though he was not hstening: instead he told her he was teaching her a lesson.
“I want to see my family and my brother and my friends,” she cried, but Paul just continued.
“I want your ass up in the air. Get it up there,” he demanded, half pulling her into a more upright position, so that her whole balance centered on her head.
“Fix my mask please,” she asked. It was not off, but she told him that it was falling. Paul retied the striped turdeneck and jerked toward Karla and the camera—covering the lens with his hand. That was the end of Lesbe Erin Mahaffy.
seventeen
ill Grekul and his wife, Linda, struggled to put their canoe in the water. It was around six in the evening on Saturday, June 29, 1991. There was a lot of rock and debris, making the enterprise awkward. Bill noted that the lake was down quite a bit.
Bill worked with stone at the Walker quarry. Lately, things had not been so good at home. He and Linda had not really been out alone for a long time. What better way to try and smooth troubled waters than with a twilight canoe ride on Lake
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Gibson. It was a hot, muggy night. He reasoned it would be much cooler out on the lake. Maybe they would talk.
The area around Lake Gibson was steeped in history and it was just remote enough to encourage an imaginary paddle back into the nineteenth century, except Bill Grekul’s canoe had a motor, which did not make the launch any easier than trying to imagine that he and Linda were back in a better time.
The irony of a motor-driven canoe was lost on the Grekul’s. Stonemasons tend to be pragmatists, not dreamers. To the Grekuls, Laura Secord made chocolates. They did not appreciate that over the crest of the hill just off to their left, the real Laura Secord had once saved Canada from an unruly band of marauding Americans.
American officers had occupied the Queenston Heights home Laura Secord shared with her wounded husband and their five children. On the cusp of the War of 1812, one well-lubricated evening, Laura overheard some of the American officers outhning an attack.
On foot, Laura scrambled an impossible twelve miles to warn the British. She ended up in the camp of Lieutenant James FitzGibbon, at a huge stone house owned by John DeCew, the ramparts of which could just be seen above the crest of the hill overlooking the Grekuls’ launch.
A few years earlier the St. Catharines historical society had torn down the dilapidated DeCew house, where an exhausted Secord had altered the course of history. The site was now a large fieldstone patio surrounded on four sides by a substantial waist-high fieldstone wall.
Embedded in the magnificent fireplace there is a commemorative brass plaque, which succinctly tells Laura Secord’s story. Until Vietnam, 1812 was the only war the Americans had ever lost. Around six on a summer evening, the sun catches the plaque and creates a startUng explosion of light.
Bill Grekul’s footing gave way and he almost dropped his end. Looking down, he saw what appeared to be a crude, flat concrete lid. It had separated, under his weight, from a
INVISIBLE darkness l8l
large concrete block. Inside the block there was some kind of peculiar fish unlike anything Bill had ever seen before; moist, it was a purplish flesh color. Showing Linda, he poked it with his paddle.
Transfixed, he had to remind himself why he was there. He held the canoe for Linda. Refusing to accept what he saw for what it was, he reluctantly stepped in after her and pushed off from a small isthmus of rocks. Determined as Bill was to make this evening something special, when he stepped on that cement block the die was cast. Everything would change irrevocably.
Divided from the reservoir and waterworks that supply the city of St. Catharines by historic DeCew, where it intersected with Beaverdams Road, Lake Gibson was a stone’s throw from Merritton and Highway 406, east of Lundy’s Lane, which ran over the Welland Canal to Niagara Falls.
Brock University and the Shaver CHnic were just east from the two bodies of water, toward the suburb of Port Dalhousie and Lake Ontario.
The area surrounding the lake was still relatively unpopulated, characterized by recreation areas, historic landmarks, agricultural and hydroelectric enclaves, the odd private home, fishermen and, after dusk, lovers in search of seclusion.
Mike Doucette cast a critical eye at the people in the motorized canoe. Doucette, a forty-two-year-old paper-mill technician and lay minister with a pony tail and beard, often went out after dinner to fish Lake Gibson from the shoreline. Well off the beaten path, the lake was only fifteen minutes from his house in Thorold.
The guy in the canoe was hollering something about cement and fish—Doucette was fishing from shore and had just cast out. He thought he felt a sHght tug on his Hne and was intently watching the spot in the water where his hook had dropped, poised to declare “fish on,” which is what he always did, mostly for fun, when he went out fishing with his adult son, Michael. He was a little miffed. Fishing was supposed to be a contemplative sport. And here was this guy with his motor, and his mouth, running.
Determined to accomphsh what he had set out to do—have some kind of interlude with his wife—Bill Grekul did not point the canoe back to shore until around 8:15 p.m. It had been a bust. The image of whatever it was in that concrete block had followed them, a large misshapen fish swimming just below the lake’s surface. Every time he looked in the water he saw it. On his way back he hollered at the fisherman again: “Did you see it?” Mike decided the only way to shut the guy up was to go over and have a look at whatever it was that had him in such a lather.
It looked like his son had hooked a big one so Mike waited until that was resolved and then he reeled in. A couple minutes more and he had navigated the rocky shoreline. The water level was exceptionally low, even for a Friday night.
There it was, just Hke the guy said. What appeared to be a crudely made cement block had come apart and inside there was something that looked like a human thigh and a foot embedded in the wet cement. The stranger with the motorized canoe said that he thought it could be body parts. Even though he knew the guy was right, Mike heard himself say no.
It looked like the block had been painted black. It resembled a miniature coffin, about two feet long and a foot deep, the kind in which a tiny infant might be buried.
The lid had simply come off Even though it was the hottest June 29 on record, Mike shivered. It was no fish. It looked like a human thigh, but it could not be. Doucette stood straight up. He looked at Bill Grekul uncomprehendingly. Whoever he was, he was right about one thing: the thing in the concrete was a human body part.
The light had started to go. And there was another block. He moved quickly; it, too, had a lid. Doucette pried it off. On this lid he noticed bloodstains. Inside there was a young girl’s calf and a foot.
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“We were almost suckin’ mud. See, during the weekend we cut our diversion back to get down to the maximum amount of water we can divert …” Bob Brickman started to explain, but Sgt. Bob Walkinson did not want to know. He just wanted to know if Brickman could maintain the water level in Lake Gibson where it was.
Brickman worked for the local hydroelectric company in St. Catharmes. He was in the process of “zeroing out” for the week when the call came in. Zeroing out is what hydroelectric guys call it when they match the water used by the region to generate hydroelectric power m any given week to the amount taken in from the St. Lawrence Seaway.
On Friday, June 29, 1991, zeroing out caused the water in Lake Gibson to drop to 554 feet above sea level around 5:30 P.M., which was as low as Hydro could go in Lake Gibson before they started getting debris caught in the valves—before they started “sucking mud,” as Brickman called it.
It was not particularly difficult, what the sergeant wanted. Bob would have to make some adjustments at Indy Two, an antiquated water-intake valve just off the town of Allanburg on Lake Ontario. It was all done by remote control. Bob did not mind. In the seventeen years he had
worked for the utility, he could not remember any similar request.
Lake Gibson was a manmade lake, built specifically to supply water for power generation to the immediate Niagara area, including St. Catharines, Niagara Falls and Welland. Later, the cops would want to know how it worked, so he told them: “Power generation is all a question of balance. We generate as much as we can during the week and of course the lake goes down and then we have to zero out by Sunday night—we have our guidelines, can’t break the contract with the Seaway. Our normal elevation is around 557.9C)—that night we were near the bottom line. We start again at zero clock Sunday night, we start a whole new week again. Efficiency and balance, that’s what power’s all about—the best water to get the best megawatts.”
Every rime a flashbulb popped it seemed to temporarily stun Marilyn Bernardo. She was like a giant mole suddenly thrust into the light, blinking uncomprehendingly. She had been chewing a big wad of gum all during the wedding ceremony. An exceedingly large woman, Marilyn was also sporting a large, filthy cast on her right leg.
Jason Mooney regarded Marilyn Bernardo with bemused disdain from across the room where he had just gotten himself a drink. They were in the Queen’s Landing, a rather well-appointed hotel in Niagara-on-the-Lake, at her son Paul’s wedding reception. There were well over one hundred people for a sit-down dinner—pheasant stuffed with veal, the whole nine yards—overlooking the Niagara River. It was a beautifiil warm evening. From here, Canada and the United States were so close an average swimmer could probably cross the mouth of the river and hit the Youngstown Marina in fifteen minutes. A reception hne had formed outside the Macleod Room, where the dinner would be served.
Mooney was a dark-haired, good-looking eighteen-year-old kid. He was the kind of youth who wears baseball caps backward—especially when he’s on vacation, which was where he’d met Paul Bernardo during spring break in Daytona Beach a couple of years earlier. Ten years the groom’s junior, Jason looked up to Paul. Paul was always well dressed. He seemed to be able to pull girls with a glance. The first night they’d been in Daytona last year, they walked into a bar called The Beach Party. An hour later Bernardo walked out with this outrageous biker chick. Nobody saw him again unril the next day.
Paul always had a wad of money on him, but Jason could never quite figure out where he got it. Just what he did for a living was not clear. He was always flill of schemes, but he was also secretive to an extreme. He said he was an accountant, but Jason never saw him with a sharpened pencil or a ledger. He had no visible means of support, at least not as far as Jason could see, not since the beginning of 1990 when he had quit working
for Price Waterhouse. Whatever Paul did, it worked, and Jason’s admiration grew.
Jason still went to school and worked part-time in a road-house outside Lindsay, Ontario, where he lived with his parents. His father was an insurance salesman. His mother was a homemaker. They lived a nice small-town life. Even though he was middle-class and came from a well-to-do family, Jason had never seen anythmg quite like this wedding, or Paul’s mother, for that matter.
At the wedding rehearsal the day before, Jason had come in a bit late with* Mark Warner, a pal of his from Lindsay who had also met Paul in Florida, and another guy named Andy Douglas, who neither he nor Mark had met before. Earlier, when the three of them got to talking, Andy told them that he too was surprised to be included in the wedding party, because, like them, he did not really know Bernardo that well. No one, except Paul’s pal Van, who was also the best man, seemed to know Paul Bernardo very well.
All of a sudden this woman the size of a cement truck in a blue tarpaulin threw a fit. Mrs. Bernardo rolled right up and pushed her sweaty, meaty face in his face, cursed him up and down, yelling and screaming, inches from his nose. Jason had never laid eyes on the woman before in his life, let alone met her. What a head case. Jason just laughed and walked away.
Paul had once told Jason that if he saw his mother in a field he would kill her. Now he understood why. Paul also told him that the guy with the Coke-bottle glasses was not his real father; that his mother had slept around and he was actually the son of a very wealthy member of the Canadian establishment. The guy must have been pretty desperate, Jason thought to himself
There was a kind of strange atmosphere about all this, but Jason put it down to extremes, such as that woman or Paul’s sister with the uncontrollable, screaming Tasmanian devils she called her children. And the guy Debbie Bernardo was with— presumably her husband and the children’s father—looked like he was completely stoned. Then there was Karla, with that look in her eye. But Jason was not complaining. The drinks were
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free, and besides, Karla had a younger sister named Lori, whom he had just met. She was hot.
Jason took a sip of his drink and watched in astonishment as Marilyn Bernardo braced herself against the wall, extended the leg with the cast and slowly shd to the floor.
Irene Votjek, who was the next person to be greeted in the receiving line by Mrs. Bernardo, also looked on, stunned. For Irene, it was a kind of double jeopardy—the invitation had surprised the hell out of her and her recalcitrant Irish husband, Trevor. They barely knew Paul—they had met him once through Steve Smirnis, while they still had their boardinghouse in Niagara-on-the-Lake. They did not know Karla at all. But a part^ was a party, and how^ often did one get mvited to the Queen’s Landing in Niagara-on-the-Lake to party for free? Still, Irene had not anticipated anything like Mrs. Bernardo.
As she extended her hand, the woman collapsed to the floor. Now she w^as sitting with her back agamst the wall, looking up expectantly at Irene as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Irene immediately bent over.
“Are you all right?”
She knew the woman was Mrs. Bernardo, because she had just been introduced to Kenneth Bernardo. Concerned, Irene glanced back at Mr. Bernardo, but he was oblivious.
The woman must be drunk already, Irene thought to herself
“Let me get you a chair …”
“No, no. I’m just fine,” Marilyn Bernardo replied in an unreasonably loud voice. “I’m here now, so I’D just stay.”
From a distance the flashbulbs popping along the edge of the lake looked Hke giant fireflies. “It has to be someone pretty sadistic to do that to a person.” Michael Doucette shook his head, looking at the blocks. Long beams of hght from the pohce flashlights crisscrossed in the darkness. Every few minutes a fl.ashbulb exploded unexpectedly, temporarily bHnding him. The cop did not look up from his notebook.
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“You know, whoever did it, they’re not from around here,” Doucette said.
“Why do you say that?” the cop asked, perfunctorily.
It was around 11:00 p.m. and the place was swarming with cops and firemen. They had found another three or four blocks. They were all mini-coftin size—around two feet by two feet by one foot. Each one contained body parts. Doucette went through the parts of the body in his head—two arms, two legs, two feet—but obviously the legs had been dismembered above the knees, the head—that should make eight cement blocks. He glanced toward the bridge. There were now five blocks in an ill-defined line about a hundred feet north off the roadway in a little cove along the lake’s shore, just east of the bridge. Mike wondered where the torso was.
“He dumped the concrete in only three feet of water. If he had dumped the stuff over the bridge, three hundred feet further down the road, the water there is quite quick and deep. We might never have found her there. That’s why I say he’s not from around here. He doesn’t know the lake.”
It was so romantic, the wedding. Everything from the service and 1 Corinthians—“love never fails …”—to the horse-drawn carriage and the bride and groom’s tour around Niagara-on-the-Lake, sipping champagne from those exquisite flutes, Paul and Karla benevolently waving to all the people on the street, eve
ry moment recorded on videotape.
Paul had the Absolute Limousine Service take them along the road, past the vineyards and the lavish private homes, to the miniature church. In the shadow of General Brock’s massive four-hundred-foot Queenston Heights monument, the little church was really just a silly tourist attraction. But there was something so romantic about how they stopped, and bending their heads so they could get through the tiny door—the steeple on the miniature church was only a few feet taller than Paul— they both signed their names and put the date below the hundreds of inscrutable Japanese names.
But the best part of all was the party. What a party. And the
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gossiping; the bridesmaids were all abuzz. They were awash with stones about Paul’s bizarre behavior—how he had got so drunk when the boys took him out for beers that he opened the car door and hung his head out only inches firom the road as they sped down the Queen EHzabeth Way. Or about how he had picked up these two slutty-looking girls in Niagara Falls and brought them back to 57 Bawiew—he said he got them for a couple of the younger single guys.
Or about how he had come into the bedroom at 57 Bayview where Patti Loyala, one of the bridesmaids, was sleeping. He locked the door and then reached into a hole behind the dresser and took something out. He left, only to return with Karla. Paul walked over to the bed, pulled down the bedclothes and lifted Patti’s nightgown above her head. Patti did not know what to do, so she pretended to be asleep. She was not sure whether Karla was encouraging him, or whether she was trying to stop him. It must have been around four in the morning.
Kristy Maan was also surprised to be invited to the wedding, because she had lost touch with Karla when Karla left the Number One Pet Center. Then Karla asked Kristy to be a bridesmaid. Kristy was stunned when she discovered she was the standin for Karla’s dead sister, Tammy. As it turned out, she and Tammy were exactly the same dress size. Tammy’s dress fit Kristy like a dream.
Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 18
