini, was forced to testify at Magnotta’s trial in 2014, sensationally revealing that Karla and her brood had returned to Canada and were now once again living in Quebec in the Montreal area.[xiv]
Despite the public fear that Karla will reoffend or become a homicidal muse for another serial killer, the prognosis for never hearing about her again is good, if she is left alone. Statistically, high-profile female offenders like Karla have rarely committed a new series of crimes. Whether her demon seed will pass to her innocent children, the way it was passed to Bernardo and to Gallego by their dysfunctional parents and to countless of other serial perpetrators, remains to be seen.
“Like Everest, he is there.”
Explaining Karla is a difficult task. There is nothing in her history prior to meeting Bernardo that is common to that of other serial killers (or psychopaths for that matter). In prison, Karla had been administered practically every psychological test known to man and scored normal profiles. Her score on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) was five; a score of at least twenty is required to designate the subject as a psychopath.[xv] On the other hand, while in prison Karla completed a degree from Queen’s University in psychology, including courses in deviant psychology. She could have manipulated her responses to the tests.
Homolka remains a mystery. It was not so much that Homolka was evil, as she was vacant. She was as colourless and heartless and as soul-dead as the anonymous suburban housing tracts and shopping malls she and her Exclusive Diamond Club friends inhabited. Karla was conscious of only her Beastie Boy right to party. Her family was a numb and shriveled middle-middle-class hive of greed in an age when greed was Wall Street celebrated: “greed is good.” All her poor sister Tammy wanted for her sixteenth birthday was a Porsche—something marginally beyond the means of the middle-middle. Karla Homolka could rattle off cosmetic-counter brand names in the midst of an unfolding rape-homicide but was incapable of the simplest moral judgment—of not submitting her sister to a rape; of releasing a frightened and battered girl when she had the power to do so. Her capacity to do the right thing was totally extinct.
For Homolka, Bernardo was as perfect as the cover of a cheap romance novel—a blond, larger than life, nicely styled Big Bad Businessman. His values were as vacant as hers and, as such, they made a perfect couple. The walls of Bernardo’s study were covered with pictures of expensive sports cars and slips of paper with slogans like “Poverty is self-imposed.” “Time is Money.” “Money never sleeps.” “Think big. Be big.” “I don’t meet the competition—I crush it.” “Poverty sucks.” Wall Street was his favorite movie. The horror is that there probably was not an ounce of murder in Karla Homolka’s heart before she met Bernardo, and probably none remains today. Yet on contact with a Bernardo, a vapid and vacant little Barbie princess like Karla becomes an enabling homicidal bitch. We know that there are lots of Paul Bernardos out there, but one wonders: How many young men and women are out there—with moral discretion as malnourished as Homolka’s—waiting to meet their mate?
Some might argue that until Bernardo met Karla he had not committed any rapes or murders; until Ian Brady met Myra Hindley; until Doug Clark met Carol Bundy. Were these women—as women sometimes tend to do when killing—using these men as their proxies for their own homicidal desires? Possibly. Would these men have gone on to rape and kill if they had not met these women? Very likely yes.
One thing we know for sure, however; in modern history there has not been a single known case of a Karla Homolka or a Myra Hindley or a Charlene Gallego raping and killing female captives without a male accomplice. (The notable exception, perhaps, is the lesbian female team of Gwendolyn Graham and Catherine May Wood, who murdered elderly patients in a retirement home for sexual thrills.) Solo female serial killers, contrary to popular belief that they mostly kill males they are intimate with for financial gain, in statistical reality tend to marginally prefer strangers as victims, and the majority include children and other women among their victims. Both male and females kill for the same motive—control—but female offenders express that compulsion for control over their victim thorough a quick act of killing rather than through prolonged torture, rape and mutilation of their victims, be they male, female or child. It’s only when a female teams up with a male psychopath that she begins to mimic his obsessions.
Although he applied it to the victims as well as accomplices of females, as Patrick Wilson concluded in his study of Home
Office statistics of nearly every woman executed in Britain since 1843, “The husband or lover of a murderess invariably plays a part in causing the murder, if only because, like Everest, he is there. The same cannot be said of male crimes of violence.”[xvi]
Acknowledgements
I want to thank my editor and proofreaders. I can't thank you enough for your ongoing support:
- Peter
Bettye McKee
Lorrie Suzanne Phillippe
Amanda Hutchins
Marlene Fabregas
Darlene Horn
Ron Steed
June Julie Dechman
Karen Emberton Spear
Katherine McCarthy
About the Author
Dr. Peter Vronsky, Ph.d. is an author, filmmaker and investigative historian. He is the author of two definitive bestselling books on the history and psychopathology of serial homicide, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (2004) and Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters (2007). He began writing about serial killers after he randomly encountered briefly two different serial killers before they were apprehended, one in New York City in December 1979 and the other in Moscow in October 1990 without knowing at the time they were serial killers.
Vronsky is also a historian of espionage, insurgency and military history. His most recent book is Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the Forgotten 1866 Battle that Made Canada (Penguin Books: 2011) an investigative account of the hidden history of Canada's first modern battle and the Irish Fenian insurgency.
Peter Vronsky recently contributed the chapters "Serial Killer Zombie Apocalypse and the Dawn of the Less Dead"and "Zebra! The Hunting Humans 'Ninja' Truck Driver Serial Killer" to the annual Serial Killers True Crime Anthologies (Vol 1 & 2) from RJ Parker Publishing. The chapters are a sneak-preview from his forthcoming book, Serial Killer Chronicles: A New History of Serial Murder Today for Berkley Books at Penguin Random House, scheduled to be published in 2016.
Vronsky holds a Ph.d from the University of Toronto in the fields of the history of espionage in international relations and criminal justice history. He currently lectures in history of the Third Reich, the American Civil War, history of terrorism, espionage and international relations in the 20th century at Ryerson University in Toronto.
Peter Vronsky’s website is www.petervronsky.org
Other books in the Crimes Canada collection
Robert Pickton: The Pig Farmer Killer
by Chris Swinney
Robert Pickton, inherited a pig farm worth a million dollars and used his wealth to lure skid row hookers to his farm where he confessed to murdering 49 female victims; dismembering and feeding their body parts to his pigs which he supplied to Vancouver area restaurants.
Marc Lepine: The Montreal Massacre
by RJ Parker
With extreme hatred in his heart against feminism, an act that feminists would label 'gynocide,' a heavily armed Marc Lépine entered the University École Polytechnique de Montreal, and after allowing the male students to leave, systematically murdered 14 female students.
But what motivated Lepine to carry out this heinous crime? Mass murderer, madman, cold-blooded killer, misogynist, political zealot? Or was he simply another desperate person frustrated with his powerless status in this world?
Sources
Bernardo Investigation Review, Report of Mr. Justice Archie Campbell, Province of Ontario, June 1996
Christopher D. Clemmer, “Obstructing The Bernardo Investigation: Kenneth Murray and the Defence Counsel’s Conflicting Obligations to Clients and the Court.” Osgoode Hall Review of Law and Policy, 1.2 (2014)
Paula Todd, (2012-06-18). Finding Karla: How I Tracked Down an Elusive Serial Child Killer and Discovered a Mother of Three, Canadian Writers Group/The Atavist. Kindle Edition.
Janet I. Warren and Robert R. Hazelwood, “Relational Patterns Associated With Sexual Sadism: A Study of 20 Wives and Girlfriends,” Journal of Family Violence, Vol. 17, No.1, March 2002
R vs Paul Bernardo, 1995.
Stephen Williams, Invisible Darkness: The Horrifying Case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, Toronto: Little, Brown Canada, 1996.
Stephen Williams, Karla: A Pact with the Devil, Toronto: Seal Books, 2003
Patrick Wilson, Murderess: A Study of Women Executed in Britain Since 1843, London: Michael Joseph, 1971
* * *
[i] Stephen Williams, Invisible Darkness: The Horrifying Case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, Toronto: Little, Brown Canada, 1996. pp. 70-71; Globe & Mail, March 3, 1993. p. A6
[ii] http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2013/01/31/sacramentos-sex-slave-murders-killer-discovered-living-in-area-speaks-after-years-of-silence/
[iii] Janet I. Warren and Robert R. Hazelwood, “Relational Patterns Associated With Sexual Sadism: A Study of 20 Wives and Girlfriends,” Journal of Family Violence, Vol. 17, No.1, March 2002, pp. 75-89
[iv] Bernardo Investigation Review, Report of Mr. Justice Archie Campbell, Province of Ontario, June 1996, p.15
[v] According to Karla Homolka’s testimony of what Paul later told her.
[vi] Bernardo Investigation Review, p. 149
[vii] http://www.cbc.ca/player/Shows/Shows/the+fifth+estate/ID/2337732322/
[viii] Christopher D. Clemmer, “Obstructing The Bernardo Investigation: Kenneth Murray and the Defence Counsel’s Conflicting Obligations to Clients and the Court.” Osgoode Hall Review of Law and Policy, 1.2 (2014): 137-197.
[ix] Clemmer, p. 145
[x] Clemmer, p. 146
[xi] http://www.torontosun.com/2014/07/03/paul-bernardo-to-marry
[xii] Marina in Murderland 2013, Marina Ladou Seeks Out Karla Homolka https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfNpbfcJSLg
[xiii] Paula Todd, (2012-06-18). Finding Karla: How I Tracked Down an Elusive Serial Child Killer and Discovered a Mother of Three (Kindle Single) (Kindle Locations 456-459). Canadian Writers Group/The Atavist. Kindle Edition.
[xiv] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/magnotta-murder-trial-hears-from-karla-homolkas-sister/article21144303/
[xv] Stephen Williams, Karla: A Pact with the Devil, Toronto: Seal Books, 2003, p. 85.
[xvi] Patrick Wilson, Murderess: A Study of Women Executed in Britain Since 1843, London: Michael Joseph, 1971, p. 94.
None
Table of Contents
Title Page
Introduction
Background
The Perfect Couple
Mean Girl
“Bastard Child from Hell”
“Big, Bad Businessman”
Wives and girlfriends of sexual sadists prison study
Hybristophilia
Prince Charming
Scarborough Rapist
“Your little girl wants to be abused”
Deadly Innocence
“It was like 2,000 other calls”
The “Christmas Wedding Present”
Sex, death, and videotape
"I loved it when you fucked my little sister"
Raping Jane Doe: “Why Couldn’t It Have Been the Same with Tammy?”
The Murder of Leslie Mahaffy
The Murder of Kristen French
“What Do You Know About Dying?”
“It didn’t sound logical that he would be out abducting her and cutting her up and then getting married...”
“Leslie’s coming for you! She’s down there in the basement. Right where I cut her up.”
“Raccoon Face”
Busted
“The ‘cycle of abuse’… She was a naive, simple, innocent helpless child…”
“We were in a situation we needed to do this.”
Obstruction of Justice
“I Hope They Let Me Do My Hair in Jail. I Would Just Die If My Hair Went to Hell.”
Karla Unbound
“We live well, in peace. We’re handling things.”
“I have no interest in rebutting what other people say. I never have.”
“
Like Everest, he is there.”
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Other books in the Crimes Canada collection
Sources
Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka: The Ken and Barbie Killers (Crimes Canada: True Crimes That Shocked The Nation Book 3) Page 10
