Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka

by Williams, Stephen, 1949-

  class. Her language skills were such that she acted as a French tutor for her less adept peers.

  Tracy Collins, another friend, saw Karla as “a thirty-year-old in a seventeen-year-old’s body.” One afternoon in the cafeteria Karla whispered in Tracy’s ear, “You know what I’d like to do? I’d bke to put dots all over somebody’s body and take a knife and then play connect the dots and then pour vinegar all over them.”

  Karla started going with a guy in her typing class. Doug laconically remembered Karla as she was generally perceived—particularly by the boys—as “different.” It was hard to say exactly how. The culture of Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School reflected the culture of the town: white, male dominant, working class, heterosexual, jock. Doug appreciated Karla’s moodiness and found the fact that she was consumed by the thought of death interesting. She was constantly threatening suicide, but he doubted her sincerity.

  Doug wasn’t the only one who noticed she was obsessed by death. Karla inscribed Lyn Cretney’s yearbook: “Remember: Suicide kicks and fasting is awesome. Bones rule! Death Rules. Death Kicks. I love death. Kill the fucking world.” Lyn never figured that one out.

  All of Karla’s close girlfriends looked the same. The three of them—Kathy Wilson, Debbie Purdie and Lisa Stanton—were around five foot five, 110 pounds with permed blond hair. They dressed a httle punk, although pop culture in a town such as St. Catharines was ignorant of Iggy Pop, Lou Reed or even Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols. Soon, they would form a little clique called the Exclusive Diamond Club. Its charter was simple: recruit rich, slightly older men who were hunks, get a diamond, marry and live happily ever after.

  Karla was “the tough one in the bunch,” as Kathy Wilson put it. Karla had a pair of real handcuffs, “with keys and every-

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  thing,” ostensibly because she wanted to become a poHce officer.

  Dorothy Homolka told Dr. Arndt her daughter wanted to be a librarian. She told him about Karla’s enthusiasm for gymnastics and figure skating, terminated when she fi^ctured her foot at the age of thirteen.

  Karla left the gymnasium and the arena behind for the theater. She joined the dance club and took a serious interest in acting, participating in school variety shows and musicals. For three years she studied music, taking voice and singing lessons. Ironically, she categorically reftised to sing in fix)nt of her class. When it was her turn to perform solo, Karla cajoled the teacher into instructing the entire class to turn its back or—if the assignment was particularly demanding—actually leave the room while she warbled.

  On May 4, 1987, Karla celebrated her seventeenth birthday poolside with the members of the Exclusive Diamond Club and Tracy Collins, who had been intrigued by Karla ever since the ^‘connect the dots” incidents. Other friends, including chubby Amanda Whading, had fallen by the wayside. Amanda hked sports; Karla liked lying perfectly still in the sun Hstening to the Beastie Boys sing “You Gotta Fight for Your Right to Party.”

  By July, Tracy CoUins’s parents had had enough and they forbade her to keep company with Karla. Tracy had failed two courses and the CoUinses did not hke the way their daughter was changing under the influence of the strange, domineering Homolka girl.

  Tracy was not the only one lost to Karla. Her new boyfriend moved to Kansas. They corresponded, but Karla did not see her lost love again until she took matters into her own hands around mid-August. In defiance of her parents, she purchased a plane ticket and surreptitiously flew to Kansas for two weeks. On her first flight beyond her parents’ control, Karla told Dr. Arndt that she and her boyfriend did cocaine—“just a little”—and Karla lost her virginity. At least she had called home, Karla told the doctor.

  According to what the boy in Kansas later told the poHce and what Karla told Dr. Arndt, there was nothing unusual

  about the sex—“it was just sex.” But when she got the girlfriends together at the beginning of the semester in September, Karla told tales of sadistic orgies, with bondage and hard spankings.

  Karla began grade twelve but quickly became disaffected. She decided to only take two courses and work full-time instead. Karla approached Kristy Maan, the youthful store manager at the Number One Pet Center, and implied that Kristy was something of a role model for her—young, pretty, engaged and employed. Karla’s part-time job became full-time. Even better, Karla’s fellow Diamond Clubber, Debbie Purdie, took over her old part-time position.

  In October 1987, Karla and Debbie were invited to g6 to a convention in Toronto for people who were involved in the pet industry. It was being held at the Howard Johnson East Hotel in Scarborough, a large suburb on the eastern boundary of Toronto.

  The way Karla told it to Dr. Arndt, she went to the convention with her friend Debbie. Then they went out to a club, came back and met Paul and his friend in the coffee shop. They invited the boys up to their room to watch a movie, but Karla ended up having sex with Paul instead. That was it.

  “The first time I met him I knew I’d marry him,” she told Dr. Arndt. “He puts women under a spell, you know. I fell in love that night.”

  Then she added: “Of course, that’s no excuse.”

  p

  three

  he sound of the key in Karla Homolka’s hotel-room door woke Kristy Maan from a deep sleep. At first she didn’t remember exactly where she was. Then she saw Karla and Debbie. They were coming in the door with two more guys. Kristy couldn’t believe her eyes. She looked at her watch. She had only been asleep for forty-five minutes. With some difficulty, they had just rid themselves of the first two. Where in God’s name did they get these two?

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  As the pet-store manager, it had been Kristy’s choice to bring Karla and Debbie to Toronto for the Hagen show. Every year, for as long as Kristy had managed the store, Hagen sponsored a show of pet suppHes and accessories for selected retailers. Normally, they only paid the store manager’s way. This was the first time the company had sprung for anybody the managers wanted to bring.

  Kristy had decided to to take her assistant manager, Jenny Cable, and Karla Homolka. Kristy liked Karla. She got along with animals, and people. Even Touki the bird liked Karla. When Karla wanted to bring her girlfriend Debbie, who also worked at the store part-time, Kristy figured “why not?” It was pure serendipity.

  “Don’t be mad,” Karla said, to her bewildered boss. “They’re nothing like those other two.”

  A little earlier, Kristy had run next door to the girls’ room because she heard a commotion. She found Debbie and Karla with two creepy-looking older guys who were obviously drunk and slightly belligerent about leaving.

  After the cocktail party downstairs, when everyone else had gone back up to their rooms, Karla and Debbie had gone to the disco. They must have picked up the creeps there. Dogs Kristy could handle, but not drunks. She went and got her district manager, but he was no match for these men either. They finally had to call security.

  “I didn’t know where you two were,” Kristy scolded Karla. Brunette, petite and attractive, with her stylish eyeglasses, Kristy looked more like an optometrist’s model than a cage cleaner from a pet store. “But what you just did, that’s crazy. You don’t know anyone around here; you shouldn’t be bringing people up here. Now, I’m gonna stay right here tonight.”

  With that, she turned on the television, lay down on the pull-out sofa in front of the window and promptly fell asleep. No sooner was she asleep than Debbie and Karla went out the door and down three floors to the hotel restaurant, a Naugahyde-and-chicken-salad-sandwich joint called Bluffer’s Atrium Lounge. It was a little before midnight.

  “Oh Kristy, they’re really nice guys, honest,” Karla cajoled. “They just came up to talk.”

  Krist)^ had seen ferrets in heat less flirtatious, less obvious than Karla wa.s now. Kristy considered herself a Christian. She tried to read her Bible every day. But what to do? She wasn’t their mother
and this wasn’t a reHgious retreat; it was a convention and the girls were over the age of consent.

  And Karla was right—they were different. The one guy was goofy looking, but they were both clean-cut, particularly the better-looking one. He was wearing a nice windbreaker, a blue button-down shirt and dark cotton pants. They were older than the girls, but they looked younger than the previous two. And they weren’t drunk.

  Nevertheless, Kristy was pretty well disgusted. She knew Karla was the instigator—even.though everybody Called Debbie Purdie “Dirty^’ Purdie. She had seen no evidence that Debbie was “dirty.” Instead, she seemed immature and shy. With Debbie, it was always “Karla this” and “Karla that.”

  Shrugging her shoulders, Kristy went back to her own room and to bed. She knew the one guy’s name was Paul. She would not find out who the other guy was until Paul and Karla were married four years later.

  Paul and his future best man, Van, could not believe their good fortune: teenage chicks with a hotel room. The night had otherwise been a bust. The men had thought they would just get something to eat at Howard Johnson’s before Van took Paul home and called it a night. Roughly the same age— Paul was twenty-three and Van twenty-two—they had grown up across the street from each other. The Smirnis family had moved away a few years earlier, but Van and Paul kept in touch. When Paul saw the two girls sitting in the well-lit restaurant wmdow, his dour mood changed drastically.

  Through the reflection in the glass window, Paul Bernardo saw himself miraculously redeemed in the green-blue eyes of a dirty blonde with a pretty face and a bad perm. By the way she returned his look and smiled, there was little doubt in his mind that he was at least going to get to talk to somebody other than Van that night.

  Paul was the kind of guy for whom something always had to be happening. In the past few months, that had been the case. He had graduated with a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Toronto, gone to Walt Disney World with a girlfriend in August, got an entry-level trainee’s job at a big accounting firm called Price Waterhouse in September, and flown back and forth to Van’s brother’s wedding in Fort Worth the weekend before last. He had two girlfriends. One of them was so jealous of the other that she had put her hand through a window at his parents’ house a few weeks eariier.

  “Sometimes in life you’ve got to say ‘what the ftick’ and make your move,” Tom Cruise said in the 1983 movie Risky Business. Paul had that quote printed out on a wall in his bedroom where he kept a record of cHches that were his mantras. Even though the restaurant had a maitre d’, Paul ignored him and went directly to the girls’ table and boldly asked the one question to which he already had the answer: would the girls mind if he and his friend joined them?

  It was apparent right away, to both Van and Debbie, that Paul and Karla had more in common than the fact that they both had swimming pools in their backyards. There was an immediate, inexplicable but very obvious attraction. Karla was ready and Paul was impetuous.

  Pleasantries exchanged, they chitchatted. The girls went to the bathroom, giggled and invited the boys up to their room. They were just going to watch a movie. The fortuitousness was part of the buzz.

  Kristy Maan shut the door behind her, the lights went out and Paul and Karla went at it. It was a typical Hojo room; small, clean and inexpensively frirnished, the pull-out couch only a couple of steps from the bed where Karla and Paul were doing a horizontal mambo.

  According to what Van later told newspaper reporters, first Karla was on top, then Paul. But he wasn’t really watching, he just saw their silhouette in the dim light. The sheets were moving, a lot.

  Debbie was somewhat surprised that the Exclusive Diamond Club President and some totally new six-footer were having sex

  right in front of them. She also knew that Karla was capable of anything. Karla and Paul kept at it, grunting and groaning and whispering sweet nothings in each other’s ear, for about four hours. Once, when they overheated, Karla poured a glass of ice-water on Paul’s back. He was impressed. He liked a girl with attitude.

  Ultimately, Debbie fell asleep on the pull-out couch. She did not want to have anything to do with Van.

  Sloppy seconds had always been one of Van’s fantasies. But when he asked Paul if he could have Karla too, Paul told him to have a go at himself instead.

  At eight o’clock the next morning, Paul and Karla took a shower together and exchanged addresses and phone numbers.

  “You see, I’m really an old-fashioned kind of girl.” Karla explained to Dr. Arndt patiently. “A stay-at-home. Girl Guides, have-a-bunch-of-kids, have-doors-opened-for-me kind of girl.”

  Dr. Arndt looked around the interview room, found a Northwestern General Hospital Blood/Chemistry work-up form, and took notes on that.

  “He treated me like a princess; he swept me off my feet… . You have to understand, I liked him back then,” she explained, squeezing Bunky. “He was the one guy who was very nice to me; he never bored me Uke the others. With the other guys I could always do what I wanted and that was boring. In all my previous relationships, I was in total control. I never cared what others thought.”

  The “one guy” who was always nice to Karla, who never bored her—whom she knew from the moment they met she would marry—was born a bastard on August 27, 1964, at Scarborough General Hospital in the suburbs of Toronto. He had also been very ugly.

  There was nothing abnormal about Marilyn Bernardo’s thirty-nine-week pregnancy. Paul Kenneth was a twenty-inch—

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  long, eight-pound-ten-ounce bouncing baby boy. But the huge black mark covering the entire left side of his head was grotesque. His mother cried out with horror the first time she saw him.

  The hospital records show his parents to be Marilyn Elizabeth Bernardo nee Eastman and Kenneth Walter Bernardo. But the records are not entirely accurate. Marilyn Bernardo was not really an Eastman—she was a Hamilton—and Paul was not Ken’s son.

  Marilyn Bernardo was born Marilyn Joyce Hamilton on May 10, 1940, in Kitchener, Ontario. Kitchener and its twin city, Waterloo, are enclaves of German immigration, approximately an hour’s drive west of the Toronto airport. Before the First World War, they were known as Berlin and Little Berlin.

  Marilyn’s natural parents, Ross and Ehzabeth Hamilton, put Marilyn and her two sisters, Claudia and Diane, and her brother, Richard, up for adoption. Marilyn never found out why. Neither did any of her sibhngs. But Marilyn got real lucky when Gerald and EHzabeth Eastman decided to adopt her.

  Gerald Ernest Eastman had become a big fish in a small pond. Born in 1901, he read law at Osgoode Hall in Toronto and was called to the bar in 1928. He joined the Kitchener law office of Clement, Hattin and Company. After World War II he became a full partner. When he retired in 1980, his law firm was known as Clement, Eastman, Dreger, Martin and Meunier.

  On July 8, 1931, Gerald married Elizabeth Ruddell. They had one natural child, Marilyn’s stepbrother Charles (Dick) Eastman. The senior Eastman soldiered in World War II from 1939 until 1945, when he was honorably discharged a Heuten-ant colonel.

  To hear Ken Bernardo tell it, Marilyn was abused in foster homes and then raped by at least three members of the Eastman family after she was adopted. But he said these things much later, when he was trying desperately to avoid jail and rationalize his own deviate and abusive behavior. Otherwise, there is no evidence to support his allegations.

  To her friends, such as EUzabeth Christner, Marilyn was an outgoing and happy teenager who had been raised in quiet, affluent civiUty by kind, understanding parents. Marilyn attended Westmount and King Edward Public Schools and then Kitchener Collegiate Institute. After she graduated from high school, Marilyn went to work for Ontario Hydro.

  An attractive blonde-^maybe a bit heavy in the thigh— Marilyn had a broad, open face, rather like the many Mennon-ite girls who crowded the bustling Kitchener farmers’ market on Saturdays.

  She met Ken Bern
ardo in November, 1955. An ignorant, horse-playing, Italian immigrant’s son, Kenneth Walter Bernardo had been born on January 29, 1935, to Frank and Mary Bernardo. He was the youngest of three siblings. Ken’s brother, Raymond Francis, had been born a decade earher, and his sister Shirley in 1927.

  According to Ken, the Bernardo children endured a kind of minor holocaust of the nuclear family. As the youngest by eight years, he suffered the least abuse but remembered his childhood as troubled and difficult. His father was an old-world authoritarian, who treated the children like stubborn mules. The old man and Ken’s brother, Raymond, fought like warring factions in the Italian parliament. Although Ken maintains the family struggled during the Great Depression, that too seems unlikely. By the time Ken was cognizant of his circumstances, it was at least 1940 and his father was prospering and starting to mellow.

  Born in northern Italy, Frank Bernardo came to Canada as an orphan at the age of ten. He married a woman of English descent and started what became a very successful marble-and-tile company. Frank retired early, sold the business and played the ponies for the rest of his long Hfe.

  Ken’s recollection is that his father stopped beating his mother when Ken was around five years old but the relationship between his parents was never tranquil or amicable. By the time the physical abuse and daily turmoil started to abate. Ken’s brother and sister were in their mid-teens.

  In 1950, the Bernardos made the city papers. Raymond was caught out in some criminal behavior and arrested. The matter

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