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

by Williams, Stephen, 1949-

  After Paul quit Goldfarb Shulman, he applied for unemployment insurance. He had paid in, and now UIC could pay the rent.

  Paul had been watching the motivational guru, Tony Robbins. From reading magazines such as Success, Paul knew there was more to the motivational-tape business than Tony Robbins. There were thousands of practitioners in the United States. They all said pretty much the same thing—each in his own way. If they could do it, so could he. He would just copy them. He started ordering mail-order motivational tapes.

  In the meantime, Paul had been smuggling cigarettes with the Smirnis brothers. Van’s parents had moved up north to Sutton—a town on Lake Simcoe about an hour’s drive from Toronto. They had a small coffee shop at the corner of Highway 48 and Brown Hill. There, the brothers hooked up with a biker

  named Patrick Johnnie. Johnnie was a Para-Dice Rider. He could finance and fence whatever Paul and the brothers brought across the border.

  Van Smirnis was planning to move to Youngstown, New York, a small town just across the Niagara River overlooking the gorge. Van was going to open a video store with his brother Steve. Smokin’ Joe’s, the Indians’ massive cigarette-and-Hquor oudet, was just up the road. The video store would make a good front for their smugghng business.

  Paul had Karla and St. Catharines. In fact, it was the Homolkas w^ho had allegedly turned Paul on to smuggling in the first place. Contraband was a way of Hfe in the Niagara region.

  The money Paul had been making smuggling cigarettes to supplement his income had rapidly become his income. By the time he quit his day job, Paul was making twice as much counting cigarettes as beans. Everything was starting to fall into place and his world was unfolding as he felt it should.

  Karla turned twenty on May 4. She wrote to her friend Debbie Purdie, asking her to be a bridesmaid, and gave her the wedding date. “Paul is great,” Karla said. “Our relationship gets better every day. He is going to make the perfect husband.”

  On the twenty-third Paul filed for personal bankruptcy. Even though he could easily have paid off” $25,000 in personal debts he had amassed with proceeds from the smuggled cigarettes, why should he? Because he was behind on his payments, his credit rating had gone to hell.

  As an accountant, Paul knew he could go broke with impu-mty. He would be better off bust. If he paid off his credit cards, his credit rating would stay in the shitter for seven years. The reality was, within six months of being discharged from personal bankruptcy he would have a clean slate and all his credit cards back. In the meantime, he could use Karla’s.

  He was so happy with the way things were going, he decided to rape Sharon Moon. He saw her get off the bus in Scarborough at two-thirt>’ Sararday morning and walk north on Mid—

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  land Avenue toward Sheppard Avenue. She was slight, with brown shoulder-length hair. She was perfect. Paul had just come back from visiting the Homolkas in St. Catharines. Irwin had the weekend off.

  Paul was wearmg a baby blue, hip-length nylon jacket with a zippered pocket, a blue-and-white striped T-shirt, tan-colored walking shorts with a pleated front and white tennis-style running shoes—no socks and no jewelry. He looked casual and cool. He parked the car around the block and walked right up to Sharon and said, “Hello.” Then, he pulled out his knife and said, “If you scream, I’ll kill you.” He slashed her face.

  Paul took Sharon to a deserted area at the north end of Agincourt Collegiate. He beat her up a bit, tied her hands and feet with twine and raped her. When Paul finished with her vagina and anus, he forced her to perform fellatio and ejaculated.

  During the attack he chatted away: “Oh, I’m just coming home from a party. You notice I have a knife. Shut up, bitch … If you try and flick me up or fuck me over, I’ll kill you. Don’t you try. Don’t you dare even try to fuck me up or fuck me over, bitch. I’ll kill you … I’m gonna leave and you can do whatever you want. Okay, you can start counting now.”

  After a few minutes, he came back, something he hadn’t done since Detective Irwin’s first rape investigation—the one on Packard in 1989. He wanted to fondle Sharon’s breasts and squeeze her buttocks.

  Then he bit her breasts—something new. “Oh, shit,” he said, “I want something to remember you by.” And he pulled out a big tuft of her pubic hair—another new thing. He stole her purse and wallet with her identification, a makeup kit and her hair brush.

  Like many of the previous victims, Sharon got a good look at him. After hospital staff treated the cut and administered the rape kit at Scarborough Grace, the police took her downtow^n to the forensic identification unit on College Street. Sharon gave the police artist another good description of Paul Bernardo.

  From the task force to which Wolfe had first appointed Irwin the previous year, the poHce had formed the sexual assault squad, to much hoopla and publicity. There was Robbery, there was Homicide—now there was Sexual Assault. Their offices were on the third floor at 40 College Street.

  Irwin’s cynicism was deepening. When Wolfe assigned Irwin to the squad, Detective Irwin was told that there would be at least sixteen permanent appointments. But there were only ten. Since the squad had taken on responsibility for all sexual-assault investigations in Toronto, there were not nearly enough bodies.

  But Irwin also recognized that the squad’s mere formation would have a significant impact on the press and public. Even though the media had not reported half the Scarborough rapes—they had only documented six or seven out of a possible fifteen—the press heralded the squad. One newspaper reporter even called it the “elite” sexual assault squad.

  The pohce strategy was simple. They would tell the press that this victim, Sharon Moon, was the first one to get a good look at her assailant. Before, the guy had always worked from behind and insisted, like the Dennis Hopper character in the movie Blue Velvet, that his victims not look at him.

  Acknowledging the fact that this composite looked just like the first two or three—and a lot like the one they had made in May, 1988—would be detrimental to the ongoing investigation. It would also cause the many victims needless distress. It would also make the poHce look incompetent. A computer-generated colored drawing of the Scarborough rapist was published in Toronto newspapers on May 29, 1990, with a telephone number.

  A $150,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the Scarborough rapist was offered. The phones started ringing.

  Gone, but not forgotten, especially by the receptionist at Price Waterhouse. Everyone gathered around Sheila’s desk and ooh’d and aah’d as they opened the newspaper. They all said “Who does this look hke?” And they all agreed: “Just Uke Paul Bernardo.”

  On June 28, 1990, one of the members of the sexual assault squad took a call from an employee at the Royal Bank on the corner of Ellesmere and Neilson Road.

  One of the bank’s customers was a dead ringer for the picture in the paper. The bank employee had not seen him for a while—at least since the twenty-sixth of May—but when he’d come in the previous day his hair was different than it had been. It was exactly the same as it was in the picture. He looked to be twenty-one, maybe twenty-two years old, but the birthdate he had given the bank said he was born on August 27, 1964. He was a university student, the records said. His name was Paul Kenneth Bernardo and he lived at 21 Sir Raymond Drive.

  It was Sunday and Karla’s parents were having a pool party. They were running out of booze and their wonderfiil “weekend son” offered to go across the border and replenish the supply.

  Tammy Lyn, Karla’s youngest sister, jumped up and down, saying, “I want to go, too. I want to go, too.”

  The sun had gone down and Paul and Tammy still were not back. Karla was outraged and humiliated. It had been literally hours and hours. She knew what Paul was up to. Karla knew Paul wanted Tammy, because he had told her.

  Karla knew Paul was seeing other women, too. She als
o knew he was raping some of them. Karla could deal with that.

  “If you really love me,” he had said, “let me do it to Tammy.” Karla really loved him. In his request, she saw an opportunity to minimize risk, take control and keep it all in the family.

  She helped Paul break the Venetian blinds in Tammy’s bedroom so he could make videos of Tammy undressing at night. That summer she and Paul had started to have sex in the afternoons on Tammy’s waterbed. They found Tammy’s dildo in her drawer and Paul used it on Karla while she pretended to be Tammy. She pretended to be Tammy and used it on herself while he masturbated.

  One night Karla crushed some Valium tablets and sprinkled

  the dust on Tammy’s spaghetti. Later that night, after Tammy had fallen into a stupor, Karla watched from the bedroom doorway while Paul masturbated beside Tammy’s head and ejaculated on her pillow. When he tried to actually have sex with Tammy, Tammy stirred and he had to stop. Karla knew that had not made him happy. While he fantasized that Tammy had really been awake and watched hmi while he had masturbated, Karla gave Paul a blow job.

  Waiting for Paul and Tammy, Karla was drmking white wine like water, and with every gulp she just got madder. She was pacing back and forth in the driveway at Dundonald. Tammy had become her parents’ favorite child, always getting litde extras. Karla had heard her asking Paul who was better looking? And Paul always said, “Oh, you are Tammy. You are.”

  When Paul and Tammy left, it had been the middle of the afternoon. Now^ it was the middle of the night. All their visitors had left and Karla’s parents had gone to bed. Finally, close to midnight, Paul and Tammy pulled into the driveway.

  It was certainly not supposed to happen this way. It was humiliating and embarrassing. It was very important that Karla regain control of the situation. Now she had two big things to plan: her wedding and her sister’s rape.

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  ake up. Tammy, wake up. There’s someone in the doorway.” Tricia was frantic. It was the middle of the night. Patricia Garcia was sleeping over at the Homolkas’ one last time before school started. She was in that strange twilight zone between waking and sleeping and was sure there was somebody lurking in Tammy’s doorway. The door was only slightly ajar, but it was the moving shadow that scared her. Tricia thought it might be Paul Bernardo.

  When Paul was at the Homolkas’, he supposedly slept on the couch outside Karla’s basement bedroom. Many of Tammy’s girlfriends—Patricia Coyle and Norma TeUier, for instance— thought Paul was really great.

  They thought, “Oh, my God, Karla’s so lucky. She has a rich boyfriend with a great car.” At first. Tammy really Hked him, too. There was even some talk that Tammy had had sex with him that summer. But Tricia was very suspicious of Paul.

  He was too generous. All summer long he was always getting them drinks and food and buying them stuff. One day, Tricia and Tammy noticed there was a film and a few white flecks on the top of their Cokes. They just laughed about it and twittered: “Oh, imagine if they were trying to do something to us.” When they noticed it again and again, it became less exciting. The girls started dumping the drinks and getting their own. It became a nagging concern, though, because they had no idea what was going on.

  One night Norma slept over, too, and the threesome decided to play detective. Most of the time Karla kept her room locked, but that night they found it open. They sneaked in and w^ent through Karla’s hope chest. They found a strange bag of white powder.

  Now, even Tammy was scared. She called Tricia the next day. What if her sister and Paul were trying to do something to her? It was Tricia’s turn to laugh and reassure her. In dayHght, it seemed so improbable. Tammy said, “I’m starting to get really scared. I don’t understand this. …”

  When Tricia first went under the covers and woke Tammy up Tammy just laughed. But then she saw the shadow, too. They pulled the covers over themselves and peeked out. Tammy asked Tricia if Paul had slept over that night, but Tricia did not know. By the streetlight she could see whoever it was had on a striped rugby shirt. When they looked again, whoever it was was gone.

  Tammy told Tricia to go downstairs and see if Paul’s shoes were there. Tricia said, “No, you go.” So they both went. Then they saw Paul standing in the Homolkas’ kitchen holding one of their Wiltshire knives, and Tammy and Tricia went, “Oh, my

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  God!” and ran back to the bedroom and jumped under the covers. They took the phone with them and agreed that if anyone came up the stairs they would phone 911 right away.

  They also planned to keep watch, spelling each other every hour on the hour until dawn, but then they fell asleep. The next morning they went down to the family room, where Paul was sleeping on the floor. He was wearing the striped rugby shirt. Tammy and Tricia asked him point-blank if he had come into their room during the night and he said, “No.”

  Tricia said, “Well, you did.”

  And Tammy asked “Were you drunk last night?” and he said that he was drinking, so Tammy and Tricia started laughing and said, “Oh, my God, you were so drunk you didn’t even know what you were doing.” Neither Tricia nor Tammy ever said anything to anybody. School started. Tammy started hanging around with Norma and a different crowd, and she and Patricia drifted apart.

  Detective Irwin had finally managed to instigate a system whereby all samples went through him to Kim Johnston, a scientist in the forensic center’s biology section. Ms. Johnston was a short, intense brunette with wire-rimmed glasses. The fact that she was diabetic, and therefore lived a somewhat restricted life, only enhanced her enthusiasm for her work. She saw things no one else could see, and that meant something—particularly when it had to do with crimes involving bodily fluids.

  As was true of the coroner’s office, the Center for Forensic Science was inextricably linked to policing by function. It was, however, separately funded by the province. It was not a division of any police force, and although its management was cooperative with the chiefs of poHce around the province, it answered to the Solicitor-General. Politics, funding issues and bureacracy were not performance enhancers.

  The center received and analyzed samples of one kind or another—hair, fibers, blood, semen, paint, bullets, glass—from crime scenes all over the province.

  On Monday, September 25, 1990, Irwin received an excited

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  phone call from Kim Johnston. She had found a stain on the back of Sharon Moon’s panties—the girl who had been raped in May—and she had been able to get a blood typing. It was not a smoking gun, but it would narrow the field considerably.

  Even though genetic fingerprinting, or DNA analysis, had become the beacon of modern forensic biology, conventional serology—blood typing—could be very discriminating. According to Johnston’s analysis of the stain on the panties, the suspect had to be either a one plus (+1)—which was 42 percent of the population—a one plus, one minus (+1—1)—which was 15 percent—or a two minus one plus (2-l+)-2+l—which was 7 percent.

  They already knew that the rapist was a non-secretor. The term non-secreting refers to a small percentage of the population—less than 20 percent—whose saliva will not yield a blood type.

  Forensic analysis is a painstaking science of comparison. Since the stain on her panties did not belong to the victim, it belonged to her attacker.

  Johnston could now say, categorically, that the rapist lived somewhere in less than 64 percent of the non-secreting white, male population. Therefore, the person who raped Sharon Moon was one among only 12.8 percent of the general male population—in all likehhood, the general male population under the age of twenty-five in Scarborough, Ontario.

  First, Detective Irwin was instructed to review all the suspects’ samples and determine which ones now fit the refined criteria. He did—there were twenty non-secretors and another twenty-one from whom they would have to get better samples
to determine their status.

  “Blood them,” Johnston said, and she would narrow that group of twenty-plus suspects with conventional serology—in a sample of forty individuals they might find two or three with the correct PGM blood profile. Then they would do DNA testing on those two or three individuals.

  Johnston told Irwin that from here on the police must get blood samples from any non-secretor that they might even

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  vaguely suspect. The sample only needed to be the size of a silver dollar.

  Although forensic DNA analysis, or genetic fingerprinting, had become important to all policemen in North America, it was still a very young, rapidly evolving science. It had only been developed sLx years earher, in 1984, by an English scientist named Alex Jefferies working at Cambridge. DNA procedures for forensic analysis were not commercially available in the United States until 1988. It took approximately two years for a technician to be trained to perform the necessary procedures to obtain reUable DNA results. Pam Newall had been the first trainee from the forensic center. Johnston was the second.

  Previously, DNA testing could be done at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police central forensic laboratory in Ottawa— but most, if not all Canadian police with crimes serious enough to justify DNA testing prior to 1990 sent their samples to the United States. Conventional DNA testing took seventy to ninety days.

  It was early fall and the leaves were just starting to change. Detective Steve Irwin was “manning the bird,” as it is called in falconry. Manning birds was not about training a bird to do what it did naturally; it was about teaching it to return to “the fist,” after it had killed.

  The trick was convincing the bird that captivity was a better option than freedom. Once the bird appeared to have accepted that idea—by taking the lure and returning to the falconer’s outstretched fist again and again—maintaining a bird in that condition demanded unwavering attention.