“Tell my dick you love him,” Paul whispered, kneeling beside her and putting her hands on the erect penis which he had released from his blue jeans.
The camera, fixed on the chair across the room, was unmoving as she cried and fumbled with his genitals. Ice-T’s Original Gangsta tape blared on the boom box. Ever' other word sounded like “bitch” or “nigger.”
“Tell me you want me to be happy. So maybe you can go home later,” he told her.
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“I want you to be happy,” Kristen said, but she could not see him shaking his head, “no.”
“You suck good cock—^you sure you never done this before?” he asked, moving away from her, sitting back on his haunches and handing her a drink. Kristen shook her head and took two sips.
Cradhng her chm, Paul instructed the sobbing girl to pull down her clothes. She rocked from side to side, pushing the boxer shorts and leotards down to her ankles. Ice-T kept calHng himself a “straight-up nigger.”
“Please,” Kristen cried to him, but he made her lower her underwear as well. Then he told her to bend her knees; he picked up the camera and zoomed in for a close-up.
“Spread your cunt for me,” he instructed. “Do it with your fingers.”
When he pulled back to take a shot of her face, it was etched with distress.
Downstairs in the kitchen Karla was preparing a chicken dinner, but her heart was not in it. At the best of times, her cuHnary skills peaked when she was melting processed cheese on nachos and opening a jar of salsa. There was too much excitement upstairs for her to cook. She could hear the pounding music.
Kristen vomited so badly her blindfold came off Paul called Karla and she cleaned up. They took off Kristen’s clothes. There was blood on her white turtleneck. Paul must have accidentally cut her during the struggle in the car. He had not meant to cut Kristen. The knife had only been meant as a symbol to quickly communicate his resolve. Karla dabbed the small wound with peroxide and put a bandage on it. Then she took the laundry down to the basement.
When Karla got back up to the kitchen, Paul had brought Kristen down. While Karla finished cooking, they talked about Kristen’s boyfriend, Elton Wade—Karla believed she knew him; and Kristen’s dog, Sasha, who was a white Samoyed. Kris-
230 STEPHEN wllliams
ten told them she had older brothers and a sister; that she was a child of her father’s second marriage.
Karla served the chicken, but Kristen only picked at it. Paul took Kristen back upstairs. There was no more blindfold.
The nussing-persons report on Kristen Dawn French was issued at 7:00 p..m. An hour later, a command post was organized at Holy Cross Secondary School and officers began arriving. Some of them knew Kristen French and the family, so they knew something was terribly wrong. By 10:30 officers were making phone calls to Kristen’s fi-iends, using an address book that had been found in her bedroom. Checks were made at two teen dances in the area.
Rap music filled the room with images of Los Angeles gangs and funky times. Kristen was naked, half under the sheets of the queen-size bed in the corner of the room. Paul leaned back and placed his groin squarely in her face.
“Okay,” said Karla, standing back and holding the camera.
“I’m fifteen years old and I love to suck dick,” said Kristen, looking at Karla as she had been told to do and bending her head and mouth over Paul’s less-than-erect penis.
“Smile,” said Karla, as if she were in a mall somewhere taking baby pictures for Sears. Returning the same half smile she had seen already on the other woman’s face, Kristen repeated the words.
“Ya, that’s good,” Karla assured her.
Paul entered Kristen roughly fi-om behind while Karla focused furiously, even as Kristen cried out in pain.
“Shut up,” Paul told her, positioning himself and grabbing a handflil of long, brown curls while LL Cool J intoned, “Come on, fool.”
Then Paul raised both of his hands and pounded his fists into the base of her back. It was a “thump, thump,” done to the
music. Tersely, he told Kristen to lower her hips and arch her back.
“Smile,” called Karla, as Paul bent over Kristen, turning her face to the camera.
Over the next few minutes, Kristen French told Paul Bernardo that she loved him twenty-six times. Each tortured phrasing was different.
“I’m bad,” rapped LL Cool J.
Maurice Charbonneau, the principal at Holy Cross, had been sure it was nothing nefarious. There was a momentary flurry at the school when one of the officers found a paper in Kristen’s locker with writing about obtaining false identification, sneaking out and going drinking. One of Kristen’s schoolmates confirmed that it was just notes fl-om an assignment written for a drama class.
That night Kristen slept on Paul’s side of the walk-in closet adjoining the master bedroom. Paul wanted to give her sleeping pills, to be sure that she would not cause a fuss or try to escape. Karla opposed the idea. They had given Leslie Halcion, and even though the police had not said so, Karla knew traces of the drug could have been found in an autopsy.
Kristen was going to die. She had seen them—seen where they lived, heard their dog.
Regardless, Paul gave Kristen one or two pills, and the girl slept.
They rose late the following day.
Officers from the criminal-investigations branch spent most of Good Friday interviewing Kristen’s classmates, family and friends. Inspector Vince Bevan was at home on leave, where he was called at 10:20 a.m. Less than an hour later, he was standing in the parking lot of Grace Lutheran Church, securing it as a
crime scene. One maroon Bass loafer had been found there. Donna French wept when it was shown to her.
When she finished showering downstairs, Karla filled the silver tray with drinks to take upstairs. Paul was perched on the upstairs bathroom countertop, filming Kristen bathing in the Jacuzzi. Karla stood quietly by the door, watching.
Kristen looked small, kneeUng in the big tub with its noisy jets, rubbing herself with a thick black facecloth, while tiny bubbles frothed around her. Her face was serious.
“Smile,” he told her. Kristen gave him a half grin. Only the right side of her mouth seemed able to meet his request.
“Is that nice?” he asked.
Kristen looked up at him, her eyes darting back toward Karla. It was difficult to hear anything above the rush of the water, and “nice” did not have anything to do with the humiliation of bathing for her sex-crazed kidnappers.
“Pardon me?” inquired Kristen. Her good manners were automatic.
The story line was about two schoolgirls and the theme was Girls’ Night Out. Karla rooted through her clothes for the checkered kilt she had worn when she was in high school. She found a white pullover and her V-necked black sweater. It was as close as she could come to Kristen’s authentic schoolgirl umform.
Kristen tucked her turtleneck neatly into her skirt. After laundering, there was no sign of the blood. Karla’s outfit was not nearly as tailored. The pleats in her old kilt were not ironed smoothly, and they would not have lain flat anyway—Karla had gained a few pounds in her first ten months of marriage. Paul told them to “do the stuff that girls do.” In front of the glass wall of the bathroom counter, Karla had laid out makeup and perfiime, everything from tiny sample bottles to her full-size colognes, skin creams and her Clinique cos-INVISIBLE darkness 233
metics. Kristen’s freshly permed curls billowed around her shoulders as she swept Karla’s powder brush over her face.
Karla nattered on about various perfume preferences, Kristen played along. If Karla asked her about Giorgio perfume, Kristen said she also wore it.
“Okay girls, you know what I want you to do,” Paul said, “Each one of you pull up your skirt at the same time.”
Almost m unison, Kristen and Karla Hfted their kilts without so much as a glance over their shoulders. Paul told them to bend over and give him “a n
ice ass shot.” Kristen bent slighdy, her buttocks bare. Karla leaned over further, with an arch in her back to lift her less youthful backside.
Through his lens, Paul could see there was no comparison. Karla was wearing white bikini underpants that bunched unattractively between her cheeks.
“Okay girls, back to work,” Paul said, and their skirts dropped.
Karla picked through her perfume cache and Kristen spotted Eternity, the only scent that was really familiar to her.
“Sometimes Eternity smells Hke chipmunks,” Kristen offered. Paul was silently confused, but Karla understood what Kristen meant. That faint cedar aroma—it was just like the shavings that they used in pet stores as bedding for hamsters and other rodent pets. Kristen was playing the game. She was being Karla’s friend.
Now they could have dinner and watch a movie. This was too special an occasion to eat Karla’s day-old chicken. Kristen could have whatever she wanted. McDonald’s had just introduced pizza. It would be a first for all of them. And as Kristen was well aware, it would mean she would be left alone with only one captor—Karla.
At the crime scene, police had seized eighteen items as evidence, including three wads of chewing gum, four cigarette butts and one battery-cap terminal. Seventy-four inches from the west curb, they found a torn section of a street map of the Scarborough area. It appeared to have been run over. In the
same area, they found a lock of brown hair, partiaUy wet and flattened onto the pavement.
Paul and Karla tied Kristen up because she was bigger than Karla and Karla was concerned that Kristen might be able to overpower her. Paul got the small rubber mallet from the workbench in the basement and gave it to Karla, just in case. He would not be long: McDonald’s pizza and the video store—an hour at the most.
Although she w^as handcuffed and her feet were bound, Kristen could talk to Karla. She could play on their “friendship.” She could beg to be set free. Of course, Karla could not let Kristen go. End of discussion. Karla rolled the TV over to the closet doorway. The six o’clock news carried a frill report on Kristen’s kidnapping.
Paul had rented Karla’s favorite movie, Criminal Law, and a dark thriller w^hich had something to do with voodoo and ritual sacrifice, called Angel Heart. It starred Mickey Rourke. Karla really liked Mickey Rourke. They would have a great time, eating pizza and watching movies. Paul got very’ angry^ when he discovered that Karla had let Kristen watch television and that they had seen Kristen’s father pleading for his daughter’s safe return on the evening news.
Kristen was crying and she had thrown up on the carpet beside the sliding door. Not much, of course, because she had not eaten. Paul told Karla to clean it up while he untied the shaken girl and tried to determine just what had happened.
He could not beheve that Karla had allowed Kristen to watch the news. She could be so smart about some things and so dumb about others.
They sat in the bedroom and watched a bit of Angel Heart while they ate McDonald’s pizza.
The mayor of West Lincoln caught the sLx o’clock television news flash about a missing girl in St. Catharines and it jogged her memor' about something she had seen in a church parking
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lot there a day earlier. Joan Packham had been driving around doing errands in the ram: picking up her daughter; retrieving her husband’s electric razor from the repair shop; dropping off paperwork for her accountants. In the parking lot of the Lutheran church on Linwell Road she had seen what seemed to be a struggle. She put it down to kids foohng around.
Maybe it was nothing, but she called Niagara Regional Police anyway. She was invited to come in to the office and ended up driving her route with two constables and circling the church parking lot. Though she was, admittedly, not good about cars, Joan thought the one she had seen looked Hke a Camaro or a Trans Am or a Z28. An acquaintance of hers had recently purchased a Z28. To assist her in identifying the vehicle the constables had her look in different parking lots, and they drove her by a Pontiac-Buick car dealership where she spotted five cars resembhng the one she had seen. Then she was presented with thirty years’ worth of automobile-identification books containing what one of the officers described as “Chev-rolets, Fords, Chryslers and many other makes and models.”
Inspector Vince Bevan made arrangements for an offline computer search based on 1982 and newer Camaros and Firebirds using the in-house pohce ORACLE system, which the inspector himself had installed.
“Don’t be nervous, it’s okay,” Karla told Kristen, as they knelt together on the bed in their schoolgirl costumes. Again, Paul wanted girl talk. Kristen asked Karla why her teeth were so straight, and Karla called her “silly.”
“Am I shaking?” Kristen asked.
“No, just try to feel at home,” advised Karla in her friendliest voice.
“Can I see your dog without it attacking me before I leave?” asked Kristen.
“It’s up to him,” Karla said, nodding her head toward Paul.
“Before you leave, yes,” said Paul, and the “schoolgirls” continued to touch each other.
As she lay back on the bed, Kristen pulled a knot from her
long hair. The overhead fan whirred above her, reminding her of the fan over the black girl’s bed in that v^eird movie, Angel Heart.
“If I close my eyes, Til fall asleep,” said Kristen.
“Trust me, you won’t,” replied Karla.
Karla told Kristen that she was a pretty girl.
“You’re pretty, too,” said Kristen, responding to the theme and referring back to the first time she saw Karla in the car, telling her that her thought was, “Holy cow is she pretty.”
Karla knelt between Kristen’s legs and began explormg her vagina with her tongue. Paul had the music up. This rap was all about “go, go and jam.” Kristen suggested that Karla was “an expert at this,” but Karla said curtly, “Trust me, I’m not.”
What Kristen had learned from Karla, Paul now wanted Kristen to do to his wife. While Karla lay back on the bed with both hands behind her head, Paul told Kristen to put her fingers “inside,” and he moved in for a close-up.
“Are my nails hurting you?” she inquired with some concern, but Karla told her it felt “real good.”
Kristen’s face was half buried between Karla’s legs when Paul asked her for a smile and told her to say she loved Karla.
Brushing back the mane of hair that was obscuring her face, Kristen put on the biggest grin she could manage.
“I love Karla,” she said, and then she asked, “Is that your name?” Paul gave her an affirmative, and decided to try a new angle.
The “schoolgirls” were positioned on the bed, side by side, kissing, with their legs spread apart. Kristen was supposed to masturbate Karla. She turned on her side, raising her knee, trying to find what it was she was supposed to be rubbing.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she said, touching Karla lightly. Elton Wade’s gold ring shone in Paul’s lens. Kristen’s left hand moved over Karla’s pubic hair. Karla told her it felt good, when Kristen asked her if she was doing “okay for the first time.”
“I hke litde girls,” said Karla.
“Thank you,” replied Kristen.
“I love you, Christian,” said Karla, mispronouncing her
INVISIBLE darkness 237
“I love you, too. Karla, is it?” replied Kristen with a question in her voice. Karla told her she was right. Now Kristen had a name to go with the face, and everything else she had seen so far. Karla was not a common name. How many of them could there be in a city as small as St. Catharines?
At 11 P.M., a province-wide alert was issued for a 1982 or later model two-door ivory or cream Camaro or Firebird. The description of the car and the missing girl who might have been in it was provided to a feral media. A school picture of Kristen French, holding a bouquet of roses, would hit the news the next day. Speculation mounted. Fourteen-year-old Terri Anderson, who had disappeared with
out a trace five months eariier, had lived eight blocks from the scene of French’s abduction. And police were no flirther ahead in the investigation of Leslie Mahaffy’s murder than they had been when they found her body in cement blocks at Lake Gibson. Hardly anyone ever talked about Krystal Connors, the petite, twenty-eight-year-old dark-haired woman who had been raped, murdered and set on fire just before Christmas in 1990. One newspaper chose to headline its Saturday morning story: “The nightmare’s back.”
When Paul got into the video at the end of Karla and Kristen’s sixteen-minute, forty-eight-second scene, he was wearing a pink T-shirt and white socks. He lay back on the bed, bracing his head upright with his right arm behind him, so he could watch.
“That’s beautiful,” said Karla, framing her shot from the end of the bed. Kristen was bent over Paul’s groin, masturbating him with her right hand. She had rolled her sweater up to her elbow.
“Tell me if I’m pulling hair,” Kristen said, not wanting to hurt or anger him, but not really understanding what he wanted either. In less than a minute, she displayed her unfamiHarity with the process by allowing Paul’s penis to constantly slip from her grip.
“Kinda play a lot,” directed Karla, knowing the clue to maintaining Paul’s erections was massaging his testicles.
“Three times and you’re out.” admonished Paul when Kristen lost her grip, “Three times … Give me the knife, I’m gonna kill ya.”
A few seconds later, he forgave her,
“Thank you,” said Kristen French.
All night long, from 8:30 p.m. until 5 a.m., identification officers were examining the church grounds and sidewalk area with a Luma Lite. They followed a visual grid, using the filters and optics of the portable light source to observe fluorescence in specimens and items that are not normally visible to the naked eye. Luma Lite is only effective in the dark.
Invisible darkness : the strange case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka Page 23
